7.9 and 8.8 Earthquakes in Japan

Re: travel

Try to find out your country's official recommendations. Belgian foreign office's one is that all non-essential travel to Japan is to be avoided at the moment.

http://grab.by/9skf

cracks

NYT's before and after satellite image slider is worth a look.

Why did the FOX News anchors say there may be a second tsunami? This is the only related evidence I've found of that so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFVt3HPuoJo

Just saw headlines saying there was a new one hitting in the next 5 minutes (Chicago Sun-Times).

BBC says helicopters have seen an (est) 3m-high tsunami off ne coast.

BreakingNews Breaking News
AP: Officials believe a hydrogen explosion has occurred at Fukushima Dai-ich plant

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/14/3163383.htm?section=justin

Japanese Met say tsunami a false alarm.
xp Reactor 3 said to have exploded.

or what that link said, basically

So hopefully the helicopter was jumping to conclusions!

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/77575.html

Some 2,000 bodies found on quake-hit Miyagi's coastal areas

SENDAI, March 14, Kyodo

Some 2,000 bodies were found Monday on two shores in Miyagi Prefecture following Friday's devastating earthquake and massive tsunami, as Japan continued to struggle to grasp the whole picture of the disaster.

The findings will significantly increase the death toll from the magnitude 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami, with police having so far confirmed 1,597 deaths and 1,481 people missing across the affected areas in northeastern and eastern Japan.

About 1,000 bodies were found coming ashore on hardest-hit Miyagi's Ojika Peninsula and another 1,000 have been spotted in the town of Minamisanriku where the prefectural government has been unable to contact about 10,000 people, or over half the local population.

The official death toll excludes about 200 to 300 bodies in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi, that have yet to be recovered by police and other workers due to the difficulty of reaching them amid the devastation and rubble.

jfc

ok, time to donate

jesus

I guess the good news is that they've been prepared for this 2ndary explosion for >24 hours. almost 300k people had been evacuated from the area yesterday.

Let's have some good thoughts for the first responders who have been working non-stop to keep this disaster as minimal as possible (6 first responders dead as of last night).

The hydrogen blast was heard/felt over 50km/31 miles away from the site.

newest nytimes article says the release of radioactive materials could go on for months

don't know if this has been posted yet, but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3K1w7u04Zo&hd=1

My mother gave a lecture on sunday in Tokyo. Business as usual. More or less anyway.
My parents are very calm about this. Apparently they had a 6 point something quake on sunday? My father laughed saying he didn't feel a thing, but my mom did cause she was sitting down.

Anyway, I am very much touched by friends, relatives and acquaintances checking with me if my parents survived.

Re: the economic angle, you'd think that reconstruction will help the Japanese economy over the medium-term, but how the hell do you even BEGIN reconstruction after something like this? Do we even know how many people are destitute as a result? What will the worst hit areas look like in a year, two, five?

http://app1.yomiuri.co.jp/image/20110314-105398_L.jpg

Guardian having a live Q&A with nuclear experts. Sample question:

"If significant amounts of radioactive material leak into the sea, what are the likely effects on mutation rates?...what are the chances of, for example, giant squid mutating into the sort of creatures that might pose a hazard to shipping?"

Yes, I could see how that might be a worry instead of say increased cancer risk and foetal abnormalities.

Sooner or later the nuclear scientists will have to break out the banana equivalent dose to calm the hysteria in some quarters.

So far, it seems TEPPCO has made decisions that pretty much effect their shareholders and employees and no one else. The shareholders may be wiped out (its very highly leveraged, even among utilities), and the workers showing up to continue pumping operations after seeing two reactor buildings (not their pressure vessels or surrounding concrete containment) after the deaths of 1 & 11 are pretty heroic.

Did not know this (assuming it's true, given that it is wikipedia) -

"Bananas are radioactive enough to regularly cause false alarms on radiation sensors used to detect possible illegal smuggling of nuclear material at US ports"

great now we have to deal w/ radioactive bananas on top of everything else

Yes, We Have No Radioactive Bananas

I was so much happier before I knew that. I just threw out all my bananas and I like bananas.

In all honesty, I keep thinking back to the recently restored Japanese version of "Godzilla," which was of course emphatically designed as a doomy cautionary anti-nuclear tale. All this destruction and radiation, it's been Godzilla and Hiroshima for me. It's like a surreal conflation of fact, horror and fiction.

Though frankly, I find all the "hydrogen explosion" headlines a hair histrionic, relatively speaking. That's hydrogen explosion as in the Hindenberg, an explosion of built up gases, but not as in, like, hydrogen bomb, which is a vital distinction.

x-post Bananas are doomed, aren't they? Between this and that blight, they're going the way of the dodo.

I remember how shocked I was when I realized that ultimately nuclear power is still all about just moving a giant turbine around, which generates electricity. In that respect it's no different than the earliest steam engines.

is there any form of electricity generation that doesn't involve moving a fucking giant magnet around? fucking magnets, how do they work?

also kind of scary to remember that some of our aircraft carriers are nuclear powered

solar

Some solar plants rely on turbines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower

i'd really like to see this - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1194612/

"Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and societal changes. In Finland, the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels – that must last the entire period the waste remains hazardous: 100,000 years."

There are plenty of places that are sealed from aquifers and accessible which will last that long. Deep salt domes like the sort excavated (with water) along the Texas/Louisiana coast and used to store crude oil in the strategic petroleum reserve, for example. The reason the U.S. congress chose an above ground-water level mountain in a geologically active area is just politics.

It's hard to keep up but Japanese news are confirming that a THIRD nuclear reactor (#2 @ Fukushima Dai-ichi) is now entering partial meltdown (fuel rods are confirmed exposed) and is failing to cool down. They are pumping in sea water (as they did with the previous 2 reactors that partially melted-down) and expect ANOTHER significant hydrogen explosion.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/14/japanese-quake-will-likely-affect-our-supply-of-gadgets/

I believe there's a well-known Twitter hashtag that may be appropriate here?

So this will be the THIRD partial meltdown in the last three days. TEPCO and NISA are confirming btw, they aren't being coy anymore.

There are plenty of places that are sealed from aquifers and accessible which will last that long.

I just don't know how you can say that with any confidence. The pyramids in Giza are approx. 4000 years old.

Did not know this (assuming it's true, given that it is wikipedia) -

"Bananas are radioactive enough to regularly cause false alarms on radiation sensors used to detect possible illegal smuggling of nuclear material at US ports"

My mother worked for years -- and I worked one summer in the mailroom -- at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Perry, OH. Neither of us ever had access to the active reactor/power generation area in Perry Unit 1, but those who did had to wear dosimeter badges and get regular checks. They were advised not to eat bananas on the days they had to get checked.

Coworkers are telling me that there is an abundance of helicopters above Tokyo right now.

Granted they're 40 years old designs, but venting the hydrogen laden steam into a sealed outer structure just seems stupid. Either open the windows, make windows, and design them to vent underground if possible.

Tokyo has been having power problems linked to the reactors, no? Could they be news copters?

I just don't know how you can say that with any confidence.

It's just the geology. Salt beds move like a highly viscous liquid on geologic timescales, enough so that broad evaporite plains in the former Gulf of Mexico desert, when overlaid by a couple miles of sediment from the continent, have pushed their way up into these bulbous columnar structures (mostly deep underground). One can measure the speed of their passage by the age of the overlaying sediment. They're not going anywhere on timescales of 100,000 years. They're more or less impervious to fractures or the saturated brine around them. Vitrefy the waste, toss it in an old deep SPR dome, and cement up the bore. If they do, they'll leak out into rocks sealed from the surface and any usable groundwater aquifers by multiple layers of nearly impervious shale (which trap oil in usable reservoirs, as well). The main danger would be if knowledge of the location was lost and some future civilization started drilling deep salt-domes. Presumably any civilization with the ability to do that would also have geiger counters, and the sense not to drill into salt domes (which aren't themselves prospective for oil, gas, or anything other than, well, salt).

The problem with Yucca is that its a highly fractured hard-rock mountain elevated above aquifers.

Just speculating, but there may be concern that the slip plane that's relieving stress at the Japan trench is migrating southwards.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/10/140_35.gif

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Maps/Legends/legend.gif

To clarify but hopefully not alarm, I've been watching this map for days, and the southern extent of that mass of tremors keeps advancing towards Tokyo, more so than on the north. The progression is barely visible on the whole world animation, but alas there's no animation for this zoom.

I remember an old semiotics problem about how you would warn people thousands of years in the future that an area contained radioactive waste. The most interesting part was that and signs used would be problematic as they would assume you were keeping them out because there was something good hidden there. Certainly head on spikes, carvings of destruction and threats of curses never kept us out of anywhere.