Japan hit by 8.9 earthquake w/tsunami

Yet another quake in Japan today, at 2223 GMT. The 6.5 magnitude quake happened about 100km off the coast of Sendai, and triggered a local tsunami warning that was later lifted.

 

It must be a decay chain product. This isotope decays so fast that a clump the mass of the earth would decay to a single atom in under a week.

USGS map and list of the aftershocks of the past 7 days. Both looked much nastier in the first week.

 

My mistake. I knew it was minutes, but my fingers typed hours. Perhaps it was a spontaneous decay inside my head.



Tom

 

fuzzy1, knowing the aftershocks would fall off that list after 7 days, I have been downloading and updating the list. I know that older info would be available from USGS on request, but simpler to just create a file.

This info will also end up in the Tohoku wiki page eventually.

What I find amazing (even though there is a theory about it named after somebody) is that if you take all the 4.5+ aftershocks (about 770 so far) and put them in rank order. Draw a log regression through the points and the R^2 is nearly 0.8. Dang, there are amazingly few natural processes that fit simple relationships so well.

The IAEA is many hours away from updating I think (link in my previous post). They don't say yet that any reactor pressure vessels have been breached. Best to get that info from them vs. my guesses. But I don't like the wy the last 24hrs have gone...

Some other news media (forgot which) said that an outside company was being brought in to test for soil contamination by plutonium. That could only come from the MOx rods in reactor 3, or from those stored in the R3 pool.

 

NSC did not update the map since then.
But, we can see following type of map and data updated daily by MEXT.

Ken@Japan

 

I saw another video containing this clip:

I'm guessing the driver survived, as the caption claims. If so, he's very lucky.

 

Wow.

 

Letters from Fukushima: Tepco Worker Emails - Japan Real Time - WSJ

 

Unfortunately, the above video is gone now. :/

However, it looks like this is the another copy.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b-2iByqHVI"]YouTube - Tsunami ravaging Kesennuma port[/ame]
Can anyone translate what the announcer is saying?

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/explained-radioactivity-0328.html has an article about the different units we've been hearing. I can't vouch for its accuracy though as this is definitely not my area of expertise.

 

Basically its a warning from Kesenuma City telling everyone that a big tsunami warning has been issued and those near the coast should evacuate to higher ground immediately.

 

Core has likely melted though the pressure vessel:
Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor | World news | The Guardian

 

That condition is not so much different than the conditions of the fuel rods in the spent fuel pools.....a massive mess of intensely contaminated fuel debris resting on a concrete slab. The only variable is how much water is covering it and how much is leaking downstream to the ocean.

Unfortunately, the mess is getting worse by the lack of a national response lead by someone that knows what to do. TEPCO can only bring limited utility resources and what is needed is national resources. Blaming TEPCO is not a response, it's destructive dithering and that is all I am seeing happening.

Here is what should be happening:
1) A full fledged monitoring and evaluation task force equipped to determine what is the actual conditions in every component. All kinds of robotic cameras should have been deployed now.....just like all the cameras on the BP well head. Additionally, all kinds of robotically mounted radiation monitors should be deployed in parallel. To be in the dark as to the actual conditions at this phase is inexcusable.
2) A contamination collection site(s) identified. If all the contamination is to stored locally, then say so. If not, a lot of infrastructure work could already be started for storing the differing levels of contaminated material.
3) Contamination removal paths and infrastructure efforts need to start. Special trucks and/or ships-barges are needed for transporting the packaged contamination to the processing/disposal location.
4) Environmental Monitoring Stations and checkpoints established around the site. Something that can be double checked and updated repeatedly.

 

TEPCO president is admitted to hospital...

Tepco President Shimizu Hospitalized, Chairman Takes Charge - Businessweek

 

US sending robots to Japan to help nuclear plant - FoxNews.com

 

At Fukushima, the current crisis seems to be no space to store hot (and/or "hot") wter tha has been keeping the pressure vessels and rod storage pools cool. Or if not cool, then not as hot as they would be otherwise.

I have no good idea, but would first look for the nearest topography that is >14 meters above sea level. Build something there - what, a million gallons? Build it fast and strong. By the 3-factor rule that would exclude 'cheap'.

If melted core is (or later gets) outside the pressure vessels, the concrete structures beneath are going to hold. At least that is how it seems to me. But they may well be water permeable. Fixing that is not going to be cheap either, but there it is.

Darn lucky, in retrospect, that all 6 reactors were not online for the quake/tsunami. As I understand it, it is normal ops to run all 6.

Meanwhile the reconstruction effort elsewhere in Japan has barely begun.

 

At Three Mile Island they solved that problem by dumping 40,000 gallons into the river. They may end up doing something like that in Japan.

Tom

 

The water releases to the sea thus far have all been unintentional. But they have not been insignificant.

 

Entombment is now a possibility...

 

Entombment is the simpler possibility, after the 'hot' water is dealt with. I suppose that they would only move the fuel rods & melted rods (corium) to another place, if there was a good way to reprocess them (which I don't know), or if concluding that the Fukushima site is seismic/tsunami unsuitable for entombment. Such a tomb is no good if it just gets busted open later. There is a large inventory of long half life isotopes on site. The unmelted ones seem the most likely to be moved.