The difference between Haiti and Tokyo is well-functioning regulation.
Or about 100 years.
I suspect there are other important differences. Like the whole much richer country thing.
2 is a factor. Also, not being cleared entirely of its native population, having new population of slaves important, who then successfully rose up against their oppressors, only to find themselves cut off from the modernizing world as punishment.
On the flip side, Haiti lacked an indigenous culture powerful enough to resist imperialism long enough to modernize under its own leadership and rise the the level of a world military power.
There may also be something about difference between the travel distance between Western Europe and Haiti and the travel distance to Japan.
Also Japan is more than 10x as large in area as Haiti. Something something something resources.
1 through 4 are true but miss the forest for the trees. Japan has good building codes, regardless of why. Haiti does not. The reasons are interesting but the essential point remains: you are better off with smart regulation than with none.
And after that initial misunderstanding, they recognized that Godzilla was a friend, protector, and symbol of national pride. I think he can use his freeze breath to stop some of the tsunami.
Also, Japan has a large tentacle porn market.
Japan did not previously have good building codes, but they were given the opportunity to rebuild the entire country from scratch after we burned it to the ground, and really did it right. So there's a lesson for you.
So there's a lesson for you.
We should carpet bomb Haiti?
I'm sure even Shearer is on board with "you are better off with smart regulation than with none," so long as "smart regulation" includes having none in certain domains.
Right now, Haiti has so many desperate needs it's hard to even think about comparing them in severity, but I'd have to say that trying to establish a stricter and better-enforced building code is, like, a zillion pages down from priority #1. (I suspect any real attempt to do so would be, in the first instance, an invitation to more corruption.)
We should carpet bomb Haiti?
Seems redundant.
8. Japan did not previously have good building codes, but they were given the opportunity to rebuild the entire country from scratch after we burned it to the ground, and really did it right.
They'd made a good start in that direction after 1923, when god burned it to the ground.
5
1 through 4 are true but miss the forest for the trees. Japan has good building codes, regardless of why. Haiti does not. The reasons are interesting but the essential point remains: you are better off with smart regulation than with none.
How much of the damage in Haiti was to recent construction? Even if you adopt (and enforce) a good code it takes a long time to replace existing buildings. Especially in a poor country like Haiti.
I'm pretty sure LB didn't mean to sound kind of victim-blamey wrt Haiti and its track record with natural catastrophe, but...um, it does. A little.
We essentially grabbed Japan, shook it like an etch-a-sketch, and then helped it rebuild. Haiti...not so much.
And pwned by everybody, ever. Really? I couldn't read 13 comments?
There may also be something about difference between the travel distance between Western Europe and Haiti and the travel distance to Japan.
I can't think of anything Europe or America needed from Japan or anywhere for which Japan is a necessary transit stop. It's the end of the world. Good thing they didn't have oil. Or sugarcane.
I note that the earthquake/tsunami coverage on Al Jazeera is much better than on CNN, and the videos of the tidal wave engulfing the land are pretty terrifying.
17: Yes, the floating fire part seems particularly mean spirited.
I also just learned that Japan gets 20% of the world's earthquakes that measure a 6 or above on the Richter scale. What the hell? To me this is like living in tornado alley, only far, far worse.
...Japan is a necessary transit stop.
World's 3rd largest economy. Paper, bonds, finance, carry-trade, national debt, default. China was already pulling back and looking toward much lower growth before this. East Asia was a very disproportionate contributor to World GDP growth last few years.
I know nothing
Poor Japan.
videos of the tidal wave engulfing the land are pretty terrifying
A cubic yard of water weighs ~1700 pounds.
19: s/b "was." And yes, poor Japan.
"President Barack Obama, while offering his condolences, said the United States was standing by to help 'in this time of great trial.' House Republican leaders criticized the President's remarks, calling the destruction 'an inevitable result of the White House's big government agenda.' 'The President needs to know that Americans want a tsunami, a tsunami of freedom,' House Speaker John Boehner said."
I suspect there are other important differences. Like the whole much richer country thing.
Right. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with regulation.
And the Japanese have always understood earthquakes and fires (and floods, and freezes, and...poor Japan)
A lost wonder of the world, Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel survived 1923 Kanto and WWII only to be killed by Capitalism.
Heian-kyo (Kyoto), 794:Streets 24m or 12m wide, buildings up off the ground, all one story, canals and water everywhere. Wood can be replaced. Paper walls can be broken through.
Oy, no, no, no, didn't mean to blame Haiti for being poor. Trying to say that being rich buys safety through being able to afford good regulation, but you need the good regulation. Damn, I can't edit the post to apologize until I get home.
25: I don't think it reads as victim blaming.
1989, Loma Prieta quake, 6.9, 63 fatalities. 1988, Spitak, Armenia, 6.9, 25,000 fatalities. Major difference, structural integrity.
25: I think everyone knows that you were bashing anti-government conservatives not poor Haitians. The question is about whether this argument is valid not your intention.
I think it is valid (obviously, because I made it). That is, a rich country with bad or no building codes would still be in trouble in an earthquake -- wealth wouldn't have a completely protective effect without regulation.
27.--Loma Prieta's epicenter was also pretty far south of the downtown area, and wasn't too shallow. Haiti just got absolutely nailed with a centralized, shallowed quake. (The other fortunate thing about Loma Prieta was that it happened right as game 1 of the Bay Area World Series was beginning, so everyone was at home getting ready to watch it instead of on the freeway at rush hour. That saved a couple hundred lives at least.)
25 sounds right, but Haiti isn't really good evidence, because of its poverty. Have there been recent earthquakes in rich countries without such regulation?
Do conservatives actually argue against building regulations in areas prone to specific natural disasters? I don't live in one of those areas, and I can't recall any such ridiculousness from national coverage. I just can't imagine the argument, beyond "C'mooooooon, let us build, the next earthquake probably won't happen for a few years." It just seems like when something happens often enough that most living adults actually remember the last time it happened, the idiocy of not planning for future occurrences is much more obvious.
Wait. WAIT. Is this me being hopeless naive and optimistic again?
A poor country with really awesome building codes but no capability to enforce them or build buildings that met the standards would not do well in an earthquake.
31: the example here is Katrina, of course, but that's not earthquakes. Which is a reminder that this stuff is sometimes more fine-grained than at the nation-state level; NO is particularly dysfunctional.
34: I don't really think Katrina is a good example. That was sort of a backwards, eyes-closed, bank shot from half court as far as hurricanes go. Everyone knew it was a possibility, but the odds of a hurricane hitting just so was definitely not a certainty. As opposed to California, or Japan, where there will be more earthquakes, and some of them will be devastating.
33: True fact. Although you could get somewhere with 'capacity to enforce' and codes oriented toward what can be built safely and cheaply. But 'capacity to enforce' by itself is unrealistic in a poor country.
And I don't think I've ever heard anyone specifically speaking out against building codes: I didn't mean to imply that I had. But people do talk negatively about 'regulation' generally, and I like pointing out what it is that 'regulation' generally includes that it would really suck to get rid of.
Spent a little while at Google books, looking for earthquake architecture in old Japan. Nothing much. Now looking for "cold and withered" mono no aware poetry.
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.
The earth speaks softly
To the mountain
Which trembles
And lights the sky.
I think, umm, I guess Wednesday night read S/ei Shon/agon in Ivan Morris Shining Prince wrote (from memory):
"Things that make me uneasy:tiled roofs."
Y'all want me to move to your 100 story sardine cans with realgoodregulated steel-and-teflon-base structural integrity and I want a little hut with a thatched roof and big shoji front door.
32: I believe Tyler Cowen argued that we should relax regulations to help New Orleans get rebuilt quickly. Also maybe relax immigration laws so that lots of poor Central Americans would move there.
Do conservatives actually argue against building regulations in areas prone to specific natural disasters?
Yes.
Have there been recent earthquakes in rich countries without such regulation?
China is rich in the aggregate, and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 70,000. Of course, it happened in a very poor area, but none-the-less in a country that one expects to be a bit more together than Haiti.
My understanding is that China has very strict earthquake building codes that are broadly ignored.
Turkey had a pretty devastating quake in the mid-1990s that I remember as having a comparatively low Richter Scale score--like 7.0 or 7.1. It came to light afterwards that so many recently built constructions came down because the contractors skimmed money by mixing the concrete to a much lower grade than had been required. That's the kind of corruption that probably goes on all the time, and you would need systematic and expensive enforcement to catch and root out.
A similar thing happened in China in that big quake last year. The school collapses were a direct result of corrupt, connected construction companies deliberately turning out shoddy work. Which is how the grief over the deaths turned so dangerously political.
35: I thought the consensus was that, in fact, the preparation was woefully insufficient; cities should not be destroyed by once-a-century storms if they hope to survive (more than a century).
But people do talk negatively about 'regulation' generally, and I like pointing out what it is that 'regulation' generally includes that it would really suck to get rid of.
We could probably do with a good deal more of this. And, thinking more about it, China: they get earthquakes, too, and that last one was awful. I remember rumblings about the lax building codes, and complete lack of enforcement due to corruption, etc. So, that would be an example, except for the whole totalitarian government thing - I can't imagine there was much public debate afterwards.
The poem in 37 is very old, unattributed and from this page on Earthquake Lights
30: Right, which is why Spitak is the better comparison. From the Wikipedia article: "geologists and earthquake engineering experts laid the blame on the poorly built support structures of apartments and other buildings built during the "stagnation" era of Leonid Brezhnev."
35: that's very much not the case. That was not nearly as bad a hurricane hit as it could have been (other problems contributed to the magnitude of the disaster). That's why, in the immediate aftermath (before it was clear that the levees failed) people were breathing a sigh of relief. It's inevitable that New Orleans will get hit by much worse hurricanes than Katrina.
40: I'm very dubious that rich-in-the-aggregate is the right benchmark. Turkey & China have similar GDP/capital, ~8k. And yes, the variation is huge. "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed," &c.
42: Oh, yeah, the preparation was abysmal, but my point is that it's much, much easier to argue against preparation (or the costs of preparation) for a once in a century even than it is for something that happens once every 10-20 years or so.
It's inevitable that New Orleans will get hit by much worse hurricanes than Katrina.
Yes, but time scale matters. Well, maybe not anymore. And I suppose the same thinking could be applied to deep water wells. And badly guarded nuclear weapons. And nuclear power plants. And plagues.
This...has not led me to a good place.
46 cont'd: and, of course, unlike (some) major earthquakes, major hurricanes in a given area do nothing to reduce the chance than another major hurricane could follow shortly thereafter.
49: I mean, I'm talking, like, within our lifetimes.
From the Wikipedia link in 45:
After the seismic disaster, avant-garde musician Pierre Schaeffer led a 498-member rescue team to look for survivors.!!
42 is right, and levee failure was predicted long ago. Let me be the first to cite John McPhee.
53: darn. I'm usually the first to cite John McPhee.
And, of course, the next time New Orleans gets hit by a Category 3 or greater hurricane, the levees will almost certainly fail again.
"rich in the aggregate" != rich; Maybe China can realize some small economy of scale, but there's no particular reason to believe that, holding per-person wealth constant, a larger country will be able to afford much better buildings.
What I'm wondering about in particular is whether maybe, since people choose which home to buy or rent, and where to work, a generally high level of per capita wealth is *sufficient* condition for earthquake-safe buildings. Obviously in the case of New Orleans people were dependent on public works at the municipal level and above, but I'm not sure there's the same coordination problem in earthquake-proofing.
A photo from this this person's blog in Japan
"earthquake night -
the stars are as silent
as ever
I just stepped out to say good night to the world .."
Two of the most common expressions (as translated) in Japanese movies:"It can't be helped" and "But isn't it a very fine day today."
32: Yes. There was a mildly infamous case in North Carolina some number of years back where a hotel developer sued the state to allow it to build a resort on a part of a barrier island that was highly likely to experience severe storm damage. After they won the right to build, built, and were subsequently demolished by a severe storm, they then sued the state for allowing them to build there. And won.
55: I got nothing, here. I keep trying to come up with something to say that isn't an awful rant about conservatism and the GOP and the South (about which I know relatively little, so, really, it's not all that fair), and I just keep coming up empty.
Nicholas Kristof "Sympathy for Japan and Admiration"
The Japanese word for nature, shizen, is a modern one, dating back only a bit more than 100 years, because traditionally there was no need to express the concept. In an essay in the Times after the Kobe quake, I made some of these same points and ended with a 17th century haiku from one of Japan's greatest poets, Basho:The vicissitudes of life.
Sad, to become finally
A bamboo shoot.
58: That's it. I give up on civil society. I'm done. I'm going to learn to whittle and shoot. I will comment via smoke signal.
59: well, that's a big part of the story, but it's also simply not possible (or at least, it's never been done, and nobody has a good idea how to do it) to build the "Cat 5 levees" everybody was talking about in the wake of Katrina.
The tidal wave has hit close to Matsushima Bay, one of the three most celebrated views in Japan, a designated national treasure. If the bay's pine-forested islands have been severely damaged, it will shock the nation to the core. The poet Basho's famous haiku on the area:"Matsushima ah!
A-ah, Matsushima, ah!
Matsushima, ah!"could be all they have to remember it by.
62: simply not possible (or at least, it's never been done, and nobody has a good idea how to do it) to build the "Cat 5 levees"
Part of the problem is that people seem to be fixated on a levy-based model of storm protection. The efforts would be better spent on restoring the huge wetland buffer that use to exist between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, but there just isn't political will to do it.
Obviously in the case of New Orleans people were dependent on public works at the municipal level and above, but I'm not sure there's the same coordination problem in earthquake-proofing
I think there's a real informational problem in earthquake-proofing. The difference between a safe and an unsafe building really isn't apparent to a layperson. For wealth to create safe construction, it would have to do it by making private, trusted 'regulators' possible, and I don't have a lot of faith in that working.
A poor country with really awesome building codes but no capability to enforce them or build buildings that met the standards would not do well in an earthquake.
Turkey, for example.
65 That sounds right to me, but it would be interesting to see some empirical evidence. There are plenty of cases where it seems like asymmetrical information would break the market, but it doesn't. For example, adverse selection hasn't actually destroyed the used car market.
Not that I'd actually want to participate in the control group for a test of earthquake regulation...
China is rich in the aggregate, and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 70,000.
China is not rich in the aggregate. Its per-capita GDP is somewhere between those of Belize and El Salvador, and way below the world average. And Sichuan isn't one of the richer bits IIRC.
67: Well, what does 'break the market' mean? I figure in the absence of building codes, the market would tick along very successfully, and people would be happy and satisfied with the buildings they bought, until an earthquake hit and the buildings collapsed.
It didn't occur to me, LB, that you were blaming the victim. But it did seem like you were using a horrible, and ongoing, disaster to make a political point that could just as easily have been made in a day or two. I'm not usually squeamish about this kind of thing -- common decency -- but it weirds me out in this case, I have to admit. I mean, I was among the first to say terrible things about Tim Russert after he died, but for some reason this time I feel like we could have waited for the corpses to cool before toting them out to prop up our side of the argument. (Which side is right, of course, so I'm not sure what my problem is. I guess I'm just getting old.)
Also, Tweety's being disingenuous about Katrina (as usual). While it's true that Cat 5 levees are a myth, there's no reason, other than poor maintenance, that the levees and floodwalls (these were the bigger problem, it should be said) had to fail during Katrina. The city could have had the usual water damage that it always suffers during a not-particularly-bad storm. But MRGO shunted a huge amount of water toward floodwalls that were improperly constructed. And that wasn't good.
Okay, my tone sounded scolding, if not outright hectoring, and that's not how I meant it. I'm genuinely not sure why this post rubbed me the wrong way, is all, as I find my reaction a bit weird.
A poor country with really awesome building codes but no capability to enforce them or build buildings that met the standards would not do well in an earthquake.
A rich country with the same problem doesn't do so well either.
Also, there were problems other than MRGO during Katrina, but since the most extreme and infamous incidents of flooding/destruction occurred in the Lower Ninth Ward, that's what I chose to talk about. That said, almost all of the major problems could have been prevented if the floodwalls and levees had been in good repair. The death toll would very likely have been in the 10s or 100s and not the 1000s. And the property damage would have been bad, but it wouldn't have permanently crippled the city.
But it did seem like you were using a horrible, and ongoing, disaster to make a political point that could just as easily have been made in a day or two.
Actually, she's using a terrific and ongoing success to make a point about government - it's not really a political point or at least it wouldn't be if you didn't have a political party which was ideologically opposed to the concept of having a functioning government.
It would have been, perhaps, less appropriate to have made that point on the day of the Haiti quake, but the point here is that lots of Japanese people are still alive because things like building regulations worked really well.
I don't want this to sound scolding or hectoring, but my first reaction to this post was "Why is Bad Yggles posting on Unfogged?"
I thought Bad Yggles was all about getting rid of regulations.
China is not rich in the aggregate. Its per-capita GDP is somewhere between those of Belize and El Salvador
Hence, "the aggregate," and not "per capita". In the aggregate, China is the worlds second biggest economy.
The Chinese government holds something like $600 worth of US Treasury bonds per capita. It seems like that money could go toward earthquake proofing, if the government decided to make that a priority. Haiti doesn't really have that option.
Actually, she's using a terrific and ongoing success to make a point about government - it's not really a political point or at least it wouldn't be if you didn't have a political party which was ideologically opposed to the concept of having a functioning government.
Huh, this is true, which just makes my reaction all the stupider. Hey, I have an idea: let's talk about New Orleans!
The richter scal doesn't mean what you think it means and its not an apples-to-apples comparison to look at earthquakes whose richter scales match. You want a measure of intensity not magnitude.
Part of what I think is rubbing people wrong about this post (and scolding and hectoring is okay -- I'm good with being hectored if I'm wrong, or if there's a plausible argument that I'm wrong) is that I threw it up quickly (I had a thought, and that happens so rarely lately that I feel like I should grab them when they hit) and I'm counting chickens before they hatch.
The basis for the post was my thought that once the casualty count is in, it's going to be a horrific amount of property damage, but possibly hundreds rather than thousands of deaths. Tragic, but not all that much in the scope of awful things that happen every couple of months somewhere. And so the idea is that a truly massive earthquake, in a terribly dense population center, can be kept from doing all that much damage.
But it really was too early to count on the casualties being relatively low -- if I'm wrong, and the death toll is much higher than I was expecting, this is going to look way off base.
I would like to take this moment to thank whoever came up with the nickname "Yggles." It's almost as good as Governor Foghorn Leghorn.
LB, I think the point holds, even if the death toll becomes much, much worse. The deaths are tragic, but systemic societal collapse would be much worse. I'm confident that Japan will not be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature exactly because it is a relatively well regulated, industrialized, wealthy nation.
81: I think we got it from armsmasher, but I can't remember who he said coined it.
I know tragedy is the wrong time for political point-scoring, but I do think that emergencies like this should call attention to the fact that, in the US, the real political split seems to be between those who want to reward those who have never had bad things happen to them, and treat tragedies as bizarre anomalies, and those who understand that tragedies are a part of human life and should be planned for and avoided as well as possible.
Current Republican policy is great if you happen to be extraordinarily lucky and self-preserving. But undermining the government's ability to react to crises, either personal or widespread, should give us particular pause at times like these. We can't, as a nation, act as if we are somehow immune from natural, economic, and personal disasters through... prayer and clean living?
81: I swear I remember it being Natalie Portman, but now I can't find the story online. Anybody know what I'm talking about?
I haven't heard yet what the right wing is blaming the earthquake on. What aspect of Japanese society will they point to in order to claim that they are responsible for this? Tentacle porn?
Well, the NYT has followed suit.
Pre-modernization, the Japanese viewed buildings as very replaceable, rebuilding them as a matter of course every couple of decades or so - I remember in a class some scholar arguing they should be considered durable consumer goods, like couches. Probably more due to fire than earthquakes. (The civic response to a fire threatening to spread was simply to pull down the surrounding buildings.)
I was in Turkey in the fall, and one of my strong impressions was "there is not enough re-bar in this country." We'd walk by a construction site and see materials about, and my inner engineer would just cringe. Needs more re-bar! I commented on it several times.
The richter scal doesn't mean what you think it means and its not an apples-to-apples comparison to look at earthquakes whose richter scales match
No, but they're not unrelated. Loma Prieta was nearly as intense as Spitak. Northridge was roughly the same intensity as Loma Prieta, with an official death toll of 57. Kobe was more intense than Spitak, and many of the 6k deaths were due to the collapse of older construction. Of course there are no apples-to-apples comparisons for many reasons, but the point about building codes still stands.
I am in Seismic class this whole month. It has been super interesting, so I shall share with you all.
1. If you build to the International Building Code standards (usually revised after looking at what happened to buildings after the most recent quake in California or Japan. The prof says things like, oh yeah, we added that when Northridge showed us...), your building is not necessarily going to be structurally sound after the quake. They are designed to fail slowly enough that people can get out, not withstand a quake with no damage. (Failure in steel, which gives slowly, not failure in concrete, which collapses catastrophically.)
2. Those fuckers are VERY serious. When Northridge showed them that Gusset plates failed if they didn't have enough room to yield (you want the plate to fail, not the beam), they devised new big brackets to reinforce the connection. Then you have to re-open your building and put those in. They are not joking around.
3. The code is pretty good now; new buildings do not fall down in design quakes. The new problem is the secondary systems, all the wiring and plumbing and gas lines. There is no code for those, because it used to didn't matter. If your building is a pile of rubble, no one cares whether a ruptured sprinkler pipe would have caused water damage.
Now that buildings are standing through quakes, lack of code for the secondary systems is becoming a problem. Strangely, the ASCE and the legislature is not tackling this, but insurance companies are. They're devising their own standards for secondary systems and won't insure your building unless you meet them.
There's lots more. Shall I continue? Nothing could be more fascinating, I know.
I was hoping you'd show up and do exactly this.
I'm finding it very interesting, Megan.
Shorter:
Engineers and architects: Yay!
(The civic response to a fire threatening to spread was simply to pull down the surrounding buildings.)
While wheeling their tansu out into the street and blocking emergency vehicles, leading to a ban on wheeled tansu after the 1923 Kanto quake, IIRC. More onerous regulation!
100 should really have been about the Kobe quake.
Well then!
4. The X pattern you see after an earthquake is from failure in shear. (Shear means that the direction the earthquake waves are traveling are the same direction as the wall.) You get the X because the ground rips your building apart in one direction, then reverses and completes the X.
89: I dunno... If I was Poseidon I might just go with the tentacle porn reason. I try to be open minded but there's a limit.
Count me in with the Megan fans. 94.last is the reasoning conservatives give for opposing building codes, incidentally. The insurance companies come up with codes of their own and refuse to insure buildings that don't meet code (or only to so at exorbitant rates). Since they also tend to oppose requiring insurance this argument isn't very strong, IMO.
Current Republican policy is great if you happen to be extraordinarily lucky and self-preserving
...you forgot "and incapable of empathizing with the less fortunate."
Engineers and architects: Yay!
5. I have been in two Seismic classes now, which is enough for me to notice that seismic engineers do nothing but mock architects. I had not known it was possible to say the word "atrium" with that much scorn. Two weeks ago, the prof turned over a cardboard box, and caressing the uninterrupted sides (shear walls!), said:
"This is the perfect building. Look at it. It won't collapse, will never fail. Unfortunately, we have architects. They want ... doors. They want ... windows. If it were up to architects, they would suspend all the floors and ceilings from skyhooks."
6. The prof showed us this picture of a building in Marina that had a weak ground floor, saying the fact that the garage doors were down was the only thing that kept the building standing; the garage doors carried the shear load.
Keep it coming, Megan, it's pretty awesome.
I like to imagine the prof twitched a little as he briefly allowed himself to imagine a perfectly engineered city with no people.
Megan do they shoot for specific targets on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale* to design to? If so, do you know what values are common to design to? Or maybe they specifically cite peak ground velocities?
The prof also briskly flipped to a picture of a hospital that failed in Northridge, saying as he did, "now this abomination...". Another ground level soft story collapse, from putting the parking garage under the working building, but unfortunately, one that trapped all the ambulances under the collapse.
7. Seismic class is an entire day of the professor talking about "erect members", "the stiffness of the member", "results of pounding." It goes on all day, and not one person in the audience giggles.
111: That might be made easier by the prevalence of photos of collapsed hospitals in disaster areas?
Well, there are design quakes, which change by region. It is basically the worst ever quake in your region, bumped up by some. I think they're aiming at a 1 in 2500 year recurrence.
After that, the code gets picky. There are different buildings and building techniques depending on how close you are to a fault (there are maps to use to look that up) and how important the building is. Some techniques simply aren't allowed in scary places. After that, you apply different safety factors to your load calculation depending on the category (close to fault x importance of building). A surprising amount of Seismic class is spent on finding your category in the code.
Oops, didn't mean to be snotty, just imagining myself giggling and then looking up at the slide to become sad and confused.
Don't think it is the failure pictures, because we looooove the failure pictures. I think no one giggles because we feel all sanctimonious and serious about being engineers. We are too mature for that and lives depend on us. We're the strongest line of resistance against architects!
We're the strongest line of resistance against architects!
The most important wars are waged in secret.
70: Also, Tweety's being disingenuous about Katrina (as usual). While it's true that Cat 5 levees are a myth, there's no reason, other than poor maintenance, that the levees and floodwalls (these were the bigger problem, it should be said) had to fail during Katrina.
I didn't mean to be; I don't disagree with any of this, hence the parenthetical about "other problems" in 46. I just think, if another cat 3 happens, the same thing will happen because the same shoddiness of construction/maintenance that obtained before Katrina most likely still obtains somewhere important.
But I stopped talking about it (unsuccessfully thus far) because I felt bad talking about that past American disaster instead of the scary ongoing disaster that was the subject of the post.
To LB's original point:
By and large, code requirements are expensive. Some stuff shouldn't cost any more (don't build one story that is weaker than the others just because you want a view, don't put up fucking parapets). But the IBC wants A LOT of steel, a lot of particular types of connectors, lots of design up front. It is very clear that wealthy countries are buying their way to safe buildings. I think that's a great trade-off, but that's 'cause we have the wealth for it.
What bothered me about this post was just that it seems to gloss over the difficult chicken/egg question of, on the one hand, institutional, legal, and regulatory regimes and capabilities, and on the other hand, the level of economic development. I'm vaguely aware of a number of different views on the causal relationships between these things. Comparing the building regulations in Japan and Haiti seemed quite the non sequitur given their vastly different levels of economic development -- although I can see the usefulness of the comparison in fighting with Republicans.
What bothered me about this post was just that it seems to gloss over the difficult chicken/egg question of, on the one hand, institutional, legal, and regulatory regimes and capabilities, and on the other hand, the level of economic development. I'm vaguely aware of a number of different views on the causal relationships between these things. Comparing the building regulations in Japan and Haiti seemed quite the non sequitur given their vastly different levels of economic development -- although I can see the usefulness of the comparison in fighting with Republicans.
I am unusually adamant this afternoon.
120: That's completely fair. A better way to express the thought would have been something like: "There's going to be a huge difference in the number of casualties between this earthquake and the weaker Haiti earthquake near a smaller city. Japan bought that difference in casualties by spending a great deal of its wealth on expensive compliance with strict building codes, and when a society has the money to spend, and chooses to spend it that way, this is the payoff, and it's worth it. People talk about regulation as if it only has costs, but it's important to remember how great the benefits can be."
We're the strongest line of resistance against architects!
Wait a minute, what's Megan, an agricultural engineer, doing in a civil engineering class? Trying to move up the hierarchy, perhaps?
I didn't mean to be
History suggests otherwise. (Also, I'm just kidding. And was just kidding above. You're welcome to call for the public assassination of as many metropolitan areas as you want, sadist/classist/racist.)
I like how Knecht both (a) links to his own comment and (b) gets the joke wrong (agricultural to civil would be moving down the hierarchy).
Megan, these are great. Are there really no gas line codes for earthquakes? I would have thought that the fire danger was at least roughly equivalent to the earthquake damage, or is fire prevention being handled through other kinds of regulation?
I'll have you know that my engineering degree is a joint Civil/Ag degree, issued by both departments. (Although in real life, I only took ag engineering classes. I'm rueing that as I prepare for the civil engineering exam.)
But it looks like I'd be moving down your hierarchy if I pass it, so that will console me when I get bad results.
(b) gets the joke wrong
**hangs head in shame**
Fire is the big danger now that buildings withstand quakes (by failing slowly). According to the prof, yeah. The expensive type stuff we force on building design hasn't been applied to secondary systems. Giving pipes the ability to flex, connecting them securely to the building? Hasn't been sorted yet (as of last Sunday).
Also, Megan, do you have earthquake insurance? I think our homes are roughly of the same age (i.e., pre-1920). I didn't get it, because of a combination of "holy shit is that expensive" and "eh, the house has stood up this long." Am I a moron (in this capacity, other capacities already conceded)?
No, because I am not in a fault zone. You are though, and being insufficiently cautious (because my inner-engineer says that everyone everywhere is insufficiently cautious). It is expensive because the risk is high. I carry a fair amount of flood insurance.
133: In that case, you could get a no-fault insurance policy.
[shields face and runs away]
My parents directly on the Hayward in a 1940s house have consciously decided that a direct earthquake hit would likely wipe them out and that they'd do better to save the insurance money towards a replacement house elsewhere.
ince they also tend to oppose requiring insurance this argument isn't very strong, IMO.
Indeed. Even in Japan, where you might think people would be alive to the financial risks of earthquakes, insurance rates are very low. The Kobe quake caused roughly $100bn of damage, of which just $3bn was insured.
I think the Japanese, like me, would rather just spend the money on beef and fish.
132: I made a similar choice not to insure during my relatively brief stint as a SoCal homeowner. Thought about it a bit. A little less than a year after we sold, there were some very minor damages to it from the Whittier quake. I'm sure much less than any deductible would have been, anyway.
In case you haven't seen it, here's video of swaying skyscrapers in Tokyo. As my father used to say, I wouldn't know whether to shit or go blind. (Needless to say, don't read the comments.)
Oh, god, I looked at that and imagined it here. I cannot conceive of how terrified that would make me, but trying to was very upsetting.
139, 140: that's totally freaky, but on the other hand, that's what they're designed to do, after all.
From an AP story: "Scientists said the quake ranked as the fifth-largest earthquake in the world since 1900 and was nearly 8,000 times stronger than one that devastated Christchurch, New Zealand, last month."
"The energy radiated by this quake is nearly equal to one month's worth of energy consumption" in the United States, U.S. Geological Survey Scientist Brian Atwater told The Associated Press."
Wow, that's amazing. Look, the building is swaying along the lines of the earthquake waves, but the one perpendicular to it (on the right) isn't moving. Shear is everything!
The sway isn't so dangerous; like Sifu says, it was designed to do that. Buildings can be very ductile and entirely sound. Generally the reason that aren't designed to be that ductile is for the comfort of the building users (who don't want to be jostled every time a truck drives by) not because it is a threat to lives and safety. 'Course, then you're back to the problem of securing secondary systems.
The real problem (as in Mexico City) is when the period of the sway is the same as the period of the earthquake waves, and resonance gets going. In Mexico City, I think buildings in the 40-50 story height ranged all collapsed. Shorter and much taller buildings did fine.
Seismic class is allowing me to be such a pedant. I didn't think it was going to have such a gratifying pay-off so soon. Before the test, even!
that's what they're designed to do, after all.
Yeah, I'm actually finding that video much more reassuring than I expected to.
143: presumably the mexico city buildings were built too early to have damping weights, though, right?
I know swaying is by design to prevent breakage, but it still hits me intestinally.
that's what they're designed to do, after all
The building where I taught at IBM Japan was built on a floating foundation. One day (just as the class was wrapping up a conversation about earthquakes, coïncidentally), there was a quake, and the building just kind of lurched slightly for a few seconds. Afterward, everyone I talked to who'd been elsewhere described the tremor as much more severe than we felt it, so yay engineering.
I've been in high rises for (very much smaller) earthquakes and have experienced (a very much smaller version) of the sway. It feels like being on a ship.
According to the prof, people's annoyance with a bouncy building would kick in long before it would be too loosey-goosey to withstand quakes. I try to tell myself the same is true of airplanes, but I don't like turbulence any better.
Well, I haven't heard of buildings having damping weights. Presumably architects wouldn't leave you room for them. We did learn about floating foundations.
They are big cylinders, not on their side like rollers, but upright. Lead in the middle, rubber around it! Like, old school rubber, 'cept to spec and everything all technical. I was daydreaming, then came back to attention, as he said something like "absorb enough energy to melt the lead core", but I missed the first half of the sentence, so I'm not sure I got that.
I've been in tall enough buildings that I could feel wind sway (the WTC, actually, back when they existed) and it actually didn't bother me that much. But looking at that video gave me the irrational cold robbies -- it just looked wrong, and bad, and scary, and wrong.
149: I think Citicorp Center in NYC has a damping weight on top. Let me look.
Then he said, in China, where they've had earthquakes for a very long time, important buildings we're built on very wide and deep gravel beds. The gravel jostles against itself enough to dampen the force on the building. He said, it works just fine for protecting the integrity of the building, but these days people don't like it if your building moves twenty feet into the street or other buildings. I guess things were easier in Emperial China. You could just redirect the street up to the new front of your building.
What it has is called a tuned mass damper.
I really do put in a comma for every place I'd take a breath in a sentence. Sorry, y'all.
It didn't occur to me, LB, that you were blaming the victim. But it did seem like you were using a horrible, and ongoing, disaster to make a political point that could just as easily have been made in a day or two. I'm not usually squeamish about this kind of thing -- common decency -- but it weirds me out in this case, I have to admit. I mean, I was among the first to say terrible things about Tim Russert after he died, but for some reason this time I feel like we could have waited for the corpses to cool before toting them out to prop up our side of the argument. (Which side is right, of course, so I'm not sure what my problem is. I guess I'm just getting old.)
Speaking as someone who is (a) probably alive because of building standards, (b) knows hundreds of other people who are alive because of building standards and (c) isn't that far from some corpses at the moment, fuck that shit. This is one of the few times that building safety regs are obviously important, and obviously matter, and you should take every chance you can to get people to listen.
How are things in Christchurch?
They're getting back to normality.
There were issues in the first week with handling of emergency utilities --- the poorer east end of the city didn't do as well as the richer west end, which is/was a sore point.
The problems now are longer term. It's things like getting the university back on track for a year of teaching, helping people who've lost their jobs through this, building a city again (one in three buildings in the CBD will be demolished, roughly). Some of this will be happening for the next twenty-thirty years.
It really scares me comparing Christchurch to Japan tho'; leaving aside the deaths, the infrastructural damage looks immense.
According to the prof, people's annoyance with a bouncy building would kick in long before it would be too loosey-goosey to withstand quakes.
There's a fine line between bouncy and nicely bouncy.
149: it's pretty common, I think, in newer high-rises. The one in Taipei 101 is crazy huge.
On conservatives and building regulations:
My aunt was telling me about a guy near Telluride, CO who was very conservative and against all regulations. He built a house for himself and wouldn't let the building inspector in.
During the first major snow storm of the season, the roof fell in on him, and he died.
Heaven help me for laughing at 162. But still.
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History and Narrative in Japanese ...Chiyuki Kumakura. I think he is saying that the Japanese can't have either. Also says Murakami Haruki can't be translated, and Murakami doesn't understand Carver for shit. And many other radical things in a short paper.
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#162: Quoting the Dead is deprecated (not least by me) but this time I can't resist:
"Tumble down shack in Big Foot county.
Snowed so hard that the roof caved in.
Delilah Jones went to meet her God,
And the old man never was the same again."
58
Yes. There was a mildly infamous case in North Carolina some number of years back where a hotel developer sued the state to allow it to build a resort on a part of a barrier island that was highly likely to experience severe storm damage. After they won the right to build, built, and were subsequently demolished by a severe storm, they then sued the state for allowing them to build there. And won.
I have some doubts this story is true. Do you have a reference?
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You know, my instincts have been opposed to romaji all along. I have looked at five or six books mostly conversational or traveler's Japanese and it just feels wrong. The web pages are not in romaji. So picking up yet another romaji grammar I had to go look:
Unfortunately, a lot of textbook writers use romaji for everything. As a result, a lot of textbooks allegedly about Japanese, are actually about some strange artificial language, "Romaji Japanese", which no one in the world actually uses. Studying Romaji Japanese is useless, time-wasting, and it isn't even any easier than real Japanese. Textbook authors who write so-called "Japanese" textbooks in Romaji are peddling junk. University departments who choose to use those textbooks are abusing their position of authority and misleading students. Of course, the departments aren't doing this deliberately, they're just acting from the best knowledge they have, which unfortunately is very flawed.
Heard a "-masu" clearly for the first time last night. I think I need to turn off subtitles.
I should probably do this at ObsWinge, but Furrburger has driven me away again.
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Do we have the character set?
or example (if you have Japanese font support), by the time you learn the character 美 (beauty), you'll already have learned 羊 (sheep) and 大 (large). If you look closely, you'll see that beauty (美) is written by writing sheep (羊) on top of large (大). So, even though beauty (美) looks like it would be really hard to learn (look at all those lines!!!!), it's actually easy, assuming you already know "sheep" and "large".
I am was a Joycean! "Sheep" + "large" = "beauty?" Fucking in love here.
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"They got some saki, and sashimi, and some clean sheets, Oh, kimono."
Now LB joins in with the earworms.
167: Sadly, no, this would have been from the very early 90's, before the intardwebs had consumed everything. I was half hoping that the apostropher would have chimed in with the specifics.
I have some doubts this story is true. Do you have a reference?
Funny, I had that reaction to 162. It has the feel of a liberal equivalent to welfare recipients driving Cadillacs. Which isn't to say that it isn't true; just that it's a little too perfect.
One of the reactors at Fukushima has now exploded.
This guy is recommended. For precision, there has been an explosion at the NPP, rather than the NPP itself exploding - the difference is important, to say the least.
Sure looks from the pictures like one of the reactors exploded. Is the theory that the building exploded around it, but the reactor is a-ok? I am unconvinced by that theory.
175 cont'd: that certainly appears to be what they're saying. The reactor building exploded, and yet the reactor is fine! Oh and they found cesium which is evidence that fuel has been damaged. But radiation levels are lower than previously! Oh and they're going to go ahead and double the size of the evacuation area. Not confidence inspiring, these nuclear spokespeople.
Not finding the destroyed hotel owner sued scenario, but I wonder if it is in fact a morphing of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (down in the middle of the article).
Some interesting incentive issues are at work in this case. In 1986, Mr. Lucas paid almost $1 million for land on a barrier island nine years after the South Carolina Coastal Council was directed by the South Carolina legislature, induced by the federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1977, to delineate a baseline of the landward-most points of erosion of the past 40 years. This line was fixed to the landward side of plaintiff's lots. Then, in 1988, the South Carolina legislature enacted the Beachfront Management Act in response to the earlier efforts to forestall erosion of coastal lands. In other words, a decade of collective discussion and concern over encroachment of South Carolina's coastal zone had taken place. While this was going on, Mr. Lucas proceeded with what would seem to have been a somewhat risky investment in land in this contested zone.According to another source:
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed , and the state had to pay the developer $1.6 million for the lots. The regulators then sold the same lots to builders to recoup their costs - in effect becoming developers.In the dissent it was noted that the land had actually been under water between 1957 and 1963. Searching for barrier island lawsuits reminds one of what a clusterfuck the whole barrier island development game is. Rich people and rich developers spending (and at time forcing towns and states to spend) large sums of money for temporary "victories" in preserving their little stretch of beach. Best is when your beach protection totally wipes out the next guy over (which is what happens when you interfere with longshore drift).
"Do you see what happens, Larry? Do you see what happens? This is what happens when you interfere with longshore drift!"
BBC has footage of the reactor building exploding.
So, I don't know from nuclear disasters, but I seem to remember a previous explosion that blew the concrete roof clear off a containment building, and it wasn't caused by a malfunctioning pump. On the other hand, if this was caused by a malfunctioning pump, what a pump.
A couple of money quotes:
Japan's nuclear agency said earlier on Saturday that radioactive caesium and iodine had been detected near the number one reactor of the power station. The agency said this could indicate that containers of uranium fuel inside the reactor may have begun melting.
Oh yeah? Huh!
But Walt Patterson, of the London research institute Chatham House, said "this is starting to look a lot like Chernobyl". He said it was too early to tell if the explosion's aftermath would result in the same extreme level of radioactive contamination that occurred at Chernobyl. The explosion was most likely caused by melting fuel coming into contact with water, he told the BBC.
Oh Walt, you worrywort. That can't happen here!
The explosion was most likely caused by melting fuel coming into contact with water, he told the BBC
Of course everyone knows you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor.
what a pump
I wouldn't have expected any description of what's going on at Japan's nuclear reactors to make laugh, but that went ahead and did.
You know what's really good at being scary, less good at being informative? Twitter.
I am sure somebody will come along shortly to say that "it's still much safer than week-end traffic".
"it's still much safer than week-end traffic"
Speaking of traffic, it occurred to me to wonder whether Gaijin Biker is OK.
Here's the NYT writeup:
Japanese nuclear safety officials and international experts said that because of crucial design differences the release of radiation at the Fukushima plant would likely be much smaller than at Chernobyl even if the Fukushima plant has a complete core meltdown, which they said it had not.That is astonishingly unconvincing.
185. Shorter BBC Environment Correspondent: I think you'll find it's more complicated than that.
Incidentally, as a complete palooka in these matters, that strikes me as quite a good article explaining the issues. Any physicists or engineers hereabouts are welcome to strike me dead for those words.
It is astonishingly unconvincing, but those are the same words they'd have to use if it were true. "It is different from Chernobyl because it is. Because of design, you see."
whether Gaijin Biker is OK
Yeah, he's fine. He was in Tokyo when it hit. He's supposed to fly out to China today.
FDL is doing a good job on Fukushima, including, in the comments links and tweets from anyone who knows anything, including the power company.
RT @maddow: NHK reporting venting is suspended due to high radiation levels - concern over pressure & possible damage to containment vessel.
TheBradBlog Brad Friedman
Bad to worse now... RT @maddow: link to very bad news NHK meltdown report: http://bit.ly/dGav8u
b0yle Alan Boyle
RT @maddow: link to very bad news NHK meltdown report: http://bit.ly/dGav8u
4 commuter trains missing
up to, so far, 9500 people missing in Miyagi
I really don't feel like playing or speculating much, but I spent a second wondering what "China Syndrome" meant. Thing is, reactor cores generate their own heat, so uncontrolled like a mile down don't ever get cooled off? Aww...sooner or later meets earthcore heat, which is much hotter. But in the meantime opens up new magma vent in a volcanic region.
AJE liveblog
But CNN hasn't been so bad, the few times I've had the heart to watch. MSNBC had Scott Walker when I check it.
I really don't feel like playing or speculating much, but I spent a second wondering what "China Syndrome" meant. Thing is, reactor cores generate their own heat, so uncontrolled like a mile down don't ever get cooled off? Aww...sooner or later meets earthcore heat, which is much hotter.
I think "a mile down" is at least an order of magnitude overestimate of how far it would get before cooling. I think (though I'm basically ignorant of this sort of thing) that the most disastrous environmental possibility is it meets groundwater.
Has anyone asked what Charlie Sheen thinks about Japan? That's important now, right?
192:Well, I was all baseless because they apparently can, and are, dump seawater on it, and because the control rods are in and the China Syndrome posits a continuing reaction.
As far as the other thing, there are people looking at the jet stream (to US) and the ocean currents (round about and to US). The destruction of the most active and productive marine ecological system in the world (Far North Pacific) is another worry for us baseless ones. Besides putting N Honshu under twenty feet of concrete forever.
Browsing the internet this morning, I've been kind of surprised by the number and variety of people who seem utterly confident that they understand the engineering of nuclear power plants well enough to make decisive judgments about what is happening in Japan, the relative environmental dangers of fossil fuels and nuclear power, and all sorts of other issues I wouldn't have thought they had expertise in. It's like a lot of bloggers are incapable of saying "I don't know" or "let's wait for further news".
It's like a lot of bloggers are incapable of saying "I don't know" or "let's wait for further news"
It's almost as if.
Incidentally, this is a superfabulous dictionary extension for Firefox that may come in handy if you're checking out Japanese news sites (or studying Japanese, for that matter). It comes with dictionaries for other languages too, but I haven't tried them out yet.
197:Rikaichan hover/popup dictionary is recommended. loaded and appreciated. Three dictionaries loaded, you need one for names. Does kanji, hiragana, and I think kitagana and maybe furigana. Does not give me Romaji, tho maybe I just didn't load it.
Taekim's is a terrific site, but there are many.
Hiragana at taekim's. Consonant-vowel combinations with audio files for the sounds. I don't want to think "ki" but think...okay I haven't loaded a stroke writing system yet. taekim also shows stroke order, with an online practice area.
Rikaichan not only translates into English, a word at a time, but also translates kanji to hiragana.
Anyway, I think I have enough to keep me busy.
I do need a way to listen to the movies better. I need to go English to kanji/kana by sound, because I think romaji can ruin ya.
It's I like a lot of bloggers arewho are incapable of saying "I don't know" or "let's wait for further news".
I find that stance on romaji weirdly absolutist. All the classes I took used romaji quite briefly, as a bridge during the time it took to learn kana (which is a little while). The spun-glass conception of language-learning?
bob having a weirdly absolutist stance on something? Impossible!
199:Not always.
Having spent an hour reading 15 economists arguing about Ricardian Equivalence this morning, I an not an absolutist about relying on experts your favorite 1 or 2 experts before expressing an opinion. I also know that it is all opinion.
The way it works is that Scarecrow relies on an MSNBC science dude. The Science Dude talked to an American Nuclear Expert. The ANE talked to a Japanese NE. The Japanese NE may have talked to somebody onsite, although those folk are pretty fucking busy.
Nobody knows everything, everybody knows something, we are all wrong most of the time. Such is the Internet. Such is Life.
That is astonishingly unconvincing.
Bullshit. Chernobyl didn't actually *have* a secondary containment structure. (Those Russians. Fun.) Just a big unhardened shed. Is that different enough? And it had a positive void coefficient* (i.e. the less water there was in the system, the faster the fucker went. Those Russians. Fun.) whereas everyone else built theirs with a negative void coefficient (i.e. if it loses coolant, it loses reactivity - like you'd want). Is that different enough?
Also, the plume from that one went up 30,000 feet and higher and just kept going, being superheated steam from the primary coolant loop, and, y'know, this....didn't. I remember the pictures from that one.** There's an order-of-magnitude problem.
TEPCO's public statements are here.
*Does anyone know why on earth they did that?
**it dumped a gaggle of radioisotopes on my house and D^2's as well - obviously, COMPLETELY NORMAL AND ENTIRELY UNAFFECTED...
Yes, Alex is right here - what's unconvincing, is the idea that a Japanese nuke plant a few clicks north of Tokyo would have been built to Soviet safety standards. Chernobyl was known to be a particularly badly designed plant.
The dangerous thing would be if the earthquake had damaged the containment system, but I get it hasn't - this is a Japanese plant after all. I am maybe a bit more sceptical than AH about the long term effects of the Chernobyl cloud, but in general properly built nuke plants are very safe and very very very expensive.
And it had a positive void coefficient* (i.e. the less water there was in the system, the faster the fucker went. Those Russians. Fun.)
Not just that, but the control rods were designed so that on insertion, they'd displace coolant. Like you said, Those Russians. Fun.
(Reading up on the series of events that led to the Chernobyl disaster is like watching a car crash in slow motion. It's just bad decision piled on top of bad decision piled on top of bad decision. Fun fact: the thing that started the whole chain of events leading up to the explosion was actually a test to make sure that the reactor could provide its own power to its cooling system in case of power grid failure. That's some cosmic fucking irony for you.)
It's like a lot of bloggers are incapable of saying "I don't know" or "let's wait for further news"....
Get the hell out of here with that crazy talk.
203: Ricardian equivalence is one of the few things in life where there's a definite right-or-wrong answer. You have an abstractly specified model. It either has the property you claim, or it doesn't. The only place subjectivity enters is if people have different models in mind.
I usually don't watch my movies on tv, because I can screen capture and go back and such with DVD's on my desktop, but Koreeda Hirokazu's Still Walking 2008 came up randomly on Sundance. Five minutes into it and I'm crying. Not because of the tragedy, I don't think, but because in about 100 different ways it had a beauty and love that was overwhelming. A love of grandma frying corn fritters for her children and grandchildren.
"alister beyond" 1st review
Few other nations can capture the beauty of family drama with such subtlety and grace as the Japanese can. Perhaps it is a blessed legacy left behind by the master Yasujiro Ozu who in his lifetime made over 50 films, all of which are family dramas that often dealt with generational gaps. Japan, more than any other nation struggles with the problem of generational gap, being a nation that has continued to endure conflict between the young and the old, the traditional and the modern. Stepping into Ozu's shoes is the acclaimed director Koreeda Hirokazu, whose films "Nobody Knows" and "After Life" has already garnered universal praises."Still Walking" begins as a family reunites to commemorate the death of one of its members. With new members joining the family and old wounds resurfacing, everyone tries their best to pass the two day gathering with as little problem as possible. Sounds simple doesn't it? Well, therein lies the plain and subtle beauty of the film. From a few words exchanged between the grandfather and his new grandson to the laughter of three children as they caress a blossoming flower, these simple moments will linger in your mind with tasteful resonance long after the film.
While watching the movie, I found it hard not to be immersed by the beauty of Japanese suburbia. I could picture myself - like the characters, taking a stroll on a simmering summer day with the cool breeze in my hair as the gentle picking of guitar strings play in the background. Or perhaps eating lunch and drinking cold ice tea on tatami mats as the wind-charm tickles with the slightest vibration. "Still Walking" is a meditation on life and death that may just move you to tears...without even trying.
Also recommended for (an idealized lyrical) modern Japan are Ishii's A Taste of Tea and Oguri's Buried Forest
I do think they are better than us. Not just a few directors, writers, actors, and crews. The whole country. Maybe a lot of other countries, it could be America and Americans are just uniquely world-historically ugly and evil.
You can learn each of the kana syllabaries in an afternoon with the first lessons of Reading Japanese, from the Yale Language Series. Know what Yale's introductory Japanese texts use? Romaji.
211:Learn Japanese in an afternoon? I guess I really suck then.
End credits were fun. Names in kanji, job descriptions in kana. I could almost tell the difference between hira and kata, the kata was the ugliest. A few things mixed kanji kana.
Donald Ritchie has lived mostly in Japan since 1949, speaks fluently, but says he never learned to read or write. He might have several reasons (and is probably exaggerating), but this is why listening for romaji kinda scares me.
Latest from AP on Fukushima. Now trying seawater and boron.
At that point, Bradford added, "many first responders would die."
I bet there are people working there now who have drastically shortened their lives.
I do think they are better than us.
Well, yes, with perhaps some minor exceptions for the way they would treat anyone not Japanese if they thought they could get away with it.
"With fears unabated about the effects of an explosion at one of Japan's nuclear plants after Friday's powerful earthquake, the nation's nuclear safety agency today reported an emergency at a second reactor in the same complex. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said the cooling system malfunctioned at Unit 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, but the severity of the condition was not known, The Associated Press reported."
214:Japanese NGO's and NPOs ...working in Africa
Committment to Foreign Aid by Country 1-6
Denmark, Netherlands, Austria, Norway, Japan (29%), Sweden
US: 18, 3%
Character in movie I just saw loved Miles Davis.
214 shows a overt prejudice that would cause banning on some blogs, especially if directed at other "nations"
Nanjing and 10s of thousands of Korean comfort ladies would like a word Bob, you fucking ghoul.
You can learn each of the kana syllabaries in an afternoon with the first lessons of Reading Japanese, from the Yale Language Series. Know what Yale's introductory Japanese texts use? Romaji.
OK, I stand corrected. Though I think myself it would take some extranormally assiduous study to learn them (in the sense of memorize, even roughly) in that time.
Digby links to AJE, NYT, TEPCO
Gov't ordered evacuations, from a disaster area with wrecked communications and transportion, up from 80 thousand to 150 thousand. 16 cases of radiation poisoning
217:What can I say? Look at who is using this catastrophe to hate on the most vulnerable damaged people. Some of us grieve, others hate. And hate. And project.
TJ despises the living and hurting Japanese children for crimes committed 75 years and I am the "worst commenter ever?"
Look at yourselves. Is 217 who you are?
Actually, ghoul, I was making the point that people are people.
I would also point out that you are the one who constantly wants the streets to run with blood (Egypt, US, you don't seem to care, so long as there is blood). Do you have any idea, ghoul, of who will cleanse the most gutters? The answer, there, is: that of relative innocents--I would hope that you would be haunted by the sudden legions of kids who die from lack of access to inoculations and vitamins, women killed as adulterers for showing face contra to some Bronze Age custom.
But they won't, 'cause there will have been blood. Ghoul.
220:Take your spittle-flecked bigotry to Obsidian Wings. Take biohazard with you. liberal japonicus over there has family in Japan.
[url=http://www.w-polsce-mamymocne-seo.pl]wpolscemamymocneseo[/url] match
That's it, bob, keep squirting the squid ink. Obfuscate all your disgusting bloodlust.
While you're at it, could you spew some more about the Mysteries of the Orient and the spiritual superiority of the Asian?
214, 216, and 217 witness quite adequately.
So anyone who doesn't romanticize the Other is a spittle-flecked bigot? Huh.
So anyone who doesn't romanticize the Other is a spittle-flecked bigot? Huh.
Funny how that goes.
I do think they are better than us. Not just a few directors, writers, actors, and crews. The whole country. Maybe a lot of other countries, it could be America and Americans are just uniquely world-historically ugly and evil.
This is what I said. It is not romantizing the Other, unless the Other is everyone not American. (I thought of including the British with Americans)
C'mon. I was mostly saying Americans are scum. Is this not an indisputable fact?
Well, yes, with perhaps some minor exceptions for the way they would treat anyone not Japanese if they thought they could get away with it.
This what biohazard said, and turgid backed him. I know, I fucking know, that all those who were offended at Charlie Sheen for saying a name, just saying a name, will not be at all disturbed by biohazard saying all Japanese are xenophobes and tj spitting "Nanjing" at the Japanese corpses.
You know who's better than us? The Swedes, that's who. Or is it the Danish? Scandinavians, anyway. Though I don't know how good the Norwegians are.
We're not talking about some sort of country like the US here. This is not a country noted for ruthless imperial ambitions recently, or a country hostile to any and all immigrants, or a place with debased standards of entertainment and culture. Just look at the great and respected - and commercially successful! film directors produced by this world of beauty and subtlety. Kazuo Komizu, Masaru Konuma, Yasuharu Hasebe...
Actually, bob, spitting Nanjing at you, you ghoul.
More than that, it is important that you willingly and consistently drool "revolution" at the prospect of dead babies. So, go ahead and find a warfarin riddled rat's ass and crawl up it.
Is this the end o the Washington Consensus ...Mark Thoma
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos sent shockwaves through Washington when he told the Financial Times that his nation is holding negotiations with China to build a multibillion dollar "dry canal" that would compete with the Panama Canal. ...For 30 years, Washington has been shopping a trade-not-aid based economic diplomacy across Latin America and beyond. According to what is generally known as the "Washington consensus", the US has provided Latin America loans conditional on privatization, deregulation and other forms of structural adjustment. More recently, what has been on offer are trade deals such as the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement: access to the US market in exchange for similar conditions.
The 30-year record of the Washington consensus was abysmal for Latin America, which grew less than 1% per year in per capita terms... East Asia, on the other hand, which is known for its state-managed globalization (most recently epitomized by China), has grown 6.7% per annum in per capita terms ... in that same period. ...
...30 years, way more than 30 years of Latin American blood and sweat building McMansions in the Hamptons
Of course you want the people to be peaceful. You hold and bless the chains.
Well, I see essear and cryptic ned have decided this is a good opportunity to spit on the Japanese.
I guess this is Unfogged.
You magnificent bastard. Truly you are a troll for the ages. Like watching a Republican operative.
I was mostly saying Americans are scum. Is this not an indisputable fact?
Wow! Those others are sure touchy about who is allowed to stereotype and who isn't.
You know who's better than us? The Swedes, that's who.
Except for that whole Swedish Empire business. But I guess they got over that.
237: Pretty harsh at the time, true.
I believe Ogged had something against them. (Or was that Eastern Europeans -- they were dour, was the complaint.)
I know I've recommended Kathleen Thelen's "How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in the Germany, Britain, the US, and Japan" before, but I'll take this natural tragedy as a good opportunity to recommend it again.
I believe Ogged had something against them.
Wasn't it his body Ogged held against the Swedish?
they were dour, was the complaint.
"Russian women are, in my experience, possessed of an irremediable sadness, and I'm too sensitive a boy to have that around me."
His emotional well-being, I think, and therefore his body.
Oh. You mean something else. It may have been Eastern Europeans. I don't remember.
Ah, the Apostropher finds the link. Sorry for my hazy memory on that.
Comment on AJE, 3 hours ago, from 河西 伸博
(not great on names yet, could be Kasai or Kawanishi, Nobuhiro)
日本国民の魂の叫びを。聴いてください。。。。。。。。。。。。そして、必ず再生し復活します。。。。。。
(Damn rikaichan not working in comment box okay)
日本国民 Japanese citizen(s)
の possessive
魂 spirit, soul
の possessive
叫び outcry;scream or verb
を object;area,time
...
聴いて hear, listen, ask
ください please do for me
...
そして and then
必ず without fail (ず masu I think, polite, respectful)
再生 rebirth, regeneration
し (tough one, death, corpse, cherry birch? part of speech?)
復活 rebirth resurrection
します to cause, make, be done
(too much politeness for anything but our agency)
"The soul of the Japanese people is crying. Please listen, and then without fail you will help our resurrection and rebirth."
244: Bob. That's deeply poetic. Someone who speaks/reads Japanese might be able to render it with more facility. I do wonder whether what seems like your awkward way of translating (no worries -- I was pretty awkward with German when I was trying to learn to read it) renders it in a poetic fashion.
I'm not saying the Japanese aren't or can't be a poetic people; just that you don't read Japanese very well, so you may not be in a position to judge.
Google Japanese to English translation
"The cry of the soul of the Japanese people. Please listen. . . . . . . . . . . . Then be sure to play back. . . . . ."
(There was no link to an audio file. Checked again)
...
Yahoo babelfish
Scream of soul of the Japanese citizen. Please hear. . . . . . . . . . . . And, be sure to play back and to revive. . . . . .
Babylon 9
The cry of the soul of the Japanese citizen. Please listen. ...........And I play it by all means and revive. .....
None of them found a verb in the first sentence. And I said the last part was a little tough
復活します this may be idiomatic for play back, but considering the 1st sentence, poetry may be more appropriate. I think the problem is probably a noun rebirth and verb rebirth (revival, come-back, etc)
al J English does take links
If a audio link had been attempted and failed, it could have been something like:"The sound of the Japanese screaming. Please listen, and the playback will resurrect the corpse."
The link being to a current Tokyo girl group or ad for beer or something. But there was no link.
215: plus three reactors at the other plant, as it turns out. I should say, I totally believe the people who say it won't be like Chernobyl. I'm just convinced that it will be, like, peachy.
About the only thing you can say for sure is that it won't be as bad as coal always is.
Three people who make me feel like Bob.
Comments like this are not very reassuring:
A couple of sentences earlier, it also says "A spokesman for the Japanese government said the reactor's core would be flooded with sea water and boric acid."
That's pretty drastic. Sea water is going to trash things thoroughly, and boric acid is to lessen the probability of parts of the fuel, perhaps slumping in meltdown, from going critical. Apparently there are some very concerned people there.
There are also some comments about zircaloy oxidation, which produces hydrogen... apparently zirconium is kind of a lousy material, but it has low neutron absorption, so it's used in fuel cladding. Nuclear engineering is hard!
Also, re 210: in the end the Japanese are nothing more or less than human beings, the same as us.
Charlie Sheen thinks it's just bad karma. The world shouldn't have messed with him so no karma is out there messing with the world.
I learn (via Facebook updates from someone in Japan) that the most detailed information on what's happening is via hourly press releases from the power plant itself, at this website. But the site is extremely sluggish, and the information is all in Japanese, so I haven't been able to learn anything from it.
Here's something else that's interesting: a plot of the gamma dose at the gate of the reactor as a function of time. The two big spikes were controlled releases to lower pressure. There was no spike at the time of the explosion.
The hydrogen explosion theory certainly seems plausible, but it seems to also indicate fuel damage. I guess now we just wait and see if the meltdowns make it through the containment vessels?
One of the British news channels had a superbly Megan-esque performance from a doctor of engineering (Mike Byfield, IIRC) who drew attention to the "perfect hemispherical shock wave - can we back the clip up? - there! you can see that it was a detonation, absolutely perfect one, because there's a percussive shockwave, and you can see it radiating out from a point outside the building". He also remarked that British reactors were indeed designed to withstand earthquakes, and also "they were designed during the Cold War, so a fair amount of blast resistance too..." Really informative, huge contrast to the gabbling Murdoch-ape anchor, and he even managed to let the subtitler keep up.
Doesn't a molten reactor core tend to just sit at the bottom of the reactor vessel in a sullen puddle, slowly cooling? Something about loss of criticality, but it's possible that I've misunderstood the various bits of layman info out there.
256: from what I've been able to glean it might do that, or if it's hot enough if it might melt through the bottom of the vessel.
255 is indeed well worth reading.
"Sunday's eruption, which was the biggest volcanic activity in Shinmoedake in 52 years, caused widespread destruction and panic. The blast could be heard for miles, and shattered windows four miles away, the BBC reported. Hundreds of people fled the area as the volcano spewed debris, including hot ash and rocks, more than 6,000 feet in the air, according to BBC reports."
260: For god's sake don't tell these people.
260:The 1707 Hoei Earthquake, 8.6, may have set off Mount Fuji ...49 days later. 2nd link is to an ash distribution map, big pink is Edo. Fuji is of course quite far from Sendai, and the Hoei (named after an Emperor) quake epicenter was much nearer Fuji.
Geological survey says that Japan, I think at least Honshu, but they said "Japan" is now 2.4 meters farther west than it was. The plates moved.
"Japan" is now 2.4 meters farther west than it was.
They are sneaky, aren't they? Well, we're watching, Japan! The world is watching!
Numerian ...at the Agonist does a little economic analysis of the consequences of the Sendai quake. The rest of the world will probably feel this disaster in increased energy, food, and other commodity prices, and more expensive credit.
Likely Japan has lost 10% of its electrical generation capacity for several years, and perhaps 10-20% of its rice production area for even longer, especially if there are radiation problems.
With the long stagnation, high debt, and aging population Japan's future may be dismal. But I think they will be amazingly creative and resourceful in their rebuilding efforts.
Someone mentioned immigration. Japan was trying a little, like most countries, cheap labor for service jobs etc. But Japan has 130 million people in a country that is the size of California (30 million) and with much much less livable area.
These before and after satellite shots (you can "pull" the before and after across each other) are the best visual representation I have seen of the extent of damage. The Fukushima nuclear plant is about halfway down.
I was wondering what Chinese blog discussions about the Japan earthquake are like. It turns out they're pretty decent. (At least this limited sample... I'm sure there's some really nasty stuff out there as well.)
267: That's amazingly cool and horrible at the same time. Thanks.
261: If you want more, just plug in 'pearl harbor' on youropenbook.org. It was similar stuff in August if you put in 'ground zero mosk'. Just the most hateful and stupid stuff imaginable, stretching on forever. You could read for hours and still have only seen a fraction.
The link at 261 isn't loading for me. What is it? Or do I not want to know?
271: A bunch of shitbird Americans gloating on fb over the earthquake, on account of Pearl Harbor.
Japan is building robots instead of importing people. Gender in Japan sure is something else.
I have thankfully seen no racist douchebaggery in my FB feed following this disaster. This was not the case after the Haitian quake.
Japan is building robots instead of importing people. Gender in Japan sure is something else.
You should read the Tanizaki story I was reading earlier today.
I have thankfully seen no racist douchebaggery in my FB feed following this disaster.
261 was so freaky and upsetting that I'm glad to hear this.
261: What the hell is wrong with people?
As a sidebar, it's not clear to me how FB decides what to show me in my Feed, because it's not what various friends have been posting recently; it seems to be limited to a few people (who are rather repetitive). It's not because I've hidden the other people. Maybe it's because the other friends have privatized themselves somehow (yet when I go directly to their pages, I can perfectly well see what they're posting.) Perhaps it's a function of some algorithm that's mysterious to me. Maybe I can change it to a real-time feed. I find FB pretty boring and silly because of this.
You can change it so it displays items from most-interacted-with fb friends or from all fb friends. It's down at the bottom of the feed, under "options". Also, at the top of the feed, click on "live feed" as opposed to "top news"
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Holy crap: just back from Madtown. That was some demonstration. Easily, easily 150,000 people around the capitol, flooding down State Street, etc. Spoke with one group of 20-somethings, and one group of 30-to-40-somethings, and came away very hopeful about how things are going down. Surprisingly, it sounded like people on the ground there are not getting the message about how much support there is all over the country, or not really internalizing it at least. So, hug a worker for Wisconsin or something.
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perhaps 10-20% of its rice production area for even longer
Fuck. That's no good. I was wondering about that. I was so relatively glad to see the footage of the tsunami sweeping across ag land rather than cities, until a while later when it occurred to me that it'll leave a fine layer of salty silt behind. Or, um, a massive line of debris. But unless you're a CA rice grower, that really sucks.
Australia's rice industry collapsed in their ten-year drought. I hear Thailand is holding steady. China is a rice importer already, I believe. Russian wheat collapsed last year. I'm going to win that bet with Halford yet.
The report from my Seismic teacher today wasn't conclusive. He said that it is too soon to know anything.
He said that Japan has very advanced seismic engineering, and will come out of this as well as anyone in the world could. He hopes California performs as well. Says there's not much engineering to do about the tsunami. He is pleased, said that quality control in Japan is extremely good, so they'll be able to see how the codes performed (instead of having that muddled by crappy construction).
279: Thanks. Switching from Top News to Live Feed was how I realized that this 'Top News' thing was some kind of silliness. Will change my options now.
OT: Holy fucking shit, part deux: Some girl I sort of know has been begging on listservs and on FB constantly for weeks for "$13,000" for "charity," which is her 8-year-old cat's chemotherapy. Here's the thing: I get it that it's sad when pets get sick. But she's responding to email threads about how we can support workers in Wisconsin or victims of the earthquake with vaguely-worded headlines about how you can also support this other "charity" and "we" are just a few thousand away from "our" goal, which goal is chemotherapy for a cat. Fine, you need help saving your pet's life, but piggybacking on altruism directed at... nevermind. I need to relax.
280: Easily, easily 150,000 people around the capitol, flooding down State Street, etc. Spoke with one group of 20-somethings, and one group of 30-to-40-somethings, and came away very hopeful about how things are going down. Surprisingly, it sounded like people on the ground there are not getting the message about how much support there is all over the country, or not really internalizing it at least.
The lack of media coverage is at this point pretty puzzling, actually. I'm as cynical as the next guy, but c'mon. Really? Crowds into the six figures are ignorable?
The link at 255 is interesting and hopefully right, but I learned from Emerson on FB that the author is not a "nuclear research scientist" but is in MIT's business school, basically, where he works on risk management issues.
I have eluded you once again, k-sky.
the author is not a "nuclear research scientist"
Well, for that matter I wouldn't expect anyone who would describe themselves as a "nuclear physicist" to know anything about these reactors, either. The nuclear physicists I know care about questions like "what fraction of the proton's spin is carried by gluons versus quarks" or "what's the phase diagram for QCD at finite density and temperature". What's happening in a reactor and how well the technology is holding up under stress is a question for engineers, not scientists.
That said, I don't really see that much reason to doubt the basic picture that's emerging, which is that despite some unsafe conditions for the people working in the plant, this is basically a success story in that the quake was much stronger than the plant was designed for and only minimal amounts of radiation seem to have escaped.
I mean, I agree that it's possible that people are covering their asses and trying to understate the amount of radioactive stuff that can get out. But people, as a rule, tend to hysterically overreact to the danger of radioactivity relative to other dangerous things, so I'm not even totally opposed to downplaying it. I mean, jesus, the tsunami swept away whole towns. Should the nuclear power plants really be dominating the headlines here?
Probably I should apply 195 to myself at this point and shut up, though.
perhaps 10-20% of its rice production area for even longer,
I know there are some warnings being issued on the harvest, but unless the nuclear stuff gets much, much worse this is a significant overestimate. That is approximately the total production in the affected entire northeast region only a small part of which was directly hit by the tsunami.
News getting Slowly Worse ...from Fukushima
290:Shrug. 180k+ evacuated, trains down, electricity down. I just read the stuff.
his is a significant overestimate
That'd be great. The world needs rice.
Another reactor building just blew up.
293: that was expected, I think.
288: I can't believe you don't have ready facts at hand about the behavior of salt water-flooded diesel generators, essear. Aren't you a physicist?
I'm not worthy of the name.
I do have ready facts at hand about Tanizaki, though, and really think bob should turn his Japanophilia in that direction. He has such an affinity with the dude in "Manganese Dioxide Dreams". Meandering ramblings about cinema and shit.
So...last I heard they thought there was going to be another strong earthquake in the area in the next few days, and now there's another tsunami warning for the northeast coast. And also that other reactor, with the hydrogen exploding.
How is this still getting worse? Leave Japan alone.
I think it's odd that the link in 255 appears to be the only post on that blog, that the blogger who posted it didn't bother to change the wordpress defaults on the about page or the sidebar, and yet so many people have found that post. (yeah, yeah, search engines) Since that post has also appeared on a number of actual, active blogs, I would not be surprised if it's part of a publicity campaign, as Emerson speculates.
This is not to say that it is wrong or anything like that. And the "research scientist" does seem to have a degree in mechanical engineering (though I find the appeal to the fact that his dad worked in the nuclear industry kind of a laughable attempt at enhancing credibility), and appears to be right on the facts (though maybe too confident in his ability to predict the future from those facts). So maybe there's no value in wondering if it is a PR thing.
I have thankfully seen no racist douchebaggery in my FB feed following this disaster.
Well, I haven't either, but that's because none of my fb friends are likely to say something like that. I'm careful that way. I've managed to avoid the fb sewer by building a levee. What the hell? I know people on fb say shit like that. I know people on the street say shit like that, too. I try to avoid both.
I'm not really sure referring to a levee as an impermeable racism barrier is entirely apropos.
So I just watched the video of the second reactor explosion, and it looks totally different (much more stable cloud, much less of a hydrogen-kinda bang) than the first explosion. I wonder if that means anything?
296:I watched Kagi 3/02. Manji is planned. I thought it was perverse, although it did leave the whole diary thing out. Thought about Sasumeyuki when I read the thing way above on Japanese perspectives, that the Japanese really can't do multiple PoVs. Some say Ozu's formalism was to remove any PoV from his work. Never mind I guess.
Tanizaki pretty low on my list. He died of a heart attack. IYKWIM. Kawabata, Dazai, Mishima. Normal healthy minds.
I am reminded of the end of Naked Lunch:"Prove you're a writer" Bang! "Okay."
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Reading the Cambridge about Heian family and residential patterns, especially the conditions that strengthened father-daughter ties:common death of women in childbirth, uxorilocal residential patterns (males move into wife's household), etc. Even though these patterns changed or reversed over centuries, I am wondering if the educated elite males (some, liberal) and highly educated women did not feel closer to classical Heian culture than medieval samurai culture. Everybody read Genji, Pillow, Michinaga, classical literature, and the cultural differences would be obvious.
Wondering cause of Ozu (and Mizo, Naruse) and Ozu's post-war focus on father-daughter stories.
Although Ozu is sympathetic toward women in the 30s, I feel there is a abrupt change toward passionate feminism with Toda Family in 1941, after Ozu came back from service in Nanjing and his good friend Yamanaka was drafted and died. I think Ozu (and other lefty directors, esp New Wave) learned the relationship between patriarchal militarism and intimate family interactions and may have been helped by the classical literature.
|>
So I just watched the video of the second reactor explosion, and it looks totally different (much more stable cloud, much less of a hydrogen-kinda bang) than the first explosion. I wonder if that means anything?
One of the things it means, I guess, is that some power station equipment (pumps, generators?) that was previously free of bits of mangled building debris is now not free of debris, and is maybe also now not working.
Perhaps things are moving towards a safe and satisfactory resolution; right now, they're midpoint in a sunless valley of unsafe and unsatisfactory. Have the plant operators had any sleep? Cognitive impairment, desperate shouts of 'no, the other clockwise' are what I'm imagining. Also, in my mind's eye, there's this single huge control room with four nuclear plants to oversee and four sets of controls, and all staff are currently in conference around the controls of reactor no. 2, say. Somebody tell me it's not like that.
304:Somebody tell me it's not like that.
Last I heard, there were 1450+ working onsite, and growing. I'm getting most of my news from Yahoo and al-Jazeera.
Meltdown">http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110314/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_earthquake_nuclear_crisis">Meltdown Threat Rises 100 minutes ago.
Fuel rods in three reactors are melting and melted. That can mean just a spot, or a pool. Apparently they are having trouble "looking" inside.
US aircraft carrier gets radiated (very lightly, but enough to wash) out at sea in a cloud.
Everybody stay indoors.
It is not good.
You know, I've been a nuclear reactor operator during a control-rod control malfunction; of what is possibly the smallest, most fail-safe reactor design tested, and a very slow malfunction of only one of our redundant main rods. And that was so terrifying that I can't even think about what it's like there now. We all knew the stories of steamjumpers accepting a horrible death to shut off one vital valve; I edited the health manual's clinical descriptions of the results.
Also, in my mind's eye, there's this single huge control room with four nuclear plants to oversee and four sets of controls, and all staff are currently in conference around the controls of reactor no. 2, say. Somebody tell me it's not like that.
I'm not sure, but that dude who was twittering about it (who has now been asked to stop twittering about it) said that keeping the control room relatively radiation-free was a big issue.
306: hey, neat! Was it an academic reactor or something? When I was in high school we had a plan for a funny gag where we would stand outside MIT's reactor in radiation suits telling people that everything was fine, there was nothing to worry about.
Steamjumper? That would be this job?
Personally, I'd be understanding if everyone at Fukushima-Daiichi decided to just go home. A bit like the flight crew of the Swissair MD-11 that had all of its electricals sequentially fail. According to the anecdote I heard, they eventually quit the cockpit - since nothing at all was working - and took up seats in the first class cabin. I doubt the truth of this, but still.
Oh wait, maybe clew was on a submarine.
308.2: I'm wondering if they're going to keep trying to cool reactors 1 and 3 if 2 has a full meltdown, or if then they just throw up their hands and acknowledge that all three are going to go?
I mean, hanging around next to a nuclear meltdown pumping seawater doesn't seem like the absolute healthiest way to spend the next year.
No, but I'd bet that no one quits: moreover, it'll turn out that people had to be ordered to stand down owing to their being injured, incapacitated, etc.
I'm not the person to talk to about radiation risks: I'd happily sign up for a tour of Pripyat, believing that it's no big deal.
I'm not really sure referring to a levee as an impermeable racism barrier is entirely apropos.
Touché. I had more of a Mayhew-esque levee in mind when I wrote, but I suppose that isn't very kosher either.
Have the plant operators had any sleep? Cognitive impairment, desperate shouts of 'no, the other clockwise' are what I'm imagining.
Tragically, this may not be entirely wrong:
"Air pressure inside the No.2 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, located 250 kilometres north of Tokyo, rose suddenly when the air flow gauge was accidentally turned off, its operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) said."
You know what's been conspicuously absent from all of these articles? Descriptions of a worst-case scenario, and what would be done about it. This makes me think no one really knows.
Also, as time goes on, and the Japanese government keeps saying things like "there's no need to worry" right before something new explodes, quotes like this one:
"Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the problem "will not develop into a situation similar to Chernobyl", Kyodo reported"
do not inspire confidence, and in fact bring to mind an unfortunate tendency towards understatement amongst officials during the last crisis of this magnitude in Japan.
I can't fucking imagine what it's like to be in Japan right now. Also, does it seem like no one's helping? I wonder if we could be helping more.
How is this still getting worse?
Um, hello, Pearl Harbor? Methinks somebody didn't pay attention in US history.
1st, to let you know my balanced perspective, I'll link h/t Brad DeLong to This Site of calm confident nuclar nerds
Then some special McManus craziness
Chernobyl on Steroids ...FDL
(3rd explosion, maybe a second at no 3)
The 20 years of spent fuel rods, filled with plutonium, so hot and radioactive they must be stored under water, were stored on top of the reactors. They may not be able to find them. They are hot enough to set the mother of all nuclear plant fires.
Prevailing winds, y'all, run toward America.
So why have we sent an aircraft carrier to Japan? Well, I think there is only one thing that can safely put out a huge plutonium fire and destroy/incinerate all the radioactives...a fusion bomb.
You had me at "Chernobyl on Steroids", bob. But "fusion bomb" was a really nice touch.
313:dona, the prevailing winds in Japan are like most such places...mountains to the coast and out to sea. And that is the way the radioactivity is going. Then into the jet stream roundabout Alaska and down to San Francisco.
Japanese WWII Fire Balloons unmanned, unpowered, ended up in Iowa and Kansas
316:Follow the link
I'm pretty serious. Fumes from Chernobyl traveled thousands of miles. If those reactors go up in flames, and you're Obama or the DoD, what would you do?
If it's so very safe, why are they evacuating a good area around the reactors? Has the US told them to? A little H-bomb wouldn't do so much damage, and would clean up the site.
The 20 years of spent fuel rods, filled with plutonium, so hot and radioactive they must be stored under water, were stored on top of the reactors. They may not be able to find them. They are hot enough to set the mother of all nuclear plant fires.
Prevailing winds, y'all, run toward America.
I'm pretty sure there weren't 20 years of spent fuel there. Why? Japan reprocesses theirs. They don't keep spent rods around anywhere. They send them up the line to their reprocessing plant in Rokkasho-mura. I do not think someone who is unaware that Japan reprocesses its nuclear fuel is a good source on the Japanese nuclear industry. In fact, it's a pretty classic McManus Link.
Also, you haven't sent a carrier to Japan. That would be the carrier whose home port is Yokosuka.
I thought Bob was the Japan guy?
316:"Chernobyl on Steroids" were not my words, but
...Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit
Follow the link at 315
I am trying to imagine the world wide reaction in the event that we unilaterally decide to drop another set of nuclear bombs on Japan, and I can't get beyond jaws dropping open to let comically long tongues unravel and eyes bursting from sockets on springs, but I'm pretty sure it would get much worse after that.
Also, if it even needed saying, if you did want to redistribute nuclear material into the jetstream, a megaton delivery over Fukushima would do so perfectly.
You'd want to groundburst, though, those structures are tough.
Follow the link
Instead I'm going to go out for a bike ride and breathe my last few breaths of California air uncontaminated by nuclear fallout. It's been a long day. I wrote a lot of really crappy stuff, and now I really need to clear my head.
318: An H bomb would not clean up the site. I cannot believe I have to write this.
those structures are tough
That's just what they said about the levees and floodwalls protecting New Orleans!!!
Agitating for dropping a hydrogen bomb on Japan? You've really outdone yourself, bob.
No, Chernobyl on steroids wasn't your words and it wasn't really her words either, but a truly horrible bit of deceitful quoting by someone at FDL. However, I stick to the point about reprocessing, and further point out that the thing about Chernobyl was that it didn't actually have a fucking roof over it. There's a nuclear engineer about who is unaware of both of these points? Seriously?
319:Also, you haven't sent a carrier to Japan. That would be the carrier whose home port is Yokosuka.
USS Ronald Reagan sent to Japan. Based in San Diego
"The warships on their way to Japan were in the western Pacific on other missions when the quake struck at 9:46 p.m. Thursday Pacific time."
Do you ever read anything before you spout off?
there is only one thing that can safely put out a huge plutonium fire and destroy/incinerate all the radioactives...a fusion bomb.
Oh, Edward Teller, is there any problem in life you can't solve?
Seriously, this is possibly the stupidest idea I've heard all week. I suspect bob may actually believe that when Pu burns it turns into something else.
324: It would, however, protect our precious bodily fluids.
I fear that the Japanese disaster and rikaichan have turned you into Mutant Godzilla Troll, bob. A fusion bomb? Really?
You know what else the Japanese are really good at? Emoticons. I just got this in an email from my ex: ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ
Seriously, that shit is hardcore.
327:and it wasn't really her words either, but a truly horrible bit of deceitful quoting by someone at FDL
"her?" Are you even capable of reading? I suppose "Arnie" with an 'r' might be female, but I doubt it.
"That would be like Chernobyl on steroids," said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer at Fairewinds Associates and a member of the public oversight panel for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is identical to the Fukushima Daiichi unit 1.
Here is the original Washington Post story that FDL is quoting Gundersen from. People can check if Kirk James, MD was being deceitful
In the comments at FDL they get into the details and history of fuel at Fukushima. MOX, etc. Do people think in reprocessing old fuel rods just sort of turn into sugarcane?
Alex, you are not doing well.
331: What the hell is that? A laughing, waving baby?
I was trying to come up with the bloodiest, most ineffectual ways a bob-led FEMA could handle various disasters, but it's really hard to outdo 315. Rods from god to handle flooding, perhaps?
333: I don't know! It gives off a Hello Kitty kind of cuton radiation.
when Pu burns it turns into something else
Everything and anything turns into PLASMA if it gets hot enough. Is an H-bomb hot enough?
IIRC, there is less fallout in certain circumstances from a fusion than from a fission bomb.
331 is like a Rorschach test. I think it's erotic.
"A little H-bomb wouldn't do so much damage, and would clean up the site" deserves to enter the permanent phrasebook of crazy. Nuke shit down!
So what, folks, if Fukushima goes all Chernobyl on steroids, tossing vast clouds our way...we just pass out the potassium iodide?
This is not necessarily what I would do, but I am trying to put myself into Obama's and the Defense Department's shoes. What would they do? Come up with a better idea. The prevailing winds, the jet stream is a fact. What burns at Fukushima gets to Oregon.
They talked about bombing Iran for even thinking about nukes.
341: I'm just wondering why you think an H-bomb would produce less fallout.
Also, USGS now gives the quake a 9.0.
339: Ok, well, now I feel like that kid in Mallrats who can't see the sailboat. Someone tell me what it is. You all know about the easter bunny already. (Thanks for that, Stanley.)
Everything and anything turns into PLASMA if it gets hot enough. Is an H-bomb hot enough?
Good grief. OK, bob doesn't know what plasma is either.
Alex was right, btw: the USS Washington is based in Yokosuka and is in the area right now.
334: riot control using trained alligators. Napalming the Ninth District of New Orleans "...because the heat from the fires will make all the water dry up!" Introducing ravenous lynx into oncology wards in the hope that they will hunt the little leprechauns that cause tumours.
Oh, and of course, remember, by the time we see the clouds billowing up over Fukushima, it will be too late. Missile defense won't stop clouds.
Alex was right, btw: the USS Washington is based in Yokosuka and is in the area right now.
Alex was wrong. It was the Ronald Reagan
Not erotic! She was commenting on the cuteness of my children, you beasts.
What would they do?
I do think it odd and concerning that this hasn't already been discussed at length in the media already. It's usually the first place we go. Possibly it could be because pretty much no one understands what's going on? Although clearly ignorance is not usually much of a hindrance. In conclusion: I want more information that will scare me, because I am scared! Give me fear!
God, you're so naive, bob. Don't you know General Dynamics has been working on the National Cloud Defense System since the Reagan administration? Why do you think it never rains on the day of the State of the Union Address, huh? Do you know how statistically improbable that is? Nineteen SOTUs since NCDS was rolled out and not one of them under anything but a blue sky?
347: I thought it was "fat tweety bird is sad".
Alex was wrong. It was the Ronald Reagan
The Reagan's in the Mediterranean, bob. That was Fox News, just trying to get their hero's name in the media yet again. Check the pictures: those F-18s are part of the Washington's air wing. It's an obvious propaganda job.
riot control using trained alligators
This would actually be less dangerous / scary than using dogs. "Oh, is that an alligator? Look at how tired he is! Let me just throw this bucket of ice water on him to wake him up."
347: Yes, but now, like me, you will be forced to stare at it looking for the hidden debauchery.
Reactor 3 uses a mixture including Uranium, right? That part's easy. Deploy the Rolling Stones to sing, "Hey, U! Get offa my cloud!"
Good grief. OK, bob doesn't know what plasma is either.
Had trouble finding it in Wiki
The Hydrogen Bomb :
The principle of nuclear fusion is used in hydrogen bomb. It is an explosive device to release a very large amount of energy by the fusion of light nuclei. The temperature required for the purpose of fusion is produced by fission reactions. The explosion of an atom bomb produces temperature of the order of 50 million degree Celsius. A suitable assembly of deuteron and Triton is arranged at the sight of the explosion of the atom bomb. Favorable temperature initiates the fusion of light nuclei in an uncontrolled manner. This releases enormous amount of heat energy.
50 million degrees Celsius hot enough fer ya? Or do you need 150?
The Reagan has indeed changed her course to head for Japan. Bob is not actually entirely wrong about that.
Anyway, this Gundersen person was quoted somewhere else. They don't make any more sense for that. You at least should know that the Washington Post isn't a newspaper any more.
Also, reprocessing does not "turn Pu rods into sugarcane". It turns them into slightly fewer new rods. It also happens in Rokkasho-mura, many, many, miles from the reactor, which is far more relevant. Further, and it gets superfluous here, that reactor runs on either U or MOX, not Pu. There's a reason why it's called *mixed* oxide.
Sadly, the Navy says it is sending the USS Ronald Reagan to Japan, from San Diego.
From this, I conclude that Bob is right about absolutely everything. We must nuke Japan -- and do so now.
In conclusion:
I am a nice guy, and not crazy.
It is the motherfuckers in power that are evil and loony tunes, invading little countries and torturing young men, and what makes me different is that I never forget what kind of assholes rule. I know how bad they can be.
Of course Obama would do it.
I am a nice guy, and not crazy.
Okay, you've lost me already.
A suitable assembly of deuteron and Triton is arranged at the sight of the explosion of the atom bomb.
Yes, you read a sentence like that and you think "clearly this person knows exactly what they are talking about".
So, bob, you still don't know what plasma is then.
359: Christians are never lost, LB.
360:"Triton" That is pretty bad.
Plasma is really really hot shit.
So you tell me the temperature at point zero of a thermonuclear bomb, instead of just fucking around.
Or blow toward the west, dude, really hard.
358: Assumes facts not in evidence.
Personally I think it would make ton of sense for eco-terrorists to try to wipe out half of the world's population, but I don't see Obama's motivation here.
If Unfogged were a meatspace debating society, at this point Bob would be up at the lectern waggling his cock around, prompting clamorous hubbub and discussion.
359,363:Hey, lawyers can stipulate
bob, when dealing with someone whose knowledge of physics ends with "plasma is really really hot shit", it's kind of difficult to know where to start. I think you should go back to thinking that it's all done by goblins.
331 looks like a fat little sleepy birdie. See its tail on the right?
If there was a film badge for Bob, mine would just have fogged.
Silly people.
Exactly how are three aircraft carriers gonna help in Japan? You never wondered the sense of it?
I'll bet the DoD has a contingency plan for radiation disasters, I bet it involves a very fucking hot bomb, I bet the Japanese are working special hard on notice, and I'll bet a secret agreement has already been reached, and I think you would be amazed at how easily the outrage will pass.
And I haven't heard any other solutions. Pretty limited imaginations.
I am a nice guy, and not crazyn entertaining black box, out of which comes all manner of unpredictable theories and revelations.
I am a bit confused at what is being debated at this point. Certainly, it seems that we can all agree that the situation in Japan is very grave. The one bright spot would seem to be that the containment vessels for all of the reactors are not in terrible shape right now, as far as we know. But most of the other news seems to be range from "very bad" to "nearly the worst case".
Without saying anything particular about the Japanese government, it does seem to be the case that whenever there is a nuclear accident, the initial reports almost always downplay it, and when the full truth is revealed, the pessimists are usually more correct than not. So I'm willing to agree with bob that there are many things to be very concerned about, but it seems like calling for fusion bombs might be ever so slightly premature at this point.
And I haven't heard any other solutions
Rather than making the radioactive materials into plasma, I propose that we riddle them with bullet holes until they convulse and wallow beneath the cruel desert sun.
Bob - A thermonuclear explosion would vaporize the nuclear material, but high temperature isn't enough - to transmute elements you need either mind-buggeringly high temperatures (for those heavier than iron you need to be inside a supernova, pretty much) or copious neutrons. You can get the latter with a neutron bomb (which is just a variety of thermonuclear weapon), but the neutrons are not selective - they'll glom onto all manner of different nucleii, rendering some more stable (as in waste that would fission into lighter elements) and others less stable (turning boring old building materials into highly radioactive fallout). This is a bit of a cartoon description, since some light elements just suck up neutrons and sit there (like boron, which is why they are injecting boric acid into the reactor core), and some heavier elements go from merely nasty to downright rude. The upshot is that nuking nuclear power plants is a bad idea.
370: Exactly how are three aircraft carriers gonna help in Japan?
1. They carry helicopters and serve as a base for helicopters.
2. They carry trained nuclear engineers and various types of nuclear safety equipment.
3. They carry and can support various types of rescue personnel.
4. They are a visible symbol of the US government's commitment to assist Japan with its response to this crisis.
Pretty limited imaginations.
I've been working on ssummoning the elder gods to help me clean my kitchen.
Oh man this is turning into a classic. "I haven't heard any other solutions."
I left out the fact that the plasma cools after the explosion and the horribles precipitate out. That's the origin of the word fallout.
Nothing escapes a black hole, right? Hawking radiation aside.
Listen to togolosh, bob. He's a physicist/engineer who builds lasers and stuff. He knows what he's talking about.
374:Finally, something constructive
So 50 million degrees isn't enough. Or any bomb you know about doesn't get hot enough, over a wide enough area.
So black clouds start the billowing, on the way to Oregon...back up, DoD won't let it get there.
Is there a way to bury the site? How about a bomb just offshore, send a big wave into Fukushima?
Is there a way to bury the site?
Actually, I rather like Unfogged.
We're getting into Mutually Assured Destruction territory here. If the US vaporizes Japan in an atomic blast again, North Korea can't just stand aside and ignore that sort of selfish aggression against one of its neighbors.
381: So you want to fight the meltdown with ... a tsunami?
381: 374:Finally, something constructive
Right, but, that's been widely reported. At least, I saw the injecting-boron-plus-seawater thing mentioned a couple of times with minimal googling. So, it's not the case that no one knows what they're doing. But it is the case that assuming that the absolute most apocalyptic solution is not only unfeasible, but exceedingly unlikely.
Gotta walk the dogs.
But oh!
Ring of Fire
Chile
New Zealand
Japan
I'm glad I live in Texas.
What if I stab the rods with this big sharp stick?
Was bob one of the ones who wanted to fight the Gulf oil spill with nukes? They're like the duct tape of apocalyptic ignorance.
Think of how big and sharp a stick can be carried on a modern aircraft carrier!
375:
water purification capacity
Doctors
Nurses
Additional comms
Was bob one of the ones who wanted to fight the Gulf oil spill with nukes?
I believe he said that Obama was considering it; I don't remember whether he endorsed the idea himself. This turn in this thread is pretty silly.
"Or any bomb you know about..."
Was a masterfully paranoid touch.
So, fun as it seems to be to bait the mentally ill guy, has anybody else heard this news twitter rumor that NHK is reporting radiation levels 10,000 times normal in the vicinity of the third explosion? Assuming that's true, and there was an explosion, I would wonder if that meant anything about the condition of the containment vessel, right?
I'd always figured that one drawback of nuclear power plants was that as bad as a nuke going off over a city was, a groundburst on a nuclear power plant near a city would be even worse in some ways, but what do I know.
I'm in wait and see mode at this point on what this means for the wisdom of nuclear power. I've generally been in the 'has issues, but less than coal and much better on global warming, albeit horribly expensive' camp. My initial reaction to the first reports of problems was that this is good news: unbelievably strong natural disaster kills a nuclear power plant but with no significant health issues to the local population. Now awaiting further developments.
393 cont'd: or maybe something about the containment pool being damaged? What is the containment pool?
Finally an article on the subject.
395: from what I've read, it's where the used rods go. In the specific kind of reactor in question, the pool is near the roof. So there's a good chance some rods got exposed.
Actually it sounds like the "suppression pool" at the bottom of the reactor is what was damaged? Possibly breached?
cnn.com has a live NHK stream where they're talking about it.
394: If it were up to me the US would pour money into research on Carlo Rubia' s Energy Amplifier concept. It's passively safe and can burn its own waste, so the high level long lived waste produced would be quite small.
...send a big wave into Fukushima?
Hasn't that happened already?
NHK report from 8:39AM Japan time (about 15 minutes ago), my translation:
Sound of Explosion at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, #2 Reactor
At a Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency press conference that started before 8AM today, it was said that "At 6:10AM, at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, #2 reactor, there was the sound of an explosion." Regarding the information that there was damage to the "suppression pool" facility, it was said, "There are no details yet. In the case that a hole opened temporarily, depending on the site where it broke, fluid or gas could leak out." The "suppression pool" is equipment which connects to the containment vessel insulating the atomic reactor, with the function of sealing inside radioactive material, etc., and if there were damage found at a part of this equipment, it is possible that it would not function to sufficiently seal inside radioactive material. Also, it was reported that atomic fuel was exposed about 2.7 meters from the surface of the water in the #2 reactor. The length of exposure corresponds to about half of the total atomic fuel. Further, it was said that in the vicinity of the Fukushima Daini Plant, just after confirmation of the explosion sound, radiation levels of 965.5 microsieverts were measured. Afterwards, the levels declined somewhat to 882 microsieverts, and at 7:05 AM they had dropped to 387.3 microsieverts.
NISA said that "we think that this change in radiation levels is due to damage to the suppression pool, but no details are clear. Measurement is continuing." On this amount of radiation, they explained that "it is not an amount causing any immediate damage to health." After the explosion, Tokyo Electric temporarily evacuated its employees working at the site. At Fukushima Daini, at a press conference with Chief Cabinet Secretary Edano, ?he? said that it is the case that there has been damage to the "suppression pool" equipment. Edano said "there has been no drastic rise in radiation levels in the surrounding area," and that their judgment is that there will be no damage to residents' health.
Or about 50 minutes ago when I finished the post.
Smoke rising from the number three reactor, roof blown off the containment pool, radiation levels at reactor two briefly hit 8000 (or so) micro-sieverts. Winds blowing southward. Who knows how much weight to give any of this, but wow?
NYT
But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates -- still being analyzed, but presumed to include cesium-137 and iodine-121 -- suggesting widening environmental contamination.
Where does it say 8000 micro-sieverts? My article says 965, NYT says 3,130.
But why is the Pentagon telling us about the radiation? Is the Pentagon always so generous with frightening information?
Anyone seen any cute pictures of kittens lately?
408: If apo posts a link, don't click on it.
408: It's always here when you need it, Wafer.
Also, somewhat on topic: did anyone read the VERY LONG and VERY SERIOUS article in the New Yorker about the Gulf oil spill? The author's tone made me crazy, and I'd like to commiserate with a like-minded critic of the culture.
406: watching NHK World as linked on cnn.com.
Fuck you clown. The results of the Great Fight Neutrons with Neutrons Experiment of 2011.
Cute kittens are
Trapped in the frame of my mac
My mind frees them, lol
408: I went looking for some but instead I found a video of a baby anteater. The poor Japanese. Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, climbed on by anteaters.
I for one welcome our new mutant overlords.
(Also "cute kittens" image search without SafeSearch went south much faster than even I anticipated.)
Uh-oh
Now be afraid. Obama's $4 billion bailout in the making is called the South Texas Project. It's been sold as a red-white-and-blue way to make power domestically with a reactor from Westinghouse, a great American brand. However, the reactor will be made substantially in Japan by the company that bought the US brand name, Westinghouse - Toshiba.
Prevailing winds run half the time south to north here. And South Texas? WTF? For the maquiladoras?
Agonist umm, Diablo Canyon
The upshot is that nuking nuclear power plants is a bad idea.
And knowing is half the battle.
418: Actually 'cute kittens' wasn't the one that went bad, it was 'Cute kittens getting nuked'.
I'm eating an atomic fireball candy right this very second. SO GOOD!
I just spent 10 minutes looking for the perfect Calvin and Hobbes strip, and failed. You know what? Google failed.
The point was: it can always get worse.
So, um...sorry.
So had someone posted about like a Firefox plugin that could selectively improve unfogged threads? Am I remembering that correctly? Is there anything similar for Chrome? Emails with info much appreciated; the address below should work.
8217 micro-sieverts about two hours after the explosion; they keep repeating that number. Radiation levels are fluctuating wildly, and they don't know why. Wheee!
a Firefox plugin that could selectively improve unfogged threads?
...What does this mean? I don't want Firefox getting editorial. There's enough pressure as it is.
Because of Stanley.
And his punning.
427: I assume it means editing out the comments of selected commenters, though I didn't know it was a Firefox plugin.
But how would you follow along? How confusing.
Oh man. Everything about this new explosion sounds worse.
Is there a plug-in that will eliminate everyone's comments except mine?
420:I am not yet convinced.
1) The Defense dep't has been looking at Iran (and Pakistan) for years now, knowing India is downwind. They may not have anything (shaped charges?), but I know damn well they have been looking very hard at taking out nuclear facilities while minimizing fallout damages.
2) If Fukushima goes bad and the winds turn South 100 million Japanese could die. It doesn't take much plutonium.
And all you liberals will all say couldn't be helped, but at least our fucking intentions were noble and our hearts were pure, and we remained popular and respected with our friends. Until the winds changed.
As long as they each drink a bottle of soy made with iodized salt, they should be ok.
Meanwhile, Bahrain is also freaking me out. I'm going to watch Archer.
8217 micro-sieverts about two hours after the explosion
How long do you want to wait? How much do you let get into the air?
429: I tend to agree. You could go totally nuts and block the comments of everyone who annoys you, and then it would be, well, odd.
Apparently the Fukushima plant was designed by General Electric.
So if nothing else, freaking out about Japanese-produced reactors per bob's quotation from Greg Palast in 419 seems premature.
It's actually not very important to following the thread of a conversation to know the content of the nonsensical trolling people are responding to. And a thread where it is important is by-and-large a pretty pointless thread. One might use such a script as a tool to keep from being baited into engaging and fucking up an otherwise interesting conversation.
I like it. It lets everyone control how much crazy sauce they want to have on top of their Unfogged.
Also, somewhat on topic: did anyone read the VERY LONG and VERY SERIOUS article in the New Yorker about the Gulf oil spill? The author's tone made me crazy, and I'd like to commiserate with a like-minded critic of the culture.
I did and had the same reaction. I was willing to believe 80% of it, but the tone was offputting.
436 is right, of course. I've blocked the remarks of someone on another discussion list, to no apparent ill effect, though it took quite a lot before I finally did it.
439: I was struck by how much shilling the author was willing to do for those in power. Dispersants are a-okay! The Obama administration was doing everything it could! BP was a actually trying really hard! All the critics were just so silly! God, it's not like people along the Gulf Coast who don't trust either big business or federal authorities to clean up after a major catastrophe don't have history, even very recent history, on their side.
I guess I needed to get that off my chest. Sorry.
Is there a way to block my own comments?
400 394: If it were up to me the US would pour money into research on Carlo Rubia' s Energy Amplifier concept. It's passively safe and can burn its own waste, so the high level long lived waste produced would be quite small.
Huh, I didn't know Rubbia was involved in that sort of thing. Is that the only proposed design for a thorium reactor?
I was struck by how much shilling the author was willing to do for those in power.
I wondered, at various points in the article, what it would be like to be one of the people fact-checking that article.
I mean you know that it's going to get angry letters, so I would hope that they put a high priority on fact checking it.
Could someone with access to the New Yorker article send me the text?
446: Only one I know of that runs on just thorium. I think there are breeder designs that turn thorium into something else and then burn that, but they also use uranium. Oh, and produce plutonium, which is politically poison.
448: it seems to be behind a paywall, and though I have access as a subscriber, I can't figure out how to copy and paste the text. Sorry.
This really doesn't seem very good at all.
"At 8:45 EST, I think that's the time, the government announced 50 staff were at the site. In other words they have given up doing much of anything."
For what it's worth, not confirmed, from FDL. There at least 50 workers at Fukushima who would be terminal, and know it.
Evacuation zone is up to 100 kilometers. Wind has shifted to the South. Tokyo is 120 km away. Prime Minister due to speak on tv.
I hope the US does have something to kill the plant, or even shift the wind.
452: keep it up, and I'm going to start blocking your comments.
I'm nukey the sadness whale! Be sad, Wafer! Be very sad and worried!
Oh wow, now I've gone back and read all the zaniness on this thread today. Who would have thought that in the space of one thread bob would go from calling us all spittle-flecked bigots who hate the Japanese to calling for a hydrogen bomb to be dropped on Japan? This is one for the record books.
450: Thanks for trying. Will it let you print to PDF, by any chance? (And then I'll stop pestering.)
Unit 4 fire at Fukushima!! Was in cold shutdown.
Look, the workers leaving the plant was something I was waiting for if the US does have a weapon that can shut down a nuclear site.
457: what are the ethics of my giving you my login and password? I mean, I feel a bit bad ripping off Remnick (and the Jews), but as long as you promise to forget it after reading the one article, I think I can live with the guilt. Send me an e-mail if you're interested: akelman AT ucdavis DOT edu.
456:We have an uncontrolled meltdown spewing radiation, 120 km N of Tokyo with south winds. We are maybe not even talking hours
Fuck yeah, I would do anything
455: I refuse to be sad. I went for a ride today and managed to miss all the rain. As it poured in town, I rode into the hills. Then, somewhat later, I was back in town when it began to pour in the hills. Lucky! Also, I'm going to try tubulars. Because I'm olde timey.
what are the ethics of my giving you my login and password?
How does it compare to building the fuel cooling pools next to the three reactors that are presently on fire, one of which is full of fuel that even other really radioactive shit thinks is really appalling radioactive shit?
Cutting and pasting comments from "lobster" at FDL
Reactor four was damaged by Unit 3 explosion.
Japan Cabinet Secy.: Number 4 reactor is burning due to a hydrogen fire. It seems that for the number 4 reactor, objects fell into the reactor.
30 milli-Sv
100 milli-Sv
milli NOT micro -- factor of one thousand larger than previous readings.
Very, very bad.
Note: 8,000 micro-Sv / hour == 8 milli-Sv / hour.
So now, they are observing another factor of 12 increase in levels from what we were talking about up-thread.
450: If you download a pdf converter, you can convert the digital edition pages into pdfs by selecting them to be printed and, once the printer window opens, selecting the pdf converter as your 'printer'. That's how I've sent articles to non-subscribers, anyway. Does this help?
How does it compare to building the fuel cooling pools next to the three reactors that are presently on fire, one of which is full of fuel that even other really radioactive shit thinks is really appalling radioactive shit?
I think it's probably not as bad. But cultural relativism in the academy has rendered me unable to say for sure.
461: I had an excellent hill ride on sunday, you'll be glad to hear, and put fenders on my new bike so I can laugh at puddles. As long as they aren't radioactive puddles, I guess.
So they sent the workers home. Sounds like it may melt down. In that case, is it likely that the other reactors will also meltdown?
Huh, so the fire at the number four reactor has really been kind of the dark horse in the race to spread radioactive material widely, but it seems to be coming on strong.
People can follow fairly up-to-the-minute Japan nuclear information via NHK, apparently. Links posted here:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/03/14/open-thread-952/
So, how many people here have friends or family living within 50 miles of the reactors? I ask because, I gotta admit, the kittens aren't working.
I don't know where "lobster" is getting these numbers, or what they represent (as in where, gate?) but he keeps posting them
now reporting 400 milli-Sv if I understood correctly.
Another factor of 4.
Dangerous range.
My closest Japanese friend is in Tokyo, and her brother is at university in Chiba. She was OK as of two days ago. I feel horribly helpless and don't know what to do. A more caring and nurturing young woman you couldn't hope to meet; she is a midwife by training but also by calling.
I also know, secondhand, some extraordinary activists in Japan. No word on how they are.
One of my best friends from grad school is in Tokyo. She and her family were fine as of this morning. I guess I should probably send her the link to the cats loling Charlie Sheen quotes or something.
Reuters - French embassy in Tokyo says weak radioactive contamination could reach Tokyo in 10 hrs from stricken nuclear plant
...
Apparently the 400 milli-Sv is onsite
At 100 mSv/hr radiation sickness sets in to exposed people in only a couple of hours. Nobody can stay on site now except in full protection suits, of which there will be a limited number anyway.
I don't even want to think about 400
I know a couple of people who live in or near Sendai but they were in Kyoto at the time of the earthquake and are staying there indefinitely for now.
I'm seeing fewer Facebook updates from people in Tokyo now than I was; I don't know if this is internet fatigue or if power outages are keeping them from posting.
Watching the live stream...now it's going to snow on them too? So, let's recap: thousands dead, seemingly everything destroyed, hundreds of thousands homeless, fucking radiation poisoning amidst complete nuclear terror, and now....inclement weather.
Japan's not that big. Where are these people supposed to go.
That no one seems to know what to do -- or, more accurately, no one's making public statements -- seems to be adding to the sense of panic. Or maybe that's just me?
Christ.
ProducerMatthew [http://twitter.com/ProducerMatthew]
Just in: Radiation up to 9 times normal level detected in Kanagawa, some 200 km south of Fukushima and well-past Tokyo - Kyodo
Kyodo: Hydrogen explosion occurs at Fukushima No. 4 reactor.
This is not the fire reported earlier.
CNN is worthless. MSNBC worthless
I don't know how good most of this info is, but appears the FDL commeters are looking everywhere
If you have access to an institutional subscription, you should be able to read the New Yorker in text version through that. And do other things that involve the processing of text.
471: My sister's husband is Japanese; his cousin's apartment was shattered in the quake, but his family is all accounted for and uninjured. However, there is a family farm in Fukushima prefecture 40 miles from the reactor. I believe they have evacuated, but I'm not sure, and I haven't heard anything at all in the last 36 hours.
I like to read 481 as advice that might be helpful to them in this dark hour.
I hadn't seen this before now. Tsunamis are pretty scary.
Comment at FDL
This is a rather simple concept that seems difficult for many to grasp. There was very little contamination at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear material was mostly blown high into the atmosphere and dispersed.
What can I say? No good choices, but this may be better.
483: I used to think tornados were the scariest thing that nature could throw at humanity, but nope. Nope, it's tsunamis. Possibly volcanoes are a close second? Basically: the Pacific.
Please stop getting worse.
485: we lived in Norman, Oklahoma in, um, whatever year it was that the huge, killer Tornado ripped through that area, destroying the town of Moore. The thing is, unless the twister had touched down right on top of us, Wizard of Oz style, we were going to be fine. The weather reporters gave block-by-block details about where it was, so we knew that all was well. Plus, if it did happen to change direction and head for us, we had a basement, which meant that we were very safe. I also lived in New Orleans during some bad storms, and those were scarier. The sound of the wind got pretty crazy-making after awhile, and watching the water rise in the streets was always alarming. But it's nothing like that video, which I suppose is what things must have looked like in parts of NOLA after Katrina's storm surge swamped the place. There's just something about the ocean rising and consuming everything in its path that seems utterly and completely terrifying, as in, "There's no hope for us, so we'd better get right with god" terrifying. That said, having a huge cloud of radioactive fallout coming your way is probably no picnic either. Plus, the snow.
BREAKING NEWS: Small amounts of radioactive substances detected in Tokyo (12:37)
Kyodo news ticker.
Radiation levels in Saitama near Tokyo 40 times normal levels: Kyodo quoting local government"
Agence-France Presse notes:California is closely monitoring efforts to contain leaks from a quake-damaged Japanese nuclear plant, a spokesman said Saturday, as experts said radiation could be blown out across the Pacific.
***
"At present there is no danger to California. However we are monitoring the situation closely in conjunction with our federal partners," Michael Sicilia, spokesman for California Department of Public Health, told AFP.
"California does have radioactivity monitoring systems in place for air, water and the food supply and can enhance that monitoring if a danger exists," he added.
***
Experts have suggested that, if there were a reactor meltdown or major leak at Fukushima, the radioactive cloud would likely be blown out east across the Pacific, towards the US West Coast.
"The wind direction for the time being seems to point the (nuclear) pollution towards the Pacific," said Andre-Claude Lacoste of the French Nuclear Safety Authority, briefing journalists in Paris on the Japanese crisis.
Straight line, 20 mph winds, 11 days Fukushima to Los Angeles
486: I knew someone from college who was in Norman for that one. The F5 that was like a mile wide or something absurd? She did not enjoy it.
I've thankfully never experienced an Act of God or anything remotely like it. Apparently when I was a baby I was on a plane where the windshield cracked, but, you know...baby. Even money my reaction was "Wheeeeee!"
Fuck. Tokyo.
Um, that wasn't, like, "Fuck Tokyo" as in "Go Mothra."
More, "Fuck. (Great sympathy for) Tokyo."
"Fuck Tokyo" as in "Go Mothra."
??! No one cares more about Toyko than Mothra.
D'oh! Um, I meant Godzilla. Godzilla's the one who fucked up Tokyo, right? And was born...from...nuclear tests.
There is no way to make this tasteful.
There's a third way you could have meant it, dona. But I think we all took it in the best possible way. I'm glued to the TV/internet, and I don't even know anyone in Japan right now. Can only imagine how others feel.
50 workers are staying behind at the plant. That is just messed up.
Why is the Nikkei open for trading? Can this possibly be helping?
495: Are they sacrificing themselves?
How long can this decay heat last? What are the reactions?
498: I have no idea if they're putting it in those terms, or if that will be the result. But the other 750 workers are being evacuated.
No, they're trying to keep the sea water cooling efforts going, right?
499: well, the three reactors could fully melt down, and the spent fuel could catch fire.
501: yeah, and put out (maybe already have put out?) the fire at #4. But radiation levels are like 8000 times normal or whatever.
498: That is what it sounded like.
Everyone is probably watching the same feed, but I just went ahead and googled Chiba (2-4x normal radiation levels) and Utsunomiya (33x), and Chiba is right next to Tokyo, Utsunomiya looks halfway btwn the reactors and Tokyo. I want to stress that I have absolutely no relevant expertise, but: that does not sound good.
The radiation levels are bad (about 2 years worth of ambient exposure each hour, if I am reading 2 millisieverts right) but nowhere near Chernobyl, dangerous rather than certainly damaging to the operators.
499: I've been annoyed that I can't seem to find the answer to that question in any news reports. It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to estimate (see http://decay-heat.tripod.com/) if you have access to some data about how much energy the reactor was typically producing (which is probably publically available).
506: Also presumably there are some things that they can do to mitigate their exposure (suits, iodine pills, etc.).
Waitaminute. Half the rods still exposed? I didn't catch the first half of the sentence. But what?
502: Would I be correct in guessing that the energy released by burning the rods is negligible compared to that from decay, and that the problem with burning is that it releases all sorts of toxic, radioactive particles?
507: That's a good site that I'll have to read tomorrow.
Oh, Jesus fuck. When the prime minister says in advance that there's a "very high possibility of further leakage," things are going to be very bad.
yeah, and put out (maybe already have put out?) the fire at #4.
Apparently that was done by a US military team. I'm presuming that with all the nuke powered ships and stuff the US military has a pretty large number of people with expertise in reactors and how to deal with potential emergencies.
HOLY SHIT! Powers that be, leave 441.2!
If I still wrote FTA, I would have already changed the tagline to "semi-smart ho-bucket."
486: Flooding water is so relentless, thorough, and unforgiving. It's horrifying. But as you say, radiation has its own horrifying characteristics too.
"318: An H bomb would not clean up the site. I cannot believe I have to write this."
"The Core" was on tv last nite.
And the news gets worse. People within 19 miles of the plant are being told to stay inside, close windows, not run ventilators, hang laundry inside.
ok it took me a while to cotton on to the fact bob's theory was that nukes were useful. I thought he was hypothsizing that evil obamer was planning on nuking japan.
"As long as they each drink a bottle of soy made with iodized salt, they should be ok.
"
well the interesting this is that while soy is a goiterogen, they are destroyed by the fermentation process. And while using soy instead of salt can cause iodine deficiency here, in japan they get their iodine from seaweed.
Looking at the IAEA updates, I have the impression that nothing is degenerating faster than the news coverage.
Does the IAEA post what they believe to be the case, or what they believe it would benefit the public to suppose is the case?
I trust the IAEA: when the US and UK governments were lying to me, they were telling the truth.
Certainly a lot of people seem to agree with you. Their server is reeling.
The Beeb tells me that Germany is rushing to close the stable door now the horse has bolted close its oldest reactors. What are Germany's oldest reactors, technically, and does this mean we ought to be worrying about a bunch of similar around the world?
No. The Schröder-Fischer government in Germany decided it was going to get out of the nuclear business some years ago, and passed an act of parliament that set the various reactors' end-of-life dates as a matter of law. It was decided just to not replace them. They instead spent a lot of money on solar and wind power.
More recently, the Merkel government decided to go back on this and approve extensions of the reactors' remaining run time. Cue enormous row. The length of the extension, and whatever works would be required were subject to a technical review, but in principle the three pre-1980 plants still in service would get an eight year extension and the others 14 years.
Now, the German political class have apparently decided that it's All About Them*. (Lufthansa has been checking aircraft with geigers in case...well, in case it really was Chernobyl all over again and somehow an aircraft taking off from Tokyo, upwind, somehow managed to find the plume and somehow managed to pick up enough radioactive material that somehow didn't blow off the wings in 10 hours of 500 mph slipstream to harm somebody in Germany, although they're apparently cool with letting people travel on the plane next to the hypothetical contamination. Security theatre, eh.) And so they're now having a further technical review of the proposed extensions.
Now, apparently the extension has been suspended for three months to facilitate further reviews ^^^kick the issue down the road. As a result, this means that the two oldest plants (Biblis I and Neckarwestheim) are outta time and must shut down at least temporarily.
As an issue, it's an identity/culture wars thing in Germany. If you're anywhere to the left of centre you're opposed to anything nuclear anywhere, ever. If you're anywhere to the right of centre, you're likely to regularly drink cooling water in public to show how pro-nuke you are. And if you're in the FDP and therefore theoretically in the centre, you probably splash on a few radioisotopes every morning before you go out.
*you may have noticed a theme here
Ah, that makes sense. As a pro-nuke lefty (I don't think nuclear is a panacea, I think it's one technology among many that can be considered in the appropriate place, such as not on a major fault line) I hadn't realised that Germany was still stuck in the 70s on this issue. Are these beasts fit for another 14 years?
As an issue, it's an identity/culture wars thing in Germany. If you're anywhere to the left of centre you're opposed to anything nuclear anywhere, ever.
Living there a decade ago, people couldn't quite get their minds around 'you're left wing' and 'you're pro nuke'. Though, older industrial union type lefties often were pro-nuke as well. I on the other hand found the 'lefty' and 'vehemently anti stem cell research' combo pretty bizarre (we're not talking devout Catholic lefties here). The right wing (US and other) 'renewables are way too expensive' and 'go nukes' combo is insane, but insane in a typical right wing way.
I hadn't realised that Germany was still stuck in the 70s on this issue.
Another way to put it is simply that nuclear power has remained a live issue in Germany in a way that it hasn't really in the US--quick googling tells me that ground was last broken on a new nuclear plant in the US in 1974.
When an issue is politically salient, there exist both electoral and psychological pressures to fit it onto the current ideological spectrum.
I mean, yes, it feels a bit weird for me, too, hearing the casual left=antinuke stuff around here. But "stuck in the 70s" seems a bit unfair.
So, uh, this looks pretty wrong now.
When did they switch to Sieverts from REMs? Bad association with "It's the end of the world as we know it"?
Huh, that's weird- the original post had an introduction (copied below) that no longer appears on the MITNSE version.
I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan's nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.
There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.
By "significant" I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on - say - a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.
I have been reading every news release on the incident since the earthquake. There has not been one single (!) report that was accurate and free of errors (and part of that problem is also a weakness in the Japanese crisis communication). By "not free of errors" I do not refer to tendentious anti-nuclear journalism - that is quite normal these days. By "not free of errors" I mean blatant errors regarding physics and natural law, as well as gross misinterpretation of facts, due to an obvious lack of fundamental and basic understanding of the way nuclear reactors are build and operated. I have read a 3 page report on CNN where every single paragraph contained an error.
We will have to cover some fundamentals, before we get into what is going on.
I mean, yes, it feels a bit weird for me, too, hearing the casual left=antinuke stuff around here. But "stuck in the 70s" seems a bit unfair.
Eh. Being anti-nuke is a pretty good generic left-wing principle. In (quite possibly many!) specific instances it may be wrong, but in general, along with being anti-fossil & anti-dumb-hydro, it's a pretty good starting point.
Who could have imagined that an MBA would turn out to be wrong.
531 And I tend to be pro hydro plant development as well. That and the nuclear stance come from combining the beliefs that electricity is a wonderful thing and fossil fuel generation a very bad one. You need to generate the stuff somehow, and things like wind or solar, while a big part of the solution, aren't sufficient on their own. Hydro in particular is pretty awesome since it can be meshed very nicely with other renewables to counteract their short-term volatility issues. Ain't no such thing as zero negative impact electricity generation.
Half the rods still exposed? I didn't catch the first half of the sentence.
It was "At the Mineshaft".
Actually electricity isn't a wonderful thing. It is what we do with electricity that is a wonderful thing. We tend to underestimate the costs of producing electricity to the environment (and this doesn't just include fossil) and we should be way more wary than we are about this. And sometimes that will mean focussing efforts on decreasing usage, not increasing supply.
(And yes, I do support some hydro sometimes. But on the other hand, in general when someone comes selling a dam, it makes sense to get really really suspicious.)
The Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that the following radiation dose rates have been observed on site at the main gate of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
At 00:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 11.9 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed. Six hours later, at 06:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 0.6 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed.
These observations indicate that the level of radioactivity has been decreasing at the site.
As reported earlier, a 400 millisieverts (mSv) per hour radiation dose observed at Fukushima Daiichi occurred between units 3 and 4. This is a high dose-level value, but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time. The IAEA continues to confirm the evolution and value of this dose rate.
I'm sort of pro-nuke as my impression is we have the ability to make them quite safe, but I have no confidence in our political system to enforce reasonable standards and, needless to say, wouldn't trust capital with the art supplies at the local closed ward.
Things definitely seem to be calming down at the moment, and presumably will continue to calm down until either another fuel pond catches fire or reactor two really busts out. Or unless something else unpredicted happens, I guess.
I basically don't think nuclear power is that much more environmentally dangerous than (just as a f'rinstance) deep sea oil drilling. But there's a compelling and terrifying inextricability to the course of a nuclear disaster, and of course there's a long history of minimizing the danger of ongoing disasters, which doesn't help a bit.
And I tend to be pro hydro plant development as well.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Everything I've read about it suggests that the Three Gorges project is not merely an ecological catastrophe in execution, but a human and economic disaster waiting to happen. I may be wrong, but that's how it looks to me.
What I'm against is any position which suggests that this or that technology is a magic bullet. None of them are, or none that we'll be able to deploy any time soon.
The first priority is to get off fossils; even if the climate thing wasn't an issue it would still be the first priority, because fossils aren't going to be an option much longer.
The second priority is to maximise renewables, but this doesn't mean we can switch over overnight. The world leader on renewables is Portugal, which has been throwing everything it's got at several technologies for 10 years and now consumes 45% of its energy from renewable sources. Yay! Portugal! but it's a small country, and there's still the other 55%. So we need to fill the gap, at least for the time being.
Which isn't an argument for putting nuclear installations on fault lines or massive hydro dams just upstream of megacities. It's an argument for considering nuclear and hydro as parts of a properly planned and engineered strategy to get from here to there. I would be delighted if there was no further need to either in fifty years time, but let's see, shall we? Meanwhile let's concentrate on the properly planned and engineered part.
530: I thought this line: "There has not been one single (!) report that was accurate and free of errors" in the original introduction to be kind of funny, since the original version went on to call control rods 'moderator rods' (an error that seems to have been corrected in subsequent versions) and say that 10^.7 is 7, when in fact it's ~5 (an error that hasn't).
Reuters 8:13 EDT
Radiation levels at the No. 4 reactor of Japan's earthquake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant had become too high on Tuesday to conduct normal work from its control room, Kyodo news agency said.
At 00:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 11.9 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed. Six hours later, at 06:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 0.6 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed.
These observations indicate that the level of radioactivity has been decreasing at the site.
Nice sample size there.
And the r^2 for the rate of decrease is 1! Perfect correlation!
Isn't no.4 the one with no fuel in it that wasn't running at the time of the earthquake?
Kyodo News:"BREAKING NEWS: TEPCO unable to pour water into No. 4 reactor's storage pool for spent fuel"
I'd give a link, but Kyodo has been impossibly slow for me since last night
Those are the spent fuel rod pools that Alex insisted didn't exist. Very nasty radioactives, very combustible.
Yes, but it's the one with the spent fuel pond that drained and caught fire. Spent fuel ponds have much less containment than a reactor core.
It sounds like all six have spent fuel ponds. It also doesn't seem to be clear that the fuel pond in four is actually empty? It may still be boiling?
Those are the spent fuel rod pools that Alex insisted didn't exist.
Telling porkies again, Bob? I insisted they don't keep 20 years' worth of rods about. Anyway, as of 0735 this morning they were reported to be out. Have they caught fire again, or is this just catching up on last night's news?
546:I think the biggest problem at No 4 is the spent fuel rod pool at the top of the reactor, although it was reported that the explosion at no 3 (no 2 ?) damaged No 4 and "dropped debris into the reactor"
Recommendation: ArmsControlWonk, which among other things has a timeline of yesterday's events.
550:The only recent news is as stated:No 4 radiation levels becoming dangerous, and unable to pump water into fuel rod pool.
Anything else is guessing. Fire and explosion (gasses) is the danger.
553+ "Recent" is within the last 1/2 hour
This timeline suggests the last IAEA brief supersedes that.
Well, I guess that settles that question.
535 I'm strongly for using regulation to force efficiency measures in electricity consumption. I'm equally strongly for using government to force increases in electricity consumption in the form of trains and use of electrical power for cars. Furthermore, even under the most optimistic efficiency scenarios, even in developed countries, you still need to replace at least part of existing fossil fuel power generation with something else, with the possible exception of France, but that's because they already largely shifted away from using fossil fuels for power generation. All that adds up to a lot more renewable power, including in scenic areas. That doesn't mean I'll support hydro proposals automatically, but I'll start with the presumption that like increasing density in urban areas or building up mass transit, that it's a good thing unless proven otherwise. And I find the standard German leftie approach of 'coal bad, but much better than nuclear' to be rather misguided.
Wait for it...I'm gonna guess nuclear.
I'm gonna guess nuclear.
Ding, Ding, Ding.
'coal bad, but much better than nuclear' to be rather misguided
That's putting it mildly.
I've seen reports that the fire was more H2 burning off, which would be less-bad news if true. (Some reactors apparently have special igniters, like glow plugs, specifically to burn off accumulations of H2 gas during a core isolation event. But of course they don't work without station-service power.)
Apparently the diesel generator problem was that they were OK, but the fuel got contaminated with water during the tsunami. But the engineering question I really want answered is what happened to the RCICs - backup cooling from turbo-pumps driven by the reactor's own steam pressure. That shouldn't need any electrical power (indeed you could probably use it to *generate* power for other systems) but apparently 2 out of 3 of them at Fukushima Daiichi failed, although all the RCICs at the other plant worked.
I don't know if they ran for a while and then failed, or never came up in the first place.
There was a mag. 6.0 aftershock about an hour ago. Non-trivial, especially where a lot of structures are already damaged. We'll see.
565.1: that wouldn't necessarily explain the amount of radioactivity released, though, would it?
The BP oil spill has made me flinchy that while tragedies are unfolding, you may be being massively lied to about the size of the damage. BP was unusual - I knew full well we were being lied to from the beginning - as opposed to Katrina or 9/11 or the tsunami in '05 where it might get worse as the news unfolds, but I didn't feel so starkly lied to.
With the nuclear stuff, particularly since it involves collapse involving industry, and an industry which I have very little knowledge of, I keep wondering how much bald-faced lying a la BP goes on.
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said the US will learn from the disaster, but that plants in the country have "rigorous" safety rules.I think it's the same reaction as Heebie at 568, but I'd be more comforted if he hadn't thought it wise to say that. (I doubt if American safety rules are much different from Japanese.)
Here is a link that kind of answers my question in 499. One week after shutdown it may take 11 hours for enough water to boil off that meltdown begins. After four weeks it looks like maybe 16 or so hours.
569: there was a mordantly humorous statement from some spokessperson for the San Onofre plant in California where they reassured people that it was designed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake and a 12' tsunami. Oh, good!
Also from here: In addition, the primary containment in this type of reactor typically has a leak rate of about 1% of its volume per day ... Thus, contrary to some news reports, the detection of cesium outside the reactor does not necessarily indicate that the primary containment has been breached.
I am in complete agreement with 541. There are no magic bullets. All technologies have downsides, as do nearly any human activities.
Refusal to deal with the fact that everything we do involves tradeoffs is one of the main drivers of shitty policy.
Per the Fri-eee Day-eee thread discussion, drivers are also the drivers of shitty policy.
That sounds like defeatist talk, togolosh.
they reassured people that it was designed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake and a 12' tsunami.
Yeah, that's really not good enough.
567: we honestly don't know. IAEA seems to doubt that the scary high transient reading was valid, and it's not like plenty of other stuff that was meant to work didn't, so why not a broken geiger or a decimal point typo? Of course that cuts both ways.
This sort of stuff is actually very difficult to hide. There's a whole science of nuclear forensics and verification (see the ArmsControlWonk team). If there was a fuel-rod fire, air sampling would detect it - when Chernobyl went off, the Russians didn't tell anybody and it was only when the Forsmark reactor in Sweden's alarms kept going off and nobody could find anything wrong that the rest of the world found out.
Anyway, one of the Brave New Climate threads answers my question. Both the controls for the RCICs and the bus bar for accepting power from mobile generators go through the main electrical switchboard, which was under water after the tsunami.
Here is where I ask ignorant questions, and those in the know may mock. When the fire first started, and people were still going to the site in large numbers to help fix it, why didn't they dump enormous amounts of something really cold, like liquid nitrogen, over the exposed area? Like, from a helicopter? Would doing that now be prohibitively dangerous? Mock or ignore away.
Both the controls for the RCICs and the bus bar for accepting power from mobile generators go through the main electrical switchboard
In retrospect this seems exceedingly unwise.
566: Oh what the hell.
Like Heebie, I have very little doubt that we aren't being lied to aggressively. Or rather, that with every new development the tendency will be to try to minimize panic. Given the nature of the disaster, I'm not sure it's a bad thing (I can't imagine choosing between deception and wide scale panic in a disaster area is a fun thing to do), but it is giving me a terrible feeling of dread. And probably not doing much for the world economy.
Oh, this is reassuring: "Even with a 6.5 earthquake, our cooling systems would not be compromised,'' said PG&E's Diablo Canyon spokesman Kory Raftery.
At Unit 4 on March 14 at approximately 8:38 p.m. EDT, a fire was reported in the reactor building. It is believed to have been from a lube oil leak in a system that drives recirculation water pumps. Fire fighting efforts extinguished the fire. The roof of the reactor building was damaged.
(From the NEI, so you may believe this less than IAEA...) Anyway, it seems that the fire refers to Unit 4 (the empty one). Units 1 and 3 are OK by Fukushima Daiichi standards, but Unit 2 is the problem.
The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) reported an explosion in the suppression pool at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2, at 7:14 p.m. EDT on March 14. Reactor water level was reported to be at 2.7 meters below the top of the fuel. The pressure in the suppression pool decreased from 3 atmospheres to 1 atmosphere. Radiation readings at the site increased to 96 millirem per hour.
Dose rates at Fukushima Daiichi as reported at 10:22 p.m. EDT on March 14 were:
Near Unit 3 reactor building 40 rem/hr
Near Unit 4 reactor building 10 rem/hr
At site boundary 821 millirem/hr.
Kitaibaraki (200 km south of site) 0.4 millirem/hr
We are working on getting updated information on radiation and dose rates at and near the plant. Station personnel not directly supporting reactor recovery efforts have been evacuated, leaving approximately 50 staff members at the site. Operators are no longer in the main control room due to high radiation levels.
Safety relief valves were able to be re-opened and seawater injection into the reactor core was restarted around 1 a.m. EDT on March 15 and is continuing.
Is there a good reason not to pick one SI unit for radiation? I'd almost forgotten how bad the unit soup is...
Kory Raftery
This cannot be a real person.
Mom says hi, everybody. Also, she says I should thank you guys for letting me hang out, since nobody else in the neighborhood will let me come over any more.
I like learning about the technical details of the ongoing nuclear crisis because it's a nice break from the horror of tsunami videos.
Kory Raftery sounds like a real person. Specifically, he sounds like someone who would hit a buzzer-beating 3 for 14th-seeded Evansville to pull off the upset.
577.2: A good reminder of how incredibly different this event is from Chernobyl in terms of information flow alone.
579: It doesn't look like the fire was the main problem, after all. (Quotable quote.)
ACW has a good discussion of this; there are a number of reasons to use water. First of all, the logistics of getting hold of that much liquid nitrogen in an earthquake-devastated flood zone that's been evacuated as a precaution are going to be difficult. But there's plenty of water in the sea, if you can pump it.
Second, LN2 is seriously cold and you really don't want any of your already sorely tried and very hot steelwork contracting rapidly. Third, what happens when the stuff warms up, and what's it like in terms of activation from being exposed to fast neutrons?
And they needed to act fast, so no time to consider exactly what isotopes you get from injecting something weird into a BWR.
577.1: it certainly seems like they would have had a tougher time getting the fire out if it was actually a fuel rod fire. On the other hand, if it damaged the roof, it seems like there's a chance it would have damaged the containment pool, too.
The frustrating thing about all this is the slow motion aspect; it doesn't seem like anybody will be able to say with any certainty that they're out of the woods for, what, weeks? And if things go bad even worse, they won't be able to say what actually went wrong for even longer. The twitter chatter has once again taken a turn for the not-so-reassuring, but of course who the fuck knows.
Operators are no longer in the main control room due to high radiation levels.
Chalk that up on the "doesn't seem good" side of the board.
585: If we grow tired of nuclear apocalypse, we can always talk about Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Iran. They have nukes and oil.
The NYT appears to have an answer as to how the storage pool could have caused the fire and yet not be currently burning:
With hydrogen gas bubbling up from chemical reactions set off by the hot fuel rods, the storage pond produced a fire and powerful explosion on Tuesday morning that blew a 26-foot-wide hole in the side of Reactor 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
588: makes sense. forgot to worry about what the radioactive material would do to the LN2.
573-575: Refusal to deal with the fact that everything we do involves trade-offs is one of the main drivers of shitty policy.
Like the 1.27M road accident deaths per year.
Also on all of these hard choices re: how to get enough energy, we must be excruciatingly careful to not suggest that it might be wise to shoot for a sustainable worldwide population number less than just going for it (yeah, yeah, I know it's happening naturally via Demographic Transition).
Stupid zirconium.
Measured in cubic units. It'll fool most casual observers.
591: I've been trying to acclimatize myself to the apocalypse by switching rapidly between stories.
we must be excruciatingly careful to not suggest that it might be wise to shoot for a sustainable worldwide population number less than just going for it
I really don't see what the desired change is, here. Are people in the countries where Unfogged commenters live having too many children? Not really, no; even if you wanted an eventual contraction, you'd want it to happen slowly. In certain other countries, there's obviously an issue, but I'm not sure what non-excruciatingly-careful talk in the US/EU/etc about poor people in poor countries having 'too many' babies is supposed to accomplish, aside from making the world hate us more.
Whose idea of a sick joke was it to put a nuclear reactor in a place called Diablo Canyon? "Well, we wanted to site the power plant at Mephistopheles Manor, but you know how the zoning board is there."
Somebody who thinks English should be the official language of the US?
Hell Gate, Montana - we're half way there!
They should build one in Boron, California to be extra safe.
(Um. Hell Gate is actually near water. I wonder if they need jobs.)
Actually come to think of it given the proximity of Edwards AFB there is probably no shortage of nuclear materials in hucking range of Boron.
Is there a good reason not to pick one SI unit for radiation? I'd almost forgotten how bad the unit soup is...
You're not helping by using all those obsolete things like "rem" and "Curies", you know.
it was only when the Forsmark reactor in Sweden's alarms kept going off and nobody could find anything wrong that the rest of the world found out.
I'd forgotten that. "Good news, Lars; we're not leaking! Bad news, someone somewhere else is leaking so badly that it's spread all over the outside of our building..."
Fire Island would be sort of expensive real estate for a reactor. Death Valley is short on water. There's always Slaughter Beach, Delaware.
The Canadians have Doom Mountain.
Reading one of the sites on radiation effects and I got a popup ad for "Buy Lead Sheet online now."
606: as I say, completely normal and entirely unaffected, the both of us, the normalest motherfuckers in the valley...there's a myth/rumour that a British coal plant did the same thing to one of our nuke stations. They kept getting low-level radiation alarms - not enough by a distance to worry about, but more than the target level of nothing getting out at all - but couldn't trace the source until they thought of correlating the alerts with the weather reports, and noticed that it happened when the wind was blowing from the direction of a huge coal-fired plant using coal that had just enough Other Stuff in it that the particulates in the exhaust were enough to trip their detectors.
597: Good pragmatic point. A discussion for another time (really a proxy for all of our economic-thinking being "growth-based"--and yes, I know that it is not necessarily linked to increased resource consumption.)
Oh, ffs. An earthquake of 6.1 magnitude was reported today at 13:31 UTC in Eastern Honshu, Japan. The Hamaoka nuclear power plant is sited an estimated 100 kilometres from the epicentre.
Apparently it's OK.
This guy from MIT seems amazingly sanguine about the nuclear reactors, and I don't know enough to determine if I should be comforted or not.
I'm getting lost in the weeds trying to get some handle on the relative sizes of possible exposures from worst case in this event, the Chernobyl exposures and US (and others) above ground testing in the 1950s. Is there a good summary somewhere (of the last two at least, that one could compare and contrast with the current).
613: That's the guy from upthread.
Oops. Haven't tried to catch up from missing the weekend's worth of comments. Where upthread?
613: Right, that's the post saying that nothing further was going to go wrong, before a whole lot of additional stuff went wrong.
Whose idea of a sick joke was it to put a nuclear reactor in a place called Diablo Canyon? "Well, we wanted to site the power plant at Mephistopheles Manor, but you know how the zoning board is there."
cf Dubai's genius idea of building a resort complex called Atlantis on land reclaimed from the sea.
617: to essentially catch you up, that guy is not a nuclear engineer, he might or might not be heavily biased, and much of that information is out of date, it is basically a certainty that the accident won't be as bad as Chernobyl, but it might still be pretty darn bad for people in the near vicinity of the power plant.
Tweety's comma splices are designed to withstand a 30-foot tsunami.
617, 619: And discussed in the light of more recent events starting at 529, 530.
622: we don't have time for periods. This is an emergency. Nonetheless, we will be examining what went wrong in that sentence with an eye towards avoiding similar problems in the future.
You'll have plenty once the USS Ronald Reagan gets there.
620: Tempting fate: the ultimate luxury. Dubai.
we don't have time for periods.
THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I BEEN SAYING ALL THIS TIME.
the MIT risk management guy (in e. g. 255, 613)'s department profile now includes a link to MIT's new "Nuclear Information Hub" and instructions to "direct all media inquiries to MIT's News Office". I am curious about the politics going on behind-scenes there.
PG&E's Diablo Canyon
This is in my hometown. My incredibly selfish reaction to the crisis in Japan is to imagine it all happening in my home town, and it's been dredging up lots of horrible childhood fears, created by all the evacuation drills, etc that we had to do. If you need me, I'll be rocking in the corner with my cats.
The comments at ArmsControlWonk are really good.
629- Sounds like a bunch of scientists and engineers told the management guy to STFU.
The ArmsControlWonk thread has some good answers to the question from 499. We're looking at something around 20 megawatts of heat being produced, which means almost 10kg/s of water needs to boil off to keep the temperature from rising.
and it's been dredging up lots of horrible childhood fears
I had this conversation this morning, elsewhere: a bloggic aquaintance said words to the effect of "I keep telling people the casualties from the nuclear reactors are going to be a tiny fraction of the deaths from the tsunami itself, but they keep freaking out about OMG nuclear." I said basically: yeah, this is probably people my age who just have an automatic freakout button wired to the word " nuclear" due to the whole thing where we were constantly reminded, at a formative age, that we might all be burnt as shadows into the ground. Not rational but understandable.
(Thorn may recall this as well: in addition to the "WE ARE ALL GOING TO NUCLEARLY DIE" banner running across our internal tv screens was the constantly mentioned fact that there was an army depot nearby with untold reserves of nerve gas in deteriorating containers. So not only might it leak one day, but it made us extra an extra appealing target.)
634: Yeah, I visited Hiroshima back in 1994, and even though it's a perfectly normal city now, I had the creeps for the entire visit: this is where the worst thing ever, that poisons a place for eternity, happened. The park at Ground Zero is very pleasant, but I was tense and twitchy the whole time I was there.
634: It's kind of the whole package. I grew up in an active fault zone (Diablo is on a fault, in fact), about half a mile from the beach. Earthquake + tsunami + nuclear catastrophe: not unpossible. We had a 6.5 earthquake not so long ago.
But I do agree with your friend on the problems of the nuclear catastrophe outweighing the devastation left behind by the tsunami. I feel bad for being so focused on it, myself.
Well, the tsunami itself is over and the reactor stuff isn't. It seems natural to be focused on it.
638: The exciting videos are over, sure.
The tsunami is over, but the tsunami-caused disaster isn't; all of the nuke stuff is driving the refugee crisis out of the news. Possibly the Japanese are just handling the refugee problem seamlessly, but it's got to be dreadful over there.
The Japanese government update for this evening. How Japanese, they've made a management-information system dashboard for it.
but it's got to be dreadful over there
And just to compound the misery, it's raining and close to freezing over most of the hardest hit areas.
579:
Because in all likelihood liquid N2 would actually cool things down less. Cooling capacity is more than just difference of temperature, it's heat capacity too. And gases aren't nearly as effective at absorbing heat as liquids. And water has a greater heat capacity and a larger liquid range than almost anything else we know.
640 and preceding, and somewhat pwned by 638: in a limited defense of the way people (including myself) are directing their attention, recovery from the tsunami undeniably an ongoing crisis -- and undeniably a far, far bigger problem than the nuclear issues will ever be -- but it doesn't seem as likely to actively get worse (in a force of nature kind of way) as the nuclear crisis does; "things still shitty for hundreds of thousands of people" isn't news in quite the same way.
On the issue of whether a melted reactor core will or won't melt through the reactor vessel, there's this:
The Mark I is unusually vulnerable to containment failure in the event of a core-melt accident. A recent study by Sandia National Laboratories shows that the likelihood of containment failure in this case is nearly 42% ... The most likely failure scenario involves the molten fuel burning through the reactor vessel, spilling onto the containment floor, and spreading until it contacts and breeches the steel containment-vessel wall.
(via)
I'm still thinking that a breach won't happen but I am having to update my Bayesian whatevers.
I visited Dounreay about 15 years ago, when their sodium cooled fast reactor was still running. It was impressive, but I did get the feeling that the whole business was immensely difficult and prone to fuck ups with long lasting consequences. Removing fuel, for example, involved the use of special 20 m long tools pressurised with argon (to stop the sodium coolant / moderator reacting with air). Given that power generation is now an everyday requirement for humankind, you perhaps don't want to be relying on techniques that are in the realm of the engineering olympics. I've also come around to the (green) view that the existence of a nuclear power generation infrastructure is driven by a state's ambitions to own nuclear weapons.
Globally, can I say how terribly, terribly wrong my assumption in the post was? I was guessing at total casualties under 1000 -- when I put up the post, I completely failed to understand the speed and size of the tsunami.
646: I mean, it still holds as stated: Tokyo did indeed come through an incredibly strong earthquake with very little loss off life and relatively little damage. That's probably cold comfort in Japan right now, but it's still true.
646: Yes, and Japan probably has the best earthquake engineering, but they most certainly had the most advanced and widespread attempts at engineered tsunami protection (a lot of it controversial). Most of it was overwhelmed in this case, but it may have delayed and mitigated things a bit and save some lives.
Right, given the size of the disaster and the level of population nearby, it's very easy to imagine a death toll in the hundreds of thousands or more. I'm still 100% on board with saying yay to building codes and government regulation.
but it doesn't seem as likely to actively get worse
Hello, let me introduce my friend cholera and his cousin dysentery.
650: sure, hence "doesn't seem as likely".
In retrospect, I'm willing to turn up the hectoring, if you'd like. That's really what we historians do best.
I completely failed to understand the speed and size of the tsunami.
People make that mistake all the time, about more than just tsunamis.
Just to continue piling on the increasingly discredited "PhD Scientist" Oehmann:
Questions about the G.E. reactor design escalated in the mid-1980s, when Harold Denton, an official with the N.R.C., asserted that Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the commission concluded that "Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely."
In an extreme accident, that analysis held, the containment could fail in as little as 40 minutes.
Hopefully we don't get to see who's right.
655: Nuclear containment failure in 40 minutes? Jesus Neutron Jack Welch Christ, GE.
Stirling Newberry comes down from the mountain (he posts about once a month now) to warn us about the lack of sunspots. Still, there is some good meta in it. For instance:
The present American theory of capitalism is that it is better to allow disaster, and then clean it up, than to insure against it. This is a misreading of economics, based on a misreading of minisup interpretations of micro-economics. The curve has to be hemi-continuous for economics to work. Disasters of this scale are not continuous the are disruptive. Disruptive means not continous, therefore not differentiable, therefore not going to find the best equilbrium because "ya can't get theya from heya."
and positive feedback
This is then, a complete vicious cycle, since each disaster feeds into the next endogenous disaster. The system is also incapable of dealing with exogenous disaster because endogenous disasters soak up all available capital. They are monetizable, and people are busy creating them. They are not profitable, but they are monetizable. Think on the difference.
"The core theme of the book is that the impact of rare events is huge and highly underrated. We are not aware of it, which increases their effect much. Our mind and thinking habits are poorly equipped to handle rare events." ...Wiki, The Black Swan
The desire to create an orderly and manageable world is what creates human catastrophes, and/or the inability to endure catastrophes. The faith that we can reverse global warming, or become earthquake- or tsunami-proof, or engineer safe and clean energy is exactly what is going to kill us off.
They are not profitable, but they are monetizable. Think on the difference.
I think what Stirling means by this is the old illusion that measuring something gives us power over it.
"It's a 8.8, no a 9.0. 5th worst ever"
Come close, bob, so I can give you a big kiss on your punim.
646: New slogan for Haitian Tourism: "We don't have nukes."
490, 491, 492: I can't believe a stray lurker has to be the one to point this out. People: Mothra is the mystical giant-moth protector of the environment. She has protected Japan and the Earth in general from numerous menaces, including but not limited to Ghidorah, Death Ghidorah, global warming, and the greatest threat of all... Man. She would be so pissed right now.
Gamera's probably disappointed, too.
662: "Death Ghidorah"? Any relation to Lord Death Man of the Japanese Batman comics of the '60s?
Heh. Alex. AJE Live Blog
12:18am
Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of quake-hit Japan's nuclear power plants at Fukushima, says it may use a helicopter to pour water on the rooftop fuel rod pool - to immerse the 20-years-worth of used fuel that also needs to be kept cool to avert meltdown.
Hey guys, just let me know if anybody tries to mess with you. Because I've got your back! Nobody bullies my best (BEST!) friends!
DO YOU HEAR ME, BAD GUYS!?!? THERE'S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN!!! WONDERSHERIFF PAULY!!!! AND I'M TAKING NAMES!!!!! IT'S BRACELET TIME!!!!!! PING! PING! PING! PI-- Grr, hang on a minute.
Leave me alone, Mom! I'm just playing in my room! Geez! Whatever!
Perfectly obvious comment that I hadn't thought of yet but is now worrying me: If the losses in Japan expose weaknesses in the insurance industry, who knows what might happen next?
667 -- A major insurance crisis seems very unlikely.. Also, note that Drum is quoting and semi-endorsing McMegan there, and anything McMegan says is presumptively wrong.
The damage from earthquakes and tsunamis should be pretty well modelled.
667:Krugman ...finds room for partial optimism in the liquidity trap. One of the flaws in Krugman. For one who is supposedly an expert on int'l economics (not really, his work was very specialized and technical, if applicable), he sometimes feels narrow.
If the US and Japan will have an easy time borrowing, some countries, probably little poor ones, are likely to have a harder time.
Anyway. As Krug says, in a way sorta kinda, WWII was great for the world economies.
Expect change, and expect to be kept busy. Don't expect much more.
You know what we needed? Another thing to worry about. When I woke up this morning, I just could not shake the feeling that two Apocalyi was simply not sufficient. It just doesn't have that oomph, you know? Now, three is a nice round number. Three Apocalyi sounds just about right. Let's get on that, world financial markets.
(I have no idea what that spelling is, btw. I just kind picked something crazy and ran with it.)
Isn't there a BTVS quote about never expecting the need for a plural of apocalypse?
You know what we needed? Another thing to worry about.
Well, if the greedy Japanese will quit hogging the spotlight for a minute, there's a real danger the NFL lockout is going to kill next season altogether.
BTVS? I assure you I am aware of all internet traditions, or something, I just prefer that you spell them out. So that the less aware can join us. Us, the people who are aware of all internet traditions.
...
What's BTVS?
Also: FUN.
Unless the nuclear plant somehow detonates and destroys Tokyo, I don't see any mechanism for financial crisis here. The Japanese banks and insurance companies are quite extremely localized, the rates of insurance are low, and the damage is quite localized in a relatively unimportant sector of Northern Japan.
None of which is to minimize the enormous human dimensions of this tragedy and is obviously cold comfort for anyone suffering from death or homelessness as a result, but I'm getting kind of sick of Americans voyeuristically freaking the fuck out.
Sure, I was pwned. But I was more of a jerk!
Anyhow we appear to be in a bit of a lull between apocalyptic events. An apocallipsis, if you will.
"Apocalypso is Tucson's steel band for any occasion."
671: Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear catastrophe. If we have another that'd be four, and we'd need to get to the next prime number. That's the important thing: Apocalypsen must come in prime numbers.
Though as I point out in 417, the Japanese have been climbed on by anteaters, which might be a demipocalypse, requiring one and a half to take us to five.
And I feel somehow sub-nerd for not being into Buffy. I loved the movie, but Sarah Michelle Gellar can't act.
I'm getting kind of sick of Americans voyeuristically freaking the fuck out
I think this is fair. Only, in the last few days I've realized my personal anxiety regarding...everything, apparently, is very much tied to my relatively recently acquired faith that the American political system will take any degree of tragedy, fear, or uncertainty and, with vicious alchemy, turn it into Batshit Crazy, which will then rain down upon the polity, further poisoning political discourse and any hopes for either a political or economic recovery for the vanishing middle class, and hastening our steady slide into an oligarchal hell with Dickensian flourishes.
I know that this probably makes me seem crazy, because it damn well makes me feel crazy, but there we are.
Sarah Michelle Gellar can't act.
Looked great in tight pants, though.
At least we won't all die congested if it's menthol-apocalyptus.
682: it's also a pretty good Presets album.
"Hello, and welcome to Inside The Actor's Final, Fiery Destruction. I'm your host, James Apocalipton."
Ok, seriously, I have seen every episode of BTVS (Laydeez!), and I am kinda surprised I didn't figure that one out. It's all the Apocalyptin'.
And, Apo. Apo. She did not look good in tight pants. She looked like a stick figure. I remember Anya being pretty hot, but that also might have been the comedic talent coming through.
I don't think anyone wants to have an argument about the hottest girl on BTVS (Charisma Carpenter).
684 -- 677.2 came across as harsher than I meant, and was not at all directed at you personally. Obviously everyone, including me, is super worried about what's going on.
And I agree that I'm personally much more scared of the national Republican party than I am of anything coming out of Japan.
692: Oh, no, I didn't think it was personal. And I do think it's a fair point. If I'm being honest, there is an element of disaster porn voyeurism mixed in with all the horror and empathy that isn't all that admirable. I think it's a human enough response -- I'm reminded of someone's comment when Egypt first started getting all uprising-y, "You're so vain, you probably think this war's about you." I just find that my genuine anxiety is tied to a new found belief that our political system will find a way, bless them, to make us feel the suckage, even if we're a world away.
681: I read in my newspaper that the next big one is predicted for California shores and, judging from the images of a non-tsunami-protected reactor on those very shores, I do hope at least this disaster will not prove to be about the US in the end.
695: What now? A tsunami in California? Coming from....? An earthquake? BE SPECIFIC WHEN YOU CAUSE PANIC.
695: to be fair, San Onofre is protected against smallish tsunamis.
And the west coast nuclear reactors aren't in a subduction zone, so there's little to no risk of a Japan style quake and tsunami.
A 'subduction zone'? Sorry, I don't understand that but I do know that "little or no risk" is not the most comforting phrase right now.
Are you the guy standing in front of those reactors exclaiming: "That can never happen here?"
IA very much NAG, and as repeatedly mentioned here don't understand math or science, but my understanding is that there are two kinds of faults -- subduction faults in which one plate is moving under another plate, and slip-strike faults where two plates are moving past each other. The West Coast does have a subduction fault in Washington and Oregon and moving into northern California, but the main California faults are slip-strike faults, and those are the only significant ones in Central and Southern California (the most significant of which, the San Andreas, is also significantly inland).
Quakes on a subduction fault in the ocean can create a giant tsunami like we saw in Japan or Sumatra; quakes on slip-strike faults will not. AFAIK here is no fault capable of creating a Japan-size tsunami near either Diablo Canyon or San Onofre, the two nuclear plants built on the coast, which do have protections against smaller tsunamis. The only nuclear plant in the Northwest is in Hanford, WA, hundreds of miles inland.
701 is true. I mean, there might be tsunamis that hit the California coast, but they won't be our fault (get it?).
The important thing to realize is that Three Miles Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were all isolated, one of a kind incidents. Nothing like that could happen here. At least not again. And not exactly like that.
There three of them, right, so it should be "Miles." Really.
Oooh oooo ooooo! Call on me teacher!! Call on meeee! I'm ever so smart!
The prof did a graphic demonstration of the two types of faults, very much along the lines that Halford describes. Slip-strike would be placing your two hands together, then moving them against each other longitudinally. That's what the San Andreas fault does when it shears.
The subduction fault demo was a small shock of horror, now that we've seen it in action. Two hands facing each other, touching fingertips. Right hand starts to slide under the left hand, left hand fingertips drag with it for a while. Eventually tension gets too great, and left hand fingertips release and flick to the sky. That's why their earthquakes are so violent, because of the "elastic response" in the flicking part.
Along slip-shear faults, earthquakes should top out in the 7s, subduction faults in the 9s. According to my prof.
Palms down in all hand demos. Sorry. That is hard to describe.
701: Current consensus among geologists suggests the probability of a megaquake in the Cascadian subduction zone in the next 50 years at at least 10 percent and perhaps as high as 37 percent, with maybe a 30-meter tsunami. Presumably that puts the entire California coast at risk.
a subduction fault in Washington and Oregon and moving into northern California
Think of it as payback for the Californication of the Pacific Northwest.
Presumably that puts the entire California coast at risk.
I don't think that's right, if "risk" means "risk of a 30 meter tsunami," but see the aforementioned caveats that I don't really have any idea what I'm talking about.
707: I was reading this morning that Seattle is about due for a magnitude 9, for values of "about due" encompassing the next hundred years or so. Anyway, everybody should start with the pants-shitting now before it gets fashionable.
708: Risk, that is, of significant tsunami damage, as in the orphan tsunami that hit Japan after the last big Cascadian quake 300 years ago.
Says my prof:
There is one subduction fault in the northern California/Washington area. It was responsible for the "orphan tsunami" in Japanese literature, one of the rare times when a tsunami arrived in Japan that they hadn't felt the earthquake for (corraborated by native American accounts of the time). That one could produce a big quake. But, high intensity waves dissipate quickly; the rolling long frequency waves will gently shake some Californian cities a few hundred miles away, but our buildings should stand, and what else could trouble Californian seismic engineers?
A 30 meter tsunami? 90 feet, in real units? That's unimaginable. Don't know whether it could happen, but if it could, it isn't something we should spend money engineering against. That would mean moving everyone east of the Coast Range. I think I would have heard about a 90 foot tsunami. A 30 foot tsunami would be bad enough.
707: right. But again, that's not our fault, you patchouli-soaked, single-speed-riding, hemp-wearing hippie, you. Also, I think the numbers are pretty similar for a mega quake along the San Andreas: roughly 30% chance in the next half century. Or at least that's what I vaguely remember reading a few years back when I reviewed a bunch of a books about the 1906 quake.
My uninformed poking around suggests that tsunamis aren't a major risk in southern California. Yes tsunamis can cause damage very far away (see Somalia in 2004, or Hilo or Crescent city after just about any giant earthquake), but southern California just doesn't seem to get hit badly from any of the major threats (Alaska, Washington, Chile, Japan). Anyway, I could be wrong I'm not an expert, but just because tsunamis can cause damage very far away doesn't mean that every coastal region has significant risk.
HEY! I just got a new single-speed. And we both mentioned the orphan tsunami! Jesus and I are totally twins!
Some evidence points to 30+ meter waves in Indonesia in 2004. Not sure how reliable it is, but it got into wikipedia.
706: I could describe the fuck out of your hand demos, and I'm pretty insulted that you didn't ask.
But I don't have video on my computers. How would I have conveyed to you what to describe?
What would you describe better? I'm so sorry I didn't ask!
I don't think anyone wants to have an argument about the hottest girl on BTVS (Charisma Carpenter) Eliza Dushku.
Fixed that strange typo for you.
Anyway, everybody should start with the pants-shitting now before it gets fashionable.
I really think wearing shit-stained pants is one of those trends where you're better off waiting a little to see if it really catches on before you jump on board. Even if it costs you the chance to be ahead of the shitty curve.
717: I would have preferred some more throwing around of terms like "ipsilateral" and "proximal" and "carpometacarpal flexion".
But I threw around terms like "shear" and "elastic response." Isn't that good enough for you, baby? That's who I am!
to immerse the 20-years-worth of used fuel that also needs to be kept cool to avert meltdown.
This quote doesn't appear at the link. Also, they didn't use helicopters last night, just a firetruck. And this news is now 24 hours behind.
711: The 30-meter figure come from here.
712: I don't wear patchouli, my bike has 21 speeds, and I don't have any hemp clothing. But I'd glad wear some.
Hey, I have to go to Seattle for exactly 24 hours next week. I think I'll deal with the risk.
I heard a friend of mine (on the west coast of North America) has been buying seaweed because for some reason he was not able to purchase iodine.
718.1: No, she'd be the sexiest. I have it worked out so everyone gets a superlative. Guess who's the gellest.
Fred! Fredfredfredfred! FREDDDDDDD! Ferrrrrrrrred!
Looks like they've got another fire. "Can everyone just stop getting shot?"
The tsunami from the 1960 Chilean earthquake (9.5 magnitude subduction zone quake) apparently reached 25 meters locally. In certain favorable places you will get isolated events that are much higher. For instance this place in Alaska in 1958 (from a rock slide caused by a quake) where in a small area it was hundreds of feet high (I liked this quote from a survivor, "The wave did not go up 1,800 feet, the water splashed there." Well OK then, no biggie!) Given the strike-slippiness, the main risk of a big tsunami on the California coast from a local quake would only be if it triggered a landslide (or an underwater one like the Storegga Slide), but don't know if there are any places where that is possible; clearly a less likely scenario in any event. Massive collapse of a Hawaiian volcano flank would be very bad, but very unlikely.
Fuck, I've started doing it now. Jeff Lewis just updated, referring to the point that the fire wasn't in the spent fuel after all, and therefore making it clear he must have been referring to the original fire, not some other fire. It's probably time to think about something else.
This is the timezone problem; if you're watching sources in two different news cycles, it's always possible that no.2 reads and reacts to something from no.1 you've already read, that's already out of date, but you get it as new news.
I don't get 730, but I would like to.
I just want to know when we're going to audit the Fred.
This is a classic paper worth reading (especially for people in the Pacific Northwest), "Surviving a Tsunami--Lessons from Chile, Hawaii, and Japan", based on the tsunamis from the 1960 Chile quake. One of the big things from Hilo (which is favorably situated for tsunamis in general but actually faces away from Chile) was don't be fooled by the water going out first (or after a small initial wave). Here are the "lessons":
# Many Will Survive the Earthquake
# Heed Natural Warnings
# Heed Official Warnings
# Expect Many Waves
# Head for High Ground and Stay There
# Abandon Belongings
# Don't Count on the Roads
# Go to an Upper Floor or Roof of a Building
# Climb a Tree
# Climb onto Something that Floats
# Expect the Waves to Leave Debris
# Expect Quakes to Lower Coastal Land
# Expect Company
my bike has 21 speeds
21 speeds? 21 speeds? You might as well get a Penny Farthing, hipster.
Seriously. Gellest?
This thread has become confusing.
That makes me sort of uncomfortable.
738: I was making a silly SMG joke.
An article about the fifty people left at the plant.
741: Ok. I have a weird blind spot where she's concerned. Just weird.
741: oh, I get it. Heehee. I actually thought it was a reference to Angel, or maybe Spike.
So really, the obsession with nuclear disasters over something much more destructive like a tsunami is about the permanence, right? With the proper resources you can begin rebuilding after a tsunami/earthquake/hurricane/tornado hours to weeks after it hits. There's something about the idea of poisoning a place for a time period longer than most people will be alive that really freaks you the fuck out.
That, and you can't see it, or smell it, or otherwise really know if it's poisoning you. Unless it's, like, really poisoning you, obviously. It's like a stealthy assassin who just might wait it out 20 years before killing you. You'd never know if you were safe. Also: can't do jack or shit about it.
For me, there's something about an engineering disaster that unfolds in slow motion and yet can't be stopped that's freaky as hell.
I think there's also something more disturbing about a catastrophe that humans created, as opposed to giant forces of nature that would operate whether we were here to see them or not.
From the link in 742:
The governor of Fukushima, Yuhei Sato, reportedly told Kan that residents are angry and about to reach breaking point. Tepco officials' vague answers at a morning press conference hit whatever confidence in the company remained.
Tepco has a history of covering up safety issues. In 2002, seventeen of its reactors were shut down and the firm's senior management resigned after it admitted hiding problems and obstructing inspections.
The Japanese nuclear industry says it has cleaned up its act in the wake of that and other scandals. The government at least appears to have learned some lessons. After the Tokaimura disaster of 1999, in which two people died and several hundred people were exposed to radiation, officials initially rejected offers of help from the IAEA.
This is exactly what I was worried about.
Luckily, Fred was in Angel rather than BTVS, so the comparison doesn't have to be made directly. But, no one stands up for Willow? Not even Vampire Willow? Plus, Anya.
I kind of suspect that a significant fraction of Whedonphilia is due to his choice of hot people to star in his shows. I mean, good shows, yes, but they're no The Wire or VM.
Gabrielle was hotter than Xena (at least early Gabrielle).
748: also the horrible irony that all of the reactors scrammed successfully three days ago. It's just the residual heat and fission byproducts that are causing problems.
On the correct thread now: a really depressing article about the workers who stayed at the plant.
I call shenanigans on 752, essear. First of all, Buffy was every bit as good as Veronica Mars (even forgetting for a moment the HUGE debt that VM owes BTVS). But second, and much more important, the idea that either of those shows should be mentioned in the same breath as The Wire is a little insane, no? (And that's without even mentioning the HUGE debt The Wire owes BTVS).
I call shenanigans on 752, essear.
Fair enough. I write stupid things when I'm bored and on trains.
(I kind of feel compelled to defend season 1 of VM as really superlative television, though, I think better than any of Buffy [though, as you say, indebted to it] and hard to compare to The Wire, not being Serious with a capital 'S', but pretty close to optimizing something, even if I can't put my finger on what.)
Another vote for Willow, especially vampire Willow. And a vote for BTVS over VM, at least what I saw of the latter (about one season). No Wire, sure, but that's not what it was trying for. Also, I'd like Herr Prof. Dr. Edelwaffel to explain what he means by The Wire's debt to Buffy.
Also, I'd like Herr Prof. Dr. Edelwaffel to explain what he means by The Wire's debt to Buffy.
I would say he was joking, but surely people with such German names do not joke.
Oh, I was wrong. Different article.
The Wire's debt to Buffy.
Twas but a joke, alas, a feeble joke.
21 speeds?
And only one derailleur!
And only one derailleur!
Made out of hemp, no doubt.
752: Not only does he cast hot women, he clearly has a specific type that he's attracted to (slim, athletic without being muscular, wearing a tight tanktop with thin straps). The fact that he's always casting people in leads who he's clearly attracted to has always struck me as a little creepy.
753 is so right.
All the workers have evacuated the plant, per CNN. What now?
760: Which season of VM? Season 3 is bad (well, more mediocre than actively bad, but it also retroactively poisons the rest of the show thereby making it actually bad).
768:Headline pwnd
Dr Murphy at FDL in detail about fuel rod problems
I wonder if the fuel rods, burning at 2200+ degrees, can burn through and drop down 4 stories to the reactors...etc. Very bad things.
What now? Bury them in foam? How big are they, what have we got, how can we deliver?
768 does sound really really bad. Basically everything melts and you hope that the containment basically holds. The really scary thing is that the pools of spent rods aren't in any containment at all.
Oh my God. People. Really.
BTVS was almost unique for its consistent ability to cast objectively visually appealing women who managed to be not attractive, Cordelia and Anya excepted. Seriously? Evil, veiny Willow? Ok, actually, I can get behind that during her less veiny moments. But basically, normal Willow and SMG: big turn offs. I mostly remember that show for being one of the only shows I loved without the corrupting influence of a massive crush on a main character.
And I have to say that the first season of VM was technically better than anything BTVS did. And yet. Somehow I'm still more emotionally attached to BTVS. Maybe it was the world building? Or the throws of adolescence?
I have a recommendation from a completely different genre: Bob's Burgers. God I love H Jon Benjamin.
Folks, I promise that the PtB will not let these fuckers burn very long, if they have to drop Hokkaido on them.
They will do something.
Guys, the actual text of that article says "The number of nuclear workers who remained on site has been slashed from 800 to 50." It's nothing new.
Buffy was way ahead of anything else on TV at the time in terms of depicting the struggles of adolescence, especially the struggles of adolescent grwomyns (even if you looked back to White Shadow, the teenage characters were largely passive and grwomyns didn't figure in the story arc at all). By the time VM rolled around, TV had become something entirely different and better, so even if VM was actually the better show, compared side to side I mean, it still wasn't as good. And that's how historians craft a spurious argument, people.
This is the link, following the breaking news about evacuation from the main site. CNN just seems really behind.
Yeah, NHK is replaying the press conference from which that news alert was taken and it sounded like the cabinet secretary was saying that workers were just evacuated from the main gate, whatever that means, not that everyone's gone. It sounds like the guys with the firehoses are still there.
What the hell is a growomyn? It sounds like something that I either should have contracted or picketed with in college.
But basically, normal Willow and SMG: big turn offs.
This is a very strange sentence.
776: yes, but that might be out of date. It's not very clear.
781: I couldn't decide between adolescent girls or women, so I mashed 'em up and added the y. Because I'm a feminist.
It sounds like the guys with the firehoses are still there.
So this should have said "Good luck in Japan"?
What the hell is a growomyn?
It's when you don't have sideburns, so you go a few days without shaving so you can growomyn.
slim, athletic without being muscular, wearing a tight tanktop with thin straps
That plus dark hair, generic worn jeans, and little or no make up pretty much describes my personal ideal, so now I'm wondering how much of my enjoyment of Buffy stems from happy if subconscious ogling. Though SMG herself, meh - blonde and too much make up.
783: It's the story that their headline links to. If they only updated the headline and not the text, that's...really stupid. I think it's more likely a careless headline.
That said, now the container of reactor 3 is damaged, per Kyodo? I hadn't checked up in a while. This is like whack-a-mole, only awful.
789: But wait, there's more! Now reactor no. 5 is losing coolant.
I couldn't decide between adolescent girls or women, so I mashed 'em up and added the y. Because I'm a feministDr. Femenstein?
Seriously, it sounds like you created a hideously well intentioned monster.
789.1: I've seen information to the effect that the headline is effect elsewhere. To sum up: I know nothing.
a hideously well intentioned monster
This describes most adolescent girls pretty well, doesn't it?
This is like whack-a-mole, only awful.
New mouseover text?
To sum up: I know nothing.
Me too!
Also: everyone else. Sad.
Apparently white smoke is pouring out of reactor no. 3. So on the plus side, the Japanese have elected a new pope.
That plus dark hair, generic worn jeans, and little or no make up pretty much describes my personal ogged's ideal, so now I'm wondering how much of my enjoyment of Buffy unfogged stems from happy if subconscious both time-shifted and vicarious oggling.
790: Without intervention all the cooling tanks will eventually boil off, the zircaloy will catch fire burn very hot and spew highly radioactive smoke. It's a very bad scene. On the other hand, the heat they produce is much smaller than the heat produced in the actual reactor cores at the moment, so it should be easier to keep them covered in water. However, they seem to be hard to actually access.
793: Touche, sir.
794: Sigh. This is the last time I embarrass myself. Can someone please explain the origin of the mouseover text to me? Is there one?
I mostly remember that show for being one of the only shows I loved without the corrupting influence of a massive crush on a main character.
This is a very strange sentence.
789.1: I've watched a lot of breaking news get reported on the internet in my day. It's not that unusual for headlines to get updated and stories to get updated a bit later. The body takes longer to write than the headline. But in this case, it really just seems unclear what's going on, at least from my watching of NHK.
I have thoroughly confused Eggplant!
FDL comment
From AP, in article noting the withdrawal of all workers from the plant.
"The level of radiation at the plant surged to 1,000 millisieverts early Wednesday before coming down to 800-600 millisieverts. Still, that was far more than the average."
Even if you are willing to die, I don't think even in a suit you can work in 600-800 milli-S. You get sick too fast.
I have thoroughly confused Eggplant!
This is a very strange sentence.
771 Not sure, she was a freshman in college. It wasn't horrible, just sort of 'what's the appeal'. A pretty generic TV drama.
All from FDL comments
"From everything I've ever read about Chernobyl one thing that remained with me is this: you cannot extinguish nuclear fire with water. Can't be done. The water burns off and becomes steam. At Chernobyl they dropped sand on the exposed reactor core and surrounding burning graphite in order to stop the emission of radioactive gases into the atmosphere."
And all the pilots at Chernobyl died. And you are not gonna drop sand from 10000 feet.
So, it seems increasingly clear that we're looking at full meltdowns in reactors one through three and fires in the spent fuel ponds for all six reactors, yeah? I've held off from saying that until now, but yeah? How else is this really going to go?
806: That's season 3. You saw a pale, sick shadow of the show you should have seen.
Ah, my comment got eaten.
Apparently this kind of failure from an external event was predicted 20 years ago in a US report. So. That's good.
Judging by the Chernobyl figures you can live quite some time after working in radiation that's orders of magnitude worse than what you're talking about. That is, you may well be dead within weeks and you're chances of being alive in ten years are low, but you're not dropping on the spot.
/Faceplant
And yeah. What Sifu said. What the hell does that mean.
I much prefer thinking about my old Willow crush than the workers desperately trying to prevent meltdown while their chromosomes are shredded.
This still won't get as bad as Chernobyl, will it? I'm not sure I understand any of this. But it seems like, since everything in Japan is happening in extreme slow motion compared to what happened at Chernobyl, and the design isn't as massively fucked up as the Soviet design, even with meltdowns in all the reactors we shouldn't expect as much radiation to get into the atmosphere as happened there. Is that too optimistic?
809: Sounds that way. Time to see what the forecast says about the wind direction.
What the hell does that mean.
FDL comment:
"This could be a calculated plan to withdraw now and let the strongest blasts occur while there is a forecast of steady wind blowing to the east for the next three days. Although, long-term picture still looks mind-boggling."
Blowing to the east.
Can someone please explain the origin of the mouseover text to me?
At our semi-secret weekly meetings at the Mineshaft, we have a tradition of holding a mouse (don't worry, it's very well cared for and never gets hurt) over regular commenter text's head, all while chanting the name of the mouse. When you see people advocating for a new mouse over text, they're making suggestions for new mouse names.
815: what does that even mean? There won't be an uncontrolled radioactive plume spewing up to 30,000 feet for two months?
That's definitely good.
There won't be, what, 140k deaths long term? Also good!
But what does that mean?
797 Yeah, I know. But not even a smart, hot, slim, dark haired tank top and jeans wearing woman could get me to want to move out to the middle of nowhere.
815:I heard Chernobyl kinda exploded and dispersed much of the core before the fire. And this could be worse...maybe 6 times worse. But I know nothing.
Further to 818: Alternatively, you could hover over the picture of a tree on the front page and behold.
I honestly haven't seen any discussion about what we do to prevent it raining on California agriculture. Or what China might do to prevent it fucking them up. Is that even possible?*
*We have already established H bombs will not do the trick.
Time to see what the forecast says about the wind direction.
No lie, we had a serious conversation this morning about when we should begin to think about starting the drive across the country -- to stay with Tweety and Blume, of course -- in case things get really bad and the wind is blowing this way. It was a surpassingly surreal moment in a marriage that hasn't lacked for surreal moments.
IANANE but my understanding is that what made Chernobyl so fucking horrible is that the whole goddamn thing blew up while in full operating mode. That is, it's precisely the fact that so much radioactive material got blown into the atmosphere that made it bad. Also, thinking about why we tend to react so badly to nuclear risks vs. coal or oil ones, part of it might be the plane crash vs. car crash thing. When nuclear power goes bad, it's one hell of a disaster, much worse than a bad coal related one. On the other hand, standard properly operating nukes are quite safe while coal just slowly fucks everything up, but that's just background noise that we don't notice on a gut level.
Msnbc reporting the 50 workers have been sent back in after radiation levels dropped.
to stay with Tweety and Blume, of course
Dude, I'm definitely anti-intercontinental nuclear disaster, but that would be awesome!
That means one bed for Von Wafer's family, one for the entire rest of the west coast commentariat.
827: you're very kind.
829: but, but, but...how will I choose which of my bikes to leave behind?
836: well, okay, point taken. But Chernobyl was one reactor, right, as opposed to I guess three or four plus six spent-fuel pools? What's that mean?
Heh. I am just this minute for the first time considering what it would mean to get radioactive fallout on the biggest snowpack we've had since 2006. Can radiation live on in water? Would we have to flush this year's melt from the system? We have the ability, but that'd be an ironic end to our drought-breaking winter.
And, fuck. I'd have to go back to work on the drought team.
Can radiation live on in water?
Gee, why didn't they think of putting water on it?
Sorry. But, um, what are you asking?
So there is, essentially, nothing to be done? Really? There aren't, like, special lead lined flying machines that only carry tons of concrete or sand or cement or whatever, and exist solely to entomb malfunctioning nuclear plants from above? We don't have a fleet of those? Why don't we have a fleet of those?
one for the entire rest of the west coast commentariat
BTW, I snore. Go sleep with Wafer.
833: My decidedly non-expert impression is that you have to worry more about environmental radiation getting concentrated as it goes up the food chain.
834: I meant, if we have to run for the hills, how will I choose which of my bikes to leave behind? Eh, forget it. Now that I know that Megan might have to be on the drought team, my suffering is in perspective.
Implications for this side of the Pacific are being discussed up and down the coast. I wish I could say that what I've heard from eggheads on the news was reassuring, but basically I'm convinced that no one really knows what's going on at this point.
839: okay, one, you ride for the hills, and two, you put family members on bikes and just let them go; the bikes know the way.
I retire to bed to re-read Christa Wolf's Accident.
It was a surpassingly surreal moment in a marriage that hasn't lacked for surreal moments.
Von Wafer and his wife routinely come across melting pocket watches.
Do I need an ignorance disclaimer in all my comments or can I trust my comment history to communicate that?
My question is whether this glorious, generous snowpack that we have for the first time in years is about to get an inch-thick layer of radiated snow that would then join the rest of the spring run-off in our reservoirs.
You can consider me the canary, Megan. If I leave town, you're back on the drought team.
839: Appreciate my misery, dude. That was one seriously dysfunctional working team.
I'll keep your bikes for you while you're away. I mean, if you want.
Thanks, but I'm building them a lead-lined fallout shelter now.
Careful, Megan: Von Wafer is known to keep his travel secret.
Outlook hazy. Try again later.
How 'bout now?
My impression was that clouds of smoke disperse relatively quickly and are unlikely to travel all the way across the pacific in large amounts. Compare with Chernobyl or atomic bomb testing. Both had long term significant damage locally, but neither did things like ruin the water supply over 4 thousand miles away.
842 I haven't read that one but I loved Kindheitsmuster.
either did things like ruin the water supply over 4 thousand miles away
That's what they want us to believe, man.
Well, yeah, for it to get here it has to get up into the jet stream, which I've been hearing is unlikely (but which is hard to look up because the Intertubes are clogged with hysteria). Of course, we could help that along by dropping a bomb on it.
I'm going to buy shares in optimism, since it seems undervalued right now. (My real view is that no one except for experts on site -- and especially not the reporters -- has the foggiest clue what's going on, and I certainly don't.)
Just to be more of a dick, I'm not a big Buffy fan, but I feel that finding Willow to be the hottest is basically lame pro-nerd nice-guy ism taken to a ludicrous extreme. Strap on a pair and admit that both Charisma Carpenter and SMG herself are way hotter.
Even with the jet stream (and I'm not sure what scenario you're imagining that ends up shooting stuff up that high), how is it going to be worse than all the nuclear bomb tests we did for decades?
Maybe not water supply but eating mushrooms in central Europe was not a good idea in Central Europe at the time. Some of my family did anyways, figuring that as they were already living in Upper Silesia, how much worse could it be. A couple years later after the end of communism, the Peace Corps quickly shut down its new program there since apparently the conditions warranted an immediate full evacuation according to US environmental law. I just remember that immediate 'I just chain smoked some Gauloises' feeling as you walked out of the train station among the fresh falling grey snow and the black stains on my hand whenever I wiped my nose.
how is it going to be worse than all the nuclear bomb tests we did for decades?
"Because bob said so" does sound like a hollow answer, I have to admit. And yet...
Strap on a pair and admit that both Charisma Carpenter and SMG herself are way hotter.
Carpenter looks like a plastic Barbie doll and Gellar is blonde. Willow on the other hand is your classic case of super hot actress playing a supposedly unattractive nerd.
and I'm not sure what scenario you're imagining that ends up shooting stuff up that high
That's just it, I can't imagine any such scenario. But the news folks seem to elide over that little detail.
You know what else is depressing? That Emma Caulfield (Anya) didn't get more work after BTVS.
CA snow will be fine even if the stored rods burn; most harmful isotopes are short lived and will decay before reaching Hawaii. Any remainder will be attenuated by a factor of 10k due to dissipation.
Kiev is about 1500 km from the PL-DE border; Sendai-CA is 5x farther, more time for effective mixing and a larger radius.
Sad that drone aircraft for assassination have attracted so much attention compared to drone aircraft capable of anything useful.
Central Europe to Chernobyl is around a tenth of the distance from Japan to California. People in Korea might need to stay away from mushrooms, but North America?
Ouch, so pwned.
Speaking of robots, I'm kind of disappointed that Japan of all places doesn't have robots that can be put to work in the reactors. When I think about it I'm not really surprised, but I kind of imagine Japan as the mythical robot future.
865: Totally. Like, duh, send in the robot armies. We know you have them.
After you send in the Tokyo Electric and GE execs, that is.
It was a surpassingly surreal moment in a marriage that hasn't lacked for surreal moments.
So what kind of porn were you looking at during the Clinton administration?
867: I like to imagine the trials will be like their game shows: needlessly cruel and entertaining. In fact! Oh, so perfect! Remember that whack-a-mole Japanese game show clip, where pretty women had (removable) circular pieces of a table tied to their heads, and pieces of raw chicken put on top of that, and then they put a giant lizard thing in the middle of the table, and the women would have to pop their heads up? We can work with that.
There won't be, what, 140k deaths long term?
Where did you get that figure? Greenpeace claims 200K excess deaths, but every other estimate I've heard has been way way way lower.
Ok. I am leaving you west coasties to it. Don't get radiation poisoning.
The NYTimes is claiming that there's still a small group of people working onsite, and that the reports to the contrary were based on a mistranslation of a press release. Good thing some news organizations have someone who can read Japanese, now if only they also had people who knew science too...
667
According to this most of the losses are uninsured which means banks are more at risk than insurance companies.
Reuters is reporting that everyone was ordered out of the plant for about an hour but that radiation levels have dropped enough for people to return.
Also, the whole BTVS is kind of bizarre. Of course people have their own particular tastes, but by pretty much all measures except those applied to television stars (and supporting casts on popular shows) pretty all of the women on BTVS were above some generic threshold of hotness. I've started watching a bit of comedy tv after years of not watching much but Simpsons reruns and The Wire, and it's kind of shocking how far out of everyday reality the appearance standards are on network tv. Not that it's not visually appealing that way.
865 Speaking of robots, I'm kind of disappointed that Japan of all places doesn't have robots that can be put to work in the reactors. When I think about it I'm not really surprised, but I kind of imagine Japan as the mythical robot future.
They've probably been busy with more important things, like perfecting sex robots.
That plus dark hair, generic worn jeans, and little or no make up pretty much describes the anglosphere's stereotype for every woman in Poland under 30. So what are you doing in America?
Well, at least the luxury sector of the economy is OK...
Prices for private jets have leapt up as thousands of people trying to get out of Japan put in orders, Reuters reports. "I got a request yesterday to fly 14 people from Tokyo to Hong Kong, 5 hour 5 minutes trip. They did not care about price," Reuters quotes Jackie Wu of Hong Kong Jet as saying.
They're leaving because they're so essential.
I hope people realise that the fire, which turned out not to be in the spent fuel at all, was already out by the time I last posted? In fact, it had already been out for many hours then. That Guardian piece, which mentions that the fire was out, is from 1839GMT yesterday. The IAEA was informed it was out at 0200GMT yesterday - eighteen and a half hours earlier.
Also, the Chernobyl fire was hard to put out because the stuff that was burning was graphite (carbon) - they used it as a moderator. I'd point and laugh at the Russians if it wasn't for the fact we pulled the same daft trick in the 1950s at Windscale/Sellafield, although they eventually managed to put it out. So you had a mahoosive steam explosion, ripping open the running, fully critical reactor, and then a fuck-off big fire, which did the work of scattering bits of nuclear fuel all over the place. It wasn't actually the fuel that was on fire - it was the graphite, and the heat from the graphite fire (and the residual decay heat, of course) did the damage.
Now, according to the IAEA, there was a second fire last night, for half an hour, in the reactor building of unit four:
Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that a fire in the reactor building of unit 4 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was visually observed at 20:45 UTC of 15 March. As of 21:15 UTC of the same day, the fire could no longer be observed.
Apparently the site was evacuated *again* this morning. From the Grauniad, some actual radiation numbers, which may even be real ones as they are given in millisieverts per hour:
4.13am: More bad news: Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said the radiation level at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant reached 10 millisievert per hour at one point on Wednesday morning, possibly due to the damage at its No 2 reactor the day before, the government's nuclear safety agency said.
The maximum level was measured at the plant's front gate at 10:40am. It fell to 6.4 millisievert at 10:45am and to 2.3 millisievert at 10:54am but rose again to about 3.4 millisievert at 11am according to Kyodo
It looks like the situation at No.2 is still pretty bad, and they're worrying about the spent fuel pond. Given that they're giving water temperatures for it, it clearly isn't on fire, but the water level has fallen enough in one of them that you can't approach it. Clear explanation here: Spent fuel rods are strongly radioactive and the water above them shields against that radiation so as long as the water level is sufficiently high - you can walk up to the edge of the pool and pour a bucket of water in. Once it is even close to the top of the rods the levels are too high to approach the pool, which is clearly what has happened in unit 4.
This Guardian story is badly confused - they certainly aren't going to drop boric acid on No.4 to "cool the core" or "slow down the nuclear reaction" because it doesn't have anything *in* the core. It does however quote that 70% of the rods in no.1 and 33% of those in no.2 have been damaged.
Details on this morning's fire: The company said at a press conference that the fire was confirmed at 5:45 AM on Wednesday. It says the northwestern corner of the 4th floor, which was on fire on Tuesday, has caught fire again. This is where the pump used to put water into the reactor is located.
Also, get your Japanese fuel cycle accounts here, including exactly how much spent fuel is stored there! The answer is "about a year's".
878: really? Aren't Poles stereotypically blonde?
I apologise for lowering the intellectual tone by posting 886 after four successive Yorkshire Rants about nuclear engineering.
I am a bit unclear why water levels in reactor 5 are now dropping - it's been offline since January, surely it's not still producing residual heat?
Even with the jet stream (and I'm not sure what scenario you're imagining that ends up shooting stuff up that high), how is it going to be worse than all the nuclear bomb tests we did for decades?
There's a lot more material around. Fallout, right, is either bits of bomb material or bits of earth made radioactive by the bomb. It gets whisked up into the air by the rising fireball and drops down later. That's why groundbursts are so much worse than airbursts for fallout: they draw up more stuff which becomes fallout. If you hit a nuclear power station, then you have a vast amount of radioactive material - more than any groundburst would normally create - which all gets scattered around.
I'm not at all sure about 5 & 6 either - do they mean cooling ponds? Apparently they're going to use the police water cannon to fill them up from a safe distance.
And the French are now freaking out, which worries me.
TEPCO has started issuing press releases again, having gone all silent for most of yesterday: summary. The second fire was apparently discovered by someone moving a battery, and was confirmed to be out.
889. Sarkozy as quoted on the Beeb feed doesn't sound as if he's freaking out, he sounds like a man covering his arse in a calm and controlled manner. Do you have better info?
The way this is going we have exactly 24 hours left before the disaster becomes major. Where's Kiefer when we need him. I'm sure we can drop him from 10.000 feet.
(@708: fair enough, me neither but I did seem to win the sympathy vote ;-)
The NYT has a satellite photo taken this morning (9:35, GMT?).
re: 893
That photo suggests more extensive damage than the company seem to have been indicating. Going by the diagrams in the newspaper of the structure of the reactor buildings, the one on the right is as described, but the central reactor building seems much more badly damaged than just the upper structure over the containment vessel and spent fuel storage tank being damaged.
Then again, what I know about nuclear reactor building engineering could be written on the back of a stamp. So who knows?
894 was my thought, in all of its particulars. To my untrained eye, the buildings surrounding reactors three and four look basically destroyed.
I think from left right the photo shows reactors 4, 3, 2 & 1. If that's correct, then no. 3 looks to be in a bad way, I agree. No. 4 (the one that's supposed to have the problem fuel store) also looks much more badly damaged than the descriptions suggested.
The helicopters plan is clearly desperate, and it's hard to see how it could be sustained at any meaningful rate. I'm not surprised that the Japanese military has found that it's too windy to fly: it looks like a ineffectual suicide mission, or a mission that could easily degenerate into such. The water cannon plan is only slightly less desperate, in my view.
The problem seems to be that there's a continuing high probability of explosion, fire and radiation release, since there's a continuing mechanism for each of those things (the presence of water and exposed fuel). Each explosion / fire / radiation release makes the effective delivery of cooling water more difficult. And so you inevitably get to a point at which the plant is abandoned, all the water boils dry, and the nastiness that emerges (hopefully contained to some degree) is accepted and dealt with.
I'm sure we can drop him from 10.000 feet.
An attractive option regardless of the situation. I'll pack his chute.
They're having problems keeping the cores/pools covered in seawater? They could sure use something like a big wave from the ocean that would submerge them.
They could sure use something like a big wave from the ocean that would submerge them.
Did you look at photo 17 in the link at 893?
The Emperor spoke to the nation. Wow.
I do wish they had adapted that understated line from his father's speech: the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage
But then again, I have a warped sense of humor.
TEPCO came out with something like 'the cooling situation at one of our plants is not as planned' a few days ago. I think it might be a grammar / sentence order thing.
893, 896: I think from left right the photo shows reactors 4, 3, 2 & 1.
Yes, and that picture can be compared with #28 in that slide show from Monday (basically oriented the other way around) when 4 was OK.
I've started watching a bit of comedy tv after years of not watching much but Simpsons reruns and The Wire, and it's kind of shocking how far out of everyday reality the appearance standards are on network tv.
I believe it was Andrew Sarris who said "I don't think it's very wise to inflict unattractive people on audiences for long periods of time."
As for Fluffy the Umpire Mayor, I think it was Tom Servo who said, of some '50s women's-wrestling-themed exploitation movie, "Sir, we salute your courage in committing your fantasies to the screen."
@898: keep the chute!
Didn't say where I'd pack it, now, did I?
I'm sure we can drop him from 10.000 feet.
Couldn't we just load Charlie Sheen with a bunch of water and let him deploy his ordnance to the ground?
"Sir, we salute your courage in committing your fantasies to the screen."
That's what screens are for.
Couldn't we just load Charlie Sheen with a bunch of water and let him deploy his ordnance to the ground?
Can't. He's full of tiger blood.
I'm sure charlie would talk all of the 6 bitches down in no time. Without a suit!
Great act, what do you call yourselves?
The Nuclear Energy Industry.
