Languish.org

QuoteMassive 8.9 quake, tsunamis hit Japan

Tokyo (CNN) -- An 8.9-magnitude earthquake hit northern Japan on Friday, triggering tsunamis and sending a massive body of water filled with debris that included boats and houses inching toward highways.

The epicenter was 373 kilometers (231 miles) away from the capital, Tokyo, the United States Geological Survey said. But residents there felt the tremors.

The quake rattled buildings and toppled cars off bridges and into waters underneath. Waves of debris flowed like lava across farmland, pushing boats, houses and trailers toward highways.


Such a large earthquake at such a shallow depth creates a lot of energy, said Shenza Chen of the U.S. Geological Survey.

It caused a power outage in about 4 million homes in Tokyo and surrounding areas.

A tsunami in the Pacific was moving closer to other shorelines in other countries, said CNN meteorologist Ivan Cabrera.

It triggered tsunami warnings for various countries, including Japan and Russia, the National Weather Service said.

"Earthquakes of this size are known to generate tsunamis potentially dangerous to coasts outside the source region," it said.

"Based on all available data a tsunami may have been generated by this earthquake that could be destructive on coastal areas even far from the epicenter."

The quake was the latest in a series in the region this week.

Early Thursday, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.3 struck off the coast of Honshu.

A day earlier, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck off of Honshu, the country's meteorological agency said.

The largest recorded quake took place in Chile on May 22, 1960, with a magnitude of 9.5, the USGS said.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 11, 2011, 06:34:48 AM
It was the helicopter footage of the masssive tsunami surge across all that farmland that bothered me;  there were cars and trucks attempting to outrace it, and they didn't.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 11, 2011, 07:35:37 AM
Japanese School Girl futures are going to go through the roof when the markets open today.

Quote from: Grey Fox on March 11, 2011, 07:57:04 AM
The country isn't THAT small. It won't disappear overnite.

QuoteWeather Service expects 6.5-foot tsunamis
Tsunamis of 6.5 feet are now anticipated in Haleiwa on the North Shore, 6.2 feet in Hilo; and 3 feet in Honolulu Harbor, the National Weather Service said.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 11, 2011, 06:34:48 AM
It was the helicopter footage of the masssive tsunami surge across all that farmland that bothered me;  there were cars and trucks attempting to outrace it, and they didn't.

Quote from: Monoriu on March 11, 2011, 08:41:16 AM
I sense an opportunity to buy cheap flight tickets to Japan  :ph34r:

QuoteFlames rise from an oil refinery after a powerful earthquake in Ichihara, Chiba prefecture (state), Japan, Friday, March 11, 2011. The largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history slammed the eastern coast Friday.

Quote from: Tyr on March 11, 2011, 07:52:23 AM
Fuck. Really bad stuff.

Bad for me personally too, been hoping to go to Japan later this year.

Quote1908: A magnitude 6.6 quake has now struck in central Japan, AP news agency reports, causing Tokyo buildings to sway. It is not clear if this is connected to the earlier quake and aftershocks.

Quote from: dps on March 11, 2011, 12:42:43 PM

Why would it be bad for you personally?  Tourism is going to be down, so you might be able to get some good deals.  And before anybody accuses me of being crass, well, yeah, that might be a crass way of looking at it, but hey, I'm not the one worrying about how the disaster affects my vacation plans.

Quote from: Tyr on March 11, 2011, 02:22:17 PM
Apparently there's quite the risk of a nuclear meltdown developing at a power plant...

Quote from: Mr.Penguin on March 11, 2011, 12:19:00 PM
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi528.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fdd324%2Fbdpopeye%2F3-188.jpg&hash=253255293a2b0d2b89b4b3186a4a31b5d5c49d8f)

QuoteFlames rise from an oil refinery after a powerful earthquake in Ichihara, Chiba prefecture (state), Japan, Friday, March 11, 2011. The largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history slammed the eastern coast Friday.

That one f**king big fireball... :blink:

Quote from: Jacob on March 11, 2011, 06:52:24 PM

Quote from: Mr.Penguin on March 11, 2011, 12:19:00 PM
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi528.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fdd324%2Fbdpopeye%2F3-188.jpg&hash=253255293a2b0d2b89b4b3186a4a31b5d5c49d8f)

QuoteFlames rise from an oil refinery after a powerful earthquake in Ichihara, Chiba prefecture (state), Japan, Friday, March 11, 2011. The largest earthquake in Japan's recorded history slammed the eastern coast Friday.

That one f**king big fireball... :blink:

By buddy lives not far from there.

Quote from: Kleves on March 11, 2011, 07:15:48 PM
Apparently three nuclear reactors are in trouble, with thousands evacuated. I don't suppose this will help the cause of nuclear power much. Story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42025882/ns/world_news-asia-pacific/?GT1=43001 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42025882/ns/world_news-asia-pacific/?GT1=43001)

Quote from: PDH on March 11, 2011, 08:32:23 PM
Instead of nuclear they should have bought clean Wyoming Kentucky coal.

Quote from: Caliga on March 11, 2011, 08:34:22 PM

Quote from: PDH on March 11, 2011, 08:32:23 PM
Instead of nuclear they should have bought clean Wyoming Kentucky Alberta coal.

I like money. :cool:

Quote from: Barrister on March 11, 2011, 11:11:53 PM

Quote from: Caliga on March 11, 2011, 08:34:22 PM

Quote from: PDH on March 11, 2011, 08:32:23 PM
Instead of nuclear they should have bought clean Wyoming Kentucky Alberta coal windpower.

I like money. :cool:

I, too, like money. :alberta:

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 11, 2011, 09:08:17 PM
A thousand feared dead. :(

QuoteExplosion Destroys Walls of Japanese Nuclear Reactor Building, NHK Reports
By Yuji Okada - Mar 12, 2011 6:15 PM GMT+0900

An explosion occurred at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station north of Tokyo, destroying the walls of the No. 1 reactor building, NHK Television said. The report came after the government said a reactor may be melting.

Smoke was rising around the nuclear reactor after an aftershock from yesterday's quake struck, Ryohei Shiomi, a spokesman at the country's nuclear safety agency said by phone.

The spokesman said several people were injured during an aftershock that struck around 3:30 p.m. Japan time, adding he had no further information. Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant, said it had no information, when contacted by Bloomberg News.

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said earlier that a nuclear reactor in the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station, about 220 kilometers (140 miles) north of Tokyo, may be starting to melt down after Japan's biggest earthquake on record hit the area yesterday.

Fuel rods at the No. 1 reactor at the plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. may be melting after radioactive Cesium material left by atomic fission was detected near the site, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, spokesman Yuji Kakizaki said by phone today.

"If the fuel rods are melting and this continues, a reactor meltdown is possible," Kakizaki said. A meltdown refers to a heat buildup in the core of such an intensity it melts the floor of the reactor containment housing.

Tokyo Electric, Asia's biggest power company, started releasing radioactive gas and steam into the atmosphere to reduce pressure in the containment housing after yesterday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake, Akitsuka Kobayashi, a company spokesman, said by phone earlier today. Pressure has started to fall in the containment housing, said Yoshihiro Sugiyama, a spokesman at the country's nuclear safety agency.

Winds in the area of the Fukushima plant are blowing at less than 18 kilometers per hour mostly in an offshore direction, according to a 4 p.m. update from the Japan Meteorological Association.

The government earlier today widened the evacuation zone around the reactor to 10 kilometers from 3 kilometers, affecting thousands of people. The quake and the tsunami that followed is estimated to have killed at least 500 people with hundreds more missing, the National Police Agency said.

Low Radiation

"When the pressure starts building up, the emergency procedure is to start venting," Dave Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project at the Union for Concerned Scientists, said in a telephone interview. "They've essentially entered a beat the clock game. As long as there is no fuel damage, there will be radioactivity, but it will be very low."

Radiation spread by the venting won't be at a level dangerous to health, said Ryohei Shiomi, a spokesman at the government's nuclear agency said earlier.

Tokyo Electric started venting gas from a containment section of the No. 1 reactor at Fukushima Dai-ichi at about 9 a.m. local time. The company is preparing to do the same at the Dai-Ni nuclear plant nearby, a spokesman said.

Tokyo Electric earlier said it had lost control of pressure building up in three reactors at the Dai-Ichi power plant. Temperatures in the control room rose to higher than 100 Celsius (212 Fahrenheit), said Naoki Tsunoda, a company spokesman.
Main Barrier

The plant's operators need to connect to the electricity grid, fix emergency diesel generators or bring in more batteries to power a backup system that pumps the water needed to cool the reactor, said Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who has worked at nuclear power plants for 17 years.

The air cooling system in the containment building probably failed due to the power loss, allowing pressure to increase inside, Lochbaum said.

The main barrier between a reactor and outside areas is the containment building, Lochbaum said. Without an air cooling system the air heats, causing pressure to rise inside the building, with the risk that radioactive air will escape.

Tokyo Electric has also started preparing to vent gas from the containment areas of four reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ni nuclear plant, Kobayashi said.

QuoteQuake moved Japan coast 8 feet; shifted Earth's axis
By Kevin Voigt, CNN
March 12, 2011 1:58 a.m. EST

(CNN) -- The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami Friday appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis.

"At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass," said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters).

The temblor, which struck Friday afternoon near the east coast of Japan, killed hundreds of people, caused the formation of 30-foot walls of water that swept across rice fields, engulfed entire towns, dragged houses onto highways, and tossed cars and boats like toys. Some waves reached six miles (10 kilometers) inland in Miyagi Prefecture on Japan's east coast.

The quake was the most powerful to hit the island nation in recorded history and the tsunami it unleashed traveled across the Pacific Ocean, triggering tsunami warnings and alerts for 50 countries and territories as far away as the western coasts of Canada, the U.S. and Chile. The quake triggered more than 160 aftershocks in the first 24 hours -- 141 measuring 5.0-magnitude or more.

The quake occurred as the Earth's crust ruptured along an area about 250 miles (400 kilometers) long by 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide, as tectonic plates slipped more than 18 meters, said Shengzao Chen, a USGS geophysicist.

Japan is located along the Pacific "ring of fire," an area of high seismic and volcanic activity stretching from New Zealand in the South Pacific up through Japan, across to Alaska and down the west coasts of North and South America. The quake was "hundreds of times larger" than the 2010 quake that ravaged Haiti, said Jim Gaherty of the LaMont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

The Japanese quake was of similar strength to the 2004 earthquake in Indonesia that triggered a tsunami that killed over 200,000 people in more than a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean. "The tsunami that it sent out was roughly comparable in terms of size," Gaherty said. "[The 2004 tsunami] happened to hit some regions that were not very prepared for tsunamis ... we didn't really have a very sophisticated tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean basin at the time so the damage was significantly worse."

The Japanese quake comes just weeks after a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck Christchurch on February 22, toppling historic buildings and killing more than 150 people. The timeframe of the two quakes have raised questions whether the two incidents are related, but experts say the distance between the two incidents makes that unlikely.

"I would think the connection is very slim," said Prof. Stephan Grilli, ocean engineering professor at the University of Rhode Island.

Quote83 rescued after floating Jeff Ruby restaurant breaks loose near Cincinnati

22 minutes ago

Firefighters rigged a precarious gangplank of ladders and ropes and safely rescued 83 people, including former Cincinnati Bengals star Cris Collinsworth, from a floating restaurant that broke free from a pier on the flooded Ohio River, authorities say.

Quote from: Neil on March 12, 2011, 08:33:30 AM
They saved Collinsworth?  Mistake.

The only good thing about a lost season is that I wouldn't have to hear his voice.

Quote from: Cecil on March 12, 2011, 04:44:34 PM
Apparently the cause of the blast at the number 1 reactor had little to do with the actual core. Some expert at bbc said that the water vapour got so hot that it chemically reacted with the zirconium inside and created zirconiumoxide leaving the hydrogen to form hydrogen gas (Hindenburg anyone?). When they tried to pump the gas outside there were apparently some leakage from the pipes so a considerable amount escaped in the outer casing of the building where it came in contact with the oxygen in the air and well....BANG.

Any comments to this hypothesis Brain?


I have to say though that this showes to me not the dangers of nuclear power but the amazing resilience of western plants. An 9 earthquake followed by a 10 meter tsunami followed by a rather large blast (you can see the shockwave in the fotage) and still barely a scratch on the reactor itself. And meltdown was avoided despite all 13 backupgenerators failing. Impressive indeed.

Quote from: The Brain on March 12, 2011, 05:22:27 PM

Quote from: Cecil on March 12, 2011, 04:44:34 PM
Apparently the cause of the blast at the number 1 reactor had little to do with the actual core. Some expert at bbc said that the water vapour got so hot that it chemically reacted with the zirconium inside and created zirconiumoxide leaving the hydrogen to form hydrogen gas (Hindenburg anyone?). When they tried to pump the gas outside there were apparently some leakage from the pipes so a considerable amount escaped in the outer casing of the building where it came in contact with the oxygen in the air and well....BANG.

Any comments to this hypothesis Brain?


I have to say though that this showes to me not the dangers of nuclear power but the amazing resilience of western plants. An 9 earthquake followed by a 10 meter tsunami followed by a rather large blast (you can see the shockwave in the fotage) and still barely a scratch on the reactor itself. And meltdown was avoided despite all 13 backupgenerators failing. Impressive indeed.

But I am not a reactor expert, I just play one on Languish.

Quote from: Grey Fox on March 11, 2011, 10:56:45 AM
Since the train in Tokyo were suspended following the Earthquake one of my Japanese co-worker walked home from the Office. Took him 4 hours. Crazy bastards.

Quote'People were screaming and crying'

By msnbc.com's Jennifer Carlile and F. Brinley Bruton

Shuji Kubodera thought he was going to throw up when the earth convulsed.

"I had to hold onto the desk and after it became big I (hid) below the desk," the 34-year-old systems engineer told msnbc.com via Skype from Tokyo. "Some people were screaming and crying ... it was then happening every ten minutes so I felt like vomiting."

The massive quake — the biggest in modern Japanese history — and a series of aftershocks slammed the island nation's eastern coast Friday, unleashing a 23-foot tsunami.

Despite the magnitude of the disaster around them, Kubodera and his colleagues stayed at work.  After the elevators stopped working they all trudged up 10 flights for a 4 p.m. meeting.  Everybody showed up but then they decided to cancel the meeting.   

He later had to walk four hours to get home because the subway had stopped working.  Kubodera considered staying at work like many of his colleagues but he worried about his two dogs and apartment.  When he arrived at 10 p.m., the place was a mess as his things had fallen out of the cupboards.

With fires engulfing buildings in the country's capital, watching the television news left him stunned.

"I wasn't able to believe it was really happening," he said.

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 12, 2011, 08:05:16 PM

Quote from: The Brain on March 12, 2011, 05:22:27 PM

Quote from: Cecil on March 12, 2011, 04:44:34 PM
Apparently the cause of the blast at the number 1 reactor had little to do with the actual core. Some expert at bbc said that the water vapour got so hot that it chemically reacted with the zirconium inside and created zirconiumoxide leaving the hydrogen to form hydrogen gas (Hindenburg anyone?). When they tried to pump the gas outside there were apparently some leakage from the pipes so a considerable amount escaped in the outer casing of the building where it came in contact with the oxygen in the air and well....BANG.

Any comments to this hypothesis Brain?


I have to say though that this showes to me not the dangers of nuclear power but the amazing resilience of western plants. An 9 earthquake followed by a 10 meter tsunami followed by a rather large blast (you can see the shockwave in the fotage) and still barely a scratch on the reactor itself. And meltdown was avoided despite all 13 backupgenerators failing. Impressive indeed.

But I am not a reactor expert, I just play one on Languish.

<snip>

Quote"I had to hold onto the desk and after it became big I (hid) below the desk," the 34-year-old systems engineer told msnbc.com via Skype from Tokyo. "Some people were screaming and crying ... it was then happening every ten minutes so I felt like vomiting."

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 12, 2011, 08:05:16 PM

Quote from: The Brain on March 12, 2011, 05:22:27 PM

Quote from: Cecil on March 12, 2011, 04:44:34 PM
Apparently the cause of the blast at the number 1 reactor had little to do with the actual core. Some expert at bbc said that the water vapour got so hot that it chemically reacted with the zirconium inside and created zirconiumoxide leaving the hydrogen to form hydrogen gas (Hindenburg anyone?). When they tried to pump the gas outside there were apparently some leakage from the pipes so a considerable amount escaped in the outer casing of the building where it came in contact with the oxygen in the air and well....BANG.

Any comments to this hypothesis Brain?


I have to say though that this showes to me not the dangers of nuclear power but the amazing resilience of western plants. An 9 earthquake followed by a 10 meter tsunami followed by a rather large blast (you can see the shockwave in the fotage) and still barely a scratch on the reactor itself. And meltdown was avoided despite all 13 backupgenerators failing. Impressive indeed.

But I am not a reactor expert, I just play one on Languish.

Say it ain't so!

Quote from: lustindarkness on March 12, 2011, 10:31:21 PM

Quote"I had to hold onto the desk and after it became big I (hid) below the desk," the 34-year-old systems engineer told msnbc.com via Skype from Tokyo. "Some people were screaming and crying ... it was then happening every ten minutes so I felt like vomiting."

Motion sickness from an earthquake? Thats a lot of shaking. Maybe emotional?

Quote from: The Brain on March 13, 2011, 12:44:13 AM

Quote from: lustindarkness on March 12, 2011, 10:31:21 PM

Quote"I had to hold onto the desk and after it became big I (hid) below the desk," the 34-year-old systems engineer told msnbc.com via Skype from Tokyo. "Some people were screaming and crying ... it was then happening every ten minutes so I felt like vomiting."

Motion sickness from an earthquake? Thats a lot of shaking. Maybe emotional?

I think many Languishers feel like vomiting every ten minutes.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 12, 2011, 10:47:00 PM
Time lapse video of the tsunami effects in Morro Bay, California yesterday, where my aunt and uncle live.

http://www.youtube.com/v/RVD2nDWVjiA&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3

Quote from: Syt on March 13, 2011, 02:03:33 AM
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fpics.kuvaton.com%2Fkuvei%2Fhistory_lessons.jpg&hash=9e5130add846e5e790f96ea26b4cc847c4325fb9)

Quote from: Berkut on March 13, 2011, 01:25:12 AM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 12, 2011, 10:47:00 PM
Time lapse video of the tsunami effects in Morro Bay, California yesterday, where my aunt and uncle live.

http://www.youtube.com/v/RVD2nDWVjiA&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3

Wow, that might have been one of the most uninteresting videos I've ever seen.

Quote from: Mr.Penguin on March 13, 2011, 03:06:08 AM

Quote from: Syt on March 13, 2011, 02:03:33 AM
(snip)

Dont you just love Americans, the world would be so boring with them...

Quote from: grumbler on March 13, 2011, 05:39:29 AM
:huh:  Syt isn't American.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 12, 2011, 10:47:00 PM
Time lapse video of the tsunami effects in Morro Bay, California yesterday, where my aunt and uncle live.

http://www.youtube.com/v/RVD2nDWVjiA&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3

Quote from: Mr.Penguin on March 13, 2011, 05:53:44 AM

Quote from: grumbler on March 13, 2011, 05:39:29 AM
:huh:  Syt isn't American.

Well, may not be Syt I am referring too, ya know...

Quote from: Caliga on March 12, 2011, 08:09:55 AM
World ending, film at 11.

Quote83 rescued after floating Jeff Ruby restaurant breaks loose near Cincinnati

22 minutes ago

Firefighters rigged a precarious gangplank of ladders and ropes and safely rescued 83 people, including former Cincinnati Bengals star Cris Collinsworth, from a floating restaurant that broke free from a pier on the flooded Ohio River, authorities say.

Quote83 rescued from Ky. eatery that floated downstream
By DAN SEWELL, Associated Press – Sat Mar 12, 7:52 pm ET

COVINGTON, Ky. – Kathy Kinane and her husband walked into the upscale Waterfront restaurant wearing snorkeling gear, a joking reference to the recent rain and rising water levels outside the eatery housed on a barge.

They almost needed it. The Kinanes and 81 others found themselves floating downstream on the Ohio River during the dinner rush Friday night when the restaurant broke from its moorings. All had to be rescued one by one with a makeshift gangplank of ladders and ropes after the boat came to rest against a bridge about 100 feet downriver.

"We were joking about the river," Kathy Kinane told The Associated Press on Saturday morning. "Well, the joke's on us now."

Officials said the hours-long rescue was orderly and calm. Women were rescued first, then the men. One patron would climb down the gangplank wearing a life jacket, which would then be sent back up for the next person. Kathy Kinane said she had to take off her heels to make her way down. Among those rescued was former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth, Covington fire Capt. Chris Kiely said.

Collinsworth, a pro football commentator for NBC, has long been associated with Waterfront owner and restaurateur Jeff Ruby. On the waterfront's menu for $40 is the "Steak Collinsworth," along with other steaks and high-end entrees including lobster, sea bass and tuna. The restaurant is one of several on the river in Covington, just across from Cincinnati.

Kinane and her husband, Bill — frequent patrons of the Waterfront — had arrived around 7:30 p.m. and listened to music for a while before joining another couple at a table for dinner. They were finishing up around 10:15 when they felt an ominous bump. Kinane said her husband peered out the window and saw that the barge was moving with the fast-paced current. They had eaten there before with the water levels rising, but the boat had always remained in place.

"That was not a good thing," she said. "We said, 'Let's get up and leave.'"

However, they found a crowd near the exit. The walkway ramp had broken loose from shore, and the patrons had no way of getting off the barge. TV footage showed diners pacing aboard the boat as firefighters put together the makeshift bridge above the water, which was swirling with broken tree limbs and other debris.

Kiely said several patrons had used cell phones to call for help. The power never went out, and tugboats and emergency crews arrived quickly, Kinane said.

The barge started moving when a main cable came loose, leaving the remaining cables to handle more pressure than they could withstand, said Covington Fire Chief Chuck Norris.

The barge came to rest against a bridge that spans the river, though the U.S. Coast Guard and other workers were still working Saturday to keep the boat secure until it could be towed back to its proper place. The Coast Guard and other boats worked to keep the restaurant in place until it could be moved — and it was unclear when that would happen, said U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Rob Reinhart. The river was already at least 3 feet above flood stage, according to the National Weather Service.

Traffic flowed normally across the bridge, and trains moved on an adjacent track uninterrupted.

"If the bridge wasn't there it could have traveled down the river quite a ways," said Rob Carlisle, co-owner of C&B Marine of Covington, which had dispatched a towboat to help secure the restaurant's front end.

The barge had come to a halt by the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge, one of several linking Cincinnati with northern Kentucky. Reinhart said the restaurant likely would be heavily damaged if it broke free again because the top of the barge stands higher than the bottom of the bridge. He said it would have been up to local authorities to order restaurants to close because of the high river levels, though it could not immediately be determined who would be responsible for that decision.

Calls by the AP to restaurateur Jeff Ruby were not returned Saturday. He owns or operates several restaurants in Cincinnati and surrounding areas.

Quote from: Mr.Penguin on March 13, 2011, 05:53:44 AM

Quote from: grumbler on March 13, 2011, 05:39:29 AM
:huh:  Syt isn't American.

Well, may not be Syt I am referring too, ya know...

Quote from: Caliga on March 13, 2011, 09:25:24 AM
!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:23:28 PM
There are some great comments out there. I liked the one that said the Japanese deserved this and more because they eat dolphins and rape the sea.

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 13, 2011, 05:33:55 PM

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:23:28 PM
There are some great comments out there. I liked the one that said the Japanese deserved this and more because they eat dolphins and rape the sea.

I respect that comment more, even though I disagree with it, because it means that the person stating it as an understanding of current events rather than only knowing Japan from WWII movies.

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:23:28 PM
There are some great comments out there. I liked the one that said the Japanese deserved this and more because they eat dolphins and rape the sea.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 13, 2011, 05:39:38 PM

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:23:28 PM
There are some great comments out there. I liked the one that said the Japanese deserved this and more because they eat dolphins and rape the sea.

Yeah, that was totally unnecessary.  The sea struck back, you should just leave it at that.

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:43:13 PM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 13, 2011, 05:39:38 PM

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:23:28 PM
There are some great comments out there. I liked the one that said the Japanese deserved this and more because they eat dolphins and rape the sea.

Yeah, that was totally unnecessary.  The sea struck back, you should just leave it at that.

Wouldn't it be the earth striking back? The sea just seemed to take advantage of the situation.  The earth is you on a date, the sea was Tim scurrying in for the leftovers.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 13, 2011, 05:39:38 PM

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:23:28 PM
There are some great comments out there. I liked the one that said the Japanese deserved this and more because they eat dolphins and rape the sea.

Yeah, that was totally unnecessary.  The sea struck back, you should just leave it at that.

Quote from: Neil on March 13, 2011, 07:15:48 PM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 13, 2011, 05:39:38 PM

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on March 13, 2011, 05:23:28 PM
There are some great comments out there. I liked the one that said the Japanese deserved this and more because they eat dolphins and rape the sea.

Yeah, that was totally unnecessary.  The sea struck back, you should just leave it at that.

If the sea struck back, then the Japanese need to show it who's boss by redoubling their efforts.  If a single marine species survives the next century, I'll be disappointed.

QuoteOfficial toll is 1,000 – but true figure likely to be far higher

By Jerome Taylor

The estimated death toll from Japan's devastating earthquake and tsunami leapt tenfold yesterday as the world's third-largest economy struggled to deal with the crippling aftermath of what Prime Minister Naoto Kan has described as the worst crisis to face his country since the Second World War.

With the relief effort continuing for a third day amid plunging night-time temperatures, the scale of Friday's disaster was unfolding as official lists of those missing were being compiled.

The official death toll last night stood at 1,000, but looked set to rise further. Police said that in Miyagi prefecture alone more than 10,000 people may have perished in the 7-metre tsunami waves that crashed in to Honshu Island's north-east coastline on Friday afternoon. Previous estimates over the weekend had hovered at around the 1,200 mark.

All across the quake-hit area reports came in of towns wiped off the map with thousands feared dead or missing.

There are concerns that as many as 9,500 people are missing in Minami Sanriku – roughly half the town's population. Further north, in the port town of Rikuzentakata, city officials confirmed yesterday that only 5,900 of the 23,000 inhabitants had made it to city shelters in the past three days. In Fukushima prefecture, officials said they were still unable to contact 1,167 residents, including 918 in the town of Namie alone.

In a sombre news conference, Mr Kan called on the people of Japan to unite in the face of its worst disaster in living memory. "The earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear incident have been the biggest crisis Japan has encountered in the 65 years since the end of World War Two," he said. "We're under scrutiny on whether we, the Japanese people, can overcome this crisis. I am confident people can overcome these hardships if we stand united."

The scale of the rescue operation now needed for those affected by the earthquake is breathtaking, even for a country as wealthy and technologically advanced as Japan. New aerial footage has shown that hundreds of kilometres of coastline have been overwhelmed by tsunami waves caused by Japan's largest recorded earthquake.

More than 310,000 people across the region are being housed in evacuation centres, many of which have little heating to guard against the freezing night temperatures. A further two million homes are without electricity and rescuers are struggling to reach some of the more remote areas.

Japanese television reported yesterday that up to 10,000 people are still cut off from emergency workers in the Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima prefectures, the three states hit hardest by the earthquake. Many were reported to be holed up in schools, shopping malls and food factories that were either missed by the tsunami or were strong enough to withstand its force.

More than 100,000 troops – half of Japan's armed forces – have been called in to oversee the rescue operation and to carry out the task of searching for bodies in the wreckage of once-thriving coastal towns.

The rescue effort has been hampered by more than 250 aftershocks, 30 of which have measured more than 6 on the Richter scale.

Friday's initial earthquake was so large that the US Geological Survey estimates that Honshu Island has moved 8ft to the west. Kenneth Hudnut, a USGS geophysicist, told CNN: "We know that one GPS station moved [eight feet], and we have seen a map from GSI [Geospatial Information Authority] in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass." Japanese seismologists have upgraded the size of the quake to 9.

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 13, 2011, 07:52:31 PM
Monkeybutt does your schtick better than you.

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 13, 2011, 08:17:10 PM
Just tragic :(

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/official-toll-is-1000-ndash-but-true-figure-likely-to-be-far-higher-2240969.html

QuoteOfficial toll is 1,000 – but true figure likely to be far higher

Quote from: Syt on March 14, 2011, 01:07:30 AM
Austrian media are following the developments in the nuclear plants closely. They're not actually going :nelson: , but I feel there's a certain smugness about the coverage and the local experts that seems to say, "And that's why we don't have nuclear power plants. We always said they're too dangerous. Here you have it."

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 14, 2011, 03:23:24 AM
Holy Shit

Quote from: The Brain on March 14, 2011, 04:39:29 AM
Amazing that a volcano that has lain dormant for several weeks suddenly erupts.

Quote from: Syt on March 14, 2011, 01:07:30 AM
Austrian media are following the developments in the nuclear plants closely. They're not actually going :nelson: , but I feel there's a certain smugness about the coverage and the local experts that seems to say, "And that's why we don't have nuclear power plants. We always said they're too dangerous. Here you have it."

Quote from: Syt on March 14, 2011, 01:23:48 AMExample from free tabloid "Heute": "How dangerous is the Atomic Cloud for Austria?" Conclusion: "No reason to panic, but if several factors should align unfavorably, then ...."

Quote from: The Brain on March 14, 2011, 01:29:58 AM
Austrians. :rolleyes:

Quote from: Syt on March 14, 2011, 01:07:30 AM
Austrian media are following the developments in the nuclear plants closely. They're not actually going :nelson: , but I feel there's a certain smugness about the coverage and the local experts that seems to say, "And that's why we don't have nuclear power plants. We always said they're too dangerous. Here you have it."

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 10:29:25 AM
Is there an actual risk of serious radioactive release here or is the media just bullshitting in order to scare people and drum up ratings?  I mean, it's not like a nuclear plant can explode like a hydrogen bomb or anything...

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 10:32:24 AM
Well, then isn't it kind of doing a disservice to the Japanese people to obsess over nuclear disaster when there's a REAL disaster that's unfolded before our eyes and is just getting worse by the day as people may remain trapped and others lack shelter, food, heat, etc.?

Quote from: Berkut on March 14, 2011, 10:37:03 AM
Natural disasters come and go.

A chance to incite hysteria over nuclear power has to be milked for all it is worth.

Quote from: Tyr on March 14, 2011, 10:39:42 AM
Even the Japanese news has been putting a lot of attention on the 'nuclear crisis'. Nuclear stuff is doubly scary in their national psyche.

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 10:41:21 AM

Quote from: Berkut on March 14, 2011, 10:37:03 AM
Natural disasters come and go.

A chance to incite hysteria over nuclear power has to be milked for all it is worth.

I don't really get why left hippies hate nuclear power so much.  It's safe, cheap, and pollution-free.

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 10:41:21 AM
I don't really get why left hippies hate nuclear power so much.  It's safe, cheap, and pollution-free.

Quote from: Tyr on March 14, 2011, 10:39:42 AM
Yeah. Earthquakes and tsunamis have been done. People understand them, they know they've little chance of ever affecting us. Meh.
The N word though...oooohhhh scary scary.

Even the Japanese news has been putting a lot of attention on the 'nuclear crisis'. Nuclear stuff is doubly scary in their national psyche.

Quote from: garbon on March 14, 2011, 11:25:29 AM

Quote from: Tyr on March 14, 2011, 10:39:42 AM
Yeah. Earthquakes and tsunamis have been done. People understand them, they know they've little chance of ever affecting us. Meh.
The N word though...oooohhhh scary scary.

Even the Japanese news has been putting a lot of attention on the 'nuclear crisis'. Nuclear stuff is doubly scary in their national psyche.

Can you explain "us" in your second sentence? I've already been "affected" before by an earthquake.

Quote from: Valmy on March 14, 2011, 11:22:50 AM

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 10:41:21 AM
I don't really get why left hippies hate nuclear power so much.  It's safe, cheap, and pollution-free.

There are left hippies who are for Nuclear Power just for those reasons but they tend to get smacked around as heretics.  A solution to pollution would ruin their position that modern life is immoral and we should return to neolithic conditions.

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 11:26:57 AM
Me too.  I've felt two in my lifetime. :cool:

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 11:49:04 AM
Given that I've only ever lived in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Kentucky, you should be pretty impressed that I've even felt a single one.  I'm not impressed that a guy in Nevada has felt a lot of earthquakes. :P

Quote from: Tyr on March 14, 2011, 10:30:39 AM
Number 2.
The thread I linked to explains it well. They could have stopped the disaster anytime they wanted by flooding the reactors; doing so though would ruin the reactors, they wanted to try and recover them if they could.

Quote from: DGuller on March 14, 2011, 12:03:37 PM

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 11:49:04 AM
Given that I've only ever lived in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Kentucky, you should be pretty impressed that I've even felt a single one.  I'm not impressed that a guy in Nevada has felt a lot of earthquakes. :P

Actually, the corner of Kentucky/Tennessee/Illinois/Missouri is a high earthquake hazard area. :smarty:

EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

Quote from: Berkut on March 14, 2011, 01:11:56 PM
Was the damage done to the plants a result of the quake or the tsunami? I am assuming it was the quake - they can't all have been close enough to the shore to be effected by the water, I would assume.

Quote from: Berkut on March 14, 2011, 01:11:56 PM
Was the damage done to the plants a result of the quake or the tsunami? I am assuming it was the quake - they can't all have been close enough to the shore to be effected by the water, I would assume.

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 01:30:28 PM
Hmmm... that raises some questions with me then, as the Sendai plain has been hit with very large tsunamis in the past (there was one in the middle ages that IIRC was so destructive that it helped the Japanese win a war against the Ainu that still inhabited the area) and there had been predictions for some time that the area was overdue for another massive quake. :hmm:

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on March 14, 2011, 12:53:58 PM
I read that the Fukushima reactors have in fact been flooded by seawater, and that the hesitancy to do this from the very beginning was indeed due to the fact that doing so renders them unrecoverable.

That is a very serious issue in itself because nuclear construction costs are so high and time to construct is so long.  The replacement cost of the Fukushima complex is likely somewhere between 9 and 15 billion dollars.  Putting aside safety issues, it might make more sense to build a number of  less complex, smaller, non-nuclear plants in areas that are at high risk of earthquake or severe flooding.  (a consideration that does not seem to impacted regime thinking in Iran).

Quote from: DGuller on March 14, 2011, 01:31:53 PM
What does it mean to be "overdue for an earthquake"?  Do earthquakes happen in cycles?

Quote from: Maximus on March 14, 2011, 02:09:50 PM
As I understand it, earthquakes are typically a sudden release of tension that has built up between plates. So essentially yes. You can have continuous small tremors or you can have more intermittent larger quakes.

Quote from: Tyr on March 14, 2011, 02:37:57 PM
So why isn't it used?

Quote from: Tyr on March 14, 2011, 01:55:12 PM
On the bright side however I remember reading these reactors are the oldest ones at the site and were due to be replaced in a year or two anyway.

QuoteNHK: explosion, suppression pool pressure drop, 10,000X increase (over normal) radition levels, partial evac of TEPCO staff - reactor 2

QuoteNHK expert saying that possibly the worst nuclear failure in history - urging officials to release more information ASAP

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 10:41:21 AM

Quote from: Berkut on March 14, 2011, 10:37:03 AM
Natural disasters come and go.

A chance to incite hysteria over nuclear power has to be milked for all it is worth.

I don't really get why left hippies hate nuclear power so much.  It's safe, cheap, and pollution-free.

Quote from: The Minsky Moment on March 14, 2011, 12:53:58 PM
That is a very serious issue in itself because nuclear construction costs are so high and time to construct is so long.  The replacement cost of the Fukushima complex is likely somewhere between 9 and 15 billion dollars.  Putting aside safety issues, it might make more sense to build a number of  less complex, smaller, non-nuclear plants in areas that are at high risk of earthquake or severe flooding.  (a consideration that does not seem to impacted regime thinking in Iran).

Quote from: DGuller on March 14, 2011, 01:31:53 PM

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 01:30:28 PM
Hmmm... that raises some questions with me then, as the Sendai plain has been hit with very large tsunamis in the past (there was one in the middle ages that IIRC was so destructive that it helped the Japanese win a war against the Ainu that still inhabited the area) and there had been predictions for some time that the area was overdue for another massive quake. :hmm:

What does it mean to be "overdue for an earthquake"?  Do earthquakes happen in cycles?

QuoteIn a picture released by the Japanese Defense Agency on March 13, sixty-year-old survivor Hiromitsu Shinkawa, right, is shown as crew members of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) Aegis vessel Choukai sail to rescue him, about 9.3 miles (15 km) off Fukushima prefecture. The Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer rescued Shinkawa after discovering him floating on a piece of roof in waters off Fukushima Prefecture two days after the disaster struck. The man, from the city of Minamisoma which has been virtually obliterated, was swept out along with his house after the massive tsunami tore into Japan's northeast following a 8.9-magnitude earthquake on Friday

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 01:30:28 PM
Hmmm... that raises some questions with me then, as the Sendai plain has been hit with very large tsunamis in the past (there was one in the middle ages that IIRC was so destructive that it helped the Japanese win a war against the Ainu that still inhabited the area) and there had been predictions for some time that the area was overdue for another massive quake. :hmm:

Quote from: Monoriu on March 14, 2011, 08:45:54 PM

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 01:30:28 PM
Hmmm... that raises some questions with me then, as the Sendai plain has been hit with very large tsunamis in the past (there was one in the middle ages that IIRC was so destructive that it helped the Japanese win a war against the Ainu that still inhabited the area) and there had been predictions for some time that the area was overdue for another massive quake. :hmm:

From what I read, the Japanese invested massively in breakwaters.  A coastal city just earned a place in the Guiness book of records for having the most elaborate and deepest breakwaters in the world.  The system was completely ineffective in this crisis and was destroyed. 

The nuclear plants were also protected by breakwaters that were not up to the task.  That's why the Japanese were caught off-guard.  They thought they had enough protection and the cooling system would remain intact.

QuoteTAKAJO, Japan — Japanese police say the official death toll from last week's massive earthquake and tsunami has risen to 2,414.

Police said Tuesday that a big share of the deaths were in Miyagi prefecture, where 1,254 people are confirmed dead.

The number of people officially missing is at 3,118. But regional officials said they believe that tens of thousands may have been swept away by the tsunami that devastated a long stretch of Japan's northeastern coast Friday.

Millions of people were facing a fifth day without water, food or heating in near-freezing temperatures along the devastated northeast coast. Meanwhile, a third reactor at a nuclear power plant lost its cooling capacity, raising fears of a meltdown, while the Japanese stock market plunged for a second day.

QuoteAflac fires Gilbert Gottfried after tsunami jokes via Twitter
The comedian is facing backlash from the public

Last Updated: 1 hour and 58 minutes ago

    * By: Mollie Reynolds

Aflac has fired actor Gilbert Gottfried, voice of the Aflac duck, for offensive remarks about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on Twitter.

@RealGilbert tweeted, "Japan is really advanced. They don't go to the beach. The beach comes to them." Another tweet said, "I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, They'll be another one floating by any minute now."

"Gilbert's recent comments about the crisis in Japan were lacking in humor and certainly do not represent the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac," Aflac Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Michael Zuna said in a written release. "Aflac Japan – and, by extension, Japan itself – is part of the Aflac family, and there is no place for anything but compassion and concern during these difficult times."

Aflac is one of the biggest insurers in Japan and  has pledged 100 million yen to the International Red Cross to help earthquake and tsunami victims.

Quote from: Neil on March 14, 2011, 09:28:05 PM
Was their any expectation that their breakwaters would be effective against a wave of that magnitude?

Quote from: Richard Hakluyt on March 15, 2011, 01:54:48 AM

Quote from: Neil on March 14, 2011, 09:28:05 PM
Was their any expectation that their breakwaters would be effective against a wave of that magnitude?

The problem is that one would need something more like a dam than a mere wall. With the tsunami's long wavelength the water keeps on piling up when it encounters a breakwater, eventually spilling over, though the breakwater will have had a mitigating effect.

Quote from: Caliga on March 15, 2011, 07:08:17 AM
Not only did Gilbert get fired, but he got fired for cracking jokes that weren't even funny. :huh:

Quote from: Richard Hakluyt on March 15, 2011, 01:54:48 AM

Quote from: Neil on March 14, 2011, 09:28:05 PM
Was their any expectation that their breakwaters would be effective against a wave of that magnitude?

The problem is that one would need something more like a dam than a mere wall. With the tsunami's long wavelength the water keeps on piling up when it encounters a breakwater, eventually spilling over, though the breakwater will have had a mitigating effect.

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 08:14:23 AM

Quote from: Richard Hakluyt on March 15, 2011, 01:54:48 AM

Quote from: Neil on March 14, 2011, 09:28:05 PM
Was their any expectation that their breakwaters would be effective against a wave of that magnitude?

The problem is that one would need something more like a dam than a mere wall. With the tsunami's long wavelength the water keeps on piling up when it encounters a breakwater, eventually spilling over, though the breakwater will have had a mitigating effect.

I was wondering this very thing myself: would a sea-wall that was only slightly lower than the tsunami do any good at all (assuming it held)? From the videos I get the impression that it would not really - any more than a dike slightly lower than sea-level would protect Holland.

Quote from: Berkut on March 15, 2011, 07:20:05 AM
Sounds like a breakwater could actually make it worse, holding back a rather huge amount of water until it inevitably fails, imparting that much more momentum to the mass of water.

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 08:14:23 AM
I was wondering this very thing myself: would a sea-wall that was only slightly lower than the tsunami do any good at all (assuming it held)? From the videos I get the impression that it would not really - any more than a dike slightly lower than sea-level would protect Holland.

Quote from: Richard Hakluyt on March 15, 2011, 12:06:37 PM
I don't think a seawall would necessarily work even if it was higher than the tsunami  :hmm:

It seems to me that the tsunami almost works like a temporary river...........so for a barrier to be effective it would have to be both very strong and much higher than the wave. I mean a normal 30-foot wave can drown the incautious.......but does not behave anything like a tsunami wave.

Quote from: grumbler on March 15, 2011, 12:15:55 PM

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 08:14:23 AM
I was wondering this very thing myself: would a sea-wall that was only slightly lower than the tsunami do any good at all (assuming it held)? From the videos I get the impression that it would not really - any more than a dike slightly lower than sea-level would protect Holland.

As I mentioned to Berkut, the conditions are completely different in the case of continuous pressure and instantaneous pressure.  If the dike around Holland is six inches lower than the height of the sea at some extraordinary peak tide, it would be infinitely preferable to no dike at all, because you could hope to limit damage using pumps and drainage canals until the tidal peak had passed.

QuoteWhile everyday wind waves have a wavelength (from crest to crest) of about 100 metres (330 ft) and a height of roughly 2 metres (6.6 ft), a tsunami in the deep ocean has a wavelength of about 200 kilometres (120 mi). Such a wave travels at well over 800 kilometres per hour (500 mph), but owing to the enormous wavelength the wave oscillation at any given point takes 20 or 30 minutes to complete a cycle and has an amplitude of only about 1 metre (3.3 ft).[19] This makes tsunamis difficult to detect over deep water. Ships rarely notice their passage.

As the tsunami approaches the coast and the waters become shallow, wave shoaling compresses the wave and its velocity slows below 80 kilometres per hour (50 mph). Its wavelength diminishes to less than 20 kilometres (12 mi) and its amplitude grows enormously. Since the wave still has the same very long period, the tsunami may take minutes to reach full height. Except for the very largest tsunamis, the approaching wave does not break (like a surf break), but rather appears like a fast moving tidal bore.[20] Open bays and coastlines adjacent to very deep water may shape the tsunami further into a step-like wave with a steep-breaking front.

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 12:50:05 PM

I don't really know whether having a sea-wall lower than the wave helps. The Japanese cities mostly had sea-walls, and got flattened anyway, but what is unknown (to me) is whether the damage would have been worse if they didn't have sea walls at all.

Quote from: Warspite on March 15, 2011, 01:00:19 PM

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 12:50:05 PM

I don't really know whether having a sea-wall lower than the wave helps. The Japanese cities mostly had sea-walls, and got flattened anyway, but what is unknown (to me) is whether the damage would have been worse if they didn't have sea walls at all.

Well imagine if a 9 metre wave with a 120 km wavelength hits a seawall that does not fail, but that is only 8.50 metre high. An intuitive visualisation would suggest the damage would be lessened. But perhaps this gets the fluid physics wrong.

Quote from: Slargos on March 15, 2011, 01:09:52 PM

Quote from: Warspite on March 15, 2011, 01:00:19 PM

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 12:50:05 PM

I don't really know whether having a sea-wall lower than the wave helps. The Japanese cities mostly had sea-walls, and got flattened anyway, but what is unknown (to me) is whether the damage would have been worse if they didn't have sea walls at all.

Well imagine if a 9 metre wave with a 120 km wavelength hits a seawall that does not fail, but that is only 8.50 metre high. An intuitive visualisation would suggest the damage would be lessened. But perhaps this gets the fluid physics wrong.

I would think that intuitively, the total amount of energy of the wave that hits the shore would be lessened by whatever is soaked up by the wall, but the water will eventually pile over the wall in a more or less continuous motion with little loss of energy once it has climbed the wall. This given the constant push of the back of the wave.

Quote from: Warspite on March 15, 2011, 01:15:04 PM

Quote from: Slargos on March 15, 2011, 01:09:52 PM

Quote from: Warspite on March 15, 2011, 01:00:19 PM

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 12:50:05 PM

I don't really know whether having a sea-wall lower than the wave helps. The Japanese cities mostly had sea-walls, and got flattened anyway, but what is unknown (to me) is whether the damage would have been worse if they didn't have sea walls at all.

Well imagine if a 9 metre wave with a 120 km wavelength hits a seawall that does not fail, but that is only 8.50 metre high. An intuitive visualisation would suggest the damage would be lessened. But perhaps this gets the fluid physics wrong.

I would think that intuitively, the total amount of energy of the wave that hits the shore would be lessened by whatever is soaked up by the wall, but the water will eventually pile over the wall in a more or less continuous motion with little loss of energy once it has climbed the wall. This given the constant push of the back of the wave.

Indeed, but are we then talking about a 10cm spill vs a 10m flow?

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 01:27:34 PM
It strikes me that us guys speculating on this issue is about as useful as a group of neanderthals arguing about long division - we sorta have an idea about the topic, but no concrete notion of the math (and in this case physics) tools necessary to actually solve it.  :D

Quote from: Slargos on March 15, 2011, 01:32:24 PM

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 01:27:34 PM
It strikes me that us guys speculating on this issue is about as useful as a group of neanderthals arguing about long division - we sorta have an idea about the topic, but no concrete notion of the math (and in this case physics) tools necessary to actually solve it.  :D

In this hypothetical scenario, do you think the jew invents long division in order to create a system of economy that allows him to parasite off the hard work of the other neanderthals?

Regardless, your protest would stand in 95% of Languish threads, but why open that can when you know it contains worms?  :hmm:

Quote from: Monoriu on March 14, 2011, 08:45:54 PM

Quote from: Caliga on March 14, 2011, 01:30:28 PM
Hmmm... that raises some questions with me then, as the Sendai plain has been hit with very large tsunamis in the past (there was one in the middle ages that IIRC was so destructive that it helped the Japanese win a war against the Ainu that still inhabited the area) and there had been predictions for some time that the area was overdue for another massive quake. :hmm:

From what I read, the Japanese invested massively in breakwaters.  A coastal city just earned a place in the Guiness book of records for having the most elaborate and deepest breakwaters in the world.  The system was completely ineffective in this crisis and was destroyed. 

The nuclear plants were also protected by breakwaters that were not up to the task.  That's why the Japanese were caught off-guard.  They thought they had enough protection and the cooling system would remain intact. 

QuoteSeveral months ago, an award ceremony was held in the town of Kamaishi in Iwate prefecture. An official from the Guiness Book of World Records had come to proclaim that the Kamaishi Tsunami Protection Breakwater (63-meters deep) the title of world's deepest breakwater. The event was described in a blog post:

    The 1,960 m (6,430 ft 5 in) long breakwater was constructed at the mouth of Kamaishi bay to prevent from the threats of tsunami disaster from Pacific sea side. It reduces the bay-mouth opening to decrease tsunami run-up height as well as wind waves and swells. The construction work started in 1978 and it took amazing 31 years until it finally completed in March 2009.

    To celebrate the much anticipated completion as well as the Guinness World Records achievement, Kamaishi city held the ceremony on the sightseeing boat, Hamayuri. I was honoured to be invited to present the certificate to the city mayor.

    It was moving to hear from the people involved how much hard work had been spent for the construction. The citizens of Kamaishi are proud of their breakwater which protects their lives. It surely is an incredible world record!

Unfortunately, the record-breaking breakwater proved to be incapable of stopping the massive tsunami that hit the town on Friday:

    ...waves swelled over the barrier, engulfing buildings and cars and smashing everything in its path to smithereens in a matter of minutes.

    The images from Japan's Pacific coastline have been a scary reminder of nature's power. Kamaishi thought it had built just the thing to keep the forces of nature at bay.

    The concrete breakwater, nearly 207 feet deep, was designed to blunt an incoming tsunami. Its construction marked the culmination of decades of research on wave dynamics and dissipation. It stretches 6,430 feet and was completed in March 2009 after more than three decades of construction.

Videos of the tsunami destroying Kamaishi:




Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has written an article that is extremely critical of Japan's use of sea walls:

    The risks of dependence on sea walls is most evident in the crisis at the Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants, both situated along the coast close to the earthquake zone. The tsunami that followed the quake washed over walls that were supposed to protect the plants.

    Peter Yanev, one of the world's best-known consultants on designing nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes, pointed out that the plants' diesel generators were situated in a low spot on the assumption that the walls were high enough. That turned out to be a fatal miscalculation.

    Critics have long argued that the construction of sea walls is a hubristic effort to control nature as well as the kind of wasteful public works project that successive Japanese governments used to reward politically connected companies. Supporters have said the sea walls increased the odds of survival in a quake-prone country.

    In Kamaishi, 14-foot waves surmounted the sea wall — the world's largest, erected a few years ago in the city's harbor at a length of 1.2 miles and a cost of $1.5 billion — and eventually submerged the city center.

    "This is going to force us to rethink our strategy," said Yoshiaki Kawata, a specialist on disaster management at Kansai University in Osaka and the director of a disaster prevention center in Kobe. "This kind of hardware just isn't effective."

Onishi is infamous for skewed and misleading articles he penned back when he served as the main Tokyo correspondent for the paper, so I'm not sure what to make of his article. It does seem obvious that sea walls failed to protect several towns from Friday's tsunami, but is it because the whole concept of sea walls is flawed, or because they were not built to stop waves from a magnitude 9.0 earthquake?

Quote from: Caliga on March 15, 2011, 07:01:25 PM
:lol:

It's been a while since I went over Geiger counters with the Red Cross, but that's like a fraction of a millirem IIRC... so in other words normal background radiation.

Crazed hippies are cute.

Quote from: Caliga on March 15, 2011, 07:01:25 PM
:lol:

It's been a while since I went over Geiger counters with the Red Cross, but that's like a fraction of a millirem IIRC... so in other words normal background radiation.

Crazed hippies are cute.

Quote from: Neil on March 15, 2011, 08:33:35 PM
No they aren't.  They're dangerous.

Quote from: Baron von Schtinkenbutt on March 15, 2011, 08:36:01 PM
According to the conversion here (http://www.hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q236.html) the current readings are about 1.3 μSv/h, which is 3 - 4 times the background radiation in Colorado.

Quote from: Caliga on March 15, 2011, 08:47:35 PM

Quote from: Neil on March 15, 2011, 08:33:35 PM
No they aren't.  They're dangerous.

The radiation levels are dangerous, or crazed hippies are?

QuoteAftershocks prompt fear of a major quake near Tokyo
The pattern of aftershocks appears to be shifting south toward the capital. Scientists say the temblors could transfer stress to nearby faults.

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times

March 16, 2011

As dozens of aftershocks continued to rattle Japan on Tuesday, scientists said they were worried that Friday's magnitude 9 earthquake might trigger a dangerous temblor close to Tokyo, the largest urban center in the world.

The fear is that the initial quake and the series of large aftershocks will transfer geophysical stress into nearby faults, causing some near Tokyo to shift violently, said Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Already, the pattern of aftershocks in Japan appears to be shifting southward toward Tokyo from off the coast of Sendai, 231 miles away. On Tuesday night local time, a magnitude 6.2 quake struck near Shizuoka, 72 miles southwest of the capital.

That quake "upped the ante" for Tokyo, said Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC.

Concern about the quake risk in the Tokyo metropolitan area, home to 32.5 million people, seems to arise from multiple sources.

First, large earthquakes spawn hundreds of aftershocks along nearby faults and plate boundaries. Some of these aftershocks can be very powerful. In Japan, aftershocks have been as big as 7.1.

Second, Tokyo is situated at what's known as a triple junction, where three tectonic plates — in this case, the Pacific, the Philippine and the Eurasian plates — come together. Such intersections are often seismically active and "tend to produce a lot of fracturing and breaking off of stuff," said Ross Stein, a U.S. Geological Service geophysicist in Menlo Park, Calif.

"Tokyo is in the center of everything, and it's pathologically located in harm's way," he said.

And then there's the fact that this week's aftershocks "seem to be migrating from Sendai toward Tokyo," said John Rundle, a seismologist at UC Davis.

A 2008 study that assessed the seismic risk in Tokyo concluded that the city faced a 30% chance of a quake with shaking as intense as that felt in Sendai in the next 30 years.

Friday's quake appears to have "slightly increased the stresses on faults around Tokyo," said Stein, who led the study. Still, he emphasized that exactly what it might herald is unclear.

Since the 1970s, seismologists have been anticipating a Big One of at least a magnitude 8 that could have devastating consequences for Tokyo. They already have a name for it: the Tokai quake.

But the Japan Meteorological Agency said Tuesday that the Shizuoka aftershock was not directly related to Tokai, said Shinji Toda, a geologist at Kyoto University, who has worked closely with Stein.

The Shizuoka aftershock was a strike-slip quake, which occurs when two sides along a fault move sideways relative to each other. The Tokai quake would be a megathrust quake, when one tectonic plate is pushed beneath another, Toda said.

Scientists noted that predicting earthquake activity was always a tricky business.

"We have an incredible habit of being wrong," Stein said.

Quote from: Caliga on March 15, 2011, 08:56:30 PM
:hmm:

Isn't that still way, way below dangerous levels of exposure? 1,000 millirems = 1 rem; 100 rems = radiation sickness?

Quote from: Ed Anger on March 15, 2011, 06:48:19 PM
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/%E3%82%AC%E3%82%A4%E3%82%AC%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AB%E3%82%A6%E3%83%B3%E3%82%BF

Live Geiger counter, Tokyo

Quote from: Barrister on March 16, 2011, 12:43:14 PM
This all reminds me of the days when I worked for AECL, had to carry a radiation badge on me at work, got a total body count test.  Ah, memories...

:nerd:

Quote from: Tyr on March 16, 2011, 01:29:23 PMJust wish NHK would stop the constant rolling news.

Quote from: Caliga on March 15, 2011, 07:08:17 AM
Not only did Gilbert get fired, but he got fired for cracking jokes that weren't even funny. :huh:

Quote from: Jacob on March 16, 2011, 01:53:22 PM


Well there are 10 000+ dead, about half a million people displaced, thousands of people still unaccounted for, a significant dip in the electricity production for the country, a massive amount of infrastructure to be rebuilt, potential long term health risk for the population of a major metropolis; it's the biggest disaster in the country since it was bombed into rubble by the Americans at the end of World War II.

Seems reasonable to me that they have constant rolling news, to be honest.

Quote from: Caliga on March 15, 2011, 11:53:05 AM
...

Hey, what ever happened to that OldMan dude?  Wasn't he an English teacher in Japan? :unsure:

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 16, 2011, 05:14:30 PM
The talking head on CNN is making a big deal out of the fact that the US is telling our citizens in Japan to stay 50 klicks away from the reactors instead of the 30 the Japs said.

Quote from: Josephus on March 16, 2011, 05:31:32 PM
The trouble with 24 hour news stations is that they have to make big deals of little things all the time.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 16, 2011, 05:48:31 PM
The power plant:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=37.314492,141.026881&spn=0.015035,0.033023&t=h&z=16


What's the little swastika symbol just to the south mean?

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 16, 2011, 05:14:30 PM
The talking head on CNN is making a big deal out of the fact that the US is telling our citizens in Japan to stay 50 klicks away from the reactors instead of the 30 the Japs said.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 16, 2011, 05:48:31 PM



What's the little swastika symbol just to the south mean?

Quote from: Tyr on March 16, 2011, 04:57:45 PM

Quote from: Jacob on March 16, 2011, 01:53:22 PM


Well there are 10 000+ dead, about half a million people displaced, thousands of people still unaccounted for, a significant dip in the electricity production for the country, a massive amount of infrastructure to be rebuilt, potential long term health risk for the population of a major metropolis; it's the biggest disaster in the country since it was bombed into rubble by the Americans at the end of World War II.

Seems reasonable to me that they have constant rolling news, to be honest.

Yeah, makes sense for them, perfectly understandable. Annoys me though. :P

Quote from: Josephus on March 16, 2011, 09:37:30 PM
What's with the iodine pills? From what I hear they help stave off thryroid cancer, which is but one symptom of radiation exposure.

Quote
So, are you being forced to watch at gunpoint or something?

Quote from: Josephus on March 16, 2011, 09:37:30 PM
What's with the iodine pills? From what I hear they help stave off thryroid cancer, which is but one symptom of radiation exposure.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 16, 2011, 05:52:17 PM
In Korea witch doctors (shamans, traditional healers, whatever) used to fly reverse swastika flags.

Quote from: Josephus on March 16, 2011, 09:37:30 PM
What's with the iodine pills? From what I hear they help stave off thryroid cancer, which is but one symptom of radiation exposure.

Quote from: katmai on March 16, 2011, 11:00:56 PM
Oh sure make Hitler the bad guy!

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 12, 2011, 09:39:01 PM
My brother's ship is headed there to provide aid.

Quote from: Monoriu on March 16, 2011, 10:30:43 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 16, 2011, 05:52:17 PM
In Korea witch doctors (shamans, traditional healers, whatever) used to fly reverse swastika flags.

It has been a Buddhist symbol for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  Hitler stole it  :mad:

Quote from: Malthus on March 15, 2011, 12:50:05 PM
From what I've seen, tsunamis appear to act neither as instantaneous nor continuous events, but rather as something inbetween - they appear to last an appreciable time, sort of like a temporary shift in sealevel that lasts a half-hour or so. The wave when in hits shore may have a wavelength of 20 km or so, at least according to wiki:

QuoteWhile everyday wind waves have a wavelength (from crest to crest) of about 100 metres (330 ft) and a height of roughly 2 metres (6.6 ft), a tsunami in the deep ocean has a wavelength of about 200 kilometres (120 mi). Such a wave travels at well over 800 kilometres per hour (500 mph), but owing to the enormous wavelength the wave oscillation at any given point takes 20 or 30 minutes to complete a cycle and has an amplitude of only about 1 metre (3.3 ft).[19] This makes tsunamis difficult to detect over deep water. Ships rarely notice their passage.

As the tsunami approaches the coast and the waters become shallow, wave shoaling compresses the wave and its velocity slows below 80 kilometres per hour (50 mph). Its wavelength diminishes to less than 20 kilometres (12 mi) and its amplitude grows enormously. Since the wave still has the same very long period, the tsunami may take minutes to reach full height. Except for the very largest tsunamis, the approaching wave does not break (like a surf break), but rather appears like a fast moving tidal bore.[20] Open bays and coastlines adjacent to very deep water may shape the tsunami further into a step-like wave with a steep-breaking front.

QuoteThus, when the wave hits a sea-wall that is lower than the wave, it floods over it and this flood moves inland - the presure of water crushing/pushing everything in its path. 

I don't really know whether having a sea-wall lower than the wave helps. The Japanese cities mostly had sea-walls, and got flattened anyway, but what is unknown (to me) is whether the damage would have been worse if they didn't have sea walls at all.

Quote from: Neil on March 16, 2011, 06:55:06 PM
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.

QuoteTOKYO — Kazuko Yamashita was five when the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, destroying her home in a second and leaving her with a lifelong fear that every time she becomes ill, this time it is finally cancer.

Now, 66 years later, she wears a dark pink sweater, her dyed hair in a neat bob, and waits out Japan's current nuclear crisis in her daughter's Tokyo home, a two-story house she also shares with her two granddaughters who play on a sofa behind her.

"I may be a bit too callous about this due to the fact that I was really heavily exposed to radiation, but I don't think this is anything to turn pale over," she told Reuters.

"People seem to be much too sensitive, though of course it's not really for me to say, and heavy radiation exposure is a serious thing. But I was 3.6 km (2.2 miles) from the bomb, and they've evacuated for 20 km (around the stricken nuclear plant). I really don't understand this kind of feeling."

Almost a week since massive earthquake and tsunami triggered the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, 150 miles north of Tokyo, many foreigners and tourists have fled the country and rolling blackouts and radiation fears have gripped the capital.

Worries about grandchildren
Yamashita said she was not taking the situation lightly, even if she laments conflicting, overly alarmist news coverage.

"I can't say I'm not concerned, but I can't say I'm all that nervous," she said. "What I really worry about is my grandchildren. They're still so young."

Yamashita suffers from diabetes, thyroid issues and osteoporosis, which she attributes to the atom bomb that fell on her native city at the end of World War Two.

"Radiation is something you only see the results of years down the road, so in that sense it's quite frightening," she said.

On that hot summer day in 1945, Yamashita was shielded from the worst of the destruction by a heavy quilt thrown over her as the bomb exploded.

"I didn't see a thing, but the noise was incredible — the sound of glass flying around, and so many other things. Then when I got up a few minutes later, everything had changed. There was nothing left of the house but the supporting pillars, and the world around us was red," she said.

"Now everybody's making such a fuss about the reactors in Fukushima. But it's nothing like that," she added.

Perhaps due to her mother's influence, her daughter, Shigeko Hara, is also quite stoic — even though she too suffers from a thyroid disorder typical of the children of atom bomb survivors.

"How safe is it really? That depends on the wind and what happens, and since I have children it is pretty scary," the 39-year old said as she sipped green tea in her living room.

"But it's also really scary that the location of strong earthquakes seems to be changing. So many places are being hit, you have no idea where's next," she added.

"I wear athletic shoes everywhere these days, even to work, because I never know what will happen and want to be ready for anything," Hara said.

Disaster backpack
Like many Tokyo residents, she has a backpack at hand for disasters filled with work gloves, socks, shoes heavy enough to walk over glass, as well as aspirin and sticking plasters.

But she also confessed that her emergency food was far past its expiry dates. A carton of mineral water and bag filled with cup noodles and snacks stood close by, ready to be added.

After the quake, she went to buy food and was shocked to see store shelves had been emptied of bread, milk and rice balls.

She was able to buy milk on Wednesday after standing in a long line, but that was the first time in two days her daughters, 7-year-old Akari and 11-year-old Yuka, had any milk to drink.

The family is limiting its electricity use as much as possible, responding to official calls to conserve power, shivering at night under extra sweaters in Tokyo's unseasonable cold.

She would like to dry her washing outside, but concerns about radiation have her hanging it inside instead.

Still, both she and her mother say their problems are small in the face of the hardships in the tsunami-hit areas.

"I called a childhood friend who lives up near the reactor and said to her, 'We went through a lot more than this in the past," Yamashita said.

"Japanese people are strong, and good at enduring."

QuoteEarthquake forecasting has progressed greatly. All large earthquakes have aftershocks, which are smaller earthquakes that relieve the residual stresses that develop in the chaos of the rupturing fault zone and the secondary faults that surround it. Since around 1990, seismologists have noticed that aftershocks tend to cluster in volumes of rock in which shear stresses on faults are predicted to increase rather than decrease. The net stress-change of an earthquake is negative, but typically a cross-like pattern of increased stresses is predicted by theory, with pockets of higher stress projecting beyond the rupture termination, as well as angled perpendicular to the fault. The stress increase is a few bars (one bar approximates atmospheric pressure), which is tiny compared to ambient stress in the rock. That this small increment of stress largely determines the pattern of aftershocks is no comfort: It tells us that a large rock volume was very close to failure before the earthquake.

Aftershock patterns benefitted earthquake forecasting when Ross Stein and his USGS colleagues discovered that the stress increments of past large earthquakes were good predictors of where the next large earthquake would occur. Long after the aftershocks subsided -- months, years, or decades after -- another earthquake of similar size often broke within the next segment of the fault zone, where stresses had been increased only slightly in relative terms. How time-delayed stress-triggering occurs is a mystery, but it has been documented worldwide.

An irregular series of large, damaging earthquakes shook the North Anatolian Fault in the twentieth century from east toward the west across modern-day Turkey, reaching the Sea of Marmara in 1999 with the Izmit earthquake. Stress increments from Izmit have loaded the fault segment next to Istanbul. The 6.6 magnitude San Fernando earthquake in 1971 loaded the nearby fault that caused the 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994. More germane to Japan, the 9.3 Sumatra-Andaman megathrust earthquake in December 2004 loaded the next subduction-zone segment to the south, and this segment generated an 8.6 megathrust event only three months later in March 2005. No prediction can be made today for Japan, but it is safe to forecast a sharply increased probability for a major earthquake on the broad, simple subduction-zone segments both north and south of the Tohoku rupture zone. The segment to the south lies offshore the Tokyo metropolitan area.

Quote from: Monoriu on March 17, 2011, 12:57:12 AM
People are spreading crazy rumours in Hong Kong and China.  The latest theory is that consuming large quantities of salt helps to combat radiation.  Because salt contains iodine.  And since sea water is being contaminated, salt supply will be affected.  I see people lining up to buy salt in the markets  :secret:

Quote from: Barrister on March 16, 2011, 11:27:03 PM

Quote from: Josephus on March 16, 2011, 09:37:30 PM
What's with the iodine pills? From what I hear they help stave off thryroid cancer, which is but one symptom of radiation exposure.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/954256--explainer-how-iodine-pills-protect-against-radiation

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 17, 2011, 12:34:41 AM
Today they had to flush the ship's whole water supply because the water had radiation in it. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but hey. Bottom's up.

Quote from: Crazy_Ivan80 on March 17, 2011, 02:17:18 AM

Quote from: Monoriu on March 16, 2011, 10:30:43 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 16, 2011, 05:52:17 PM
In Korea witch doctors (shamans, traditional healers, whatever) used to fly reverse swastika flags.

It has been a Buddhist symbol for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  Hitler stole it  :mad:

swastika is older than buddhism. Uness of course the early settled people in the Levant were Buddhists :p

Quote from: Ed Anger on March 17, 2011, 05:35:59 PM
Screw the damn dogs.

Quote
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.

(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.telegraph.co.uk%2Fmultimedia%2Farchive%2F01850%2Freactor4_1850941b.jpg&hash=1315b9414aaeecc0c4e9c806e25d652580410fba)

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.

Quote from: Neil on March 16, 2011, 06:55:06 PM
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.

QuoteCould 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."

QuoteMiyagi'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.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 17, 2011, 04:56:18 PM
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.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 21, 2011, 12:43:28 PM
Modern Keynesians don't subscribe to it.

Quote from: DGuller on March 21, 2011, 12:59:48 PM

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 21, 2011, 12:43:28 PM
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.

Quote from: Malthus on March 22, 2011, 08:30:24 AM
Heh, I wonder where the cars pouring over the seawall in the first pic came from.

Quote

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix

George Monbiot


You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It's not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren't popular, either.

The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50% or 70%, perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nuclear, while beyond that point, nuclear has smaller impacts than renewables.

Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impact on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion.

But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week in which I argued that nuclear remains safer than coal. What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.

At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources. It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales, but it's not much use in Birmingham.

And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.

Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution.

The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain – wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad, as well as most sea trout and salmon.

Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.

Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

Quote from: The Brain on March 22, 2011, 02:56:05 PM
No time to read, stockpiling iodine and foil hats.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 22, 2011, 02:51:36 PM

Quote

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

Japan's disaster would weigh more heavily if there were less harmful alternatives. Atomic power is part of the mix

George Monbiot

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

QuoteUS relief effort rebuilds lives, ties to Japan
'They are like gods descending from the sky,' says tearful school worker

Quote from: Tyr on March 23, 2011, 04:11:57 AM
Planning your next holiday to take advantage of the love Tim?

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 23, 2011, 02:48:36 AM
Isn't that what everyone says about Americans? ;)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42221279/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

QuoteUS relief effort rebuilds lives, ties to Japan
'They are like gods descending from the sky,' says tearful school worker

Quote from: Slargos on March 23, 2011, 02:57:04 AM
Angry, insane gods with a lust for blood and oil.

Quote
Toyota tells U.S. plants 'prepare to shut down'
cnnmoney


Peter Valdes-Dapena, senior writer, On Wednesday March 23, 2011, 9:05 pm EDT

Toyota's U.S. manufacturing arm is preparing for a possible shutdown because of parts shortages from Japan, a Toyota spokesman said. Word has gone out to all 13 of Toyota's factories in the United States, Canada and Mexico. This does not mean that the plants will stop working, Toyota spokesman Mike Goss said, but that they should be ready in case the need arises.

"We expect some kind of interruptions," he said.

While Toyota's car factories in Japan have stopped working since the March 11 earthquake in Japan, the automaker was able to resume production of some auto parts on March 17.

Toyota employs 25,000 manufacturing and R&D workers in North America.

Toyota has a long-standing policy of continuing to pay its employees while finding other work for them -- either within Toyota or even in the communities where they are located doing volunteer work -- during production shut-downs.

But Toyota's plans signal that this parts issue could be just the beginning of an industry-wide problem.

"They did resume parts production for overseas and for replacement parts," Goss said, "but that was just the suppliers that were capable of doing it."

Toyota is still in the process of assessing which suppliers are capable of full operation at this time, Goss said.

"We're not talking about just a few companies," he said.

Even suppliers based in North America may not be able to provide components for cars because they, in turn, rely on parts suppliers in Japan with crippled factories.

"All automakers are just now figuring out who supplies every little part." Said Edmunds.com senior analyst Michelle Krebs. "The shortage of any one could shut down an assembly line. Toyota isn't the only one vulnerable; virtually all major automakers have some risks."

Spokespeople for Nissan, Honda and Ford all said those automakers are making no plans to shut down their plants at this time.

U.S. automaker General Motors has already had to stop production of a truck plant in Shreveport, La. and a related engine plant in New York State due to shortages of parts from Japan.

QuoteN.Korea Kim Jong-il sends $500,000 to quake-hit Japan
REUTERS

2011/03/25

SEOUL--North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has sent half a million dollars to aid Korean expatriates in Japan after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, Pyongyang's official news agency said on Thursday.

Decades of tightly controlled economic policy that has seen North Korea channel much of its scarce resources to arms development has left the country acutely short of cash although its leaders continue to live lavishly, according to South Korean news reports. Food is also reportedly scarce.

Japan, formerly Korea's colonial master, is frequently lambasted as a "war monger" in North Korea's state-controlled media along with South Korea and the United States.

"Leader Kim Jong-il sent (a) relief fund of 500,000 U.S. dollars to Korean residents in Japan who suffered from the killer quake and tsunami happened there," KCNA news agency said.

Half a million U.S. dollars is equivalent to the annual average income earned by 520 North Koreans in all of 2009, according to Bank of Korea data.

U.N. sanctions in 2009 imposed for its nuclear and missile tests that defied international warnings have further cut into North Korea's finances, choking off much of its lucrative arms trade.

The North's Red Cross has separately sent $100,000 in disaster relief to Japan, KCNA said.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 25, 2011, 11:09:38 AM
Any of you guys texting 10 bucks to Japan?

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 25, 2011, 11:09:38 AM
Any of you guys texting 10 bucks to Japan?

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 25, 2011, 08:05:05 PM
:lol: Timmy has met his match.

Sure you're not thinking of Jerusalem's whaling wall Squeeze?

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 25, 2011, 08:05:05 PM
:lol: Timmy has met his match.

Sure you're not thinking of Jerusalem's whaling wall Squeeze?

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 25, 2011, 08:26:55 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 25, 2011, 08:05:05 PM
:lol: Timmy has met his match.

Sure you're not thinking of Jerusalem's whaling wall Squeeze?

:huh:

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 25, 2011, 08:55:26 PM

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 25, 2011, 08:26:55 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 25, 2011, 08:05:05 PM
:lol: Timmy has met his match.

Sure you're not thinking of Jerusalem's whaling wall Squeeze?

:huh:

You don't even see it, do you?  It's right there in front of you, stabbing you in the face, and you don't even realize it.

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 25, 2011, 08:57:54 PM

Quote from: CountDeMoney on March 25, 2011, 08:55:26 PM

Quote from: jimmy olsen on March 25, 2011, 08:26:55 PM

Quote from: Admiral Yi on March 25, 2011, 08:05:05 PM
:lol: Timmy has met his match.

Sure you're not thinking of Jerusalem's whaling wall Squeeze?

:huh:

You don't even see it, do you?  It's right there in front of you, stabbing you in the face, and you don't even realize it.

I see it now, I thought Yi was make a value laden statement rather than a spelling one so I wasn't looking for that at first.

QuoteRadioactive Water Levels Surge at Troubled Japan Nuclear Plant
Published March 27, 2011 | Associated Press


Emergency workers struggling to pump contaminated water from Japan's stricken nuclear complex fled one of the troubled reactors Sunday after reporting a huge spike in radioactivity, with levels 10 million times higher than normal in the reactor's cooling system, officials said.
The numbers were so high that the worker measuring radiation levels withdrew before taking a second reading, officials said.

It was not immediately clear, however, how long workers were exposed to the highly radioactive water or how long the levels had been that high at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, 140 miles northeast of Tokyo.
But it came as officials acknowledged there was contaminated water in all four of the complex's most troubled reactors, and as airborne radiation inside one reactor unit measured 1,000 millisieverts per hour -- four times the limit deemed safe by the government, Tokyo Electric Power Co. spokesman Takashi Kurita said.

While the discovery of the high radiation levels -- and the evacuation of workers from one reactor unit -- again delayed efforts to bring the deeply troubled complex under control, a top official insisted the situation had partially stabilized.

"We have somewhat prevented the situation from turning worse," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters Sunday evening. "But the prospects are not improving in a straight line and we've expected twists and turns. The contaminated water is one of them and we'll continue to repair the damage."


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/03/27/workers-grapple-radioactive-water-troubled-japan-nuclear-plant/#ixzz1HnKnX38f

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 27, 2011, 03:22:43 PM
Oops, it was only 100,000 times normal, not 10 million. We goofed.

Quote

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/28/japan.tsunami.hospital/index.html?hpt=T2

Nurse haunted by screams of patients she could not save as tsunami hit

Rikuzen-Takata, Japan (CNN) -- At a hospital in northeastern Japan, the remnants of lives stolen in seconds are scattered on each of its four floors.

Metal beds are bent, I-V bags are filled with muddy water, and blood pressure monitors sit underneath splintered trees.

But Takata Hospital nurse Fumiko Suzuki doesn't just see the damage, she hears the haunted screams of the patients she could not save.

"The patients couldn't walk," said Suzuki, recalling the moment the tsunami hit.

"I heard someone screaming, 'Auntie, I can't save you. I'm sorry.' Then she ran out of the room."

Suzuki said a glance out of the window revealed a wave as high as the fourth floor.

The nurse said she told the patient "I'm sorry" as she raced up the stairs.

"If I tried to save this person who was lying on the bed, I would have lost my life as well," she said.

Suzuki pauses, grief etched on her face.

"It is the biggest regret I have," she said of leaving patients behind.

The tsunami following the 9.0-magnitude earthquake on March 11 engulfed every floor of the hospital just as Suzuki stepped onto the roof. At least 10,901 were killed nationwide.

Of the 51 patients hospitalized, doctors and nurses could not move 12 and they drowned in their beds, said Mikihito Ishiki, a medical director at the hospital.

One patient died as the hospital staff moved him to the roof while two more died on the frigid roof awaiting rescue.

"Ten of my staff also died with the patients," Ishiki said.

The doctor lost his staff, his patients and the hospital he proudly called his home. His wife remains missing and is presumed dead.

As soon as rescuers plucked the doctor from the engulfed building, he started working from a makeshift clinic on higher ground.

The doctor's composure cracks as he lifts a handwritten note from a satellite phone sitting in his clinic.

"Yokosawa is helping us from heaven," he reads, referring to a 60-year-old hospital administrator, Shigeru Yokosawa, set to retire in April.

After the tsunami warning, Ishiki asked Yokosawa to find the satellite phone on the first floor of the hospital.

Satellite phones are vital lines of communication after a natural disaster because phone lines are usually knocked out.

Yokosawa got the phone and moments before a massive wave swallowed him, tossed it to a colleague, who ran to the roof.

Seconds later, the tsunami engulfed the hospital.

His sacrifice is part of the reason Ishiki won't leave this clinic, now fully operational and treating patients across Rikuzen-Takata.

His fellow survivors tirelesslesly work along him.

Suzuki, who brought her elderly and sick mother to the clinic, said the doctors and nurses can't feel guilty for surviving the disaster.

"When I hear that," she said, "it breaks my heart. It's a natural disaster. They want to save everyone, but in this situation, they can't."

Suzuki said she is grateful to see familiar faces of her colleagues, and hope they realize they are making a difference in the present.

She pushes her pain -- the loss of her home, her friends and her relatives -- to the back of her mind as she focuses on her patients.

The town has given her not just a refuge from the pain, but donations of clothes for days she's not wearing her nurse uniform.

"Whatever the situation, I will stay here. Talking with the patients will be my cure. I feel like I'm not the one taking care of others, but the one being taken care of," she said.

Quote from: The Brain on March 28, 2011, 11:06:02 AM
"X times normal" is a lame unit. I spilled some milk on the floor. OMG milk levels are 100 billion times normal!

QuoteA swarm of purple took over Ripken Stadium in Aberdeen for an important cause.

Thousands of Ravens fans stood in a line that wrapped around the lower concourse of the stadium to give a donate money for the Japan relief effort in exchange for autographs from players.

Ravens safety Haruki Nakamura, one of only a few NFL players of Japanese descent, organized the event to help the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear power plant disaster afflicting Japan. He said he got "goosebumps" when he saw the amount of people in the parking lot when he entered the stadium.

The event -- which drew an estimated crowd of 3,000 -- earned $60,000 toward emergency relief.

"This just shows how much people truly care," Nakamura said. "It's not about football players looking to give autographs. This is for something that's very special. We're trying to make an impact on a society 'that's in grave danger of nuclear issues and with lasting effects of a tsunami. This is what we're here for. And the fact that these people are here to support that is awesome."

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on March 25, 2011, 11:14:21 AM
I gave $200 to something Japan-related last week.

Quote from: Berkut on April 04, 2011, 12:33:59 PM
Maybe the Ravens could have a fundraiser for the families of Jacinth Baker and Richard Lollar.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Quote from: Berkut on April 04, 2011, 12:33:59 PM
Maybe the Ravens could have a fundraiser for the families of Jacinth Baker and Richard Lollar.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Quote from: Neil on April 04, 2011, 10:04:47 PM

Quote from: Berkut on April 04, 2011, 12:33:59 PM
Maybe the Ravens could have a fundraiser for the families of Jacinth Baker and Richard Lollar.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Haven't they already been more than adequately compensated?

QuoteJapan Rattled By 7.4-Magnitude Quake, Markets Shake

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake rattled Japan and a tsunami warning has been issued, according to the AP.  The quake, which occurred during the Japanese night on Thursday, hit 60 miles east of the city of Sendai and about 90 miles from Fukushima, where the beleaguered Daiichi nuclear plant is located; Tepco, the plant's operator, released a statement noting none of its facilities received further damage from the quake.

The quake, categorized as an aftershock by the AP, prompted a tsunami warning from Japan's meteorological agency, with the wave possibly reaching a meter in height.  The depth of the quake was 25 miles.

Quote from: Caliga on April 07, 2011, 12:06:01 PM
I dunno how/if the magnitude figures in to deciding if a quake is an aftershock, but distance in time from the primary quake doesn't matter.  There are still aftershocks occurring every year in Missouri and Arkansas from the New Madrid Quake of 1812.

Quote

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04/12/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html?hpt=T1

Japan nuclear disaster tops scale

Tokyo (CNN) -- Japan's prime minister vowed to wind down the month-long crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant "at all costs" Tuesday after his government officially designated the situation there a Chernobyl-level nuclear accident.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he wants the plant's owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, to produce a timetable for bringing the disaster to an end, "and they will be doing that soon." And a day after his government warned that thousands more people would need to be evacuated from the surrounding region, he pledged to provide jobs, housing and education for those uprooted by the accident.

"The government will not forsake the people who are suffering because of the nuclear accident," Kan told reporters in a Tuesday evening news conference.

Japan declared the Fukushima Daiichi crisis a Level 7 event on the international system for rating nuclear accidents Tuesday, putting it on par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union. The top-scale designation was based on the massive release of radioactivity since the accident began, particularly in its early days, and classifies Fukushima Daiichi a "major accident" requiring long-term countermeasures.

"At all costs, all the reactors and the spent nuclear fuel pools must be brought under control so that we can prevent a further expansion of the damage," Kan said.

Tetsunari Iida, a former nuclear engineer-turned-industry critic, told CNN the declaration has no immediate practical impact on the crisis. But it's a sign that Japanese regulators have rethought their earlier assessments of the disaster, said Iida, who now runs an alternative energy think-tank in Tokyo.

Tokyo Electric's president, Masataka Shimizu, issued a new apology for the disaster and the "enormous anxiety" it has caused after the Level 7 designation Tuesday.

"We would like to stabilize the situation as soon as possible, and we are working on the measures and steps to cool the reactors and prevent the spread of nuclear substances," he said. "While continuing to ask for the support and cooperation of the government, the ministries, and the municipalities, we would like to maintain close communication with them, and we will make the utmost effort to bring the situation to an end."

Scientists believe the amount of radiation released is only a tenth of what was released at Chernobyl, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, the chief spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. But the levels for radioactive iodine and cesium that have been spewed into the air, water and soil around the plant are in the thousands of trillions of bequerels -- 15 times higher than the threshold for a top-scale event, according to figures released by the safety agency Tuesday morning.
Magnitude 6.4 quake hits Japan
First moments of a tsunami
Japan: One month since quake
Finding memories in Japan
RELATED TOPICS

    * Fukushima Daiichi
    * Tokyo Electric Power Co. Inc.
    * 2011 Japan Disaster

The crisis began with the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated northern Japan. The tsunami knocked out the plant's cooling systems, leaving operators with no way to keep the three operational reactors from overheating after they shut down.

Engineers are now pumping hundreds of tons of water a day into the damaged reactors to keep them cool, but Tokyo Electric said long-term solutions must wait until it can get the highly contaminated water out of the basements of the units' turbine plants. In addition, more water is being poured into pools housing spent but still-potent fuel rods in units 1-3 as well as unit 4, which had no fuel in the reactor at the time of the quake.

The work has been complicated over the past five days by a series of powerful aftershocks that have forced workers to clear out of the units and seek shelter.

Monday, Japan ordered new evacuations for towns around the plant, including some outside the 20- and 30-km danger zones drawn in the early days of the accident, and warned others to stand by. But after Tuesday's declaration, both Nishiyama and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano tried to draw distinctions between their crisis and Chernobyl.

"What's different here from the Chernobyl accident is that we have not yet seen a direct impact on the health of the people as a result of the nuclear accident," said Edano, the Japanese government's leading spokesman on the crisis. "The accident itself is big, but we will make, as our first priority, our utmost effort to avoid any health impact on the people."

And Nishiyama said that unlike the Chernobyl disaster, the reactors inside the badly damaged buildings at Fukushima Daiichi remain largely intact, "although there are some leaks being seen."

"In the case of Chernobyl, the radioactive material release made it very difficult to enter the facility itself," he said. "It had to be left alone for a very long time by itself. But it in the Fukushima Daiichi case, day and night, workers are there trying to salvage the situation."

Thomas Breuer, a researcher for the anti-nuclear group Greenpeace, told CNN that Japanese authorities were "too slow" to respond to the crisis at first -- but they have stepped up their efforts in recent days due to pressure from local officials, outside critics and their own people. Now, he said, they have to step up their plans to evacuate towns that have been dusted with large quantities of longer-lived radioactive particles.

"There are still a lot of measures to be done, but they have to do it now," said Breuer, who has studied the aftereffects of Chernobyl.

Breuer said Greenpeace, which called for evacuations in towns outside the 30-km radius in late March, believes the accident will end up being "worse than Chernobyl" because it has occurred in a more densely populated area.

Evacuation orders have so far covered about 85,000 people inside the 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) zone, while another 62,000 within 30 kilometers have been told to stay inside, Fukushima prefecture officials told CNN. Japan's government said it had no estimate of the number of people who would be covered by the new directives.

Nishiyama said Tuesday's designation was made "provisionally," and that a final level won't be set until the disaster is over and a more detailed investigation has been conducted. The previous event level of 5, equal to the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, was also a provisional designation.

Three Mile Island involved a partial meltdown of the radioactive core of one reactor, with only a limited release of radioactivity, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

At Chernobyl, an explosion and fire at a nuclear power plant resulted in the permanent evacuation of a 30-km radius around the plant. There were 32 deaths among plant workers and firefighters, mostly due to radiation exposure, and the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates another 4,000 will or have died of related cancers.

CNN's Kyung Lah, Whitney Hurst and Junko Ogura contributed to this report.

QuoteJapan's tsunami waves top historic heights
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Posted 32m ago |

Tsunami waves topped 60 feet or more as they broke on-shore following Japan's earthquake, according to some of the first surveys measuring the impact along the afflicted nation's entire coast. Some waves grew to more than 100 feet high, breaking historic records, as they squeezed between fingers of land surrounding port towns.

The tsunami was born when the magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck March 11 about 45 miles off Japan's coast. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake lifted and then dropped a slab of seafloor 50 miles wide and more than 180 miles long. The force shifted the seafloor nearly 80 feet westward above the quake center.

Within a half-hour, the waves arrived on Japan's coast, plateaus of water that surged up to six miles inland and unleashed much of the devastation that killed about 14,300 people, with another 12,000 still missing. The new estimates on wave heights from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, gathered from Japanese university surveys, show the biggest waves hit the hilly harbor towns north of where the quake was centered. The surge grew in between inlet hills to 124 feet high at the fishing port of Koborinai.

"Waves this high are completely predictable after such a large earthquake. But they are still almost unimaginable," says tsunami geologist Jody Bourgeois of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was in Japan when the quake struck.

Japan's science ministry has dispatched more than 200 tsunami experts to map where and how high the waves came during the tsunami. North of the city of Sendai, University of Southern California tsunami expert Costas Synolakis, found that the surge exceeded 40 foot depths a quarter-mile inland, and still reached over 26 feet high about a half-mile inland. "We have only seen such extremes 'recently' in Banda Aceh during the 2004 tsunami," Costas says, by e-mail. That 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 230,000 people in 14 southeast Asian countries.

Building on an analysis released earlier this month, University of Tokyo tsunami expert Yoshinobu Tsuji, reports the wave heights exceeded those of a record 1896 tsunami in Japan. Although wave heights were lower on the Japanese coast south of the epicenter of the March 11 quake,, they were still high enough to top an 18-foot sea wall at Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, sparking an ongoing crisis there.

Although terrible, the preliminary estimate also finds a better-than 92%survival rate for people living in coastal towns hit by the waves, Bourgeois says. "In that sense, given the magnitude of the unexpectedly large earthquake, things could have been even worse," she says.

Quote from: jimmy olsen on April 24, 2011, 06:51:04 PM
Must have been a breathtaking sight.

QuoteQuake Shifted Japan; Towns Now Flood at High Tide
Published May 09, 2011 | Associated Press

When water begins to trickle down the streets of her coastal neighborhood, Yoshiko Takahashi knows it is time to hurry home.
Twice a day, the flow steadily increases until it is knee-deep, carrying fish and debris by her front door and trapping people in their homes. Those still on the streets slosh through the sea water in rubber boots or on bicycle.
"I look out the window, and it's like our houses are in the middle of the ocean," says Takahashi, who moved in three years ago.
The March 11 earthquake that hit eastern Japan was so powerful it pulled the entire country out and down into the sea. The mostly devastated coastal communities now face regular flooding, because of their lower elevation and damage to sea walls from the massive tsunamis triggered by the quake.
In port cities such as Onagawa and Kesennuma, the tide flows in and out among crumpled homes and warehouses along now uninhabited streets.
A cluster of neighborhoods in Ishinomaki city is rare in that it escaped tsunami damage through fortuitous geography. So, many residents still live in their homes, and they now face a daily trial: The area floods at high tide, and the normally sleepy streets turn frantic as residents rush home before the water rises too high.
"I just try to get all my shopping and chores done by 3 p.m.," says Takuya Kondo, 32, who lives with his family in his childhood home.
Most houses sit above the water's reach, but travel by car becomes impossible and the sewage system swamps, rendering toilets unusable.
Scientists say the new conditions are permanent.
Japan's northern half sits on the North American tectonic plate. The Pacific plate, which is mostly undersea, normally slides under this plate, slowly nudging the country west. But in the earthquake, the fault line between the two plates ruptured, and the North American plate slid up and out along the Pacific plate.
The rising edge of plate caused the sea floor off Japan's eastern coast to bulge up — one measuring station run by Tohoku University reported an underwater rise of 16 feet (5 meters) — creating the tsunami that devastated the coast. The portion of the plate under Japan was pulled lower as it slid toward the ocean, which caused a corresponding plunge in elevation under the country.
Some areas in Ishinomaki moved southeast 17 feet (5.3 meters) and sank 4 feet (1.2 meters) lower.
"We thought this slippage would happen gradually, bit by bit. We didn't expect it to happen all at once," says Testuro Imakiire, a researcher at Japan's Geospatial Information Authority, the government body in charge of mapping and surveys.
Imakiire says the quake was powerful enough to move the entire country, the first time this has been recorded since measurements began in the late 19th century. In Tokyo, 210 miles (340 kilometers) from Ishinomaki, parts of the city moved 9 inches (24 centimeters) seaward.
The drop lower was most pronounced around Ishinomaki, the area closest to the epicenter. The effects are apparent: Manholes, supported by underground piping, jut out of streets that fell around them. Telephone poles sank even farther, leaving wires at head height.
As surrounding areas clear rubble and make plans to rebuild, residents in this section of Ishinomaki are stuck in limbo — their homes are mostly undamaged and ineligible for major insurance claims or government compensation, but twice a day the tide swamps their streets.
"We can't really complain, because other people lost so much," says Yuichiro Mogi, 43, as his daughters examine a dead blowfish floating near his curb.
The earthquake and tsunami left more than 25,000 people either dead or missing, and many more lost their homes and possessions.
Mogi noticed that the daily floods were slowly carrying away the dirt foundation of his house, and built a small embankment of sandbags to keep the water at bay. The shipping company worker moved here 10 years ago, because he got a good deal on enough land to build a home with a spacious front lawn, where he lives with his four children and wife.
Most of the residences in the area are relatively new.
"Everyone here still has housing loans they have to pay, and you can't give away this land, let alone sell it," says Seietsu Sasaki, 57, who also has to pay off loans on two cars ruined in the flooding.
Sasaki, who moved in 12 years ago with his extended family, says he hopes the government can build flood walls to protect the neighborhood. He never paid much attention to the tides in the past, but now checks the newspaper for peak times each morning.
Officials have begun work on some embankments, but with much of the city devastated, resources are tight. Major construction projects to raise the roads were completed before the tsunami, but much of that work was negated when the ground below them sank.
The constant flooding means that construction crews can only work in short bursts, and electricity and running water were restored only about two weeks ago. The area still doesn't have gas for hot water, and residents go to evacuee shelters to bathe.
"We get a lot of requests to build up these areas, but we don't really have the budget right now," says Kiyoshi Koizumi, a manager in Ishinomaki's roads and infrastructure division.
Sasaki says he hopes they work something out soon: Japan's heavy summer rains begin in about a month, and the higher tides in autumn will rise well above the floor of his house.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/05/09/quake-shifted-japan-towns-flood-high-tide/#ixzz1LuAyMxAH

Quote from: Tonitrus on May 09, 2011, 07:32:42 PM
Scientists say the new conditions are permanent.

Quote
31 May 2011 Last updated at 03:19 ET

Japan pensioners volunteer to tackle nuclear crisis
By Roland Buerk BBC News, Tokyo



A group of more than 200 Japanese pensioners are volunteering to tackle the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power station.

The Skilled Veterans Corps, as they call themselves, is made up of retired engineers and other professionals, all over the age of 60.

They say they should be facing the dangers of radiation, not the young.

It was while watching the television news that Yasuteru Yamada decided it was time for his generation to stand up.

No longer could he be just an observer of the struggle to stabilise the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The retired engineer is reporting back for duty at the age of 72, and he is organising a team of pensioners to go with him.

For weeks now Mr Yamada has been getting back in touch with old friends, sending out e-mails and even messages on Twitter.

Volunteering to take the place of younger workers at the power station is not brave, Mr Yamada says, but logical.



"I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live," he says.

"Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer."

Mr Yamada is lobbying the government hard for his volunteers to be allowed into the power station. The government has expressed gratitude for the offer but is cautious.

Certainly a couple of MPs are supporting Mr Yamada.

"At this moment I can say that I am talking with many key government and Tepco people. But I am sorry I can't say any more at this moment. It is on the way but it is a very, very sensitive issue politically," he said.

Certainly it is likely more workers will be needed.

The plant is still spewing radiation, nearly three months after an earthquake and tsunami knocked out its cooling systems, triggering explosions.

Its operator, Tepco, has now confirmed three of the reactors probably suffered meltdowns.

The plan is to bring the plant to a cold shutdown by January, although some experts believe that is over optimistic.

To cope with the disaster Japan has raised the radiation exposure limit for emergency workers from 100 millisieverts to 250 millisieverts.

But Tepco announced this week two workers at Fukushima might have already been exposed to more.
Kamikaze?

Many of Mr Yamada's veterans are retired engineers like him.

Others are former power station workers, experts in factory design - and even a singer and two cooks - Mr Yamada says they will be useful to keep his team amused and fed.

Michio Ito used to be a primary school teacher but is spending his retirement helping out in a cafe that offers work experience to people with learning difficulties.

He is keen to swap his apron for a radiation suit.

"I don't think I'm particularly special," he says. "Most Japanese have this feeling in their heart. The question is whether you step forward, or you stay behind and watch.

"To take that step you need a lot of guts, but I hope it will be a great experience. Most Japanese want to help out any way they can."

Mr Yamada has already tried on his old overalls for size.

He says he is as fit as ever - with a lifetime of experience to bring to the task.

And he laughs off suggestions his proposed team is comparable to the kamikaze pilots who flew suicide missions in World War II.

"We are not kamikaze. The kamikaze were something strange, no risk management there. They were going to die. But we are going to come back. We have to work but never die."

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on June 01, 2011, 05:26:19 PM

Why so sensitive politically? Is Tepco honestly still concerned with losing face at this point? It seems to me that these guys' volunteering would be a positive spin story otherwise.

Quote
Instruments saw Japan quake lurch

Japan's 11 March mega-quake shifted the ocean floor sideways by more than 20m (65ft), according one instrument placed on the seabed off the nation's coast.

This direct measurement exceeds the displacement suggested by some models built only from data gathered on land.

The figure was recorded by the Japan Coast Guard which maintains underwater geodetic equipment along the fault responsible for the giant tremor.

An upwards movement of 3m (10ft) was registered by the same instrument.
......

Quote
Tepco Works to Cover Fukushima as Storm Nears

Tokyo Electric Power Co. is rushing to install a cover over a building at its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant to shield it from wind and rain as Typhoon Ma-on approaches Japan's coast from the south.

Work on the cover for the turbine building of the No. 3 reactor started at about 8:30 a.m. today, Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at the utility known as Tepco, said at briefing in Tokyo. The transfer of tainted water for storage in a barge docked next to the plant was halted, spokesman Satoshi Watanabe said by telephone.

The eye of Ma-on, which is categorized as "extremely strong," was about 420 kilometers (260 miles) southeast of the city of Kagoshima at 4 p.m. today, or 1,200 kilometers from the Fukushima plant, according to the website of the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The storm was moving north at 25 kilometers per hour with winds blowing at 157 kph. Ma-on is forecast to continuing heading north and may cross coast of the southwestern island of Kyushu after 6 a.m. tomorrow. A forecast track from the U.S. Navy Joint Typhoon Warning Center indicates the storm may pass over the Fukushima plant by July 21.

The Japanese weather agency issued warnings for floods and high waves along the southern coast from Okinawa to Tokyo.

Last year, the eyes of two storms passed within 300 kilometers of Tohoku, as the area where the plants are located is known, data from the weather agency show.

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on July 18, 2011, 04:22:44 PM
Probably overblown

Quote from: Syt on February 24, 2012, 09:59:16 AM
Japanese people clean up good:

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/02/japan-earthquake-before-and-after/100251/

QuoteI look at these pictures, then I drive around New Orleans and think:  If only.

Quote from: Syt on February 24, 2012, 10:26:56 AM
I liked:

QuoteI look at these pictures, then I drive around New Orleans and think:  If only.