To Everything... Turn, Turn, Turn

I finally broke down and bought a new phone. The keypad 
was starting to
 had completely given out on parts of my old Moto-Q. Turns out "P", "space" and "enter" are kinda important from time to time. Plus it's an old Windoze Mobile 6.1 (upgraded) phone that didn't have a big touchscreen and really was out of date for about 99% of the apps out there. 


It was time to go.

I settled on the Samsung Captivate (AT&T's version of the Samsung Galaxy S) because it has tons of features and nothing but great reviews. Plus the $99 price tag for a new one looked pretty good in the bang for the buck category. I've wanted an iPhone since they first came out, but I think the Android platform is more versatile and the Samsung has a better camera. Not to mention, it isn't made by Apple.

The Captivate cost me $99. But I could have bought a cosmetic refurb 8G iPhone3GS  for free. I still think I made the right deal going with the Droid.

Thoughts?


I also lucked out because a major factor in changing phones was swapping rate plans. I had a $19.99 Unlimited data plan that was hard to beat. Turns out I can get by on the $15.99 plan because I really don't surf that much from my phone.


Anywho, here's the Samsung Galaxy S:
http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=394&p=all#page2877

Samsung Captivate

Update: An astute friend was kind enough to point out I could have got the exact same phone for $50 less if I bought it from RadioShack.

Craigslist Funny or Sad

The whole "funny Craigslist ad" is really more of a Silicone Alley bit, but I ran across this on a message board and had to repost for you guys. The big discussion was if it was a joke or real. You decide.

http://anchorage.craigslist.org/mis/2268834840.html

"I cain't afford ta work"

I was talking with a guy the other day that was complaining he'd been out of work for 2 years and still couldn't find a job, blamed the government for having to live on foodstamps, ect, ect. I thought I'd do him a favor and told him I heard Peterbilt in Denton was hiring close to 1,000 people. I know several people that have been hired in the last week or two.

What was his response? "I cain't afford ta work there".

Huh?

OK, maybe I didn't give it a full sales pitch. "Peterbilt... In Denton... Is hiring 1,000 people. $22 an hour."

Nope, my car gets 14MPG. The gas would kill me. I'd be losing money.

They are paying over $22 an hour and you can't afford to work there? You can't afford to ditch the 1984 Chevy 1/2 ton for a newer car that gets 3 times the gas mileage? You can't afford to relocate closer to the work?  You can't afford to make an effort to get off assistance?

Is the truck really the problem or is it you just don't want to work, but you really like bitching about Democrats, Mexicans and the guvamint for all your problems with your buddies while ya'll kill a 30 pack or two of Natty Lite and Stones with 4 or 5 bags of Food Stamp Cheetos?

Another Musical Interlude: Rockin' That 'Fro Edition

Just because I got nuthin' is no reason not to harken back to those thrilling days (and hairstyles) of yesteryear.

You play that funky music, white boy! You play it till you die, or you lose your hair follicles from those perms.

I mean really, WTF were you thinking?


On a side note, why is VH1 calling this part of their Disco Party?

A Musical Interlude: Buck Owens Edition

Infreakingcredible

This is raw footage of the tsunami hitting Kesennuma, Japan. It is was a city of 75,000 about 5 miles from the coast. While it did not hit like the crushing 30 foot wall seen in earlier videos, you will see just how fast and deadly it was.


View Larger Map

Kiss A FW Landmark Goodbye?

From Fort Worth Weekly:

The largest and most eye-catching motel sign on Jacksboro Highway might be going away soon.  The Caravan Inn owners are toying with the idea of selling the property to a gas station chain. The recession has taken a toll on the motel business since 2007.

Manufacturing a similar sign today would cost a small fortune, Patel said. The sign might be valuable to someone who happens to have a motel named Caravan Inn. Or maybe a collector is looking for a really, really large piece of yard art. Now that would make an impressive collectible.

More News From Japan

"Here is a photo of the (toll) highway a little north of where I live. 

The 9.0 quake about 180 miles away did this."

A few updates from my friend in Japan. Keep in mind he's replying to questions on a forum so some of this may be hard to follow.

(Regarding Fukushima disaster)

March 14, 2011, 06:49:24 PM Very serious now. The containment vessel may have been breached. The workers have evacuated the plant. Things are happening very fast - this is serious March 14, 2011, 06:59:50 PM No one can verify as of this minute, but appears that way.  Real time instantaneous information is difficult. March 14, 2011, 07:19:51 PM

The area has been evacuated for days. Things are still not 100% clear and everything now is just speculation. March 14, 2011, 09:29:35 PM Fire is not radioactive. (added)They just corrected to say it is radioactive. Damn. up to 400 mSv levels in the facility. (Added again) This not clear. It seems the smoke may just be carrying some of the radiation from the vicinity  of the reactors and not radioactive in origin. My translation of what they said is that. But, one of  the Tokyo Power guys said that the fire may have been in the stored fuel area. The stored rods  may be the source of the radiation.  March 15, 2011 at 04:40:22 AM The fire is out. Spent fuel rods in a storage pool were exposed, forming hydrogen gas and an  explosion. That explosion caused the fire. The storage pool water temperature is now reduced,  but still double what is normal. There are reports that the fire added to the radiation spike  discussed below. The radiation level near reactor 2 was 400 mSv/hr during the spike with the fire. That's high and serious for anyone in the area unprotected. It is reported to have dropped back down to 1.2 mSv within minutes. The suppression pool (a toroid with a large volume of water under the  reactor) may have been damaged when a hydrogen explosion occurred near the bottom of the  reactor, instead of higher in the building seen in previous explosions. The amount and nature of  damage isn't clear yet. Everyone has been evacuated from within 20 km - the evacuation started days ago. People  20 -30 km away are staying inside and taking other precautions. The radiation measurements  outside the area are very low and of no consequence. I'm downwind about 100km away and  not concerned or affected by the minuscule increase in radiation. March 15, 2011 at 07:12:07 PM The problems at the plant are: 1. There is no electric power to do anything. 2. The stored fuel rod pools are the main problem. They are located above the reactors in the  same buildings and they cannot keep the spent fuel rods covered. They appear to be the  radioactive source, not the reactors. They have no way to pump water (seawater - the only  source now) up to them without power. They were using firetrucks, but they have been damaged  in the hydrogen explosions. 3. There are 6 reactors, all with the same pools and problems. Every time one gets under control,  another loses water and it's like juggling 6 hot potatoes. The radiation from the rods doesn't contain I-131 (Iodine-131), so I-127 (Iodine-127) has  no effect. It's meaningless. The radiation levels outside the immediate area of the plant is in the scale of 0.8 µSv. That is  8/10,000,000th of a Sv. It has no effect on anything. Japan has bigger problems than that. The trucks aren't running, the grocery stores throughout  the entire Tokyo (200 miles and 40 million people south) are running out of food, there is no  gasoline (we don't know why) and stores are only open for a few hours because of rolling  blackouts from power shortages. Some areas only have 3-4 hours of power per day. Factories  and other businesses are all closed. March 15, 2011 at 11:15:30 PM My place is still shaking from another big quake just minutes ago. The spike was micro (µSv), not milli (mSv). That is 1,000 times less. Sending the wife to Okinawa in a few days. Already have reservation and planes are flying in  and out of Tokyo. I'm collecting blankets from all the neighbors and some of us will fill our cars and head north to help.

“Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors.”

OK, this is quite a read, but worth it. What exactly do we have to worry about with the Japanese nuclear reactor accidents? This guy is a big giant nuclear brain at MIT and he breaks it down for you in language you can understand. But it's still a wall o' text.

Put on your reading glasses get some learnin'.

Modified version of original post written by Josef Oehmen
Posted on March 13, 2011 by mitnse

This post originally appeared on Morgsatlarge. It has been migrated to this location which is hosted and maintained by the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Members of the NSE community have edited the original post and will be monitoring and posting comments, updates, and new information. Please visit to learn more.

The original post written by Dr Josef Oehmen “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors.” 

We will have to cover some fundamentals, before we get into what is going on.

Construction of the Fukushima nuclear power plants

The plants at Fukushima are Boiling Water Reactors (BWR for short). A BWR produces electricity by boiling water, and spinning a a turbine with that steam. The nuclear fuel heats water, the water boils and creates steam, the steam then drives turbines that create the electricity, and the steam is then cooled and condensed back to water, and the water returns to be heated by the nuclear fuel. The reactor operates at about 285 °C.

The nuclear fuel is uranium oxide. Uranium oxide is a ceramic with a very high melting point of about 2800 °C. The fuel is manufactured in pellets (cylinders that are about 1 cm tall and 1 com in diameter). These pellets are then put into a long tube made of Zircaloy (an alloy of zirconium) with a failure temperature of 1200 °C (caused by the auto-catalytic oxidation of water), and sealed tight. This tube is called a fuel rod. These fuel rods are then put together to form assemblies, of which several hundred make up the reactor core.

The solid fuel pellet (a ceramic oxide matrix) is the first barrier that retains many of the radioactive fission products produced by the fission process.  The Zircaloy casing is the second barrier to release that separates the radioactive fuel from the rest of the reactor.

The core is then placed in the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel is a thick steel vessel that operates at a pressure of about 7 MPa (~1000 psi), and is designed to withstand the high pressures that may occur during an accident. The pressure vessel is the third barrier to radioactive material release.

The entire primary loop of the nuclear reactor – the pressure vessel, pipes, and pumps that contain the coolant (water) – are housed in the containment structure.  This structure is the fourth barrier to radioactive material release. The containment structure is a hermetically (air tight) sealed, very thick structure made of steel and concrete. This structure is designed, built and tested for one single purpose: To contain, indefinitely, a complete core meltdown. To aid in this purpose, a large, thick concrete structure is poured around the containment structure and is referred to as the secondary containment.

Both the main containment structure and the secondary containment structure are housed in the reactor building. The reactor building is an outer shell that is supposed to keep the weather out, but nothing in. (this is the part that was damaged in the explosions, but more to that later).

Fundamentals of nuclear reactions

The uranium fuel generates heat by neutron-induced nuclear fission. Uranium atoms are split into lighter atoms (aka fission products). This process generates heat and more neutrons (one of the particles that forms an atom). When one of these neutrons hits another uranium atom, that atom can split, generating more neutrons and so on. That is called the nuclear chain reaction. During normal, full-power operation, the neutron population in a core is stable (remains the same) and the reactor is in a critical state.

It is worth mentioning at this point that the nuclear fuel in a reactor can never cause a nuclear explosion like a nuclear bomb. At Chernobyl, the explosion was caused by excessive pressure buildup, hydrogen explosion and rupture of all structures, propelling molten core material into the environment.  Note that Chernobyl did not have a containment structure as a barrier to the environment. Why that did not and will not happen in Japan, is discussed further below.

In order to control the nuclear chain reaction, the reactor operators use control rods. The control rods are made of boron which absorbs neutrons.  During normal operation in a BWR, the control rods are used to maintain the chain reaction at a critical state. The control rods are also used to shut the reactor down from 100% power to about 7% power (residual or decay heat).

The residual heat is caused from the radioactive decay of fission products.  Radioactive decay is the process by which the fission products  stabilize themselves by emitting energy in the form of small particles (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron, etc.).  There is a multitude of fission products that are produced in a reactor, including cesium and iodine.  This residual heat decreases over time after the reactor is shutdown, and must be removed by cooling systems to prevent the fuel rod from overheating and failing as a barrier to radioactive release. Maintaining enough cooling to remove the decay heat in the reactor is the main challenge in the affected reactors in Japan right now.

It is important to note that many of these fission products decay (produce heat) extremely quickly, and become harmless by the time you spell “R-A-D-I-O-N-U-C-L-I-D-E.”  Others decay more slowly, like some cesium, iodine, strontium, and argon.

What happened at Fukushima (as of March 12, 2011)

I will try to summarize the main facts. The earthquake that hit Japan was several times more powerful than the worst earthquake the nuclear power plant was built for (the Richter scale works logarithmically; the difference between the 8.2 that the plants were built for and the 8.9 that happened is 5 times, not 0.7).

When the earthquake hit, the nuclear reactors all automatically shutdown. Within seconds after the earthquake started, the control rods had been inserted into the core and nuclear chain reaction of the uranium stopped. Now, the cooling system has to carry away the residual heat. The residual heat load is about 3% of the heat load under normal operating conditions.

The earthquake destroyed the external power supply of the nuclear reactor. That is one of the most serious accidents for a nuclear power plant, and accordingly, a “plant black out” receives a lot of attention when designing backup systems. The power is needed to keep the coolant pumps working. Since the power plant had been shut down, it cannot produce any electricity by itself any more.

Things were going well for an hour. One set of multiple sets of emergency Diesel power generators kicked in and provided the electricity that was needed. Then the Tsunami came, much bigger than people had expected when building the power plant (see above, factor 7). The tsunami took out all multiple sets of backup Diesel generators.

When designing a nuclear power plant, engineers follow a philosophy called “Defense of Depth”. That means that you first build everything to withstand the worst catastrophe you can imagine, and then design the plant in such a way that it can still handle one system failure (that you thought could never happen) after the other. A tsunami taking out all backup power in one swift strike is such a scenario. The last line of defense is putting everything into the third containment (see above), that will keep everything, whatever the mess, control rods in our out, core molten or not, inside the reactor.

When the diesel generators were gone, the reactor operators switched to emergency battery power. The batteries were designed as one of the backups to the backups, to provide power for cooling the core for 8 hours. And they did.

Within the 8 hours, another power source had to be found and connected to the power plant. The power grid was down due to the earthquake. The diesel generators were destroyed by the tsunami. So mobile diesel generators were trucked in.

This is where things started to go seriously wrong. The external power generators could not be connected to the power plant (the plugs did not fit). So after the batteries ran out, the residual heat could not be carried away any more.

At this point the plant operators begin to follow emergency procedures that are in place for a “loss of cooling event”. It is again a step along the “Depth of Defense” lines. The power to the cooling systems should never have failed completely, but it did, so they “retreat” to the next line of defense. All of this, however shocking it seems to us, is part of the day-to-day training you go through as an operator, right through to managing a core meltdown.

It was at this stage that people started to talk about core meltdown. Because at the end of the day, if cooling cannot be restored, the core will eventually melt (after hours or days), and the last line of defense, the core catcher and third containment, would come into play.

But the goal at this stage was to manage the core while it was heating up, and ensure that the first containment (the Zircaloy tubes that contains the nuclear fuel), as well as the second containment (our pressure cooker) remain intact and operational for as long as possible, to give the engineers time to fix the cooling systems.

Because cooling the core is such a big deal, the reactor has a number of cooling systems, each in multiple versions (the reactor water cleanup system, the decay heat removal, the reactor core isolating cooling, the standby liquid cooling system, and the emergency core cooling system). Which one failed when or did not fail is not clear at this point in time.

So imagine our pressure cooker on the stove, heat on low, but on. The operators use whatever cooling system capacity they have to get rid of as much heat as possible, but the pressure starts building up. The priority now is to maintain integrity of the first containment (keep temperature of the fuel rods below 2200°C), as well as the second containment, the pressure cooker.  In order to maintain integrity of the pressure cooker (the second containment), the pressure has to be released from time to time. Because the ability to do that in an emergency is so important, the reactor has 11 pressure release valves. The operators now started venting steam from time to time to control the pressure. The temperature at this stage was about 550°C.

This is when the reports about “radiation leakage” starting coming in. I believe I explained above why venting the steam is theoretically the same as releasing radiation into the environment, but why it was and is not dangerous. The radioactive nitrogen as well as the noble gases do not pose a threat to human health.

At some stage during this venting, the explosion occurred. The explosion took place outside of the third containment (our “last line of defense”), and the reactor building. Remember that the reactor building has no function in keeping the radioactivity contained. It is not entirely clear yet what has happened, but this is the likely scenario: The operators decided to vent the steam from the pressure vessel not directly into the environment, but into the space between the third containment and the reactor building (to give the radioactivity in the steam more time to subside). The problem is that at the high temperatures that the core had reached at this stage, water molecules can “disassociate” into oxygen and hydrogen – an explosive mixture. And it did explode, outside the third containment, damaging the reactor building around. It was that sort of explosion, but inside the pressure vessel (because it was badly designed and not managed properly by the operators) that lead to the explosion of Chernobyl. This was never a risk at Fukushima. The problem of hydrogen-oxygen formation is one of the biggies when you design a power plant (if you are not Soviet, that is), so the reactor is build and operated in a way it cannot happen inside the containment. It happened outside, which was not intended but a possible scenario and OK, because it did not pose a risk for the containment.

So the pressure was under control, as steam was vented. Now, if you keep boiling your pot, the problem is that the water level will keep falling and falling. The core is covered by several meters of water in order to allow for some time to pass (hours, days) before it gets exposed. Once the rods start to be exposed at the top, the exposed parts will reach the critical temperature of 2200 °C after about 45 minutes. This is when the first containment, the Zircaloy tube, would fail.

And this started to happen. The cooling could not be restored before there was some (very limited, but still) damage to the casing of some of the fuel. The nuclear material itself was still intact, but the surrounding Zircaloy shell had started melting. What happened now is that some of the byproducts of the uranium decay – radioactive Cesium and Iodine – started to mix with the steam. The big problem, uranium, was still under control, because the uranium oxide rods were good until 3000 °C. It is confirmed that a very small amount of Cesium and Iodine was measured in the steam that was released into the atmosphere.

It seems this was the “go signal” for a major plan B. The small amounts of Cesium that were measured told the operators that the first containment on one of the rods somewhere was about to give. The Plan A had been to restore one of the regular cooling systems to the core. Why that failed is unclear. One plausible explanation is that the tsunami also took away / polluted all the clean water needed for the regular cooling systems.

The water used in the cooling system is very clean, demineralized (like distilled) water. The reason to use pure water is the above mentioned activation by the neutrons from the Uranium: Pure water does not get activated much, so stays practically radioactive-free. Dirt or salt in the water will absorb the neutrons quicker, becoming more radioactive. This has no effect whatsoever on the core – it does not care what it is cooled by. But it makes life more difficult for the operators and mechanics when they have to deal with activated (i.e. slightly radioactive) water.

But Plan A had failed – cooling systems down or additional clean water unavailable – so Plan B came into effect. This is what it looks like happened:

In order to prevent a core meltdown, the operators started to use sea water to cool the core. I am not quite sure if they flooded our pressure cooker with it (the second containment), or if they flooded the third containment, immersing the pressure cooker. But that is not relevant for us.

The point is that the nuclear fuel has now been cooled down. Because the chain reaction has been stopped a long time ago, there is only very little residual heat being produced now. The large amount of cooling water that has been used is sufficient to take up that heat. Because it is a lot of water, the core does not produce sufficient heat any more to produce any significant pressure. Also, boric acid has been added to the seawater. Boric acid is “liquid control rod”. Whatever decay is still going on, the Boron will capture the neutrons and further speed up the cooling down of the core.

The plant came close to a core meltdown. Here is the worst-case scenario that was avoided: If the seawater could not have been used for treatment, the operators would have continued to vent the water steam to avoid pressure buildup. The third containment would then have been completely sealed to allow the core meltdown to happen without releasing radioactive material. After the meltdown, there would have been a waiting period for the intermediate radioactive materials to decay inside the reactor, and all radioactive particles to settle on a surface inside the containment. The cooling system would have been restored eventually, and the molten core cooled to a manageable temperature. The containment would have been cleaned up on the inside. Then a messy job of removing the molten core from the containment would have begun, packing the (now solid again) fuel bit by bit into transportation containers to be shipped to processing plants. Depending on the damage, the block of the plant would then either be repaired or dismantled.

Now, where does that leave us? My assessment:

The plant is safe now and will stay safe.
Japan is looking at an INES Level 4 Accident: Nuclear accident with local consequences. That is bad for the company that owns the plant, but not for anyone else.
Some radiation was released when the pressure vessel was vented. All radioactive isotopes from the activated steam have gone (decayed). A very small amount of Cesium was released, as well as Iodine. If you were sitting on top of the plants’ chimney when they were venting, you should probably give up smoking to return to your former life expectancy. The Cesium and Iodine isotopes were carried out to the sea and will never be seen again.
There was some limited damage to the first containment. That means that some amounts of radioactive Cesium and Iodine will also be released into the cooling water, but no Uranium or other nasty stuff (the Uranium oxide does not “dissolve” in the water). There are facilities for treating the cooling water inside the third containment. The radioactive Cesium and Iodine will be removed there and eventually stored as radioactive waste in terminal storage.
The seawater used as cooling water will be activated to some degree. Because the control rods are fully inserted, the Uranium chain reaction is not happening. That means the “main” nuclear reaction is not happening, thus not contributing to the activation. The intermediate radioactive materials (Cesium and Iodine) are also almost gone at this stage, because the Uranium decay was stopped a long time ago. This further reduces the activation. The bottom line is that there will be some low level of activation of the seawater, which will also be removed by the treatment facilities.
The seawater will then be replaced over time with the “normal” cooling water
The reactor core will then be dismantled and transported to a processing facility, just like during a regular fuel change.
Fuel rods and the entire plant will be checked for potential damage. This will take about 4-5 years.
The safety systems on all Japanese plants will be upgraded to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami (or worse)
(Updated) I believe the most significant problem will be a prolonged power shortage. 11 of Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors in different plants were shut down and will have to be inspected, directly reducing the nation’s nuclear power generating capacity by 20%, with nuclear power accounting for about 30% of the national total power generation capacity. I have not looked into possible consequences for other nuclear plants not directly affected. This will probably be covered by running gas power plants that are usually only used for peak loads to cover some of the base load as well.  I am not familiar with Japan’s energy supply chain for oil, gas and coal, and what damage the harbors, refinery, storage and transportation networks have suffered, as well as damage to the national distribution grid. All of that will increase your electricity bill, as well as lead to power shortages during peak demand and reconstruction efforts, in Japan.
This all is only part of a much bigger picture. Emergency response has to deal with shelter, drinking water, food and medical care, transportation and communication infrastructure, as well as electricity supply. In a world of lean supply chains, we are looking at some major challenges in all of these areas.

Spanning The Globe

Remember my friend in Iceland that lives next door to the volcano? As fate would have it, I have another (from the same online game) that lives in Japan. Here's a few of his posts in chronological order. All times are CST/CDT.

March 11, 2011, 08:45:59 AM
Howdy...

My power just came back on a few minutes ago and it's 11:15 pm Friday. Unbelievable is all I can say. There were 4 different quakes within 30 minutes that spread across the entire Pacific tectonic plate just offshore. I live close to the second one - a 7.4 quake.

The first (8.8 magnitude) massive one was 300 km north of me. It was so strong that I was thrown around like a rag doll inside a stopped car and could not get out. The car (Mercedes station wagon)was bouncing like a toy. My wife was outdoors in a clear area and could barely keep standing. And that was 300km from the quake. The news is reporting that it was the largest quake ever recorded in Japanese history. The aftershocks have been continuous and very strong.

1. The photo (shown in a previous post) is a gas facility near Tokyo, not a nuclear power plant.
2. There is no emergency at the nuclear plant in Fukushima. People within 3 km are being evacuated because there is still a possibility of more tsunamis in the area. It is precautionary.
3. If this had been closer to Tokyo, I couldn't even imagine the casualties.
4. It has been reported that this such a rare tectonic event that it's possible there could be another within the next week.

There have been three aftershocks as I wrote this, that's how frequently they are happening, even after 8 hours after the first quake. We are very lucky and have no damage at all to our place. A lot of people are not as lucky.


March 11, 2011, 09:13:09 AM
(Replying to initial denial of radiation leaks)


I watched him on TV and that is not what he said in the news conference. So, I don't know what to say?

I'm in the middle of another big quake this minute. This is astounding.


March 11, 2011, 05:33:13 PM
It's 8 am, Saturday in Japan. The weather is beautiful, but Japan is a mess.

- Kyodo news ( a print news agency) reported last night on their English website that 88,000 people were missing. I don't know the veracity of that. I've not seen anything similar reported on TV today.

- TV news is reporting only that "over 1,000" are confirmed dead. I don't think anyone can estimate the total casualties yet.

- I've spoken to a friend in Yokohama and all the power was restored last night. There was little damage (it's further south), so I wouldn't worry about relatives there, since no casualties reported. The phone system is jammed, so don't expect calls.

- I just watched a report on the Fukushima plant. They are going to vent (it's filtered) to relieve some pressure, and there will be a small amount to radiation released in the process, but it's an insignificant amount. The evacuation is a precaution, not a necessity. There are more important problems and it's not being reported as something people need to panic about.

- The quakes have been relentless. We didn't get any sleep, as we were awakened throughout the night with quakes, and there have been three so far as I write this.

I hate earthquakes. Every quake/aftershock we've had since the big ones yesterday are as big as anything I've felt before in Japan. Every time another quake starts, and the house and furniture begin to rattle and shake, you don't know if this is going to be another big one, or a lesser one than yesterday.


March 12, 2011, 05:22:54 PM
(Replying to the dynamics of earthquakes)
Yes, the geometry of quakes are different and magnitude isn't the sole indicator of damage. One mile is deep is very shallow. Over 6,000 people died in the Kobe earthquake in Kobe in 1995 and there was no tsunami because it's more inland. Vertical motion is the most dangerous, not horizontal swaying.

It was the tsunamis that caused the deaths and destruction of all of northeast Japan shoreline, not the earthquake. But, the quake packed enough power to move Japan. The entire country moved 8 feet. Think about picking up a country and moving it 8 feet.

I'm about 100 miles south of the most southern area where the tsunami damage starts, but 50 million people in east Japan will be affected for the rest of our lives. Here's how: Those nuclear power plants up north will be offline and there is not enough generation capacity. Most of the trains are not running yet, factories and offices are closed this weekend and so are many businesses throughout eastern Japan.

And yet, there is not enough generating capacity now to provide power to everyone now, when everything is closed. What happens on Monday? Businesses and factories will want to open, people will want to run heaters and have lights (it was snowing in many of the places where the tsunamis hit - it's cold), people living in high rises and working in high rise offices will want to have elevators to take them up 30 floors, instead of climbing stairs.

Starting Monday, we are going to have rolling blackouts. They could last for the rest of my life. Building new generating capacity takes a long time. Our already high energy costs are going to skyrocket, but still not have enough power.

I like electricity.


March 14, 2011 at 08:51:41 PM
It's Monday morning here.

Just had another big quake about 10 minutes ago very near my place. Sigh

Cell phone service is returning... slowly.
Undersea telephone cables were cut during quake, so many international telephone providers may have no service.

Central Tokyo will keep power all the time. The rest of us in the suburban areas are going to have blackouts starting today. I will lose power 6-10 am and 5 to 8:30 pm every day. Those blackouts will affect everything, including traffic signals, water service, everything. Imagine the impact on businesses... 45 million people are affected by this rationing.

All the gas stations have run out of gasoline here.

Everyone has followed the traditional custom of hoarding 1 year worth of toilet paper and tissue. Supermarkets as running out of food.

No trains or highway traffic beyond 30 minutes north of me. The train and highway bridges were damaged.
Very few trains are running this morning in Tokyo. The new schedules will only have some morning and afternoon trains - stopping mid-day.
They say the electricity rationing is only through April, but I'm not sure that will be true. Could be a stopgap until they work out some other rationing system since those nuclear plants are not coming back on line and I don't know where they will get the generating capacity so quickly. I feel it's like the hostess telling you the wait for a table is only 15 minutes, but the truth is that it will be an hour.

Things are confusing this morning as people try to go to work. The transportation and blackout timing will take some time to iron out. People are very patient and there is no panic. Japanese are quite calm and don't overreact in situations like this.

On the other hand, the foreign reporting I've read of the nuclear plant situation is overboard and sensationalism. It's a disservice to society to have so much fear mongering for the sake of ratings. There is no possibility of a "Chernobyl" incident - zero chance. Also, no "China Syndrome" as long as the containment vessels are undamaged, which is the case so far. Melting fuel can reach temperatures high enough to melt itself, but it cannot get high enough to penetrate the steel used in containment vessel construction.

If the containment vessels hold through a 9.0 quake, all of the aftershocks and tsunamis, I am impressed. The people exposed to radiation is the same amount as a chest X-ray.

I feel so sorry for the people up north. It's going to be cold with rain and snow tomorrow. It's truly hell for them. There is still a possibility of another large quake. Apparently it's normal to have a second quake after about a week that is 1 magnitude less, which would be an 8.0. That would trigger another tsunami. Let's hope that we defy the odds on that scenario.


02:19:33 AM
Well, the last explosion at number 3 reactor damaged the cooling system at the adjoining number 2 reactor, so we're into the 3rd emergency at the Fukushima plant.

I'm about to lose my electric power, so I'll see you later.


 06:19:58 AM
My power is on now, obviously...

The 3rd reactor building (Reactor #2) that was stabilized a few days ago is likely to explode as they have to release pressure. The pump has failed on the fire truck being used to pump sea water into the reactor. They're trying to get another firetruck but they may not get there in time.

What an astounding cascade of bad luck. It's like a movie. If they get through this last episode, the reactor emergencies will be contained.

Let it be.