Anyway, prayers and best wishes to Japan.
On nuclear reactors: I bet Japan will restart them soon. Give them a month, max 3. For the fcks sake, they still hunt whales. IMHO Japan is one of those countries that still don't give a damn about loud-screamos. Although they'll upgrade their plants to prevent failure like this one. Kudos to them.
And patio11 is talking bullshit as well: the situation at Fukushiuma may not be a Apocalyptic Nightmare Scenarios yet, but the systems did not work "exactly as designed", the situation it's not under control, and may still turn into a ANS if containment fails and the wind turns towards Tokyo (which is forecast to happen around Tuesday). Flooding the building with sea water is a desparate measure, not SOP.
The reactors I knew (I assume it's similar in Japan) each had a LOT of options for cooling them. Some options would allow regular operation (which requires very fine control of cooling), some options would harmlessly shut a reactor down (where "harmlessly" means without causing any damage to the reactor). The filling-with-sea-water option was "standard operating procedure" in the sense that it was in the manual as a standard procedure, but it's the kind of thing you only get to do once because after you've done it your reactor is permanently broken and won't be restarted.
I like a lot the comparison of nuclear energy with airplane safety: when you look at the statistics, it's a lot safer. But when it fails, it makes the headlines.
I'd be very interested to learn what those specs actually said. If it really was a Richter scale value, it would logically have to be at point blank, which this quake wasn't. If so, the energy that hit the reactors may well have been considerably less than what they were designed for,
Flooding the building with sea water is not something they came up with on the spur of the moment during this crisis. All of their options are well planned.
More info: https://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-w...
Nuclear engineering is imagining the worst case, every reload, and coming up with a plan for what to do to contain radioactive material if it happens.
patio basically says everything is under control, nothing to worry about, no harmful radiation levels - not more than eating a banana or taking a long distance flight.
The media is talking about meltdown, nuclear catastrophe and there have been at least two explosions by now. US forces moved away from the shores due to radiation, Russia is worried about the wind carrying radioactive caesium and iod all the way over to them. As far as I can tell from news coverage, radiation levels did exceed 500 mikro-sievert, at times were as high as 1500.
It is just hard to understand what all this really means in terms of risk and how bad the situation really is. Meltdown and explosions at a nuclear plant just generally does not sound very safe and "standard procedure" to me.
Anyone can shed some light on what is going on there, from a technical and engineering and maybe even physicist point of view?
Still, several thousand people died in the third biggest economic power in the world, that’s obviously going to get a lot of coverage and moms are going to call because that’s how moms are.
[0] Approximate quote from one report I saw: “There’s no student who doesn’t get to take a ride on the earthquake simulator, no kindergartner who doesn’t learn how high tsunami waves can become.”
I haven't seen single article in local media saying how well Japanese survived the earthquake/tsunami. It's more about how shitty situation (usually with ever-rising dead/missing headcount) is and rat-race to find worse pictures of post-apocalyptic Japan.
The result: more than 10 times the death toll in an (I think) much less densely populated area. The effort and money Japan is able and willing to spend on earthquake/tsunami preparation has most certainly had a big effect. Even if devastation in the worst-hit areas is complete, a lot of people probably escaped because of the infrastructure and drills.
Between 100,000 and 300,000 people (the numbers are still very much unclear) were killed during the or in the aftermath of the much weaker earthquake in Haiti and if you look at other earthquakes you see similarly high death tolls – that tells me very clearly that Japan was extremely well prepared and I never for one second doubted that.
Guess the glass can be half-empty or half-full. FWIW, I'm also sitting in Germany and I'm mighty impressed by the Japanese response. It's bad but it could have been much worse.
Saying that the situation in the affected areas in Japan (which, even relative to Japan’s size, is quite a large area) is most certainly bad is in itself not at all a criticism of the Japanese response and I’m a bit baffled at how you could get that impression. There are certain things no diligent and excellent preparation can currently prevent (as evidenced by the horrible death toll).