There go those “stupid hippies” again….

One of the things I like least about being a liberal is that there are many in our ranks that attempt to speak out about science and technical issues…and don’t know what they are talking about.

Here is a post from Alan Colmes’ Liberalland (a blog that I usually enjoy):

An explosion at the Fukushima Daiici nuclear plant in Okuma Japan seems to have caused a meltdown.

A meltdown occurs when the control rods fail to contain the neutron emission and the heat levels inside the reactor thus rise to a point that the fuel itself melts, generally temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, causing uncontrolled radiation-generating reactions and making approaching the reactor incredibly hazardous. A meltdown does not necessarily mean a nuclear disaster. As long as the reactor core, which is specifically designed to contain high levels of heat, pressure and radiation, remains intact, the melted fuel can be dealt with. If the core breaches but the containment facility built around the core remains intact, the melted fuel can still be dealt with — typically entombed within specialized concrete — but the cost and difficulty of such containment increases exponentially.

Emphasis mine.

Note: a problem with the control rods CAN lead to a meltdown, but that isn’t the case here. The rods are in and the fissions are not the problem. The problem is that the remaining fission products (atoms that are left over from a split uranium atom) are radioactively unstable and therefore decay; they emit gamma radiation (like an x-ray but stronger) which can generate a substantial amount of heat; depending on the design of the reactor this can be over 10 percent of a reactor’s power. I don’t know what the potential is in this type of design.

The bottom line is that if a reactor, once it has been started up, needs coolant even if fissions aren’t occurring above a background level.

The rest of the above post is ok.

But please, if you are a liberal and you have a concern about a technical issue, find an engineer or scientist to talk to.