The more I see of this disaster, the more apparent it is just how horribly devastating this is.

A comment was made on the news from there about how organized, polite, and graceful the people are handling it.  You're not seeing the looting and other undesirable actions that have been common place in the US and Haiti after disasters.  Of course maybe after another week of no food or water that may change.

The police rounded up some looters after our New Zealand quake also Marcos. 

The TV commentators are saying now that the nuclear aspect of this tragedy is more likely to be of three mile island scale as opposed to Chernobyl. I hope very much they are correct about this.

I just heard that the second reactor has exploded. (out of 6 total in trouble)

Our US naval ships, men and helicopters are now in the radioactive dust cloud. They are finding radioactivity on the men and choppers coming back to the ships.

One of the reactors fuel rods are now, according to the news, fully exposed and are melting down.  Since there are two reactors that are out of control, and four more in trouble this is not looking like it's going to turn out well for Japan... they are probably going to have two Chernobyl type events in their country.... and unfortunately, the prevailing winds blow right toward the US mainland.

One guy I know on face book is talking about the Japanese style reactors we have here in the USA. Turns out we have 23 of them, and one of them is in the New Brunswick station in Wilmington, NC. Fortunately NC doesn't have any major faults and the ones we do are in the western part of the state. He was pointing out that here in the USA, in the state of California, there are a number of these same style reactors built directly atop the major fault lines there. The San Andreas fault being one of them.

My take on this: We better learn from this real quick and be sure we can shut these things off if we loose the backup power to them. How much does it cost to install or have on hand a second generator to keep the cooling pumps running long enough to get the control rods in place and the reactor shut down? It's cheaper to spend the money to "beef them up" now, than to pay the cost in human suffering after, to clean up the mess.

Some people need to be asking some serious What If questions here before we have a similar incident...... remember, it has already happened on US soil...... 3 Mile Island in PA.

Hope you have a nice day as you dwell on this issue.

tom1


In California, the nuclear plants were built to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 7.

Supposedly, no plants lie on a fault line capable of an earthquake above the magnitude of 6.5
There are no plants built on the San Andreas fault which is the one fault capable of a magnitude 10 and beyond.

Even if this is the case it seems ludicrous to build nuclear power stations in earthquake country;

 
and even more alarming is how and where we are storing this country's nuclear waste.

I'm just wondering how a man can say..."oh yeah...we're cool building this nuke plant here on this fault... it will never produce more than a 6.5 quake....." and keep a straight face or any form of credibility. And 10+...isn't that like the wrath of God when he's having a bad day and really ticked off at us?

hind site is always 20/20 but I think it would have been better to build geo-thermal or coal fired plants in earthquake country..... just saying....

Guitarhacker

I'm just wondering how a man can say..."oh yeah...we're cool building this nuke plant here on this fault... it will never produce more than a 6.5 quake....." and keep a straight face or any form of credibility. And 10+...isn't that like the wrath of God when he's having a bad day and really ticked off at us?

hind site is always 20/20 but I think it would have been better to build geo-thermal or coal fired plants in earthquake country..... just saying....

I agree 100%.

there are two plants in California built on the Pacific coast near the San Andreas fault.
Those plants were built to withstand a magnitude 7.5 earthquake.
The San Francisco quake of 1906 measured 8.3.

do you think we should renew those operating licenses?

Some of the before and after pics reminded me of some pics I saw of North Carolina's Hatteras Island before and after hurricane Hazel.

Before, there was a road, telephone poles and houses on both sides of the road. The same location after showed only the broken stub of one phone pole and a few of the house pilings......everything else was gone.

Nature can be totally devastating.

Some amazing photos here.

Yup, the "big one" we're due for up here would be quite similar to the one in Japan. In fact, the one that hit Anchorage in 1964 was a subduction quake that measured, IIRC, 9.2. There was no tsunami, but large ships were still tossed onto the shore.

Not only are subduction quakes massively more intense than the type usually experienced along the west coast, they are also much longer in duration. The duration of an earthquake is the biggest determinator of structural damage, since even "earthquake resistant" structures will fail if they keep shaking long enough. Anchorage was completely leveled in '64. The only structures that remained standing were log cabins, which ironically do not meet building codes in many cities.

Am I ready? Nope. How can anyone be ready for a cataclysm? I have my first-aid kit, propane stove, canned food, a crank-operated radio and a single 5-gallon water jug. That's about it.

At least I'll have a better shot at surviving a tsunami here at 500 ft than my business partner, whose home is in Ocean Shores about 6 ft. above sea level with a single two-lane road out of town. He'll be toast. I've suggested that he start storing his boat on the roof.

Indeed, there's a lot that can be done to "prepare" for what's, at some point, going to hit us here in the Pacific Northwest.
I must admin, I had no idea what a 9 earthquake could be like until Friday... no idea. I'm not from here (PNW) originally, though I've been here for a while now, and though I've been through some earthquakes, they just don't really count.

Something that's come out with us is the need for a re-grouping/communication chain.

Meaning:
My wife and son's were supposed to be going to Fukushima for 6 weeks in June/July. I have some phone numbers, a few email addresses, etc.
Not nearly enough, I've realized.
If they were there now, I'd be absolutely freaking out.
If the same thing had happened here instead of there... they'd be absolutely freaking out.

Water and batteries are one thing, but big on my list of things to do is to come up with some strategies and systems for at least attempting to manage the communications chaos.

Seattle has long been aware that a big one is coming.
Now that I see how big BIG can be, I think I'll take some steps to ward off as much as possible. Not that you can ward off everything, of course.
3-4 minutes of a 9.0 and my house... not so sure that anything could be done.

- zevo

I think that the power grid should be decentralized and "self-healing" too.  If we had enough solar or alternative power sources spread around, we wouldn't need all these nukes to withstand 9.0 quakes.  And we wouldn't have rolling brown outs during the summer. 

"I think that the power grid should be decentralized and "self-healing" too.  If we had enough solar or alternative power sources spread around, we wouldn't need all these nukes to withstand 9.0 quakes.  And we wouldn't have rolling brown outs during the summer. "

I live in New Zealand and we don't have nuclear power plants. We have only 4 million people, with abundant natural resources to harness energy and convert it to electricity and yet we still have embarrassing "brown outs" and our electricity prices increase at about 2.5 times the rate of inflation.

What is happening in Japan is terrifying but I believe these are older plants. I hope mankind learns from the mistakes and does not give up on peaceful nuclear energy projects. Improvements have beeen made since Chernobyl and now I hope new smarter plants will be designed.

p.s. Windmill farms are bloody annoying. Noisy eyesores.

RobertB

ShermanSmelville

p.s. Windmill farms are bloody annoying. Noisy eyesores.

Perhaps, but if a windmill breaks, the worst problem is a broken windmill.

Unless it hits you in the eye.

Windmills have the added benefit of providing food. You merely have to gather up all the dead birds scattered around their bases.

Unfortunately, there is no free ride when it comes to energy production. Every method has its drawbacks. Even here in the Pacific Northwest, where most of our electricity generation is hydroelectric, our dams have wiped out the salmon runs and we have to truck fish past them so they don't go extinct.

I'd like to know more about the quiet windmills, though. I always thought the noise problem was from the high speed at the tips of the enormous blades, which are moving at close to the speed of sound. Smaller blades, perhaps?

- No worries Sherman!  I was just answering Bitflipper, but maybe this information will interest you as well?

I've got several math models that I've written to help estimate lots of aspects for wind and hydro power, I'll have to play around with some blade sizes to see which tips actually go faster.  The larger blades turn much slower (like 12 RPM), but the tips are so far out that they are still hauling ass.  The smaller blades turn much faster (some over 220 RPM), however the circumference is so much smaller that the tips aren't really going that much quicker than the blades...
 
The main reason our approach is quieter is that we use permanent magnet A/C (PMAC) motor/generators.  We don't need to be turning these at 1200 or 1800 RPM (the usual speeds for 6 or 4 pole induction generators).  In fact, we don't need to be turning at any consistent speed - we can handle a large range of speeds and still produce perfect 3-phase, 480 V power that's cleaner than utilities expect (<3% THD) and without leading or lagging (unity power factor).  So what's REALLY the main reason for the quietness besides the better generators?  No four-stage 98:1 gearbox.  These 4.5 TON beasts make an incredible racket (especially that last stage) and are constantly failing.  By using extremely high torque PMAC's we don't need to spin the turbine or the generator as fast.  Needless to say, this also means the tips are moving slower as well which lowers the annoying sound they make.  On top of that, our Chief Engineer (a PhD with 70 patents to his name) has designed a blade tip that cuts smoothly without distorting the wind at that point (a major reason for the noise that the tips make).
 
So, all in all you get a much quieter, WAY more efficient turbine (because we can not only generate power at wind speeds below and above those of traditional approaches, we're considerably more efficient at the same speeds).  If we use a gearbox at all, it's usually a single stage, sub-4:1 ratio turning at low RPM's.
 
And, not to avoid your other two points Bitflipper, you'd be surprised at how low the actual number of bird deaths really are.  I can look for the supporting documentation, but I remember one that was talking about something like 1,000 birds over the course of a year - but it was in one of the So. Cal. farms that has 6,000 turbines.  One benefit of the slower blade speeds is that most birds simply fly right through unharmed.  When you compare this to geothermal events like one that happened on Mammoth Mountain where gas was vented killing over 10,000 birds and animals, it's not too bad (note that I'm not saying I don't care).  As for the hydro, the projects we are working on are not big damn-type affairs, they are smaller projects contained on their own vessels that do not impact the fish like the larger projects do (NDA's prevent me from giving details until they are available for retail use).
 
I have a pretty good grasp of the mechanics of a nuclear reactor and they tend to have FAR more impact on the surrounding environment than the so-called "alternative" energy generation techniques.  Most sit next to a body of water that is used for cooling purposes (normally to help cool the "pure" water - not the last-ditch efforts we currently see in Japan where the sea water itself is being used - this will probably trash the reactor permanently).  What ends up happening after the water is used (converted for high-temperature phase change that sends super-heated steam under intense pressure at turbines) is that the body of water becomes much warmer than normal for up to nine miles and this causes a lot of havoc on marine life.
 
I guess the main point is that just about every form of power generation has some negative aspect, but we're trying to find the ones with the least amount of enviromental impact.  The unfortunate events coming out of Japan just tend to highlight this.