[ExI] Two Japanese reactors on red alert

[Richard Loosemore]

Mirco Romanato wrote:
> Il 16/03/2011 14.36, Richard Loosemore ha scritto:
>> Mirco Romanato wrote:

> Japan planners and designers planned for earthquakes and tsunami they
> knew at the time, not for earthquakes and tsunami we know now.

This is not correct.

What the Japanese planners knew, and what they were supposed to plan 
for, was the following list of historical Japanese earthquakes that had 
a magnitude of 8.0 or above:

DATE            MAGNITUDE (minimum)
  11/29/684	8.0
   7/13/869	8.3
   8/3/1361	8.3
12/31/1703	8.0
10/28/1707	8.6
12/23/1854	8.4
10/28/1891	8.0
  6/15/1896	8.5
   9/1/1923	8.3
   3/2/1933	8.4
12/20/1946	8.1
11/15/2006	8.3
  1/13/2007	8.1

The largest magnitude was 8.6, only a factor of 5 in energy (roughly) 
less than the quake that just occurred.

Your argument seems to be that their planning teams should have taken 
only the highest of these, and not assumed that it would never go beyond 
that.

> I don't think we know the real frequency of 9.0 quakes in Japan in the
> region of the reactors. Nor we know exactly the frequency a 30 feet high
> tsunami. One in 50 years? One in a century? More?
> We have recorded data only for the last century or two. No more.

Nonsense.  The above list was easy to obtain.  It includes data for 
about FOURTEEN centuries.

> Your statement that planners in Japan put the plant ON an active fault
> line is factually false. The active fault was somewhere 130 km east of
> the Senday City, under the sea.

"On" is relative.  Did you think that I meant that it was aligned with 
the fault to an accuracy of 10 microns?

And the fault was just offshore?  All the better to create a tsunami.

Who would have seen THAT coming, huh?


> It is difficult to plan for something that could happen 160 Km away in
> any point of the many fault lines near and around Japan.
> Planners plan, make assumptions, make decision and accept trade off.
> Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes much
> wrong, sometimes only a little. Sometimes they are lucky good planners
> and sometimes they are unlucky stupid planners.

?



Richard Loosemore