Earthquake in Japan

[degrub]

last i heard. there are.

[Dr Mordrid]

There's a small army of Russians, Americans and IIRC Europeans there providing expertise, pumping gear robots etc. I thinf a lot of those from the US are from the area carrier task forces, including ships that can provide continuous desalinated/filtered fresh water to a small city.

[Brian Ellis]

Two points:
Help for dealing with the nuke problems
Much more important: help for the homeless

I heard yesterday there was a third death at Fukushima. Like the first two, I assume it is not radiation related. Of course, this is nothing compared to the 28,000 earthquake/tsunami-related deaths. Where is our sense of proportion?

[Evildead666]

The sense of proportion I think comes from the Tsunami being over, and not threatening.
Its happened before, and will happen again.
Japan is very good and rapid at recovering from this type of problem.
Thousands of homeless, a container ship could probably take enough prefab buildings for everyone to get out of the gymnasiums, and into private temporary shelter.

The Nuclear plant on the other hand, isn't over, and is continuing to threaten the area and the Pacific.
The information bits are few and far between, as if an almost media blackout has been put in place to keep it low on peoples radar. We don't want nuclear power to have a tarnished name now, do we ?

It also doesn't help that there are credibility problems about Japanese food, due to the lack of information, traceability and just general confidence. Thats hurting them economically, which is hurting their rebuilding process.

What about the people who work and live in the 50-60km zone, where you can't stay outside for too long or you get too high a dose of radiation ? Otherwise, why would the Gov't be removing the topsoil ? Fertilization purposes ?

This is a poster-child for what happens when a serious nuclear accident happens.
It shows exactly what before/after measures are in place to solve potential problems.
Two months on and we haven't really advanced much at all.
But, the official stance, is "everything is OK and under control " "Nothing to see here".

[VJ]

Strange... Now there are reports that the cooling system failed before the tsunami hit:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/05/megaquake-took-out-fukushimas.html

Before it was stated that all failsafe measures worked...

[Evildead666]

From what I've read, the workers stopped the cooling for three hours after the tsunami, because the pressure dropped from 75MPa to 45MPa and they feared the reactor could be damaged.
They are investigating exactly what happened, and whether another decision could have been better.

Also, the plant having dropped a 30cm down, has been clarified a bit more, and its the whole of the coastline that has dropped up to 50cm, and stretched east out into the sea by up to 2.5m.
They say that there have been some landslides at certain areas along the coast due to this shift.

[Evildead666]

Three month anniversary is coming up, and how are we doing ?

Here's a blog which is quite interesting.

http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/

[Brian Ellis]

Three month anniversary is coming up, and how are we doing ?

Here's a blog which is quite interesting.
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/

Meaningless blog, just unqualified numbers.

Not looking too good, just now, though but we are still lacking substantiated FACTS.

Here is a thought for you: according to the IAEA, one of the least stable reactors today is close to Karachi and it is also close to a fault line. There are an estimated 9 million persons living in the 30 km radius. Alternatively, there is one near Taipei with a 6 million population within 30 km. Either of these makes the 150,000 evacuated in Japan look like nothing.

[Evildead666]

...
Not looking too good, just now, though but we are still lacking substantiated FACTS.
...

So, we just sit and wait while a load of people from the Atomic Industry congratulate Japan on a job well done ?

Maybe in another couple of months we can be informed of approximately how much has leaked into the air and sea, and hopefully, what has leaked as well.

[Brian Ellis]

I'm not sure that we'll ever learn the unvarnished truth

[Evildead666]

The only good thing I've heard coming from it all is that the ocean currents are being monitored with unprecedented detail due to the radiation flow, and their ability to detect it and follow its path.

The sad part of this is that at some point the initial radiation leak will catch up with whats currently leaking, and it'll become a bit of a mess after that.

We'll learn the truth by what the aftermath will be.
They'll have to leave a whole section uninhabitable for a good few years. Look at Chernobyl as an example, and some areas are still not any where near inhabitable. So being nice, thats a good 25 years + that they are going to have to leave to 'fallow'.
They have this idea that planting Rape seed and sunflowers will magically clean the land of its ills. What they're not saying is what they are going to do with the rapeseed and the sunflowers.
Bio-Diesel anyone ? Of course its safe once its burnt. No problem there. Or incineration. Thats 100% safe.

We may never know, but we'll have to live with it anyway.
Japan will try and have some sort of economy once this is sorted out. Not before. I'm sorry for all the nice Japanese people who are having to live through this. Especially those poor sods who are still living in cardboard cities in gymnasiums, and are having a hard time getting enough supplies of food and drinking water. Nearly three months later.
They'd probably all like some Radiation detectors and meters too.

[Evildead666]

A Couple of videos showing Professor Tatsuhiko Kadama from Tokyo University. His speciality is in Radiological substances and their effects.

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlf4gOvzxYc&feature=player_embedded

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDlEOmcALwQ&feature=player_embedded

you'll have to click on the "cc" button to get the english subs.

edit : And here's an earlier video from Arnie Gundersen, of Fairewinds on the radioactive Rice Hay :

http://vimeo.com/26651670

http://www.fairewinds.com/

[Brian Ellis]

Interesting. I had a look at his publications on PubMed: I found exactly 1,928 of them, covering all aspects of medical research. I tried to narrow it down to where his name was early in the list (better chance of being involved in the actual research and not just a referee) and found a few reviews that he had signed solo. I admit that many of the titles were above my head and, unfortunately, were published in Japanese (my vocabulary of which is confined to perhaps 25-50 words). Very few were involved with radiation and those that appeared more often dealt with radiotherapy, a different kettle of fish.

He is obviously a very prominent member of the faculty and is head of the radioisotope treatment centre. Are his major academic qualifications sufficient to justify this angry tirade where he likens Fukushima, with no radiation deaths, to 20 Hiroshima bombs which would result in millions of deaths, or is this hyperbole? He obviously feels strongly, but has emotion overcome scientific fact? I don't know. Unfortunately, I have not come across a paper on the subject, which might be more easily evaluated than an oral presentation with political content.

In fact, I could not help a mental comparison of what he said and how he said it with the events leading up to and after the 11 July catastrophe on this island and the presentations made by numerous experts and politicians. This, of course, also took out a major power station.

[Evildead666]

Brian, he equates the radiation aftermath to that of 20 Hiroshima's.
One Nuclear blast gives off a lot of instantaneous, highly ionizing, radiation, but this has been a continual release, with much further reaching radiation deposits on the ground.
This is what he is comparing it to.
He's also very pissed at the fact that Japanese children/people have the same radiation level limit as the rest of the world has for their Nuclear Power Plant workers.

If you are interested, go to the Ex-skf blog I linked up in post 142, (which you immediately dismissed as just a bunch of numbers).
That's where this info comes from, and got translated by a third party, after the author of the blog gave his translation of the video. Its amazing how much info doesn't get outside of Japan, or even local prefectures.
You can take it all with some salt I suppose, but some info is better than none, and we all know that the Japanese Govt and Tepco have been telling nothing but the truth since day 1.

[Brian Ellis]

Yes, I agree that accurate information has not been forthcoming and is still not. I also admit that I have great difficulty in getting my head round ionising radiation units, because they are temporally variable. For example, a given number of microsieverts spread over a year may cause no long-term effects, yet the same dose in a few moments may cause radiation sickness. As I understand it, radiation will affect DNA only at the moment when a molecule is splitting, that is to say when part of it consists of two single spirals rather than the famous double helix. Such splitting takes place all the time, even in old geezers like me. I look on this as meaning the low dosage, long-term radiation does not reach a threshold which causes the DNA to mutate. The microsieverts and becquerels do not, in my light, really form units which are meaningful, because it is impossible to average them. Perhaps I am expressing myself badly but this is a very complex subject and my knowledge of it is very poor (as you may have guessed!). At the best, I can see only a nonlinearity in the expressions.

Perhaps what upset me most while viewing the two video clips was the fact that The Professor was very obviously emotionally involved in his subject, something which is rather uncharacteristic of the Japanese in particular and scientists in general (at least when dealing with science).