Last edited on 2011-04-03 19:37:44 by stolfi
Jorge Stolfi
2011-04-01 02:40
I have just found a picture by GeoEye that shows Reactor #3 destroyed but #4 still intact. So what follows is nonsense. Ignore it for now.
The following discussion refers to this image of unit #4, taken by a drone on March 24, 2011. North is to the left in this picture, West is towards the viewer; the Pacific ocean is in the back.
While the debris on the ground adjacent to the West side suggest that an explosion occurred inside #4, other details do not seem to fit and suggest that some of the damage was instead caused by the explosion of #3 (just off the photo, to the left).
The outer wall apparently consisted of a thin concrete shell suported on the inside by a grid of concrete pillars and crossbeams, which divided the shell into a grid of "panels": 3×6 panels on the West and East walls, 3×5 panels on the North and South. (From early news it seems that each section of this grid is about 8 meters square, so the building's floorplan apparently measures 40 × 50 metres.) While some of the panels on the West face have fallen off, the five that remain (4) appear to have been pushed inwards against the concrete famework, rather than outwards.
The tar/concrete cover of the roof vanished, but the underlying steel framework (3) is largely intact. In its middle section it is not even bent, so it gives no clues as to the direction of the blast that removed the roof. However, at the North and South ends the roof lattice is bent downwards, possibly by falling debris from #3's explosion.
One of these debris is a large metal plate (2) --- concave, with ragged edge, about 25--30 meters long --- that apparently fell over the roof framework, along the North wall. The top edge of that wall (1) is pushed inwards, while the rest of the concrete panels below it bulge out and hang in vertical strips. Gray smudges on that wall look like places where the paint was scraped off. My guess is that the metal plate was blasted off the #3 reactor, hit the top edge of the North wall of #4, tumbled over it, and crashed trough the roof of #4.
Two openings on the West wall of #4 (5) have their debris hanging on the outside, and suggest an explosion within the building. From these pics I cannot tell where the topmost working floor was exactly, but this explosion may have occurred below it.
To be continued
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