Major Earthquake Hits Japan

[Sparky]

People will want these things to be meteor proof next.

Analysis by The Register:

Analysis Japan's nuclear powerplants have performed magnificently in the face of a disaster hugely greater than they were designed to withstand, remaining entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage. The unfolding Fukushima story has enormously strengthened the case for advanced nations – including Japan – to build more nuclear powerplants, in the knowledge that no imaginable disaster can result in serious problems.

Let's recap on what's happened so far. The earthquake which hit on Friday was terrifically powerful, shaking the entire planet on its axis and jolting the whole of Japan several feet sideways. At 8.9 on the Richter scale, it was some five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with.

If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place1, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive.
More:



and

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

Shameful media panic very slowly begins to subside

The situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan, badly damaged during the extremely severe earthquake and tsunami there a week ago, continues to stabilise. It is becoming more probable by the day that public health consequences will be zero and radiation health effects among workers at the site will be so minor as to be hard to measure. Nuclear experts are beginning to condemn the international hysteria which has followed the incident in increasingly blunt terms.

Seawater cooling of the three damaged reactor cores (Nos 1, 2 and 3) at the site continues. US officials and other foreign commentators continued to remain focused on a spent-fuel storage pool at the No 4 reactor (whose fuel had been removed and placed in the pool some three months prior to the quake).

Despite this, operations by Japanese powerplant technicians, military personnel and emergency services at the site focused instead on cooling the spent-fuel pool at the No 3 building, and on restoring grid electrical power at the plant. Japanese officials continued to contend that water remained in the No 4 pool and the situation there was less serious than that at No 3. Police riot vehicles mounting powerful water cannon and fire trucks were used to douse the spent-fuel pool at No 3 with water, causing steam to emerge – confirming that some cooling at least was being achieved. One of the fire trucks was reportedly lent by US military units based locally, though operated by Japanese troops.

World Nuclear News reports that radiation levels have generally decreased across the plant, though they remain hazardous in the immediate area of reactors 2 and 3; levels also climb temporarily when technicians open valves to vent steam from the damaged cores in order to allow fresh seawater coolant to be pumped in, prompting teams to retreat before venting is carried out. Nonetheless 180 personnel are now working within the site where and when radiation levels permit them to do so safely.

[Colonel Sun]

The fixation on and histrionics about a hypothetical meltdown reinforces how inept the human mind is at estimating the probabilities associated with relative risk.

Probably useful as an early evolutionary survival strategy, but not so useful, and possibly detrimental, in a contemporary industrialized society.

[Apollonius]

[Colonel Sun]

[Apollonius]

[Mr. Perfect]

Eh, how many people died from the death rays, and how many from collapsed buildings/flood waters?

[Sparky]

[Caskhades]

[Mr. Perfect]

I heard it was just like 3 mile island!

(How many people died at 3 mile island?)

[lzzrdgrrl]

[crashtech]

[Hoosiernorm]

Why was everyone much nicer when they thought that Col Sun may be either dead or injured? Now that he is neither everyone takes a turn trying to injure him and blame the dead

edit: Why did no one savage the idea of placing the reactor closer to the volcanoes?

[lzzrdgrrl]

I don't know if our colonel pointed that out, but thought the general absurdity of the situation should speak for itself. If you needed water for an emergency yet made it harder to carry the water, why should a lil' thing like a volcano perplex you?......

[Colonel Sun]

[AzariLoveIran]

US electrci generation by source.jpg (35.24 KiB) Viewed 614 times

[Alph]

Thread,

Colonel Sun is quite right about the competence and efficacy of the Japanese government's response. A 8.9 mm earthquake is a shockingly powerful earthquake. No earthquake of that power has hit a modern industrialized region of the world. Ever. This is the first time since modern times that an earthquake of that power has struck a populated region.

The last truly major earthquake to hit Los Angeles was in 1857. That was a 7.9 mm earthquake. The earthquake that just hit Japan was about ten times more powerful than that. The 1994 LA earthquake that broke all of those highways was a 6.7 mm earthquake. That's an earthquake whose power is less than one one hundredth of the one that just struck Japan. (Or one nine hundredth the practical damage caused, which expands three times faster than the raw power.) The earthquake that more or less destroyed Port-au-Prince last year was a 7.0.

The thing to take away from this isn't, "The Japanese don't know what they're doing." or "Nuclear power is unsafe!" but, "Can you believe that Japanese building codes were so effective and the Japanese government and society so competent that so few people have died in an 8.9 earthquake and a major tsunami?" and "Can you believe that nuclear power is so safe that after the largest earthquake in modern history to strike an industrialized region struck a power plant, a power plant built in the sixties only to withstand one of the most powerful earthquakes that has ever struck a center of civilization in modern times (a 7.9), that it survived essentially intact despite the ground beneath it moving eight feet... until it was also hit by a tsunami?"

If that earthquake and tsunami had hit Los Angeles the immediate death toll would have been vastly greater.

[Endovelico]

Ignoring the catastrophic risks of nuclear power generation is plain stupid. Allowing a child to play with a loaded gun until the day that he shoots himself or someone else, with the argument that he never did any harm until then, is dumb. We may not minimize the errors being made everyday, in Japan and elsewhere, in respect of nuclear power. If we want to keep nuclear power we must improve the building of plants and their running. Anything else is stupid. Saying that more people have died driving to the pharmacy than from radiation from nuclear plants, is not worthy of a scientific mind.

[Ammianus]

[Ammianus]

[noddy]

middle of a once a century disaster with much of japan still in danger from death from the effects of the TSUNAMI, i find picking on colonel sun about anti nuclear stances quite repulsive.

if we had a vomit over ip protocol, id be doing the sprinkler dance.

im getting pretty dark out our media for concentrating on the nuclear aspect, ignoring the humanitarian aspect of millions caught without homes and services when its snowing, but it seems the media is pretty on the ball for much of its audience.

just sayin.

[Torchwood]

Given the scale of the disaster - biggest ever earthquake and one of the biggest tsunamis - criticism of the Japanese government can be overdone. TEPCO is another matter, there seems to be a long thread of incompetence, buck passing and failure to disclose - apparently they wanted to abandon the site straight after the tsunami and leave it to the army!

What is surprising is:
- given that there is a risk of criticality with the ponds for spent fuel if they run dry, why were they not enclosed in a containment bunker like the reactor? After all, a more benign error or accident than a force 9 earthquake/tsunami could cause them to do so. Bad design.
- whey so much spent fuel on site? No long term storage for waste, or reprocessing. Global problem. Sound of chickens roosting.

[Apollonius]

[Colonel Sun]

[Colonel Sun]

[monster_gardener]