A: No, absolutely not. The Chernobyl disaster was a combination of a bad reactor design coupled with a bad operational sequence. It led to a steam explosion, a burning reactor, and no containment building so radioactive byproducts were spread far and wide. Fundamentally, Chernobyl was driven by fission energy (95% of the energy produced in a nuclear reactor) not by decay heat energy (5% of the energy produced in a nuclear reactor).
The circumstances at Fukushima-Daiichi are very different. The reactors shut down successfully and their heat generated from the decay of fission products began to drop rapidly.
It has been several days since the reactors were shut down and they are now generating only about 0.5% of the thermal power they were generating before. Assuming that they were generating about 1500 thermal megawatts of power, now they’re only generating about 7 megawatts of thermal power. Nevertheless, that heat needed to be removed through cooling systems, but there’s not nearly enough power there to cause a Chernobyl-type incident.
Source: Japanese Earthquake Implications Quick Q&A
http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/03/12/japanese-earthquake-qa1/
The circumstances at Fukushima-Daiichi are very different. The reactors shut down successfully and their heat generated from the decay of fission products began to drop rapidly.
It has been several days since the reactors were shut down and they are now generating only about 0.5% of the thermal power they were generating before. Assuming that they were generating about 1500 thermal megawatts of power, now they’re only generating about 7 megawatts of thermal power. Nevertheless, that heat needed to be removed through cooling systems, but there’s not nearly enough power there to cause a Chernobyl-type incident.
Source: Japanese Earthquake Implications Quick Q&A
http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/03/12/japanese-earthquake-qa1/