The Fukushima complex

[Xenophile]

You've all heard about the Tsunami that hit Japan's eastern coast last week, and you have no doubt heard about the Fukushima nuclear complex that was damaged in the quake. Things have now turned for the worse, and the experts are comparing this to the infamous Chernobyl.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-web-20110314,0,7456231.story

The fuel rods are exposed, and even the desperate attempt to use salt water for coolant has failed.
As a nuclear power supporter, this provokes all kinds of emotions. I was shocked and horrified when I heard and read the new,s becasue I can appreciate the awesome consequences a unrestricted and uncontrolled meltdown can cause. I am also angered by the Japanese officials' lack of honesty in this matter, and infuriated in the (now obvious) lack of care and consideration that was put into building a nuclear power plant in one of the world's most earthquake prone places in the world. Whatever methods the engineers employed to make it foolproof, as they said a few years prior, where not enough. That is insulting to the people that are opposed to nuclear power, but most of all the supporters.

The biggest reason why people support nuclear power is the promise that all safeties will be employed and used, and that there will be no short-cuts in the construction. Maybe it was naive to believe that a nuclear power plant would go unscathed in Japan, but the ultimate blame goes to the people responsible for the project, as they promised that they had taken all precautions. The faith in nuclear power is shattered when a modern nuclear power is now facing meltdown. But as an ardent supporter, I do think that perhaps this is a wake-up call for us all. Supporters or not.

But this is a discussion, not a rant.
What is your opinion about how the Fukushima complex incident/disaster has been dealt, and what will this spell for the idea that nuclear power is a viable alternative to fossil fuels in the future?

[RubySlippers]

It was a huge Earthquake and as far as I know ran practically under the reactor how the hell can you prepare for that?

Although a modern reactor using fuel pellets encased in ceramics would not be at risk to melt down so is viable the Germans proved this system cannot melt down in a test they turned off the cooling and it never reached critical points just stabilized after heating up somewhat.

We just need to use the better safer technology when its an issue like Japan that is Earthquake prone.

[Callie Del Noire]

Well the design in quesiton is decades old. A lot of changes have been considered since then, and put into play. The genie is out of the bottle and we can't wave a wand to banish the use of nuclear power. Point of fact something like 1/5th of our power in the US comes from nuclear power plants.

The fear and perception of things like this makes them literally uninsured by anyone but governments. The design criteria for the plants are so radicallly different than anything else. The timeline for environmental considerations extend far past anything else. Most normal buildings are approached on a 100 year event schedule, nuclear plants are more like 500 year events. 

[Xenophile]

Even if the design is decades old, it was at the time also built on a very earthquake prone region of the world. Assurances where made that it would be a foolproof design, very robust and completely safe. That was a promise given then, and it was expected to last. Japan is also respected when it comes to reactor construction, because they are building and planning to build more that are state-of-the-art, and they supply a good dosage of the materials in the international market.

The commercial interests are so high, that it is difficult to be "as safe" as they want to be. What if they believed the reactor to be unsafe? If they where ethical, they would have shut it down either permanently, or temporarily to upgrade its safeties. It wasn't, and this disaster is the consequence of that commercial interest. If there is an accident on a coal burning planet, then we can expect a fire and some smoke, possibly injuries and deaths to the workers. But with nuclear power plants? So much more is at stake. Completely new levels of ethical management must be enforced, and it's real pisser for me as a supporter to see even an inkling of recklessness when dealing with something as dangerous as nuclear power.

[Callie Del Noire]

Remember that management and oversight change over time. The initial managers are most likely retired by now, given the plant started up decades ago and new outlooks could be easily shaped by the consistent record of good performance. An air of complacency can start to creep in.

That might be part of what happened.

Who knows? We will find out in the end though, this is too big to hide. Japan is too invested in nuclear power to let this go under the rug.

[Xenophile]

Complacency would no doubt be a big part of this, but I cannot shake the feeling that as reactor performance is under scrutiny, they must have known it's failings. My guess is that commercial interests getting in conflict with excellent safety protocols is to blame is the biggest cause of the nonchalant attitude. And that is a damn shame.

[Oniya]

At the time, the design was believed to be earthquake proof.  However, it was later that the Germans did their experiment with the ceramic-encased fuel pellets.  It seems to me that this would have made the German design more earthquake proof, and therefore something to upgrade to as soon as humanly possible - if not faster.  It's like the building constructions that incorporate the rolling foundation and the interlocking bricks would be more earthquake-proof than either safety method alone.

[Zakharra]

  Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear people are going to use this incident, even if there is no meltdown, as fuel in their campaign to block any attempts to build more nuclear powerplants. They'll point at is and scream 'See! SEE!  Nuclear is unsafe!!" and flail their arms in a screaming fit. While ignoring the facts that these complexes are decades old and modern nuclear plants are extremely safe.

[Xenophile]

That is true, but that does not defeat the claim when those decade old plants are still in service. A complete overhaul needs to be done, but it is impractical because a complete overhaul would demand and shutdown of those plants... And some nations could not cope with that deficit of power. So, I guess a gradual upgrading is needed, but it must be immediate.

[Oniya]

They could always use the method that has proved successful with sports stadiums:  You build the new alternative in the parking lot of the old one, and switch over when the new one is ready for use.

Okay, I suppose the parking lot for a nuclear power plant is a lot smaller, proportionately, but something like that would be a possible way of upgrading without cutting off the power supply.

[Xenophile]

That's not entirely impossible. If a nuclear power grid is already in place, the other plants could share the burden and produce more power for the duration of the upgrade. But that would demand a quick schedule, and quick schedules for upgrade work made for safety is not the best of ideas of ideas, if you ask me.

One plant at the time sounds like a good plan.

[Zakharra]

 I wonder how hard it  is to get the building permits for a nuclear plant and when the last one was built in Japan. It it's hard to get a permit and you get constant court battles to stop it, that might be a reason the plants were not upgraded/rebuilt.

I know in the US, it is extremely hard to get permits for a nuclear power plant, partially because of the constant court challenges, environmental studies (again and again and again....) that are throw up by opponents to stop construction.

Hell, where I live, it's taken 60 years just to get a bypass built because of court challenges and environmental studies. There were alternatives thrown up, even a suggestion to build a tunnel under the town. Mind you, the town practically sits on the watertable, it's by a huge lake, so yeah...   But if things as simple as a bypass take this long, getting a nuke plant built, has got to take a monumental effort and a LOT of money.

[Xenophile]

Here in Sweden the national government has always been involved in nuclear power plants. Hell, even in hydroplants and wind power parks, the government has its say. There has been a few building bans on the nuclear plants a few times, and "promises" of dismantling before 2020 or something made in the late 1980's. I think only one of four or five have been taken down. Nuclear power stands for about 15-20 percent if I remember it right of the entire power grid, while about 50% is hydro. They're in good shape, but the Forsmark-plant has a bad reputation after a few minor incidents in the past years.

I'm not sure if there are any problems with upgrades, but building new plants is a hotly debated issue that's divided the left and the right.

[Xenophile]

Alright, gonna check the news on the Swedish television networks to see if there's any change.

.....


Explosion this morning, perhaps by hydrogen gas. Fuel rods are beginning to become overheated. It seems like they're having problem even after they began to pump ocean water into the reactor. Interviewing journalist from a Live-broadcast says that he's spoken with several Tokyo-residents, and there seems to be little or no trust towards the official news, as "too much interest has been invested".
It seems like the back-up systems worked and quake itself didn't cause this, but it was the Tsunami that knocked the diesel generators needed to regulate the reactor temperature.

Fingers crossed that we won't get a genuine meltdown á la Chernobyl, or worse.

[Vekseid]

  Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear people are going to use this incident, even if there is no meltdown, as fuel in their campaign to block any attempts to build more nuclear powerplants. They'll point at is and scream 'See! SEE!  Nuclear is unsafe!!" and flail their arms in a screaming fit. While ignoring the facts that these complexes are decades old and modern nuclear plants are extremely safe.

They already are. I can usually stomach the hysteria at Daily Kos but now it's getting sickening.

Thousands dead or missing from the earthquake and tsunami. Thousands die each year from pollution, coal mining deaths, and so on.

But heaven forbid that, out of the thousands of nuclear power plants in the world, a few go bust in a time of tragedy, and endanger the lives of a few. Rather than try to promote greater safety, and try to find solutions to our problems, the only acceptable solution is no solution at all.

Should we forbid buildings because some of them collapse on people?

No, we work to build better buildings.

This isn't to say that nuclear power plant operators have been completely innocent. But having a plan for our future requires a realistic analysis of our needs, evaluating the solutions available and working to solve the challenges that that solution represents.

There are only two major sources of baseline power in the world
1) Coal
2) Nuclear

Everything else - Solar, Wind, Hydro - is either too limited in capacity, or too temperamental to rely on as baseline power. Our choices are one or the other. We have, maybe, a century of coal left at projected burn rates, more than we've ever used so far, and what we've used so far -already- represents a massive ecological catastrophe.

Nuclear power catastrophes, on the other hand, don't do a lot of ecological damage, compared to mountaintop removal mining and mass pollution.

A consequence of our modern world is acknowledging that we face problems, and cowering from them is not a viable solution.

[Sure]

How much radiation is coming out of the plant, anyway? Last I heard it was .003 Sv/h at worst. You don't start getting general fatalities until you reach around 2 Sv (here, about four weeks of exposure). Less than 2 Sv is likely to cause illness such as vomiting, hair loss, and diarrhea, but very rarely fatal on its own. Less than .5 Sv (about a week of exposure) is considered not serious but might cause some symptoms. Less than .1 Sv (33 hours of exposure) doesn't significantly alter your body's chemistry. The regulatory maximum yearly dose for a worker in the plant is .05 Sv (17 hours of exposure), which is the amount the Japanese believe prevents anything bad from happening at all, even increased cancer risk.

As to the Chernobyl Disaster, thirty one people died within three months, almost all of them either responders to or workers at the plant. Two hundred and thirty seven died within ten years. At least two thousand plus Japanese are confirmed dead right now, to put that in perspective. Regardless, the amount of radiation being given off was also much, much worse. About a hundred thousand times worse at the core, and about six to seven thousand times worse at its outlying buildings. Further, the reactor has a containment structure, and uses water rather than graphite (water cannot catch on fire like graphite can), so again it won't be anywhere near as bad.

It is not a non-accident, but it is not worthy of the amount of attention it's getting in the middle of the deadliest earthquake since the Yushu Earthquake last year.

The trouble with Nuclear Power is that, on the one hand, the Republicans are not overly concerned by oil and coal and gas, and on the other, Democrats are more concerned with the Environmentalists and Environmentalism (portions of which are sustained on blind faith alone, including most of their anti-nuclear beliefs) than energy independence. Whatever else Bush may have done, he began making four new nuclear power plants, which is more impressive if you consider they are the first to be built in thirty years or so.

As a side-problem, there is more regulation about nuclear engineering than any other kind of engineering. This isn't necessarily a problem, but nuclear engineering is not the highest (nor among the highest) paid kind of engineering nor is their a wide range of applications. Plus, if you're a nuclear engineer, you basically work for the government or in an environment so regulated you might as well be. This is not an environment that attracts talent, and talented engineers are necessary to improve an industry. In contrast, oil/whatever you want to call them engineers are basically shoehorned into one industry, but are paid ridiculously well even by engineering standards. They also don't have anywhere near the restrictions on them that a nuclear engineer does.

[DarklingAlice]

The last figure I had on the radiation was 400 mSv/hour that may have changed by this point depending on how the containment process is going.

Also, from what I have been able to glean, the plant survived the earthquake perfectly, it was the size of the tsunami that they were unprepared for. The wave damaged the backup generators (which were being used since the main generators had gone offline in the earthquake) leading to a cooling failure which in turn led to explosions and fires. Essentially they weren't sufficiently prepared for the wave height and didn't foresee the need to have backup backup power.

[Vekseid]

They did have backup backup power. Just, that failed too.

Newer reactor designs don't require active cooling, so I hope to all heavens that this isn't going to stop next-generation designs from getting constructed : /

[Sure]

The last figure I had on the radiation was 400 mSv/hour that may have changed by this point depending on how the containment process is going.

Sorry, but mili or micro? m is the mili prefix (μ is micro) but all the reports I got were in μSv (or microsieverts). If it is in milisieverts now, it's gotten worse. :-\

[Oniya]

http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20110315/NEWS04/303159969

The radiation level around one of the reactors stood at 400,000 microsiverts per hour, four times higher than the safe level.

Looks like Darkling has a similar source to this one.

[gaggedLouise]

The last figure I had on the radiation was 400 mSv/hour that may have changed by this point depending on how the containment process is going.

Also, from what I have been able to glean, the plant survived the earthquake perfectly, it was the size of the tsunami that they were unprepared for. The wave damaged the backup generators (which were being used since the main generators had gone offline in the earthquake) leading to a cooling failure which in turn led to explosions and fires. Essentially they weren't sufficiently prepared for the wave height and didn't foresee the need to have backup backup power.

Yes, the reactor hearth and its enclosing walls seem to have stood up to the earthquake itself. And obviously you can't ever build so that every risk would be out of the picture. No nuclear plant - or oil refinery - would hold up against a direct hit by a large rock from space (as in Siberia in 1908, and a similar though smaller object came close to dropping down in the US/Canadian far west in 1972, but was repelled by gravity at a very low height - visible only as a fireball). The earthquake and the tsunami were exceptionally powerful even for Japan, especially the quake, and still the construction in the plant and in many other buildings could handle the quake itself. The wholesale destruction we see on tv now is the work of the flooding of course, not just the earthquake.

I used to be firmly against nuclear power (we have ten reactors here in Sweden, built in the seventies and eighties; two more that are located twenty miles from where I live, on the coast, were closed a few years ago). I still don't think it's a form of energy free of problems, not at all, but as for now I don't think it's something we can do without, not within the next fifty years. And saying "we" I mean the contemporary world in general.  I would agree on some of the points against it, the contamination risks of course but also the link to the spread of possible nuclear weapons, through both raw materials and technology. But we can't go on burning up oil or gas like we're doing now. Making electricity from burning oil - as is widely done in Europe, the US and many other places - is senseless; this bonfire of fossil fuels is a waste of non-renewable assets and also a political liability, because you get tied in with regimes like Russia, Libya and Saudi Arabia that are not very good partners in other ways: they gain leverage with you and with others.

Uranium is a non-renewable substance too of course but it seems more economical to use and it has much higher output of energy - aand unlike oil, which comes from once living organisms, it might one day be mined on places such as the moon. So it makes sense to me that nuclear power should be dveloped further, certainly in developed countries, and japan doesn't have many other alternatives. Solar energy, wind energy etc will not come near the amount of energy provided by nuclear plants in a very long time. And trying to decide which was the worst, the Gulf oil spill or a radiation leak from a nuclear plant, is a moot point I think - they are both disastrous and both leave very long-term devastation of nature and people.

A nuclear facility can't really explode on itself in the way an atomic bomb would, even if it often has more nuclear fuel. To achieve an explosion of a nuke, you need to have the active core compressed and locked in by a shell (by magnetic plasma forces, mostly) while the chain reaction is getting started, so that at least won't occur in a damaged reactor: there will be constant air access and the fuel isn't compressed in a lump like that. The worst you could get, and even that ius very unlikely, would be like a depleted uranium bomb, a "dirty bomb" - but that's very unlikely with the Fukushima plant. I don't think they got that in Chernobyl either: there was heavy radition leakage but not an actual sustained nuclear reaction explosion at the reactor. And Chernobyl had much less secure standards than Fukushima or most Western reactors, both in construction, in maintenance and in what was going on there prior to the disaster.

[Vekseid]

Only light-water reactors require enriched fuel. Heavy water (CANDU) and graphite (Pebble Bed) moderators can use unenriched fuel and thus don't pose a proliferation risk.

Breeder reactors - thorium (U-233 producing) and plutonium producing designs are proliferation risks, but I'm beginning to think that the solution to the world's problems is not going to be one filled with endless paranoia. At some point were are going to have to be able to trust and likewise make assurances that we can be trusted.

[Zeitgeist]

It may be the case too, no matter how well you design the structures and the backup systems, if the natural disaster is catastrophic enough no design will be survivable. Obviously a 9.0 earthquake is about as bad as it gets. You could forbid building them on fault lines, but isn't Japan one big fault line, or damn near?

Yeah it would be a damn shame if this was used to pull back on nuclear plant design. As tragic as this was (and is!) its a once in a century event. And it's pretty clear that energy sources will be a cafeteria style plan, no one idea will meet all needs.

[Vekseid]

The earthquake was nothing (one fatality - how is that for disaster preparedness?) - it was the tsunami that followed that wrecked stuff.

[Zakharra]

They did have backup backup power. Just, that failed too.

Newer reactor designs don't require active cooling, so I hope to all heavens that this isn't going to stop next-generation designs from getting constructed : /

Here here. This should be used to push construction of modern plants and the upgrading of older ones. Not as a chain to halt all nuclear power.

[Oniya]

The earthquake was nothing (one fatality - how is that for disaster preparedness?) - it was the tsunami that followed that wrecked stuff.

When you're talking about a region like Japan (island or shoreline in general), and an earthquake of that intensity, isn't a tsunami something that's naturally going to follow?  I could see a statement like this if they had an earthquake and then a few months later there was a tsunami sparked by an eruption in Hawaii, but in this case, I really think it's like saying 'it wasn't the fire that caused the deaths, it was the smoke'.

[RubySlippers]

They had that in the plans for a large one but the waves were larger than planned for, its not unlike Katrina the levees were designed for a typical region storm surge and hurricane not that big an event.

I suspect if they had suspected that was a risk to take into account they would have built the reactor on even higher ground with sea walls and other protections.

[Valerian]

Your "average" earthquake won't trigger a tsunami -- I believe it has to be over 7 or 7.5 on the Richter scale for sufficient water to be displaced to cause a tsunami.

The problem is that the fault near Japan is a subduction fault, which is first, much more likely to produce stronger quakes; and second, more likely to cause severe water displacement than, say, a strike-slip fault, as in the San Andreas fault.  Subduction faults involve one tectonic plate slipping beneath another one, and when one of those plates is oceanic, as in Japan, the rapid deforming of the ocean floor can easily cause tsunamis.

(Source: My notes from the geophysics class I took last year.)

[Oniya]

Your "average" earthquake won't trigger a tsunami -- I believe it has to be over 7 or 7.5 on the Richter scale for sufficient water to be displaced to cause a tsunami.

The problem is that the fault near Japan is a subduction fault, which is first, much more likely to produce stronger quakes; and second, more likely to cause severe water displacement than, say, a strike-slip fault, as in the San Andreas fault.  Subduction faults involve one tectonic plate slipping beneath another one, and when one of those plates is oceanic, as in Japan, the rapid deforming of the ocean floor can easily cause tsunamis.

(Source: My notes from the geophysics class I took last year.)

So, as I'm reading this, a tsunami would be a natural side-effect of the displacement of an 8.8 Richter quake, and even more so in a subduction area like Japan.  I'm not faulting the earthquake-preparedness, just so it's clear, just the conversational treatment of the tsunami and the quake as separate things.

[gaggedLouise]

So, as I'm reading this, a tsunami would be a natural side-effect of the displacement of an 8.8 Richter quake, and even more so in a subduction area like Japan.  I'm not faulting the earthquake-preparedness, just so it's clear, just the conversational treatment of the tsunami and the quake as separate things.

Yes, you roughly need a quake of / Richter or stronger to trigger a substantial tsunami. But the actual strength and direction it will get are all but impossible to predict. The tsunami from Sumatra in 2004 was a lot more powerful, long-range, than the one from the Japanese quake (and it hit places that were nowhere near as prepared as Japan. For a place like Sendai the actul warning didn't matter much though - it was too close to hive much time.

There was a tsunami in the North Atlantic in 1929, after an undersea quake off Newfoundland. The unrest on the seafloor from sand and clay avalanches broke telegraph cables and people used to speculate that those would have buried the wreck of the Titanic, cause it was known to have sunk roughly in or near the area where the bottom got reshaped.

[RubySlippers]

Excuse me but this is a non-issue to the average American they are seeing a nuclear reactor accident that LOOKS bad and warnings on five others that were in place for a time. The whys and wherefores don't matter this set back any nuclear reactors in the US back alot over coal and alternative energy sources in the case the first one being king.

An average American is driven by sound bites, short news articles and what people tell them that sound more convincing and what their gut tells them at the moment not the facts.

[Oniya]

Not all of us are Americans, and some of those of us who are vote on these issues.

[RubySlippers]

I'm not saying caring about the issues and do research Americans I'm talking the average voter trying to get by, two different things.

I'm the former I know with really good planning and the latest technology its likely very safe France proves that, but most people see a disaster with a nuclear plant that was in fact very rare but happened. If it might happen to ME so not by ME please build it over there way far away from ME. Even though natural gas is far more likely to kill him then a off the long shot big time nuclear accident.

Three Mile Island had no noticeable leak and that nearly this bad that seemed to have a negative impact on nuclear power in the US, Japan had the best of the older technology and all the safeguards and one reactor is in danger. That is what people will remember not its very rare but it is failing and is taking efforts to stop.

[Bayushi]

Yes, you roughly need a quake of / Richter or stronger to trigger a substantial tsunami. But the actual strength and direction it will get are all but impossible to predict. The tsunami from Sumatra in 2004 was a lot more powerful, long-range, than the one from the Japanese quake (and it hit places that were nowhere near as prepared as Japan. For a place like Sendai the actul warning didn't matter much though - it was too close to hive much time.

The epicenter of the quake (which was upgraded from 8.9 to 9.0, btw) was indicated to be about 50 miles from the coast, outside of Tokyo Bay.

When a tsunami travels at around 650 miles per hour, HOW is anyone supposed to react in time after the earthquake?

Secondly, HOW are they supposed to prepare, at all? Earthquakes can be prepared for, and if anyone in the world is prepared for quakes, the Japanese are. Considering they have at least two 3.0+ quakes PER DAY, anyways. But you can not realistically prepare for a tsunami. Except for just plain not building at or near the coast.

The only thing regarding the Fukushima complex is that it should have been built further inland, and on higher ground. Given Japan's propensity for seismic events, they of all people should be (and mostly are) very prepared for tsunamis.

[Jude]

By the way, we no longer use the Richter Scale.  We now use the moment magnitude scale.  Richter was phased out in the 1970s.  So many people who still describe quakes that way were born after we switched.  This is a great illustration of the problem with letting the public make science decisions.

EDIT:  One other interesting tidbit.  Neither scale increases linearly.  An 8 isn't "a bit stronger" than a 7 for example, just as a 5 isn't 5 times stronger than a 1.  If you go up one it's actually 32x stronger, and if you go up 2 it's 1000 times stronger.  So a magnitude 9 quake, releases roughly 1000 times the energy of a magnitude 7.  So... yeah, 9 is pretty insane and rare.

[gaggedLouise]

Yes I knew about the Richter scale getting saturated for quakes more powerful than around 8½R - that is, it isn't terribly exact in relative terms for those - and about the Moment scale. Used Richter because I wasn't sure exactly how to abbreviate or unitize the Moment scale in typing, and I figured the Richter scale would be more familiar to people here. The precise strength of the earthquake isn't an issue in this thread; everyone knows by now that it was one of the ten strongest in the past seventy years or so.

I also know both scales are nowhere near arithmetic. I have personally experienced an earthquake of just below 5, decently close to the epicentre: it was the strongest one Sweden has had in almost a hundred years - with the granite bedrock here and the distance from any plate boundaries, tangible seismic activity is an ultra rare thing. I was in bed at the time and I knew instantly it had to be an earthquake, there was an unmistakable (but not violent) shaking that semed to come from the ground, several stories down. Now if a magnitude 7.5 earthquake had been 50% stronger than that one, then I should have been very surprised that we get to hear anything about those quakes at all! :D

[Oniya]

Yes I knew about the Richter scale getting saturated for quakes more powerful than around 8½R - that is, it isn't terribly exact in relative terms for those - and about the Moment scale. Used Richter because I wasn't sure exactly how to abbreviate or unitize the Moment scale in typing, and I figured the Richter scale would be more familiar to people here. The precise strength of the earthquake isn't an issue in this thread; everyone knows by now that it was one of the ten strongest in the past seventy years or so.

Past 7R, I think most earthquakes just fall into the 'holy fuck!' category of people's brains.  Also, because I'm curious about things like this, the Moment scale is abbreviated M_W.

[Bayushi]

EDIT:  One other interesting tidbit.  Neither scale increases linearly.  An 8 isn't "a bit stronger" than a 7 for example, just as a 5 isn't 5 times stronger than a 1.  If you go up one it's actually 32x stronger, and if you go up 2 it's 1000 times stronger.  So a magnitude 9 quake, releases roughly 1000 times the energy of a magnitude 7.  So... yeah, 9 is pretty insane and rare.

They are indeed rare. Apparently, from what I have been hearing, magnitude 9 quakes happen approximately every three hundred years.

Having lived in Japan several times over my life, I've grown accustomed to earthquakes. As expected, as per videos posted online, most of the Japanese people were relatively calm during and after the quake. The quake wasn't the problem, as those are commonplace in Japan (though not 9.0 quakes), it was the tsunami afterwards.

The lucky part, for the US West coast, is that the majority of the fault line in our area is on shore(eg: San Andreas fault), and far less likely to cause the devastation that this tsunami did to Japan. The earthquake itself would be the danger, in the US, not a tsunami (though you can't rule it out entirely).

[gaggedLouise]

For comic relief, I can't help quoting this line by the angry, overwrought doctor Helmer in Lars von Trier's tv miniseries The Kingdom which is set at the Royal Hospital (colloquially "Kingdom") in Copenhagen, where the gifted but choleric head doctor, who has probably had to go expatriate from Sweden because people couldn't take his desire to always be in the right, spends his days respected and sometimes feared by a host of vivacious Danish doctors, patients and nurses. From time to time he can't take it any longer and gets up to the roof of the hospital to gaze across the water at his native land (and it happens to be the province where I live). In the distance he glimpses the controversial nuclear power station at Barsebäck on the Swedish shoreline; it was still running at the time the series was filmed in the mid-nineties but has since been closed; it was always the most controversial Swedish nuclear plant because of its location in a densely populated region and near the capital of another country.

The good doctor exclaims: "There lies Sweden, hewn in granite. And here we have Denmark, sh***en out in soft chalk and water. I thank you, you proud watchtowers! /referring to the reactors, of course/ With plutonium we shall force the Dane to his knees. Danish scum! Danish scum!!"

:D

[Vekseid]

TPM has a rather blistering condemnation of American media in general with regards to reporting:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/03/taking_stock_3.php

...

It also just looks good because there is something so ugly beside it: the non-Japanese coverage. That, I am afraid, has been full of factual errors and other problems. This has not been just Fox News, but also CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and even the New York Times to differing degrees. They get the reactors mixed up or report information that is simply wrong (e.g., writing that the TEPCO workers had fully abandoned the effort to control the plant because of radiation levels when TEPCO had only withdrawn some non-essential personnel). They are perpetually late, continuing to report things the Japanese media had shown to be wrong or different the day before. They are woefully selective, bringing out just the sensational elements ("toxic clouds" over Tokyo―when in fact radiation in Tokyo now is actually less than that in LA on some days). They are misleading (implying for instance that the dumping of water from the air was some last ditch effort to cool the core, when it was just an effort to replenish the water in the spent rod pools―which are now full in reactor 3 and back to normal temperature). Colleagues have noted problems with European coverage as well, but the difference between media can be obvious:

http://www.japanprobe.com/2011/03/18/media-sensationalism-bbc-vs-huffington-post/

I for one cannot understand why ABC, for instance, could feature Michio Kaku multiple times over several days when by the time his declarations of imminent disaster, the situation on the ground had already proven him wrong.

...

[Zakharra]

TPM has a rather blistering condemnation of American media in general with regards to reporting:

t also just looks good because there is something so ugly beside it: the non-Japanese coverage. That, I am afraid, has been full of factual errors and other problems. This has not been just Fox News, but also CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and even the New York Times to differing degrees. They get the reactors mixed up or report information that is simply wrong (e.g., writing that the TEPCO workers had fully abandoned the effort to control the plant because of radiation levels when TEPCO had only withdrawn some non-essential personnel). They are perpetually late, continuing to report things the Japanese media had shown to be wrong or different the day before. They are woefully selective, bringing out just the sensational elements ("toxic clouds" over Tokyo―when in fact radiation in Tokyo now is actually less than that in LA on some days). They are misleading (implying for instance that the dumping of water from the air was some last ditch effort to cool the core, when it was just an effort to replenish the water in the spent rod pools―which are now full in reactor 3 and back to normal temperature). Colleagues have noted problems with European coverage as well, but the difference between media can be obvious:

http://www.japanprobe.com/2011/03/18/media-sensationalism-bbc-vs-huffington-post/

I for one cannot understand why ABC, for instance, could feature Michio Kaku multiple times over several days when by the time his declarations of imminent disaster, the situation on the ground had already proven him wrong.

American media at it's finest.   ::)

[Jude]

Good call Vekseid.

Also, the American Media has shown people wearing allergy masks (which is very common in Japan) and passed it off as a populace gripped with fear over radiation.  This level of distortion is practically criminal.