Japan Quake

[vRStu]

Yep, seems they've had another explosion.

[RedRobin]

^^^^
Oh no!

Too late for this one but why build a nuclear plant near the coast of a country which has a long history of earthquakes and even tsunami's?



^ Famous woodblock print of circa 1830.

[Janner_Sy]

i think thats a valid point RR.  We mentioned this in work today.  Why not another 5 miles inland?  they did have a break water installed across the sea front but thats no use with that mass of water coming in land.

ref the plant their back up systems were allegedly meticulously designed and accepted as being fully up to the job hence why they were aloud to install the plants.  The generators which stopped working after the tsunamis worked as expected as they were protected from the Tsunami.  however they forgot to protect the Generator fuel tanks which were washed away.

small error with drastic consequences.

[Top Cat]

It does make one wonder, but they build them on the coast in most countries my guess is to limit it being near the centre of populated  areas. I find it strange that all the reactors are suffering different faults. Surely this points to fundemental problems that were there only triggered by the wave. 

[cmdrfire]

The reactors survived the earthquake rather well. But it was the tsunami that caused the trouble, flooding the six backups generators which is what (I understand) led to the resultant coolant failure (or the generator fuel tanks as you say Sy).

I don't think anyone expected a catastrophe of this magnitude. I understand that previous studies conducted (admittedly by the nuclear company TEPCO) determined that the maximum magnitude of an earthquake along those three faultlines was going to be 7.9. As it's a logarithmic scale an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 is orders of magnitude more powerful than the earlier estimation. Presumably no one expected a tsunami of such proportions as well.

[Janner_Sy]

Radiation levels surrounding hte plant are now 4 times that of earlier this morning.  They also believe one of the reactors has damage to the bottom of one of the reactors. 

The fuel tank issue was mentioned by some atomic Scientist who has worked at the plant who did an interview on the news earlier today.

[joesgti]

I live next vertually next door to two nuclear powerstation, hope we dont have any earthquakes 

Heysham 1 and 2 

[182_blue]

I live next vertually next door to two nuclear powerstation, hope we dont have any earthquakes 

Heysham 1 and 2 

I must admit that the first thing i did was check the location of all the nuclear power stations in the UK !

[Hedge]

I live next vertually next door to two nuclear powerstation, hope we dont have any earthquakes 

Heysham 1 and 2 

Aha. Slowly the picture becomes complete. 

[GTIjames]

luckily we dont have any major fault lines near us, its the californians that need to be on the cautious side their coastline runs along the 'ring of the fire' like japan and they also have two nuclear power stations slap bang on the coast - which can apparently withstand an earthquake of 7.7 magnitude, not enough to survive what happened last friday..  might reconsider my holiday plans for this summer

[Hedge]

People who have lived in england or other developed countries take things for granted.....England would be up there with the best, you guys are going on as if we are a third world country 

Not at all. I have lived in both China and Pakistan so do understand a bit about other cultures.

Ours is not a third world country by any means just becoming 3rd rate thanks to nanny state, politically correct nonsense. Bring all our troops back home and repel the boarders to our own country before we go picking fights in far off countries. 

[JPC]

with regards to Radiation levels, as of today, i dont think there is much to worry about at the moment.

everyones saying its "10 times normal". Well, yes it might be but quantify normal and dangerous. No one one the news knows, theyre just scare mongering.

We are taking of levels of radiation being at around 0.9 sieverts per hour (highest recorded so far away from power plant)

To put that into perspective, you would receive about 50 microsieverts when having a chest xray. I would take a years worth of exposure to 100 microsieverts to cause cancer, 6000 microsieverts would probably kill you in a matter of weeks.

At the Nuclear power station...the levels are about 40 microsieverts.

Whilst im not saying the situation (at the moment) isnt a bad one, of course it is, its not as drastic as the world wants you to thing

[cmdrfire]

From BBC:
"...radiation dosages of up to 400 millisieverts per hour were recorded at the site."

[JPC]

holy moly. a lot has changed since i was catching up at 10AM!

I heard there was a very short spike this morning, and has not settled down. do you know if this is the "spike" or more recent developments?

[cmdrfire]

I think it was a transient but now they're worried that the containment in reactor no. 2 has failed 
30km exclusion zone now.