News Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, & Nuclear Disaster

[Urwumpe]

New big explosion at Fukushima plant today (see date and time at top of security camera):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaQgkERHuNY&feature=youtu.be

Yes, and if you look more careful at the time, you can see that the video is a time lapse over about 10 minutes, with the "big explosion" propagating at snail speed.

Looks more like somebody switched the flood lights on in fog.

 

[statisticsnerd]

^^ Ah, good catch.. You're probably right. *slaps self*

 

[Wishbone]

New fission suspected at Fukushima Daiichi - Xenon detected

http://bigpondnews.com/articles/Wor...sion_suspected_at_Fukushima_plant_680739.html

New fission suspected at Fukushima plant

02 Nov 2011 - 03:40pm

The operator of Japan's tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant says it fears nuclear fission has resumed within one of its reactors despite a shutdown.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it had begun injecting water and boric acid into Reactor No.2 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which began leaking radiation after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

'We cannot deny the possibility of a small nuclear fission reaction,' TEPCO spokesman Hiroki Kawamata said, adding that the injection was a precautionary measure.

He said there was no fresh danger at the plant because the reactor's temperature and pressure, as well as radiation levels at monitoring posts, showed no substantial changes.

Fission is the process by which an operating nuclear reactor produces power.

The reactor automatically shut down in the wake of the disaster but nuclear fuel is believed to have melted through its container onto the bottom of the outer vessel when the tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems.

The injection was ordered after preliminary analysis of gas samples from the reactor building showed the possible presence of xenon 133 and xenon 135, byproducts of a nuclear reaction.

The two substances have short half-lives - five days for xenon 133 and just nine hours for xenon 135 - indicating that any nuclear fission was a recent phenomenon.

The temperature at the reactor No.2 had been brought to below 100 degrees Celsius, TEPCO said, one of the conditions for the utility to declare so-called 'cold shutdown'.

Technicians have been battling since the tsunami to achieve cold shutdown of the reactors, a stable condition in which temperatures drop and no reaction takes place.

Comment: with Fukushima having as much as 42% of Chernobyl's emission of isotopes in the air (and much more released into the Pacific), we're bound to live in some "interesting times".

 

[T.Neo]

we're bound to live in some "interesting times".

Hi there! How are you doing today?

 

[Scruce]

Japan's Fukushima plant opened to journalists

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/12/japan-opens-fukushima-plant-journalists

Officials showed reporters around the plant for the first time since March when the natural disasters triggered a meltdown in three of the plant's reactors, the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl 25 years ago.

Martin Fackler, the New York Times' Tokyo bureau chief, said the site was strewn with piles of rubble virtually untouched since the tsunami struck.

He said: "There's debris all around where the reactors are – twisted metal, crumpled trucks, large water tanks that have been dented and bent.

 

[Urwumpe]

Hi there! How are you doing today?

My attempt of a caption there:

こんにちは!

 

[Fozzy]

One word: wow!

 

[garyw]

Google Streetview returns to Japan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16157549

The images show just how much damage was done by that Tsunami.

For me, this shows much more vividly how powerful the tsuami was than the pre and post satellite images.

 

[Scruce]

Eleven months after...

When Japan was hit by both an earthquake and tsunami in quick succession in March last year, the images of devastation gripped the world.
And now after 11 months of tireless rebuilding, these pictures reveal the amazing progress made since those tragic events.
Photographers returned to the scenes of desolation to take these stunning shots that capture the way in which the areas most severely affected have changed.

Image | Caption

|Houses crumbled either side of this main road in the tsunami-hit area of Ofunato, Iwate but ongoing efforts have cleared the debris - and despite the nearest homes on either side being pulled down, many of the other buildings were salvaged.

|In March, Yuko Sugimoto was photographed wrapped with a blanket standing in front of debris looking for her son in the tsunami-hit town of Ishinomaki. Below, the same housewife stands with her five-year-old son Raito at the same place.

|Rubble: Collapsed buildings and rubble in Kesennuma in Miyagi had made this corner impossible to get through but the impressively swift clean up has left the same corner accessible to traffic.

|Pile up: cars had piled up in front of the airport control tower in Sendai on after the tsunami but has since been totally transformed.

|Pile up: cars had piled up in front of the airport control tower in Sendai on after the tsunami but has since been totally transformed.

|All change in Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture, as seen on March 22, 2011 and January 15, 2012.

|Rebuild: Cars and even a plane cluttered up the Sendai Airport in Natori, Miyagi but after an intense clean up the fenced off airport is now back in service.

|More work to do: Back in March last year a rescue worker wades through rubble in the tsunami hit area of Minamisanriku, Miyagi, and although the area has largely been cleared tyres and gas canisters have since been dumped there.

|Chaos: In Ishonomaki, Miyagi a boat washed up in to the middle of this street bringing down pylons and buildings and although the building nearest to the camera on the left needed to be pulled down all the other buildings were repaired.

|Back to normality: Cars are able to come and go through this bridge in Hishonomaki, Miyagi less than a year after a washed up boat prevented anyone from using the road.

|Major project: A number of areas like this site Natori, near Sendai required large scale operations to clear them of the debris which seemed never ending.

|In March four people take to the area of Rikuzentakata, Iwate unsure where to begin after it was devastated by rubble but 11 months on the whole area has been cleared leaving just a cross roads in the centre.

The Japanese cabinet had to approve almost $50billion worth of spending on post-earthquake reconstruction - the country's biggest building project since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

The emergency budget was followed by more spending packages and is still dwarfed by the overall cost of damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami, estimated at more than $300 billion.

The earthquake destroyed tens of thousands of homes and smashed a nuclear power plant which began leaking radiation, a situation the plant is still managing.

Article (Daily Mail)

 

[JEL]

Almost a whole year has passed already.

 

[Suzy]

"Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis", NYT, 27/2. How would they evacuate a city of over 13 million - where would they send everyone? (Edit: though looking at the [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo"]Wikipedia page[/ame], the greater Tokyo region's population is an astounding 35 million...!)

 

[Codz]

"Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis", NYT, 27/2. How would they evacuate a city of over 13 million - where would they send everyone?

Australia, China, pacific islands, US?

 

[tl8]

Australia, China, pacific islands, US?

Have you tried moving 13 million by plane?

Assuming 500 people per flight, 1 flight leaving every 5 minutes. 90 days straight.

Australia couldn't support that many. We only have 22 Million people and they are quite spread out.

 

[Suzy]

Australia, China, pacific islands, US?

China is hugely overcrowded as it is, Australia is mostly desert and the infrastructure of its cities is not coping with the current population, don't know about the USA, Pacific Islands are threatened by rising seas from global warming.

 

[Codz]

I'm not saying it's feasible I'm simply saying there are places they could go temporarily.

 

[Sky Captain]

Quickly evacuating entire Tokyo region would be impossible. It is not so much about how to transport and where to put all those people, but how to support them. Water, food, shelter, sanitation, medicine. Quickly providing all that in some Australian desert would be impossible. Such evacuation attempt probably would kill more through accidents and disase than all four Fukushima reactors spontaneusly exploding Chernobyl style.

 

[T.Neo]

Transport and logistics issues aside, I wonder how "hugely overcrowded" China actually is. Especially in regard to a few million people.

Rising sea levels are far less immediate a threat than nuclear contamination (or lack of infrastructure). It isn't like islands are magically getting swallowed up by the sea.

If for whatever reason the best cause of action were to evacuate a large portion of Japan, you'd have severe trouble doing so. It is the tenth most populous country on Earth, after all.

 

[Urwumpe]

The two airports of Tokyo alone manage 100 million passengers per year at civilian operations. If you would reduce things to the pure uncomfortable hauling of people from A to B without transporting anything but fuel from B to A, you should manage about 300 million passengers in the same time, alone by higher flight rates possible if you do the turn around elsewhere. Let the little baggage of the people be transported by ship or train, and you get another increase in capacity, maybe up to 400% in total. This would mean you could evacuate Tokyo in less than two weeks by aircraft alone.

Two weeks is a pretty good value for the kind of danger, we don't speak of Godzilla approaching.

 

[RisingFury]

Rising sea levels are far less immediate a threat than nuclear contamination (or lack of infrastructure). It isn't like islands are magically getting swallowed up by the sea.

Bit off topic, but they are.

Not due to seal level rise, but because tectonic plates drift and often take islands under water. You'll often find reports in the media about global warming and seal level rise. They'll go out to an island and show peer and structures 10 meters under water. What they're failing to consider is that seal level rise due to increased water temperature - you know, water expands - is currently at about 20 to 30 cm.

 

[Sky Captain]

Two weeks is a pretty good value for the kind of danger, we don't speak of Godzilla approaching.

Wouldn't it be more effective to tell people to seal their doors and windows as good as possible and wait few days till radiation levels decrease in a hypothetical scenario where Fukushima exploded like Chernobyl and spewed fallout over Tokyo? Most radioactive stuff with short half lifes decay quickly leaving isotopes with longer half lifes but those emit less radiation. When fallout is over launch massive decontamination operation and evacuate only those areas that are too radioactive for safe long term habitation and can't be effectively decontaminated.