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Germany to shut down seven nuclear plants for safety review | AHN
German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced Tuesday the shutting down of seven of the seventeen nuclear power plants in the country for three months for a safety check of the power facilities.
I call this a knee jerk because Germany doesn't get bad earthquakes.
Earthquakes in Germany - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
People, we need to keep in mind that this incident happened after the largest earthquake in Japan's history and the 5th largest in recorded history. This isn't an every day thing and the worst that can happen is a melt down. What happens in a melt down?
Nuclear meltdown - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A nuclear meltdown is an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency[1] or by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.[2] However, it has been defined to mean the accidental melting of the core of a nuclear reactor,[3] and is in common usage a reference to the core's either complete or partial collapse. "Core melt accident" and "partial core melt" are the analogous technical terms, though the severity of these nuclear accidents can vary in the extreme.
A meltdown occurs when a severe failure of a nuclear power plant system prevents proper cooling of the reactor core, to the extent that the nuclear fuel assemblies overheat and melt, either partially or completely. A meltdown is considered very serious because of the potential that highly intense radioactive materials with long half-lives and lethal threat could be released into the environment.
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In a modern reactor, a nuclear meltdown, whether partial or total, should be contained inside the reactor's containment structure. Thus (assuming that no other major disasters occur) while the meltdown will severely damage the reactor itself, possibly contaminating the whole structure with highly radioactive material, a meltdown alone should not lead to significant radiation release or danger to the public.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown#cite_note-15
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