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Japan hit with 9.0 Earthquake and 45 ft Tsunami

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Was planning on going to Tokyo next weekend, but this changes things.

It's pretty nuts how much that earth quake just destroyed that place. Tokyo, while not heavily hit by the ground shaking has a ton of other issues right now. The city is operating on 40% power and doing brown outs for 2 hours at a time throughout the city in order to keep things up and running. On top of that, they have a ton of people flooding in from areas that were damaged or are completely jacked up. So as I hear, one of the most populated cities in the world has about double the people it had a week ago.
 
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scooter1369;1891230; said:
If only someone had mentioned that 24 hours ago....
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Well after a quality post like that I must follow up with something almost as insightful.

Here in Korea, the news has focused some concern on our own mountain of death Baekdu Mountain. Considering the distance between Shinmoedake and the actual epicenter of the quake, a lot of people are starting to grow worried. The thing hasn't exploded in over a hundred years, but I guess when the earths stomach rumbles like that you worry about every hole.

On a different note, looks like this is going to have some effect on Travel, considering I end up going to Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong pretty frequently for work, I may get a week or two travel free, yay!

http://www.ausbt.com.au/ash-cloud-from-japanese-volcano-in-path-of-flights-to-korea-china-taiwan
 
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Press Release (Mar 14,2011)
Occurrence of a Specific Incident (Failure of reactor cooling function)
Stipulated in Article 15, Clause 1 of the Act on Special Measures
Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness
At 2:46PM on March 11th 2011, the turbines and reactors of Fukushima
Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Unit 1 (Boiling Water Reactor, rated output
460 Megawatts) and Units 2 and 3 (Boiling Water Reactor, Rated Output
784 Megawatts) that had been operating at rated power automatically
shutdown due to the Tohoku-Chihou-Taiheiyou-Oki Earthquake.(previously
announced)In response, water injection into Unit 2's reactor were being
carried out by the Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System. However, as the
Reactor Core Isolation Cooling System failed today, it was determined that
a specific incident (failure of reactor cooling function) stipulated in article
15, clause 1 has occurred at 1:25 pm today.


yeah - they're right on that. :shake:
 
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Crap. Turns out that the loss of DC power was mostly because the f-in' fuel oil tanks were swept out to sea by the tsunami. Pretty easy concept, no fuel no power. Also, at some point you have water intrusion in what fuel oil was in the system. Also, I've heard that the basement of the turbine building was flooded by the wave. The ac/dc switchgear was in that flooded basement as well. And, I read where the design criteria was taking into account a 7 meter tsunami wave. The 10 meter wave was supposed to be a once in 1,000 years event. Murphy, always a putz and a jokester, took the opportunity to have the 8.9 right off the coast. Plants survived the quake just fine. But the ungodly tsunami took out the backup diesel power, and they were left with no way to run the many redundant safety cooling systems. There are three lavyers of redundancy, but all of them have to have power to work.

This may be really, really bad guys. I think they may have containment breach in #2. I've heard rumors of suppression pool damage, which for a BWR would be very bad. Seems the wave and DC power loss disabled the EFW (Emergency Feedwaeter) and CST (Condensate Storage Tank) pumps from the get-go. The Powers that be in Japan are very guarded about information, and asking for help....too little too late from the IAEA.

Simply, HAD no way to cool the suckers down. [Mark May].
 
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Oh joy. The IAEA says the Japanese have informed them "that the spent fuel storage pond at the Unit 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is on fire and radioactivity is being released directly into the atmosphere".

"Dose rates of up to 400 millisievert per hour have been reported at the site." Pray for the operators who are staying and trying to fight this. Flashback: Mr. Spock - "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
 
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400 millisievert (mSv) Per Hour release

1 rem (rem) = 10 millisievert (mSv)
40 rem (rem) = 400 millisievert (mSv) Per Hour.

So. 40 rem per hour hanging around there now, if that is accurate.

What is that?

Here is the dose limit of an Occupational Nuclear Worker in the U.S.
? 20.1201 Occupational dose limits for adults.

(a) The licensee shall control the occupational dose to individual adults, except for planned special exposures under ? 20.1206, to the following dose limits.
(1) An annual limit, which is the more limiting of--
(i) The total effective dose equivalent being equal to 5 rems (0.05 Sv); or
(ii) The sum of the deep-dose equivalent and the committed dose equivalent to any individual organ or tissue other than the lens of the eye being equal to 50 rems (0.5 Sv).
(2) The annual limits to the lens of the eye, to the skin of the whole body, and to the skin of the extremities, which are:
(i) A lens dose equivalent of 15 rems (0.15 Sv), and
(ii) A shallow-dose equivalent of 50 rem (0.5 Sv) to the skin of the whole body or to the skin of any extremity.
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Hanging out there any length of time would be a bad thing.
 
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Gatorubet;1891249; said:
Crap. Turns out that the loss of DC power was mostly because the f-in' fuel oil tanks were swept out to sea by the tsunami. Pretty easy concept, no fuel no power. Also, at some point you have water intrusion in what fuel oil was in the system. Also, I've heard that the basement of the turbine building was flooded by the wave. The ac/dc switchgear was in that flooded basement as well. And, I read where the design criteria was taking into account a 7 meter tsunami wave. The 10 meter wave was supposed to be a once in 1,000 years event. Murphy, always a putz and a jokester, took the opportunity to have the 8.9 right off the coast. Plants survived the quake just fine. But the ungodly tsunami took out the backup diesel power, and they were left with no way to run the many redundant safety cooling systems. There are three lavyers of redundancy, but all of them have to have power to work.

This may be really, really bad guys. I think they may have containment breach in #2. I've heard rumors of suppression pool damage, which for a BWR would be very bad. Seems the wave and DC power loss disabled the EFW (Emergency Feedwaeter) and CST (Condensate Storage Tank) pumps from the get-go. The Powers that be in Japan are very guarded about information, and asking for help....too little too late from the IAEA.

Simply, no way to cool the suckers down. Shit.
Click to expand...

I have been reading all over about this, from Asian News, to BBC, to US News, and everyone seems to have a different opinion on the subject. In Korea, the news seems to talk very little about any potential nuclear disaster. Most Asian news is that way minus what I have seen of Japans where they are evacuating people.

BBC seems to be all about "nothing bad is going to happen, no worries"

The various US news outlets seem to go from "nothing to see here, let's talk about Lindsay Lohan" to "The world is over, we're all going to die" but that seems to be the case with news in the States.

http://blogs.forbes.com/neilweinberg/2011/03/14/in-japan-reports-of-meltdown-fukushima-evacuation/

That's one of the US news panics.

I feel for the Japanese people right now though, no matter what happens here there is no real "good" outcome. The Sea water method is a hope that they can keep the cores cooled down, if that doesn't work they are going to have a whole lot of dead land and the fears that we could see issues with the ocean and blow off to either Hawaii or the Koreas is another concern (Not that it would be enough to kill either, but you could see some life shortening effects.)

I just keep watching the news, I am past the morbid curiousity now and just hoping that this ends without half of japan glowing in the dark and the other half without power.
 
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Fire in spent fuel pool now being reported as put out.

yeah OC, the rolling black outs in winter are not good.

The lack of info from the Japanese Power Co. is not helping. Nobody cares who is losing face right now. I think they are trying to walk the dog between not causing a panic and not giving false positive news, with the end result being nobody knows what the hell is going on. I guess I can see the dilemma, but I have to say the default should be to inform more and not less.

How are your travel plans going OC? :biggrin:
 
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Japanese public has every right to be concerned, but there's no credible likelihood of serious radiation hazard to the public outside of the immediate area of the affected reactors.

The Japanese have many, many tragedies to cope with here; the reactor issues fall way down the list.
 
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