Re:Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an...
by marze on Monday August 05, 2013 @03:54PM
(#6162498)
Those are some awesome calculations. Since we are talking Japan's food supply and the Pacific Ocean, it would be nice to have some independent measurements taken on site, in addition to your nice back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Keep in mind this water is all indoors, so unless you have some openings you are blowing air in, there will be no evaporation whatsoever.
This has to do with the strength of the hydrogen bond in water. The energy require to vaporize the water is the same as hundreds of degrees of merely heating the water, thats why the starting temp has little effect on water boiling rate, etc.
Still I stand by my numbers, 2 MW continuously can evaporate your 50 tons of water per day, to one sig fig.
Note that we're not arguing about much. Sunlight is like a KW per sq meter so we're arguing about the energy from 2000 or so sq meters of sunlit area, which isn't much compared to a giant nuclear plant facility.
It just doesn't strike me as much of an engineering challenge to evaporate 50 tons/day given that size of a facility and the decay heat and the solar insolation.