Japan Quake

[Chris & Nean]

Awful terrible news of whats happend in japan, so sad to see the destruction and loss of life.

[J.P]

Tell me about it.
I work for a Japanese stockbrokers, surrounded by Japanese people who all have relatives all over Japan who have been directly effected in one way or another.
One major problem is that the 3rd largest phone service provider has lost 95% of its land-line cables making communication that bit more difficult.

[gremlin]

Iwatched some of the news feed on line it was horrific, just seeing the huge wave sweeping up everything in its path. The fact it's hit the farming areas will cause so much suffering to all. It will be interesting to see how quickly they get back on their feet though, the Japanese are very tenacious and have an amazing work ethic.
Seeing it all going on puts life in to perspective, we whinge and whine about stuff but it's very doubtful we'll ever have to go through anything like that, the only ones at risk are those who live on the coast in Norfolk or down in Sussex, some are pretty close to the edge and each high tide is a worry, but it's unlikely anything on this scale will ever hit, it's just a slow erosion dropping houses into the sea.

[Chris & Nean]

Its blown up :shocked: this could be far worse than Chernobyl, Japan is a tiny country unlike Russia, they just ain't got the space for 100 mile exclusion zone on that tiny strip of an island, what a terrible terrible disaster this it.

[gremlin]

may not be as bad as first thought, the core should be safe apparantly. They've been very open about it all so actions can be taken to prevent a disaster. It's amazing how their nuclear plants stood up though, it makes me feel a lot happier about them in this country as we'll never have to face anything like this well in theory anyway. It's heartbreaking to see the devastation though. It will take so long for the farming areas to recover due to the salt contamination and there has been such a huge loss of housing in out lying areas. I feel I want to do something to help but I don't know what would be helpful. They are such a proud people too so it must be so hard for them to ask for help from us outsiders. Mother Nature can be bit of a bitch sometimes.

[utopia]

First point...massive sympathy for the people involved.
Second point...building a nuclear reactor in a known severe earthquake zone on a volcanic island chain was always a huge risk, and somewhat misguided imo.
Third point...see first point.

[Nickj]

Its blown up :shocked: this could be far worse than Chernobyl, Japan is a tiny country unlike Russia, they just ain't got the space for 100 mile exclusion zone on that tiny strip of an island, what a terrible terrible disaster this it.

Looks like they had some coolant problems so it was probably 'just' a hydrogen oxygen flash fire in the area around the actual containment build, the outside shell really. If it was coolant even secondary could well account for the low level caesium detected.
If the containment vessel had been breached there would be rather more panic in the air although the government there has buried other problems with their nuclear program in the past.
Having said that anything sticking out of the containment shell itself is going to be toast like plumbing for secondary cooling, control systems.. You've got to hope that the SCRAM system didn't get trashed when it went bang then they'd more than likely already dropped the control rods. They'd also hopefully got a neutron poison into the primary cooling system to damp the reactor down. The reactor would have been hot (physically and radioactively) when the quake hit but not have been running outside of it's operating ranges.
Cherobyl was very different and being deliberately pushed running way past its operating range with the safety cut outs disabled, by the time they realised they'd screwed it and manually tried to drop the control rods the core was already self destructing and so buckled they couldn't drop the dampers to stop the reactor. The last resort of an emergency shut down, injecting the core primary cooling system with a liquid damper was the icing on the disaster, the coolant pipes were full of holes with maybe half or more already melted so they just tossed water onto white hot materials. The water/borax mix flashed into superheated steam where the pipes were good and just pressure injected it straight into the now virtually molten core where it broke up into hydrogen and oxygen, the resulting explosion blew the top off of the containment vessel meaning there was no way they could do anything else and the core just started slowly melting its way through the containment vessel.

Living close to the Hinkley reactors for a few portions of my life you take an interest in how these things fail over or not.

[gremlin]

blimey Nick that was pretty good info! I'd got the bit about the cooling etc and understood some of the in and outs but you've done a better job than the Beeb in explaining it all. Just hope it can be contained and rebuilt without too much hassle.
I'm sure it will be sorted pretty quickly once they have assessed it and got people together and some sort of infrastructure back in place.
Japan uses so much energy it will have to get everything up and running pretty quickly to be able to survive in the global market, for a country that is so heavily dependant on its manufacturing industry it must be pretty tough to have its power cut so drastically, from what I gather the worst hit areas were more farming orientated rather than industry so I guess that is a blessing for them in some ways.
Wonder if China will step up its production to counter Japans losses. It could do so much damage if they take too long to get back into production, could give this country a chance to step up to the plate but I doubt we will as we haven't the sites ready as most of our work went to Japan and now China. I doubt banks would lend to anyone trying to get up and running and probably the equipment we'd need is manufactured in....Japan!

[jerry]

On a lighter note.......

Japan gets ****ed...when all the people in China all Jump in Unison

I phoned my friend in Japan but all he kept on about was his social life ......he said it was a great rave????????