7.9 and 8.8 Earthquakes in Japan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12722435

Well, the BBC says that For comparison, radiation therapy for cancer typically involves several doses of between one and seven grays at a time - but these doses are highly controlled, and usually specifically targeted at small areas of the body.

by the way, I found a donation link:

http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

donations go directly to the Japanese Red Cross.

good timing

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20042264-503544.html

if anyone cares about trolly gal posted upthread, here is ~resolution~

the footage of minami-sanriku here from about a minute in is just
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12735023

the worst videos are only emerging now i guess, ppl who were closest to minamisanriku

that last one is is awful

jesus

How many blasts have there been at the power station now? I'm getting confused.

the last shot is some proper apocalyptic stuff

xp 3 I think

However, I haven't seen any footage of the third one, which is kind of surprising given the blanket coverage (apparently the authorities have imposed a no-fly zone so maybe that is why there is no footage of the third explosion?).

okay, the video where you can see a whole group of houses moving in unison along with the water, like the world's biggest school of fish

jesus

the people in the lower left - what the fuck are you doing

it kinda looked to me like a bridge went out, there, or at least the water overtook a long stretch of land that people were walking over; you see a guy run back that way to help people along at some point.

i think the weirder thing about seeing houses drift away is it seeming kinda logical - like watching other debris drifting towards them makes you think well they would drift away, under that pressure.

I'm limiting myself to watching footage on the news. Waaaaaaay too visceral.

the people in the lower left - what the fuck are you doing

srsly

I think the most stunning part is how quietly relentless the tsunami is. like in some of the videos, it'll start with the first small waves washing in - the camera will pan away, look at some cars, other people, pan back - oh hey, the water's now 3 feet higher than before and starting to cover cars. camera pans away, some seconds go by, pans back, oh look, now it's 6 feet how. now it's at the second story of the building. now you can only see the roof. and the lack of sound in some of these videos, just some faint rustling, so fucking eerie.

i'm never living by the coast.. I've decided

Via LA Times, some radiation amounts for comparison:

Limit on whole-body exposure for a radiation worker for one year: 50,000 microsieverts
One year's worth of exposure to natural radiation from soil, cosmic rays and other sources: 3,000 microsieverts
One Chest X-ray: 100 microsieverts
One dental X-ray: 40-150 microsieverts
One mammogram: 700 microsieverts
Ct scan (abdomen): 8000 microsieverts
Full-body airport X-ray scanner: 0.0148 microsieverts
Airplane flight from New York to Los Angeles: 30-40 microsieverts
Smoking a pack a day for one year: 80,000 microsieverts
Average dose to people living within 10 miles of 1979 Three Mile Island accident: 80 microsieverts
Average radiation dose to evacuees from areas highly contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster: 33,000 microsieverts (Of 600,000 of the most-affected people, cancer risk went up by a few percent -- perhaps eventually representing an extra 4,000 fatal cancers on top of the 100,000 fatal cancers otherwise expected.)

anyone cares about trolly gal posted upthread, here is ~resolution~

― buzza, Tuesday, March 15, 2011 2:30 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

What was it? All the vids say taken down due a claim by LaughAloneTV, and that one linked's to a closed a/c

― stet, Tuesday, March 15, 2011 8:15 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes what happened

the people in the lower left - what the fuck are you doing

― dayo, Tuesday, March 15, 2011 8:57 AM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

theyre trying to cary something, at least one of them gets swept away, its v upsetting

Right now: Huge 6+ aftershock but notable for Sanpuku, the epicenter was in Shizuoka. Seems like the pressure on the faults is moving South.

I still think the most nightmarish video is the one I posted where the tsunami is seen at full height coming to shore from ground level. It is a wall of water- a classic wave literally straight out of our nightmares. Not to say the version of the tsunami that is a never ending swell of water isn't terrifying either...

I'm so mesmerized by it that I am obsessed and I don't know if I'm hurting myself watching these over and over.

Yeah - I watched that one numerous times yesterday. The little cars just going down the road maybe unaware of what was coming at them. ugh.

Somehow it went from feeling really surreal to all too real overnight and I feel all sorts of jumpy and sick thinking about it/watching the videos now. I think I need to not do that for a while.

so I think some of my students were making jokes about this in class today, but I couldn't catch it since cantonese isn't my first language. I felt really sick and really just wanted to end class right there.

Here is a stupid comment I found on a forum:

"all these videos minus well be fake... I know they're not but NONE of them show anyone getting hurt....

we see videos of whole cities being washed away, but it shows no one hurt in any of them...

we see cars driving and water getting close but the video gets cut off...

nothing but BS and a waste of time..."

Some people just have no concept of reality, making them insensitive and in this case fucking stupid.

people only want to see bullied kids powerbombing their bullies on concrete these days

we see videos of whole cities being washed away, but it shows no one hurt in any of them...

People generally have to be underwater to drown.

anyone cares about trolly gal posted upthread, here is ~resolution~

― buzza, Tuesday, March 15, 2011 2:30 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

What was it? All the vids say taken down due a claim by LaughAloneTV, and that one linked's to a closed a/c

― stet, Tuesday, March 15, 2011 8:15 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes what happened

― ice cr?m, Tuesday, 15 March 2011 13:13 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

this

Hi, I have an idea.

Let's stop giving idiots the oxygen of publicity. Let's stop treating them like what they have to say is as important as what intelligent people have to say, or that their insensitivities or lies or prejudices or paranoias are in any way a useful part of 21st century society. Let's not be afraid to be a little bit elitist about that, because if things like facts and 'book smarts' are to be defined as elitism, FINE, because I'm starting to feel like every day we treat these people as though whatever drips from their cakeholes is worthy of consideration is a wasted day.

Wholeheartedly cosigning Suzy

Hi, Suzy. You're welcome to your elitism. I happen to be capable of the cognitive dissonance that allows me to be curious about something I find reprehensible, and it'd be cool if I wasn't tarred as 'part of the problem' for that.

Back on topic--

A basic video description of how a nuclear meltdown occurs, specific to fukushima: http://su.pr/17l0Wu

for those wondering she basically said "hi yeah so i've been trolling you guys, time to come clean, been doing this kinds of videos for awhile now, but i'ma stop this one right now because i'm tired of these pizzas getting delivered to my house. anyway, this was fun! see ya round!"

What a lot of fucking noise about nothing.

as for actual videos of the actual crisis at hand, i haven't been able to make myself watch any of them :/

Fukushima's a 6 now.

I made the mistake of watching a bunch of these new videos before bedtime and had nightmares all night. Need to start donating.

re:donations vs haiti, apparently a lot of ppl arent donating because they think japan has the money for it, but the communities hardest hit are full of elderly ppl & arent japan's wealthiest, plus the scale of the cost is already humungous, threatening to slide the country into a recession iirc? idk doesnt seem like theres any real reason not to donate more

So is the Japanese Red Cross the best place to donate? Sorry if this has already been discussed - this thread is just too long to review.

To my understanding Red Cross Japan & Doctors Without Borders are the two with the highest ratio of money-from-you::help on the ground in Japan.

yeah, but we can be confident that japan can/will get the money it will need to rebuild and that it has the infrastructure to make sure that money goes to the places its most needed. definitely not saying "dont donate" (i might say "dont donate to japan, donate unrestricted funds to the charity of your choice") just saying that it makes sense that haiti raised so much more money.

yah, MSF has several teams there already

also max otm---by all means give give give but i might also suggest that if you were planning on giving say $50 maybe give half that to MSF and half to a local charity

cool - thanks guys!

many xposts to deej - as hard of a time as I am having processing everything that's going on in Japan, I can't even imagine what you are going through right now.

basically anyone with personal ties to Japan ITT, just want to give all of you much love and hugs and support and whatever you need to make it through each day

<3 <3 <3

Tokyo background readings are more or less normal now that prevailing winds are towards the east.

http://mu.jklmnop.net/japan/radiation.jpg

The present concern is with communities on the shore north of Fukushima. Yesterday I was watching a site withrealtime dosimetry readings from . The highest reading, from a town just north of the evacuation zone, was 4414 nGy/h, which assuming β decay (as in Sr-90 and Cs-137) is 4.414 µSv/hr.

A high altitude flight (Wikipedia uses the example London Heathrow to Tokyo Narita on a high-latitude polar route) has a measured background radiation of 6 μSv/hr.

Presently, the highest dose rate is 1041 nGy/h, roughly 1/6th of that received in high altitude flight. Would you want to live in that for a year? Probably not. Will there be a handful of premature cancer deaths from this incident? Yes. Which is still less than the radiation spewed by equivalent coal-fired power plants over their lifetime.

Note, in my managed investment accounts, I was about 16% exposed to junior uranium explorers, which have been crushed. If you believe, as I do, that fission remains the most practical low-carbon baseload generation for the next 60 years while renewables ramp up, there will be a decadal buying opportunity once the stop loss sales are digested this week.

ty

BTW that should read:

Realtime dosimetry readings from the Japanese System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information

When checking these, please consider that roughly 100 nGy/h is normal sea-level background, and roughly 6000 nGy/h is normal for air travel.

So far, it looks like TEPPCO did well given the 40 year-old designs didn't have the modern failsaves of dumping boric acid in distilled into the reactor, and they didn't have the sense to locate backup generation uphill. Their present shareholders will still be more or less be crushed to 0 given the high leverage of the company.

I'm mostly impressed with the fact that their employees working the pumps are showing up having watched 2 fatal and 1 non-fatal explosions from hydrogen buildup. These are the heroes of the quake.

I thought they were pumping in boric acid?

Sea water, IIRC