Yea, we have volcanoes too, but not the kind that blow the whole top of the mountain off
. Ours do more of an ooze thing than an explosion thing, although seeing lava being bLasted a few hundred feet in the air at night is a sight to behold.
I'd also like to take this chance to try to eliminate another common misconception about reactors. They cannot blow up in a nuclear explosion like you see in the movies. They have steam plants just like fossil fuel plants and there can be conventional steam explosions, but they
cannot explode in a "nuclear" explosion in the way that a nuclear bomb explodes. They simply are completely different devices and whatever you may have seen in the movies is just impossible (K-219, for example). If there were a large enough problem at a plant, there could be some release of radioactive material as has happened a few times in the past, but none of these were, or could have been, your typical Hollywood "mushroom cloud".
Also, not many people know this or choose to acknowledge it, but people working at coal plants generally get more radiation exposure from the coal (which contains Carbon-14) than most nuclear workers. Even though C-14 is only found in trace amounts in natural coal, those huge piles of coal collectively have a lot of "trace" C-14 which is exposing coal plant workers to radiation. Also, since their exposure is not tracked, there is no real record of this. It's kind of ironic to me that this fact is not widely known and people think that nuclear plant workers are the only people who get occupational radiation exposure.
People who fly in airplanes for a living spend a lot of thier time high in the atmosphere where cosmic radiation levels are not as shielded by the atmosphere, but their exposure is not tracked either.
Slick.
Re: Chernobyl
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