EARFQUAKE!

[Linoleum]

/derail
There are many people such as myself that feel that the reason the evac didn't happen had far more to do with the ethnic makeup (shall we say) of the people needing evac than it did about the government's actual capability to evac those people.
/end derail (but probably not, sorry couldn't resist)

Are we talking evac after or before? After, there's more than enough review of activity floating out there to burst this theory. Helicopters were working non-stop, but there are only so many choppers. Singapore actually managed to help out a lot because they had three Chinooks training in Texas when Katrina hit (the RSAF only owns, I believe, twelve in total).

I don't think Japan has more than 15-20 Chinooks for the whole country. Heavy airlift-capable helicopters are expensive to buy and operate, maintenance intensive, dangerous to operate and as a result even rich developed nations don't generally have very many of them. It's not surprising that the Japanese are having logistical issues, I'm not even sure how much of their capability got knocked out by the tsunami.

[Brandon Clements]

I don't think Japan has more than 15-20 Chinooks for the whole country. Heavy airlift-capable helicopters are expensive to buy and operate, maintenance intensive, dangerous to operate and as a result even rich developed nations don't generally have very many of them. It's not surprising that the Japanese are having logistical issues, I'm not even sure how much of their capability got knocked out by the tsunami.

And they're going to be a bitch and probably time consuming to decontaminate after their sortie.

[Rimbo]

The facts about the Fukushima situation, courtesy of a nuclear engineer friend of a friend.

Summary: Don't Panic

Thanks for the link, Matt. That's a good read.

[Odovacar]

QT3 has a history of Germans going overboard with prose when they are powerless with rage...

Must be a trait of the german people then, maybe we can get it incorporated in Civilization 6.

And a few too many gamers second guessing and telling others how easy it should be in the wake of a quake and tsunami to assemble the right improvised tools and use them effectively.

Too many opinions for you? We can debate if and why something should be easy or not. But apparently you have no opinion so others aren´t allowed to state theirs? Furthermore, the opinions of gamers are especially invalid?

But maybe you´re right and they did everything they could. I will be the first one who will admit that I made a fool out of myself. Actually I hope that my worries about the whole situation are nothing else than german angst (maybe the second trait for Civ6?)

[Odovacar]

Could we drop Newbrof's trees in the reactor?

But yeah Hans has a point; remember New Orleans under a few feet of water, and we couldn't evac it for days? That was the world's superpower, a couple of miles of water, and an entire fishing industry within a day's drive. Katrina was a mild, slow flood compared to the tsunami, yet we let over a thousand people die after the fact.

H.

If I remember correctly that was partially also incompetence? Didn´t Bush fire the Head of FEMA or something because of that?

[Amurigo]

The helicopters are still needed to drop off supplies to the people in the shelters, evac the sick and search for the missing. The infrastructure is still shitty in the tsunami hit areas.

TEPCO has released video shot from SDF helicopter on March 16, 4pm, of Fukushima reactors http://youtu.be/lBXqiw6EJUk

Sorry if this is a repeat, video shot from a car when the tsunami hit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7IL37t7Wjg

[Woolen Horde]

And they're going to be a bitch and probably time consuming to decontaminate after their sortie.

If the radiation is as hot as feared, those choppers might have to be disposed of as radioactive waste; no way they could be used once this crisis is over. There's a boneyard outside Chernobyl full of radioactive helicopters.

[Blackadar]

Thanks for the link, Matt. That's a good read.

It appears that there are some rather major inaccuracies in it.

First, it focuses on the reactors which are in the containment housing, which are just one problem. Another problem is with the spent fuel rods, which are not in the containment housing. That's why there are calls for Japan to pursue the "Chernobyl" option, which was to use choppers to pour sand/concrete/barium over the facilities and entomb them.

Furthermore, his radiation estimates seem to be quite off. He said the radiation spike was 8,000 microsieverts. If the radiation was that low, why would Japan have cleared out all the workers and why wouldn't they be able to get closer to the reactors? It doesn't make sense. Of course, estimates I've read elsewhere said there's been a peak of 400 millisieverts per hour on the inland side of unit 3, not 8,000 microsieverts. The conversion factor for this is 1 mSv (millisieverts) = 1,000 μSv (microsieverts). So it appears he's understated the amount of radiation by a factor of 50.

If these two critical things are incorrect, pretty much that entire blog post is useless.

[dtolman]

New footage from the helicopter of the reactors. Shaky, but its some of the best views yet of how f'ed up those buildings are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBXqi...layer_embedded

---

EDIT - bah! Missed the link above. Sorry about the duplicate.

[Houngan]

If I remember correctly that was partially also incompetence? Didn´t Bush fire the Head of FEMA or something because of that?

It was entirely incompetence on the part of dozens of people, plus a complete dismantling of our supposedly superior methodologies. That's my point, that even if resources are available, getting them there is sometimes the hardest part for human reasons, not physical.

[Sarkus]

/derail
There are many people such as myself that feel that the reason the evac didn't happen had far more to do with the ethnic makeup (shall we say) of the people needing evac than it did about the government's actual capability to evac those people.
/end derail (but probably not, sorry couldn't resist)

Every disaster preparation thing I've ever seen is that you should be prepared to wait at least four days for help to arrive in a natural disaster. That's the timeframe of what happened at Katrina, and your rant also ignores the complete failure of local and state response.

I'm sure the Japanese are doing everything they can, but I do wonder if the view longer-term will be that they should have asked for outside help sooner. Hopefully we don't find out that they had a very realistic understanding of what they were facing early on but hoped they could handle things.

[Hanacker]

If the Japanese stock market is crashing, why is the Yen just getting stronger compared to the dollar? It's below 80 yen per dollar now.

[Woolen Horde]

If the Japanese stock market is crashing, why is the Yen just getting stronger compared to the dollar? It's below 80 yen per dollar now.

I heard it has to do something with the prospect of rebuilding. Honestly, it's going to require hundreds of billions of dollars (or trillions of yen). There's definitely going to be work for anything related to construction and infrastructure. And the government of Japan is going to fund most of it.

Investors, on the other hand, hate risk. That's why stocks are crashing.

[drbob]

If the Japanese stock market is crashing, why is the Yen just getting stronger compared to the dollar? It's below 80 yen per dollar now.

Because currency speculators think the insurance companies are going to have to buy trillions of yen as they liquidate and repatriate foreign investments to cover the claims for all the damage.

[MattKeil]

It appears that there are some rather major inaccuracies in it.

It was written before the containment pool situation was fully reported. As for the rest, let's see your degree in nuclear physics first.

If these two critical things are incorrect, pretty much that entire blog post is useless.

Nope. Good internet naysayer routine, though.

[caesarbear]

I'm sorry Matt, but how does PEN know that it's only the fins of the fuel rods that are partially melted? Where did that come from? And why is there nothing about the 400 mSv radiation spike that was reported days ago?

I want to agree, that everything is going to turn out ok, but there are some obvious inconsistencies.

[Clay]

From the nuclear scientist who participated in this forum yesterday.

[Odovacar]

http://plainenglishnuclear.blogspot....post.html#more

It was written before the containment pool situation was fully reported.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Japan Earthquake Update (15 March 2011, 05:15 UTC)
...
Japanese authorities also today informed the IAEA at 04:50 CET that the spent fuel storage pond at the Unit 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is on fire and radioactivity is being released directly into the atmosphere.

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/...iupdate01.html

Each of these radioactivity releases to the environment at Fukushima so far has produced about the level of one dental X-ray if you were standing right over the release and breathing in really hard.

Holy shit the blogger really does claiming this?!

Japan Earthquake Update (15 March 2011, 11:25 UTC)
...
As reported earlier, a 400 millisieverts (mSv) per hour radiation dose observed at Fukushima Daiichi occurred between Units 3 and 4.
...
For example, one chest X-ray will give about 0.2 mSv of radiation dose.

If there were a hole in the containment structure, radioactivity carried in liquid coolant could leak out of the hole and into the surrounding reactor building. Radioactive gases could leak out of the hole and up into the atmosphere. It’s important to emphasize that the only members of the public who would be at risk in this situation would a) be downwind, and b) probably not get a dose that would kill them or cause cancer - probably a dose closer to 2 or 3 CT scans put together. I’m not a health physicist, though, so I could be wrong.

From this point on, while water injection operations are still underway, the
temporary transfer to a safe place of TEPCO employees and workers from
other companies not directly involved with this work has begun. Currently,
at Fukushima Dai-ichi Power Station, the remaining workers are doing their
best to secure the safety and security of the site.

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp...1031604-e.html

They evacuated people because it was safer that way – just like we evacuate people during tornado and hurricane warnings. No exposure to the public was expected, but better safe than sorry!

.
There are numerous factors in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, including weather, wind direction, and speed, and the nature of the reactor problem that affect the risk of radioactive contamination within this 50-mile (80-kilometer) radius or the possibility of lower-level radioactive materials reaching greater distances.

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_p...w/tw_5390.html

[Dan_Theman]

I kind of agree with caesarbear in that I'm not as optimistic as that scientist althought I'd like to be, except for the panic on the West Coast bit which I believe most of us here have already dismissed as silliness. My concern is for the Japanese people, and it keeps seeming like a lot of people who have a gazillion times more knowledge than myself on the subject are weighing in on the issue and seem to be unable to come up with a consensus.

[baruk]

Explanatory cartoon, introducing nuclear boy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN...layer_embedded

[Ben Sones]

It’s important to emphasize that the only members of the public who would be at risk in this situation would a) be downwind, and b) probably not get a dose that would kill them or cause cancer - probably a dose closer to 2 or 3 CT scans put together. I’m not a health physicist, though, so I could be wrong.

Yeah, could be.

[9:38 a.m. ET Thursday, 10:38 p.m. Thursday in Tokyo] High levels of radiation have been detected 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, broadcaster NHK reports, citing Japan's Science Ministry. Exposure to those levels of radiation for six hours would be equivalent to the safe level of what a person can absorb in a year, according to the report.

[Houngan]

I kind of agree with caesarbear in that I'm not as optimistic as that scientist althought I'd like to be, except for the panic on the West Coast bit which I believe most of us here have already dismissed as silliness. My concern is for the Japanese people, and it keeps seeming like a lot of people who have a gazillion times more knowledge than myself on the subject are weighing in on the issue and seem to be unable to come up with a consensus.

Perzackly. I'll say it again: Nobody knows what is (see: needing the helicopter pilots to tell them that there is water in the pools) and nobody knows what will. It's pointless to try and predict, this is a horse race run in the dark with no known distance and a good chance of lions on the backstretch.

H.

[Quaro]

Two more amazing videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqeAKpFd0k0&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wYiNnHEGyY&hd=1

One of them starts in a car and the cameraman makes the right call and jumps out and heads to a building just in time.

[Quaro]

The facts about the Fukushima situation, courtesy of a nuclear engineer friend of a friend.

Summary: Don't Panic

Update:

Remember my worst-case prediction from yesterday? I just didn’t have enough imagination. I didn’t expect any problems with the fuel pools. (No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!) But it’s still not panic time, people! No one in the US is in any danger at all. The public near the reactors in Japan will probably get a dose, yes – but from everything I’m reading, I currently expect that dose to be way under anything that would cause lasting health effects, and certainly not to the level of radiation sickness. It’s the workers who are bearing the worst of it; conditions there at the plant keep changing rapidly, and the dose rate there on the site is going up and down but is high enough that they generally can’t work for long.

[Raife]

[Gendal]

Ars Technica posted their take on the matter, reading it myself now.

[Sarkus]

So apparently unit two is now on fire. Great. They just can't catch a break.

[Blips]

So apparently unit two is now on fire. Great. They just can't catch a break.

Source?

[BlueJackalope]

Two more amazing videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqeAKpFd0k0&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wYiNnHEGyY&hd=1

One of them starts in a car and the cameraman makes the right call and jumps out and heads to a building just in time.

Those poor people.

More scary water video.

[Sarkus]

Source?

http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/03/...r-2-56713.html

I originally read about it in the Seattle Times online page, but the headline now links to completely different AP article. I'm not sure if that means the story has changed or what.