Japan hit by 8.9 quake and following tsunami

[MadImmortalMan]

Japan nuclear plant: exposed to the elements - nuclear fuel in meltdown
Open to the elements after its walls were blown away, this is the dried-up storage pool where overheating fuel rods are threatening a nuclear meltdown at Japan's stricken Fukushima power plant.



Close-up pictures of the devastated No 4 reactor building show the gaping hole through which radiation is escaping into the atmosphere as the rods break down.

Last night, the UN's nuclear safety body said it was "too early to say" whether desperate attempts to cool them by spraying water into the building had been a success.

The Foreign Office issued an urgent statement advising any Britons within 50 miles of the plant to leave the area immediately, and arranged charter flights to get British citizens out of the country.

Radiation levels 20 miles from the plant – well outside Japan's official 12-mile evacuation zone – came close to double the safety limit normally allowed for nuclear workers.

Despite assurances that other countries were not at risk of harmful levels of radiation, growing alarm led to panic-buying of radiation-blocking drugs in places thousands of miles from Japan.


A week after the Fukushima Daiichi plant was crippled by the earthquake and tsunami, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the situation remained "very serious". Graham Andrew, the scientific and technical adviser at the UN safety body, said there had been "no significant worsening" of the situation, but the No 4 unit remained "a major safety concern".

Asked whether frantic attempts to cool the plant with sea water had been a success, he said: "I think it's too early to say that. It hasn't got worse, which is positive. But it's still possible that it could get worse.

"So I'd rather not speculate. I think we'd say it's reasonably stable compared to yesterday."

Photographs taken from an aircraft by an employee of the company which owns the power station showed for the first time the full extent of the damage to the reactor units, three of which suffered explosions following a failure of its cooling system.

In unit No 4, a whole wall is missing from the area where spent fuel rods are stored while they cool to a safe temperature.

Inside the building, a green-painted crane, which is normally used to move the fuel rods, caught the daylight flooding into the hall.

Beneath the crane, just out of shot, is the pool holding the fuel rods, which should contain water 45ft deep but which has now boiled dry.

Other pictures show the collapsed metal framework of another reactor unit's roof twisted beyond recognition. Workers who volunteered to risk their lives to save the plant from meltdown spent another day frantically trying to get water into the storage pool by every means possible.

Attempts to dump thousands of gallons of sea water from helicopters appeared to meet with little success, and efforts to use a water cannon had to be abandoned at one stage because radiation levels outside the plant became unacceptably high.

Scientists in Sweden said that radioactive particles from the plant, blown across the Pacific by prevailing winds, would reach the west coast of America today, leading to a slight increase in background radiation.

Lars-Erik De Geer, research director at the Swedish Defence Research Institute, said the radioactive particles would eventually reach Europe and the whole of the northern hemisphere.

He stressed that the increased radiation would not be harmful to human health in any way, but officials in the United States and Russia said they were stepping up their monitoring of background radiation.

Despite assurances from governments around the world that the crisis would not have health implications outside Japan, several countries reported panic-buying of potassium iodide tablets, which are taken to prevent the body absorbing radiation.

In China, supermarkets ran out of salt, which contains low levels of iodine, even though it would be useless in protecting against radiation, and pharmacists ran out of iodine supplements as far away as Bulgaria and the US. President Barack Obama made a live television statement to reassure Americans that they were safe, saying: "We do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States."

At airports around the world, passengers from Japan were being checked for radiation as they disembarked last night.

France said it would fly 100 tons of boric acid, which helps absorb radiation, to Japan.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the Fukushima plant, offered a ray of hope when it said that it had managed to connect a temporary power line to reactor No 2, in the first stage of its efforts to restore electricity and start up the cooling system in the units.

A spokesman said: "If the restoration work is completed, we will be able to activate various electric pumps and pour water into reactors and pools for spent nuclear fuel."

Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, was due to arrive in Japan today for a first-hand briefing on the crisis.

The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami had reached 5,692, with another 9,522 people missing yesterday.

About 850,000 households in the north of Japan were still without electricity in near-freezing weather, Tohuku Electric Power Company said, and the government said that at least 1.5 million households lacked running water.

[Admiral Yi]

Americans have no conception of how to deal with a nuclear incident, other than to panic and start looting.  It would be wise to take the advice of the US government with a grain of salt.

Or maybe a couple million of salt.

[jimmy olsen]

Cool video of some reporters surviving the tsunami and helping other people.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/42142794#42142794

[KRonn]

That's an amazing video; the film crew just made it, and then helped others get to safety. 

[garbon]

The kind of irrelevant articles that get spawned after events like this...

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/03/17/2011-03-17_could_an_earthquake_hit_new_york_city_history_says_yes_but_probably_not_like_jap.html

Could a major earthquake shake the Big Apple to its core?

If the past is any indication, the answer is yes, says John Armbruster, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Based on historical precedent, Armbruster says the New York City metro area is susceptible to an earthquake of at least a magnitude of 5.0 once a century.

Lynn Skyes, lead author of a recent study by seismologists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory adds that a magnitude-6 quake hits the area about every 670 years, and magnitude-7 every 3,400 years.

A 5.2-magnitude quake shook New York City in 1737 and another of the same severity hit in 1884. Tremors were felt from Maine to Virginia.

There are several fault lines in the metro area, including one along Manhattan's 125th St. - which may have generated two small tremors in 1981 and may have been the source of the major 1737 earthquake, says Armbruster. There's another fault line on Dyckman St. and one in Dobbs Ferry in nearby Westchester County.

"The problem here comes from many subtle faults," explained Skyes after the study was published. "We now see there is earthquake activity on them. Each one is small, but when you add them up, they are probably more dangerous than we thought."

"While uncommon, the earthquake hazard of the New York City metropolitan area has been assessed as moderate," the New York City Area Consortium for Earthquake Loss Mitigation writes on its website. "Considering population density and the condition of the region's infrastructure and building stock, it is clear that even a moderate earthquake would have considerable consequences in terms of public safety and economic impact."

Armbruster says a 5.0-magnitude earthquake today likely would result in casualties and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. "I would expect some people to be killed," he notes. "Enough chimneys, facades on buildings would fall and someone would be underneath."

The scope and scale of damage would multiply exponentially with each additional tick on the Richter scale.

"Will there be one in my lifetime or your lifetime? I don't know. But this is the longest period we've gone without one."

[jimmy olsen]

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110320x2.html

Miyagi's death toll to exceed 15,000, police chief says
Kyodo News

The death toll from last week's devastating earthquake and tsunami will top 15,000 in Miyagi Prefecture alone, the local police chief said Sunday, as the Self-Defense Forces, police and firefighters continued relief efforts.

More than 360,000 evacuees continued to endure cold weather at shelters in 14 prefectures, including Tokyo, as blankets and other desperately needed relief supplies arrived from overseas.

Many of the items being sent from abroad are intended to help survivors weather the wintry conditions, with at least 110,000 blankets donated so far, authorities said.

Radioactive iodine and cesium — telltale byproducts of uranium fission — have been detected in rain, tap water and air in areas southwest of the nuclear plant, including Tokyo, the science ministry and the Ibaraki Prefectural Government announced Sunday. The trace amounts do not pose any health risk, they said.

The number of dead and missing nationwide rose to 20,405 as of noon Sunday — 8,133 deaths and 12,272 unaccounted for, the National Police Agency said.

The military, police and local firefighting units have mobilized 120,000 people for the massive relief effort.

By Sunday, relief materials had been received from 13 nations, including 230,000 bottles of water and 30,000 packets of boil-in-the-bag fried rice from South Korea, 25,000 blankets from Canada and 500 power generators from Taiwan, the authorities said.

The evacuees include those who lived near the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant but have moved on to other prefectures, including neighboring Gunma, Niigata and Ibaraki.

In the town of Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Mayor Koki Kato was found dead Saturday, prefectural officials said Sunday. The mayor was swept away by the tsunami during an emergency meeting outside the government building shortly after the March 11 quake, which struck at 2:46 p.m.

[DGuller]

Paul Krugman subscribes on a grand scale to the broken window fallacy.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/meltdown-macroeconomics/


Astonishing. Macabre. Disappointing. I can't decide on the right word. Whatever.

I guess you must be one of the people who don't buy into the notion that WW2 got US out of Depression?

[Habbaku]

[DGuller]

What's -worthy is criticizing a Keynesian economist for "subscribing to broken window fallacy".  That's like criticizing a biologist for not subscribing to the notion that God created humans.

[MadImmortalMan]

Modern Keynesians don't subscribe to it.

[DGuller]

Modern Keynesians don't subscribe to it.

How are they different in that respect?  All Keynesians think that the economy can get stuck in high unemployment phase for a long time.  To oversimplify, the waste of resources brought on by that unnecessary unemployment is the variable not captured by the naive application of the broken window fallacy.  What libertarians fail to realize is that economic theory evolved in the last 160 years.

[MadImmortalMan]

Modern Keynesians don't subscribe to it.

How are they different in that respect?  All Keynesians think that the economy can get stuck in high unemployment phase for a long time.  To oversimplify, the waste of resources brought on by that unnecessary unemployment is the variable not captured by the naive application of the broken window fallacy.  What libertarians fail to realize is that economic theory evolved in the last 160 years.

I'm not sure what you're asking, but specifically regarding the broken window fallacy, neither Neo-Keynesians nor Post-Keynsians subscribe to it AFAIK. This statement was the first time I can remember seeing Krugman come near it. He's changed. I don't give a shit what libertarians think.

[DGuller]

I guess I phrased it awkwardly.  When I say that Keynesians subscribe to that fallacy, I don't imply that their theory actually is fallacious.  I'm just saying that Keynesian theories of all stripes can be superficially attacked by the parable of the broken window. 

In certain unpleasant situations, Keynesian theories predict that apparently destructive actions can be beneficial.  However, they're also quick to point out that the destructive actions are never the optimum way to extract the benefits from stimulus.

[jimmy olsen]

[Malthus]

Heh, I wonder where the cars pouring over the seawall in the first pic came from.