[ExI] Two Japanese reactors on red alert

[Mirco Romanato]

Il 16/03/2011 20.53, Richard Loosemore ha scritto:
> 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.

Thank you for the data. It is interesting.
Can you give a link to the source?

> 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.

Yes.
Because these quakes hit in different places of Japan.

We have 1327 years of data, with 13 events 8 or more powerful.
It is improbable these events hit all in the same place.
I suppose these were distributed around all the Japan Islands.
Give the data, a 9.0 event is something that happen one time over a
millennium or more.
This event, like many before, killed many people, damaged many
properties. The nuclear contamination, in the worse scenario, will add
very little more material damage and human loss to this.

Must be remarked that the quake did nothing to the power plants.
The quake + tsunami did it.

Now, we can suppose that this, is at worse, a one over a millennium
event. Japan can recover from the quake and the tsunami in one or two
years (thanks to its wealth and human resources). The nuclear leaks will
add a few days to the recover, no more. Chernobyl was 100.000 much worse
(as radiation contamination) and needed only 25 years to return to the
natural background radiation level.

Japan recovered from a 8.3 quake in 1923, when 150.000 people where
killed (with a much smaller population and much less wealth) and in ten
years was able to invade China and extend his power in the Pacific Ocean.

So we can expect this to happen, with the same old nuclear technology,
one time every millennium. It is a risk I would accept. The risk to
cross the road is much larger than this over a millennium.

>> 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.

And no one 9.0 quake. This is the first.

Good luck is blind; bad luck have an eagle sight.

>> 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.

130 km is very relative.

> Did you think that I meant that it was aligned
> with the fault to an accuracy of 10 microns?

Not, with the accuracy of twenty meters.

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

> Who would have seen THAT coming, huh?

The planners, that planned for a 20 feet wave.
It was a 30 feet wave, instead.
The first in a millennium, I suppose.


>> 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.

> ?

People acting take risks. People talking don't.
Any plan can go wrong. Any planner can be wrong.
This is true for them as is true for you or Eugene.
You only know after and not before.

Come a new Ice Age (whatever be the reason) your plan would be wrong and
the nuclear plants would be right. But someone like you would lament
your lack of foresight.
Hey, the next Ice Age is a millennium or two later than usual.

-- 
Leggimi su Extropolitica Blog <http://extropolitca.blogspot.com/>
Leggimi su Estropico Blog <http://estropico.blogspot.com/>
*Mirco Romanato*




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