Japanese Earthquake

[ESPImperium]

Some research:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Meiji ... earthquake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_e ... Mount_Fuji

From what im reading into, there could be a period of activity at Mt Fuji in the next 10 years or so.

Altho data inst perfect, its good enough for me to make a corelation.

[manchild]

http://www.facebook.com/exploredogs

[segedunum]

There is no nuclear disaster going to happen. What they're doing right now is attempting to save the reactors so they don't have to shut them down.

I wish news agencies would stop posting nonsense and I wish people would stop picking up the 'Drop the Dead Donkey' sensationalism. Most people throw around the name 'Chernobyl' without the slightest clue as to how or why it happened.

[forty-two]

Seg, a nuclear reactor containment building has been blown to bits from the inside, I would say that is a nuclear disaster by any yard stick. The true meaning of what's happened is yet to be discovered, but the signs are not great.

I don't think a comment like that is right or proper.

[Pup]

I don't think a comment like that is right or proper.

Personally, I think it's right, proper, but no more than 50% correct*. And I rarely agree with segedumum. This incident so far is a minor annoyance relative to everything else they're having to deal with.

Unless, and this is a big unless - they can't flood the containment. I understand that there are problems. If they can't, then yes, we might actually have a disaster.


*The reactor is toast. The explosion would have killed any chances of saving it.

[forty-two]

I don't think a comment like that is right or proper.

Personally, I think it's right, proper, and 100% correct. And I rarely agree with segedumum. This incident is a minor annoyance relative to everything else they're having to deal with.

And wierdly, I normally agree with you. Perhaps it's situations like this where one learns more about yourself than anything else.

I don't see it the same as you do, I think that this particular disaster, of the three which the people of Japan have experienced as a result of the siesmic activity, could very well turn out to be the one which causes the most suffering. Perhaps the suffering in question will take years to present itself, and may never categorically be nailed down to the nuclear "incident" (if you'll accept that word in place of "disaster"?).

The fact is, and I hate to quote spiderman here, but with great power comes great responsibility. There truly is no permanent means of dealing with nuclear waste, and that's when everything goes to plan. Throw in an area of massive seismic activity and a couple of perhaps seemingly unimportant issues and you have a potentially global disaster on your hands. Of course, I expect the the true "cost" of this "incident" to never hit the papers, but if you've ever had a conversation with people from the Ukraine about the impact of Chernobyl, you might change your mind.

Any nuclear incident is massively important for anyone who lives on the earth, it affects all of us.

For these reasons, and plenty more which must be apparent, I feel that describing an incident such as this as a disaster is wholly accurate.

I'm not a religious person, and it feels wierd writing this, but may god help them.

[manchild]

segedunum, nothing personal, just curious - where did you get the info that news agencies are making fuss over something that is much smaller?

I mean, first Japanese authorities have been caught lying today about the situation. It was US that detected and reported about Cesium in the radioactive cloud which is heading toward Russia. Russia is preparing to face it.

The leak didn't happen afterwards, but while the surrounding concrete structure/building was still standing. So it wasn't just the radioactive steam from boiling water that went up when hydrogen exploded, but the radioactive particles from the leak as well.

There's an article about Japanese nuclear company on previous page I think. So much affairs and deliberate security flaws just as if it was in some banana republic.

As WB pointed out, it is virtually impossible to have 14 diesel engines to die all at the same time. That is 100 years old technology. Imagine the amount of negligence that lead to such mass malfunctioning.

What they're doing right now is attempting to save the reactors so they don't have to shut them down.

There is nothing left to be saved or shut down. Everything but the steel container had fell apart. They are desperately trying not to have Chernobyl like explosion, while in the meantime, another reactor also overheated.

Yesterday they were talking about evacuation of 14.000 people, today it is already 300.000, iodine, medical checks of refugees for radiation.

They are not controlling the situation, and it is hard for them to admit it.
Nothing but desperate attempts to have controlled leak with unknown consequences, instead of Chernobyl like "all at once" explosion. There is no option that excludes much bigger disaster than initial blow up was. The question is only how big will it be.

Fortunately US military is there, and Russia isn't far away, so they'll be able to monitor what goes on and prevent Japanese officials from faking reports as they already did.

Latest from AP http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ ... TE=DEFAULT

[forty-two]

Surely, drenching with seawater (or any water for that matter) when the containment building is destroyed will result in ensuring contanimants go airbourne?

I'm FAR from a nuclear physicist, but perhaps this is the least worst option now?

It strikes me, and again I find myself quoting silly films, but the only way to win is not to play? Nuclear power is something we, as a race don't yet fully understand and don't have solutions for even the most fundamental problems.

The story is that the diesel generators were flooded by the tsunami and as such could not perform when the power grid failed as a result of the earthquake shutting down a large proportion of the grid. Surely the fact that the word Tsunami is a Japanese word should have been a clue here?

If I were designing backups for a system such as this, I would as a minimum have ensured that there were two backups for each of my my backups, and a battery powered standby housed within each enclosure capable of providing enough power to ensure a graceful failure under any circumstances, ESPECIALLY if the installtion were in a heavily seismically affected area. Failure to do so beggars belief.

[Pup]

Modern reactors default to a safe state so that there is no need for backups. And there are more 'modern' designs that are even better, but which never get built for financial or political reasons. That seems to be changing, though. China is looking to build a molten salt reactor - a concept that was proven at Oak Ridge decades ago. We should have long ago replaced existing reactors with these. If a disaster strikes a molten salt reactor, you just turn off the lights, go home, and come back the next day to restart it. They run on spent fuel from other reactors and they don't produce weapons grade material, or at least not enough of it to matter. But alas, water cooled reactors are cheaper and more profitable to operate, so that's what gets built.

[WhiteBlue]

List of Tepco reports

March 12 report

another March 13 report

Tepco press release 13 March about the events at Fukushima and other power stations

It is clear that unit 1 was a total loss already on March 12 when reportedly sea water and boric acid was used to flood the outer containment around the reactor vessel. German news film with explanation This #1 unit is also the unit which had a worker contaminated with more than the 100 mSv dose and which outer building roof was wrecked in the H2 explosion. According to German scientific sources the procedure for outer cooling of #1 has never before been tried.

The most critical unit at this time seems to be unit 3 where the injection system failed which caused loss of control by injecting boric acid which would have killed off the reactor. They may have to flood this unit as well to reduce the heat in the core.

Considering the information we receive from external experts these reports are ridiculous regarding the depth of information. They tell very little about critical operations such as venting actions and what kind of radioactive material was vented and discharged from the units by the actions.

The question remains why the diesel generators failed. German sources say that the tsunami has flooded the generators. Those failures must have been decisive for the pressure build up that had to be relieved by venting on all three operating units. It is unclear why the generators were not build on a sufficiently high structure to survive a tsunami. It is also unclear why it took 1 hour for the damage to occur after the quake. The tsunami wave travels at 800 kph and must have reached the power station much earlier than one hour.

One has to consider that these were very old units with 30-40 years of operation and that long term radiation makes all the plumbing and safety systems brittle. That is a big risk when structures get hit by seismic shocks. We saw most damage to the oldest system which was scheduled for terminal shut down this month. One has to ask the question why the reactors were allowed to run this long and if shorter life cycles have to be implemented for reactors in seismic active areas.

I'm not convinced that more modern reactor designs and particularly breeders are much safer to operate. Each new generation of reactors had their own teething problems during the scale up from experimental to industrial size. The safety systems cannot be tested for heavy earth quakes. It is impossible to test crash a nuclear reactor with a 9.0 quake or inundate it under a 10 m tsunami for obvious reasons. Therefore nobody can guarantee what will happen to the main and backup safety systems.

[Formula None]

I'm not convinced that more modern reactor designs and particularly breeders are much safer to operate. Each new generation of reactors had their own teething problems during the scale up from experimental to industrial size. The safety systems cannot be tested for heavy earth quakes. It is impossible to test crash a nuclear reactor with a 9.0 quake or inundate it under a 10 m tsunami for obvious reasons. Therefore nobody can guarantee what will happen to the main and backup safety systems.

I agree. So reason enough to stop exploring fission, you think? I want it work, it has a some much potential. But we can't get so scared of carbon that we run to fission out of desperation. Events like this give me doubt, despite generally being in support of nuclear power. If only wind and solar were more "viable"...

Frustrating to know that my country has spent around $1 trillion in Iraq thus far (maybe even upwards of 3 times that, taking indirect costs into account). We could have purchased ~286,000 $3.5 million, 2 MW range wind turbines for that amount. Probably a lot more even, since economies of scale would have kicked in.

...we'd have a total wind capacity of around 570 GW, or more than the US' total combined coal & natural gas nameplate capacity (550 GW). Imagine if we could be so committed to infrastructure spending. Nuclear wouldn't even need to enter the discussion. Agreeing to big job creating military-action-scale mega projects like this, or building earthquake-proof housing, tsunami proof (hyrdrodynamic?) buildings, buoyant flood proof and windproof (aerodynamic) structures, etc. You know, straightforward engineering problems that we never have the money to spend on because it only benefits the working classes?

K, turning off hindsight, removing rose tinted glasses, initiating cynicism, grabbing beer...

[Agenda_Is_Incorrect]

Regarding my avatar and sig. they are not political, but informal people movements, representing no country, regime or political idea, just promote humanism, peace and freedom for all (unlike Ronald Reagan avatar of certain member that you don't seam to have problem with).

Humanism can very well be a political and ideological instrument, just like anything else. It's promoted by you and most others as one of the strongest political and ideological movements of today. Just because you are defending supposedly holier than holier goals such as nature and human rights doesn't take you out of this possibility and by the way you are doing it it's clearly ideological.

What you are blaming Japan for is prove of that and very discussing in the light of the situation. It was an accident caused by the so heavenly mother nature, which had no consideration in "giving" us some of the current earthquakes. If they are using sea water is maybe because there's nothing left to do and all the rest of the possibilities is much worse. I'm sure they are not comfortable with it. I'm also sure most people are not comfortable with it when due to an accident someone spills some poisonous element on the air or the water (which can occur by the simple fall of a thermometer on the ground). What do you expect? People to swallow the damn thing so that the so heavenly mother earth doesn't decide to punish us?

We all live together on Earth and it's very unreasonable to obligate no one shares it's problems with others in events like this. Much more yet is to put blame on someone for this. Except if someone was indeed negligent with the power plants, but with or without this there's always a possibility to a disaster to spread trough the World. Should Japanese people make barricades with their houses so that the tsunamis don't bring trash to the sea or don't go any further? This is as reasonable as trying to put Earth on a court for doing the earthquake.

[segedunum]

There is nothing left to be saved or shut down. Everything but the steel container had fell apart. They are desperately trying not to have Chernobyl like explosion, while in the meantime, another reactor also overheated.

No, they are not. There will be no Chernobyl like explosion because it can't happen to these reactors. What they don't want to do right now is completely shut them down, but if push comes to shove, they will.

I wish people would stop repeating nonsense from news agencies. I suppose there's no news like bad news, and I'm getting a little sick of the sensationalist reporting masquerading as genuine concern for Japan.

[WhiteBlue]

There is nothing left to be saved or shut down. Everything but the steel container had fell apart. They are desperately trying not to have Chernobyl like explosion, while in the meantime, another reactor also overheated.

No, they are not. There will be no Chernobyl like explosion because it can't happen to these reactors. What they don't want to do right now is completely shut them down, but if push comes to shove, they will.

I wish people would stop repeating nonsense from news agencies. I suppose there's no news like bad news, and I'm getting a little sick of the sensationalist reporting masquerading as genuine concern for Japan.

This is also incorrect. Please read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_ ... ite_note-5 and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building

to understand the nature of the accident and how it compares to Chernobyl. My understanding is that a containment will add another level of protection against full melt down but it will not give total protection. If emergency cooling fails to remove the decay reaction heat after a shut down, a Chernobyl type of disaster is quite possible albeit with a lesser degree of probability due to increased options for the disaster recovery.

The decision to cool both #1 and #3 with seas water/boric acid mix was the terminal point for those reactors to operate. Decontamination will be uneconomic after the contamination. The units will have to be decommissioned. This is most likely applicable to all six units at Fukushima I because all of their design life cycle will end in the next seven years. The cost of rebuilding and upgrading against the risks of earth quake/tsunami will be uneconomical.

[manchild]

There is nothing left to be saved or shut down. Everything but the steel container had fell apart. They are desperately trying not to have Chernobyl like explosion, while in the meantime, another reactor also overheated.

No, they are not. There will be no Chernobyl like explosion because it can't happen to these reactors. What they don't want to do right now is completely shut them down, but if push comes to shove, they will.

The use of seawater shows that authorities are giving up future use of the Daiichi plant and are focusing solely on protecting people and the environment, experts said.

"If they are (using seawater), it's because they have no other choice," said James Walsh, a research associate at the security studies program at MIT. "The last thing you want to do is pump seawater and boron into a reactor."

The salt and boron will corrode the reactor, he said.

"Essentially, they are saving the white flag and saying, 'This plant is done,' " Walsh said. "This is a last-ditch mechanism to try to prevent overheating and to prevent a partial or full meltdown."

"One reactor has had half the core exposed already," he explained. "This is the one they're flooding with sea water in a desperate effort to prevent it from a complete meltdown. They lost control of a second reactor next to it, a partial meltdown, and there is actually a third reactor at a related site 20-kilometers away they have also lost control over. We have never had a situation like this before."

http://www.channel4.com/news/japan-how- ... ear-blasts