Decay Heat Calculations, Will Fukushima Heat Up The Pacific Ocean?

PhilipUpNorth posed an interesting question on ENENEWS.     What is the decay heat for 3 reactor cores in BTU?

I have pondered pondering this question.   And today I endeavored to stop pondering and start contributing.


Then as an added bonus, I shall divy up those BTUs across the volume of the Pacific and I can tell you how much the Pacific would heat up if all of those BTUs went into the Pacific.

OK Weighing in with the answer.     Fukushima, no matter what reactor fuel or spent fuel may have got into the ocean , or transmitted it's decay heat into the ocean, will not matter a hill of beans in increasing the temperature of the ocean. 

Two Cases:

1) If the radiation spreads evenly through the whole Pacific

2) What if the radiation stays in the top 200 feet and over a limited portion of north hemisphere Pacific Ocean?    Still almost nothing.

Want to dig further, check the results?   Here is my spreadsheet.


https://app.box.com/s/h6zg1whk5je785hx2t62qcqqe4th50s8

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Did Fukushima heat up the USA?   This chart indicates not any immediate effect in 2011, but there a very unusual spike up in USA temps in 2012, which could very well indicate a Fukushima impact.

The standard deviation of temperature anomalies in the USA 1979 to 2014 is

0.870928 deg F

The anomalies exactly 1 year after Fukushima was

3.293 deg F

That is 3.78 standard deviations away from "normal" 
http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~ifischer/Statistical_Tables/Z-distribution.pdf

The odds that the temperature spike was just random are 0.00008 (see link above)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Most of my information is coming from Oak Ridge
http://info.ornl.gov/sites/publications/files/Pub31857.pdf

 Hint, Part of the fuel is Oxygen, roughly 12% by weight, so we need to multiply the gross weight of fuel by 0.88 to get weight of heavy metal.