News: Japan's Earthquake

[Rostere]

Wals, you do realize that planning for an earthquake in the magnitude of 9.0 is damn near impossible right? There have only been 3 such earthquakes that have EVER been recorded, and the amount of power cut loose by them is just.... insane. 6 or 7 is plannable, but once you're up that high, the sheer amount of damage that's going to be done is just gonna throw any possible plan out the window.

 

9.0 is approx the power of 474 MEGATONS of TNT being detonated.

 

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqi...001xgp/#details

 

There's a link to the US Geological Survey article. According to them the only earthquake near this strong in this area was in 869. And that's simply theoretical.

 

Still, with those numbers the risk that exactly this would happen is in hindsight roughly 5 percent, with the approximation that the reactor shutdown would have commenced in 2011. Would you make that gamble? Planning for extreme events is central to planning nuclear power. If you look at what happened you realize they had not planned for a flooding at all, and not provided enough redundant power supply options.

[Tale]

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/1...dex.html?hpt=T1

"It's pretty clear that they will be getting very high doses of radiation. There's certainly the potential for lethal doses of radiation. They know it, and I think you have to call these people heroes."

[Oblarg]

Wals, with all due respect, I don't think you quite appreciate the difference between an 8.2 (what the system was designed to cope with) and a 9.0 (what the system got hit with). It's a logarithmic scale - the difference is a factor of 8. That's nearly an order of magnitude. Expecting a system designed to cope with an 8.2 to be able to cope with a 9.0 is, quite honestly, completely absurd. A 9.0 magnitude quake is almost impossible to deal with under any circumstance.

 

If anything needs to be questioned in this situation, it's the wisdom of building nuclear reactors in a quake-prone area, not the efficacy of the safety measures at the plants themselves.

[213374U]

If anything needs to be questioned in this situation, it's the wisdom of building nuclear reactors in a quake-prone area, not the efficacy of the safety measures at the plants themselves.

Unfortunately, for the Japanese there isn't much choice with regards to nuclear power.

 

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110314-ja...ian-gulf-energy

 

^ While the piece's interpretation of Japan's WWII economic factors is... not what I'm used to reading, it's essentially right in that Japan's huge industrial economy is extremely sensitive to changes in the availability of oil. Nuclear power mitigates this dependency, somewhat. Perhaps if the power plants hadn't been so close to the littoral, the tsunami would have been a non-issue and damage less catastrophic, but the bottom line is that Japan really does need her nuclear plants.

[Walsingham]

Wals, with all due respect, I don't think you quite appreciate the difference between an 8.2 (what the system was designed to cope with) and a 9.0 (what the system got hit with). It's a logarithmic scale - the difference is a factor of 8. That's nearly an order of magnitude. Expecting a system designed to cope with an 8.2 to be able to cope with a 9.0 is, quite honestly, completely absurd. A 9.0 magnitude quake is almost impossible to deal with under any circumstance.

 

If anything needs to be questioned in this situation, it's the wisdom of building nuclear reactors in a quake-prone area, not the efficacy of the safety measures at the plants themselves.

 

 

As Numbers points out, Japan cannot realistically rely on anything else.

 

But to return to the main issue:

 

1. Response measures do not rise in a direct scale proportionate to the main event. I do not need a different ambulance if I get hit in the chest with a .22 or a .50AE round.

2. My information concurs with Rostere's. They hadn't considered flooding at the site, and the power redundancies were insufficient - and far more importantly - not geographically diverse enough or where they were they didn't consider issues of transport into a quake hit zone.

3. One of the biggest problems at Lloyds of London in the last century was that they failed to grasp pretty basic maths. Because the odds of any single extreme disaster were nearly zero they calculated their exposure as low. However, what they should have been doing is calculating the odds of NOT having an extreme disaster, which is the reciprocal of the probabilities to the power of the number of possible events. Given that the number of possible extreme events is in fact pretty huge, their exposure turned out to be high. The question here is the same. Not the probability of a quake of this magnitude, but the probability of NOT having something which affected the local area very significantly (affecting the diesels and the storage pools), AND the wider area infrastructure to transport in alternatives. Which strikes me as pretty low.

 

As I say, the disaster response industry very quickly identified one of the problems with Katrina being that no-one had grasped that a storm surge and a hurricane might co-occur. Even though any expert in the field would have told you that they did. Here they seem to have not noticed that quakes and tsunamis go hand in hand. Which is odd given that they 'invented' tsunamis.

[Oblarg]

Nah, the redundancies were most likely perfectly fine for coping with the sort of disaster the plant was designed to cope with. You seem to be caught up on the fact that it was the tsunami that caused the backup power to fail, but do you have any reliable source that the same could have happened in the type of 8.2 magnitude quake the system was designed, at most, to cope with? I find it very hard to believe.

[Zoraptor]

There are two things to bear in mind there. Firstly, magnitude is 'irrelevant' in terms of how much destuction is caused as the energy can be dissipated very easily and effectively if the quake is deep. Effective damage is measured using the Mercelli scale. The exact way in which this happens is dependant upon a host of factors, of which magnitude is a major, but not sole cause. For example, the 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch- theoretically well below what a nuclear plant is designed to withstand Richter wise- had a maximum Ground Force Acceleration of 2.2g (ie ~21m/s/s), or if you like, the equivalent of accelerating a building to around 70km/h from a standing start over the course of a second. From what I can tell this is 3 times the GFA (0.76g) even the most modern Japanese plant is designed to survive and that was from a 6.3 quake. Apparently the Sendai earthquake's GFA was ~0.5g.

 

Secondly, the tsunami was the big thing and Walsingham's read seems to be pretty fair- they simply did not anticipate so many things going wrong at once as a result of that. While it's very difficult to be sure given the amount of contradictory information floating around it does seem that the actual earthquake proofing worked well and the reactor got 'parked' automatically as it should but even in this state it still needs cooling

[Walsingham]

Nah, the redundancies were most likely perfectly fine for coping with the sort of disaster the plant was designed to cope with. You seem to be caught up on the fact that it was the tsunami that caused the backup power to fail, but do you have any reliable source that the same could have happened in the type of 8.2 magnitude quake the system was designed, at most, to cope with? I find it very hard to believe.

 

I apologise if I gave the impression that I have inside info on the cause of failure. I'm working from the same open sources as you are.

 

However, it seems we've isolated the disagreement to the question of whether the ancillary damage would have occurred with a lesser quake. That's a matter of opinion, in this forum, so I'm content to let it rest.

[Walsingham]

As an aside, what's this gibberish about Glenn Beck blaming mankind's wrongdoing for the quake?

[Wrath of Dagon]

As I say, the disaster response industry very quickly identified one of the problems with Katrina being that no-one had grasped that a storm surge and a hurricane might co-occur.

I think it was more that the levies were not built properly, and thus didn't hold. I'm pretty sure they anticipated the storm surge, or there wouldn't be levies in the first place.

[Walsingham]

As I say, the disaster response industry very quickly identified one of the problems with Katrina being that no-one had grasped that a storm surge and a hurricane might co-occur.

I think it was more that the levies were not built properly, and thus didn't hold. I'm pretty sure they anticipated the storm surge, or there wouldn't be levies in the first place.

 

Again, just because it's obvious doesn't mean that it had been officially considered. I think you'd enjoy reading the journal I mentioned, WoD. Have a browse through a couple of editions.

[Monte Carlo]

As an aside, what's this gibberish about Glenn Beck blaming mankind's wrongdoing for the quake?

 

Glenn Beck and gibberish goes together like beef and mustard, why bother even reading it?

[Walsingham]

As an aside, what's this gibberish about Glenn Beck blaming mankind's wrongdoing for the quake?

 

Glenn Beck and gibberish goes together like beef and mustard, why bother even reading it?

 

Mmmmmm... beef and mustard... damnit, why isn't it dinner time?

[Oblarg]

I apologise if I gave the impression that I have inside info on the cause of failure. I'm working from the same open sources as you are.

 

However, it seems we've isolated the disagreement to the question of whether the ancillary damage would have occurred with a lesser quake. That's a matter of opinion, in this forum, so I'm content to let it rest.

 

Fair enough.

 

This situation is pretty scary, tbh - a few days ago it seemed they'd have it under control, but now it's looking quite bad.

[Guard Dog]

As an aside, what's this gibberish about Glenn Beck blaming mankind's wrongdoing for the quake?

You do realize he is not someone taken very seriously right?

 

On a tangent I've been waitying to see who would be the first to blame the quake on global warning.

[Calax]

As an aside, what's this gibberish about Glenn Beck blaming mankind's wrongdoing for the quake?

You do realize he is not someone taken very seriously right?

 

On a tangent I've been waitying to see who would be the first to blame the quake on global warning.

I donno, but it was pretty amazing to see how fast people were happy to say that it was justice (against the Atheists, or just the Japanese in general)

[pmp10]

IAEA report warns that one of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plan may have lost all water in it's fuel pool.

It's pretty problematic as that reactor stores spent fuel rods that can catch fire and spread radioactive particles around sizable area.

 

 

On a tangent I've been waitying to see who would be the first to blame the quake on global warning.

Isn't that a little paranoid?

I can understand skepticism but I have never seen any reputable source connecting climate change with earthquakes.

[Oblarg]

You do realize he is not someone taken very seriously right?

 

On a tangent I've been waitying to see who would be the first to blame the quake on global warning.

 

I'd sure like it if he weren't taken seriously, but there are a lot of morons in this country.

 

The "global warming caused Katrina" crowd aren't much better, mind you - if anything, they're worse, as they make it hard for anyone to take a reasonable look at the effects of climate change and what steps (if any) should be taken.

[Solo]

Solo here.

 

The Kanagawa area was spared the hardship that Sendai and the surrounding areas got. Though people have lost their minds here. It took me 2 days to get gas for my scooter that takes less than a minute to fill up. The first day I should say was delayed because of the rolling blackouts they are doing.

 

Chiba and got rocked pretty good the other day.

 

Will report more later.

[WDeranged]

On the climate change thing, as far as I see tell there are no reputable sources claiming a connection, there is however a bit of scaremongering from the usual types.

 

Heres a good article.

 

He makes a good point that the BBC's dedicated coverage of the nuclear reactor might be a bit unbalanced compared to the ongoing chaos caused by the actual earthquake.

[Guard Dog]

That was a tounge-in-cheek comment on my part because there are legions of idiots who blame every phenomenon, natural or otherwise, on "man made" global warming. It is as most of you seem to get, ridiculous.

 

But they are out there, I'm just suprised they've been so quiet.

[Azdeus]

That's probably because those kind of people are hiding from the supermoon, coming on the 19th.

[Solo]

LOL.

 

Have to really laugh at all the doom going on around here by people that have 0 clue as to what is really happening but have a great number of people following them.

[Walsingham]

I was watching the news th other day and listening to people who had worked to avert the Windscale nuclear reactor disaster in the UK way back when.

 

Most interesting of all, it seems that, pressed for labour the police went into the local cinema and volunteers/volunteered (not clear how voluntary) the back two rows to come into the plant and PUSH OUT THE FUEL RODS USING SCAFFOLDING POLES.

 

I can't find any mention of how many of these civilians died subsequently. However, it seems to me that they deserve a bloody statue!

[Calax]

Sooo, this is only tangentially related but apparently after the quake the Japanese Emperor (who I thought had been ejected after Hirohito/Showa) did make a televised appearance to the nation to tell them to buck up and work together.

 

For some reason it strikes me as odd that Japan still has a monarchy, but then it's one of those things that NEVER comes up in ANY way shape or form in the US except during a WW2 unit in high school.