We live in the future.

[elfs]

Unfortunately, it's the scary one.

Comments

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Just so.

I could have lived very happily without getting a breaking news update that read as follows: "Officials believe a hydrogen explosion occurred at Japanese plant."

[autopope.livejournal.com]

No, we live in the future where the news media seem to be intent on frightening us all into an early grave with inaccurate or misleading reporting.

(Yes, those three reactors are basically write-offs. No, the situation is nowhere near as bad as most of the news reports are saying. The worst possible case is on the same level as Three Mile Island; a Chernobyl-grade mess is physically impossible with this type of reactor: right now it's not even TMI level bad.)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'm familiar with the story of the reactors, and know the difference between an INES-4 (this) and an INES-7 (Chernobyl) disaster. It was just that photo, of the woman and her daughter separated by a thick pane of glass because the daughter was being processed for surface nuclear materials, that reminded me of far too many bad science fiction films.

[blaisepascal]

That answers that question. The link you gave is not static, and did not point to that picture when I went to look at it.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Bleah! Thanks for noticing that. It would have been nice if they'd at least kept them in order.

[blaisepascal]

It was easy to notice. I followed your link, and went "what's so scary about that?". Then reading the comments to your post several hours later, I saw your description of the picture and went "that doesn't sound like what I saw" and followed the link again. I then went "this isn't what I saw before" and went following the slide show until I found both the image I saw earlier and the image you described.

I don't know if there's a permalink to a particular frame in the slide-show. I suspect they add new images to the beginning, so what was slide N becomes slide N+1.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

There's another point, one that I heard on Friday from a foreign news source ("foreign" as in not-US for non-US consumption). It's now been lost in the noise being generated by that information-cuisinart, The US Media.

All Japanese nuclear power plants have built-in shutoff systems in the event of earthquakes. They're designed to handle earthquakes.


And, if you think about it, this makes sense. Japan's on top of a farging major ocean trench fer crying out loud! Earthquakes are commonplace there. (I remember seeing a program about traditional Japanese architecture. Buildings older than a certain age all survive earthquakes. The very old ones, it turns out, use no rigid joints, but instead are interlocking. They're designed to shake.)

Just because the US eliminates safety-systems to cut the bottom line, then pretend that earthquakes will never hit that nuclear power plant … that doesn't mean everyone does. Japan's not stupid!


No, the problem here isn't the design of the Japanese nuclear plants. They were built to withstand and survive earthquakes … just not magnitude-9 quakes. Because no one can build anything guaranteed to survive a magnitude-9 earthquake.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

FYI:

The magnitude scale used to measure earthquakes replaced the Richter scale several decades ago has the following logarithmic increase

1-point magnitude larger == 32 times more energetic
2-point magnitude larger == 1000 times more energetic

[source: wikipedia]


That means that the Sendai Earthquake was…
…1000 times more powerful than the Haiti Earthquake last year;
…almost 8000 times more powerful than the 1933 Long Beach earthquake (mag. 6.4);
…1000 times more powerful than the Loma-Prieta Earthquake in 1989;
…a bit over 1000 times more powerful than the 1993 earthquake that hit Kobe, Japan.
…about 11000 times more powerful than the Christchurch, NZ earthquake (mag. 6.3) this year…

There are aftershocks to this earthquake with magnitude 6-7. Several per day, in fact.

[blaisepascal]

This was the 4th or 5th largest earthquake on record worldwide since 1900 (the 1952 Kamtchatka earthquake was also a 9.0), and the largest earthquake recorded in Japan ever.

[rhonan.livejournal.com]

I did smile at the photo of the 60 yo man found waving from a pile of debris miles out to sea. It is times like this when one has to look at the few bits of good news, lest one be overwhelmed by the bad. One also has to give to good, secular, aid agencies. The Japanese need food and body bags, not bibles and tracts.