9.0 in Japan

AURAPTOR

Monday, March 14, 2011 12:55 AM

Seismologists think that another major after shock is inevitable, about 80% of the strength of the initial quake.

Big shocks have already happened, but they're expecting even bigger. Might not happen, of course, but when you're dealing w/ forces on this level...

Did this quake release enough energy for a while, to keep things a bit stable? Or did it realign the plates somewhere else, and what was some what held in check, is now on the verge of yet another major release.

Time will tell.


And yes, we are a strange little species. Capable of screwing things up for us, to some degree, but nature is always there to bitch slap mankind, and remind us all how insignificant and puny we are on the grand scale.


" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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BYTEMITE

Monday, March 14, 2011 4:20 AM

Niki: Strike-slip faults.

All faults have displacement. The other two are normal faults and thrust faults.

...One of my friends is going to Japan on Wednesday. Not related to the earthquake, this was a teaching thing they set up a while back. >_> I have concerns.

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HARDWARE

Monday, March 14, 2011 3:15 PM

I'd have to look up the citation, but I thought the San Andreas was actually a torsional plate that is rotating clockwise as the Pacific plate subducts under the North American plate?

I also recall that the Mammoth Lake area of California had been "humping" under geological pressure. Something there wants out. I sure hope Chile, New Zealand and now Japan are not precursors of something else big going on the ring of fire.

The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.

...and he that has no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. Luke 22:36

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1KIKI

Monday, March 14, 2011 3:37 PM

Dr Brian Baptie, also from the BGS, explained that the earthquake occurred on the subduction zone along two different tectonic plates, the Pacific plate to the east and another plate to the west, which many geologists regard as a continuation of the North American plate.

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BYTEMITE

Monday, March 14, 2011 3:44 PM

The pacific plate is a tough one, it seems to be moving north or northeast. Torsion may have been suggested to explain the many directions it seems to be moving (judging by the subduction zones) The San Andreas is not a plate in of itself.

Subduction along north america and south america actually only occurs in a few locations, such as along the kodiak islands in Alaska, under the micro-plate in the vicinity of Seattle, and around the chilean mountains, where there's another plate between it and the pacific plate.

In any case, the San Andreas Fault is distinctly a strike-slip fault.

Illustration:



EDIT: Heh, Kiki posted one too. Anyway, hope that all helps people.

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SIGNYM

Monday, March 14, 2011 3:53 PM

The release of hydrogen gas from the nuclear reactors means that the "cladding" of the fuel rods is oxidizing (steam + zirconium alloy + heat = zirconium oxide powder + hydrogen). That process actually ADDS heat to the reactor core, and drives up the temperature even further.

What that means is the fuel rods are swelling and possibly splitting. If the fuel rods swell and split, it will be physically impossible to remove them because they will be jammed in to their holders.

Very close to the oxidation temperature of Zircalloy is the runaway temperature, where the "moderator" materials melt and run down into a puddle in the bottom of the containment vessel, leaving the fuel rods naked to each other.

The operators HAVE to keep the core cool by ANY means possible, or there will be a Chernobyl-style meltdown.

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PIRATENEWS

Monday, March 14, 2011 4:01 PM

The Super Moon will be increasing its gravitational force upon planet Earth for the rest of this week...

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BYTEMITE

Monday, March 14, 2011 4:14 PM

Here's a thought: why do we even have nuclear power plants above ground, anyway?

When they test nuclear weapons, they drill into a solid granite stock and the bury it before they set it off. When people are doing experiments with particle accelerators, they do them below ground.

If you absolutely have to have nuclear power plants, and your public doesn't want to individualize their power supply with something more manageable, why in HELL do you build them above ground?

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FREMDFIRMA

Monday, March 14, 2011 4:37 PM

Actually it's Yellowstone which has me wincing...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110119-yellowstone-par
k-supervolcano-eruption-magma-science/

If that sucker ever goes, it'd make what happened in Japan look like a wet firecracker by comparison.

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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DREAMTROVE

Monday, March 14, 2011 4:50 PM

Quote:

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
Here's a thought: why do we even have nuclear power plants above ground, anyway?

When they test nuclear weapons, they drill into a solid granite stock and the bury it before they set it off. When people are doing experiments with particle accelerators, they do them below ground.

If you absolutely have to have nuclear power plants, and your public doesn't want to individualize their power supply with something more manageable, why in HELL do you build them above ground?

---

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BYTEMITE

Monday, March 14, 2011 5:01 PM

None of those things suggest to me that a reactor has to be above ground. It seems like you could control temperatures above ground just as well as below ground. Water is EVERYWHERE below ground, far more than is at the surface. You just have to pump it out of the ground/walls.

You could have steam vents that go to the surface.

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NIKI2

Monday, March 14, 2011 6:10 PM

Quote:

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And yes, we are a strange little species. Capable of screwing things up for us, to some degree, but nature is always there to bitch slap mankind, and remind us all how insignificant and puny we are on the grand scale.

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Yes, she is, and I hope she always will be...

Ahhh, thank you Byte. Yes, that’s it. There are places in Marin where you can SEE where the last big San Andreas was, tho’ by now the grass has overgrown it in most places...it’s eerie to see.

As to build-up, who knows? We’ve supposedly been “overdue” for “the big one” for decades on the San Andreas---but the Loma Prieta 7.9 was the HAYWARD Faul (an offshoot of the S.A.)t, so we’re still “overdue”. I don’t think Nature keeps to man’s timetable, if you know what I mean... It kinda comes down to “seismologists say the guess...” rather than “seismologists say...” in the end, really, y’know?

Mmmm, Mammoth. Yes...Jim’s son lives there, and actually they’ve decided now it’s not a fault after all:

Quote:

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this sizable fissure is not an earthquake fault caused by a single quake, as the name implies. Geologists now believe it is a system of fractures formed during a series of strong quakes when the Inyo Craters and Inyo Domes erupted centuries ago.

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It IS certainly, however, a volcanic area, with hot springs; Mammoth Mountain itself being the central volcano, which has been dormant for 50,000-some years. They get lots of little shakers all the time...and of course it’s near Yosemite and it’s glacier-cut geology, too, and Yosemite gets shakers and has nearby hot springs. Mammoth is part of the Long Valley Caldera, which includes the famous, weird-looking Mono Lake, an inland salt “sea” which was cut off ages ago, creating all those weird “sculptures”, still an active volcanic area.


Jeff sends us lots of stuff on Mammoth, he adores it up there. Tough to make a living, tho’, as its economy is based on tourism...mostly Winter. But he’s taken all kinds of jobs, just to stay there...it IS gorgeous, less populous, and is covered with hiking trails and great skiing. Just look up “Mammoth Lakes Pictures” and you’ll wanna move there, too!

I don’t remember enough of the details about the San Andreas, some of it sticks in my head but of course the old memory ain’t what it was in college...but yes, it’s a strike-slip. As a child I lived in the hills of San Mateo over Crystal Springs Reservoir, which is a filled-in remnant of the fault line:

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Like all transform plate boundaries, the San Andreas is a strike-slip fault, movement along which is dominantly horizontal. Specifically, the San Andreas fault zone separates the Pacific and North American Plates, which are slowly grinding past each other in a roughly north-south direction. The Pacific Plate (western side of the fault) is moving horizontally in a northerly direction relative to the North American Plate (eastern side of the fault). Evidence of the sideways shift of these two landmasses can be found all along the fault zone, as seen from the differences in topography, geologic structures, and, sometimes, vegetation of the terrain from one side of the fault to the other. For example, the San Andreas runs directly along Crystal Springs Reservoir on the San Francisco Peninsula. Topographically, this reservoir fills a long, straight, narrow valley that was formed by erosion of the easily erodible rocks mashed within the fault zone.

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http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/tectonics.html

That stuff about the differences is really true up on the Pt. Reyes Peninsula. It’s part of the Pacific plate, and the terrain out there is VERY different from the rest of the North American Plate...it’s actually kinda eerie.

Now, L.A.’s more recent Northridge earthquake did not directly involve movement along one of the strands of the San Andreas Fault system. It was on the San

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CANTTAKESKY

Monday, March 14, 2011 6:57 PM

Grab a tissue, and read the tweets from Japan.

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1oR7mRBNCog-FeVrtl0dD4Suoi2hL0
XE4YOoAPdCyZ3w&pli=1

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HARDWARE

Monday, March 14, 2011 7:35 PM

New Madrid quake of 1811 made church bells ring in Boston. No estimate on the size, but consider that the Mississippi flowed north during the quake. A comparable quake now, with all the population living in buildings built with no thinking of seismic protection, God, the loss of life could be in the millions.

The more I get to know people the more I like my dogs.

...and he that has no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. Luke 22:36

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SIGNYM

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:49 AM

SO, I wondered... since hydrogen is produced by the destruction of fuel rod "cladding" (Zirconium + steam + heat = zirconium oxide powder + hydrogen) and three of the plants have suffered repeated hydrogen explosions, I thought I would try pencil-whipping the amount of hydrogen produced, and therefore the amount of "cladding" that has been destroyed, and therefore provide an estimate of fuel rod damage.

Each reactor building (not containment vessel, reactor building) looks like like it has a footprint of at least 70' X 70" and about 120' high. The lower explosive limit for hydrogen (the minimum concentration required for an explosion) is 4%, so I calculated that there must have been AT LEAST 67,000 liters of hydrogen involved with each explosion. That equates to AT LEAST 6000 pounds of zirconium destroyed before each explosion. Multiply by four (for each explosion). That's not counting the hydrogen that just leaked away without exploding, and assuming that the hydrogen didn't build up higher before exploding.

So at least 24,000 pounds (12 tons) of Zr cladding was destroyed, but that could be higher by a factor of 10 or even more.

That's a lot of cladding.

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SIGNYM

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 1:47 AM

So if you're interested... not that anyone is... here are the calculations

Internal volume:
70' X 70' X 120' = 588000 cubic feet
588,000 cubic feet X 28.3 liters per cubic foot= 16,640,400 liters (I'm a chemist, I think in liters)

Minimum amount of hydrogen in that volume (4% LEL)
16,640,400 liters X 0.04 = 666,000 liters of pure hydrogen
With approximately 22.4 liters per mole (a "mole" is a numeric count of molecules, kind of like a "dozen" but much much larger), that would mean

16,640,400/ 22.4 = 29700 moles of hydrogen

Amount of zirconium destroyed
Since each "mole" of hydrogen produced indicates that one "mole" of zirconium was destroyed
29700 "moles" of zirconium were destroyed.
But who the h@ll thinks in "moles" except a chemist? To put this in terms we all understand... one "mole" of Zirconium is 91 grams, that means

2704100 * 91 = 2704100 grams of zirconium
At 454 grams per pound, that's

2704100/ 454 = 5960 pounds of zirconium fuel rod "cladding" destroyed (minimum)

per explosion

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BYTEMITE

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 2:58 AM

Ooh, math! :D

Nicely done Sig.

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SIGNYM

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 4:13 AM

BAD TO WORSE

SOMA, Japan — Radiation leaked from a crippled nuclear plant in tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan after a third reactor was rocked by an explosion Tuesday and a fourth caught fire in a dramatic escalation of the 4-day-old catastrophe. The government warned anyone nearby to stay indoors to avoid exposure.

In a nationally televised statement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation has spread from four reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Fukushima province, one of the hardest-hit in Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the ensuing tsunami that has killed more than 10,000 people.

"The level seems very high, and there is still a very high risk of more radiation coming out," Kan said. "We are making utmost efforts to prevent further explosions and radiation leaks."

This is the worst nuclear crisis Japan has faced since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. It is also the first time that such a grave nuclear threat has been raised in the world since a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Russia exploded in 1986.

Kan warned there are dangers of more leaks and told people living within 19 miles (30 kilometers) of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex to stay indoors to avoid radiation sickness. Some 180,000 people had already been evacuated from a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius and it was not immediately clear how many people live in the outer radius for which the new warning was issued.

Three reactors at the power plant were in critical condition after Friday's quake, losing their ability to cool down and releasing some radiation. A fourth reactor that was unoperational caught fire on Tuesday and more radiation was released, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said.

The fire was put out. Even though it was unoperational, the fourth reactor was believed to be the source of the elevated radiation release because of the hydrogen release that triggered the fire.

--------------

In THIS case, the explosion was in the containment vessel itself. Fission products are being released, which means fuel rods have broken open.

I hate being right.

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BYTEMITE

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 5:05 AM

Yeah, it's been pretty obvious from the beginning here that the reassurances have just been PR to keep the affected population from panicking.

Of course, that doesn't make the reassurances from the guys around here trying to build a nuclear power plant on the green river within a stones throw from the hurricane fault any easier to palate. I mean, I get that they've convinced themselves, so they have something to prove that it's safe, but it seems pretty inappropriate when we're watching people get sick from radiation poisoning elsewhere.

I have another friend with family in Japan, she still hasn't heard any news from them. We're hoping it's just because the phone and power is out.

How long before you think it'll go full meltdown? Or do you think that was the final steam explosion phase? If there's corium, do you think that adding sea water for coolant may have increased the risks in the long run for a containment breach?

Maybe they're just buying time so some of the worse contamination can decay before release, which would mean a lower radiation dose.

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RIONAEIRE

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 6:45 AM

I imagine the people in Japan feel like the end of the world is nye with all that's going on there right now. What a rutting mess.

I'm talking to Jennifer again tomorrow but on Fri. evening she said Eureka faired fine, they closed downtown but it didn't interfere with her work etc. I'll have a better idea tomorrow, but it wasn't anything like Crescent City. It worries me a lot that when her husband woke up to the tsunami alarms he went downstairs, looked out side, saw that "it wasn't wet" and then went back to bed, never even waking her up, that worries me, have I mentioned that I don't like him?

CTS, I didn't really find your pilot-getting-boxcuttered comment worth a snicker, didn't seem funny to me.

Scary situation.

In OR we are in a fairly dangerous position, we're right along the ring of fire with the Juan de Fuca plate, plus we've got a bunch of sleeping volcanoes all around us, with the Cascades and Mt. Saint Helens, which was active again about 7 years ago, had some minor activity with little erruptions etc. So we're humped if we get hit bad. We've had two sizable earthquakes in my life time. One when I was six and one when I was fifteen, the latter measured 6.9 or 7.0 as I recall, not much damage fortunately, but if we get a big one it will cause lots of trouble and wake up our mountains etc. I don't even want to think about yellowstone.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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NIKI2

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:48 PM

I haven’t listened to the news yet today...kind of hesitant to do so, considering yesterday’s developments...

But ahother concern I didn't catch anyone else mentioning yet is previous cover-ups and scandals by the owners and operators of these nuclear facilities and by the Japanese government:

Quote:

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On August 29, 2002, the government of Japan revealed that TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) was guilty of false reporting in routine governmental inspection of its nuclear plants and systematic concealment of plant safety incidents. All seventeen of its boiling-water reactors were shut down for inspection as a result. TEPCO's chairman Hiroshi Araki, President Nobuya Minami, Vice-President Toshiaki Enomoto, as well as the advisers Sho Nasu and Gaishi Hiraiwa stepped-down by September 30, 2002.[6] The utility "eventually admitted to two hundred occasions over more than two decades between 1977 and 2002, involving the submission of false technical data to authorities".[7] Upon taking over leadership responsibilities, TEPCO's new president issued a public commitment that the company would take all the countermeasures necessary to prevent fraud and restore the nation's confidence. By the end of 2005, generation at suspended plants had been restarted, with government approval.

In 2007, however, the company announced to the public that an internal investigation had revealed a large number of unreported incidents. These included an unexpected unit criticality in 1978 and additional systematic false reporting, which had not been uncovered during the 2002 inquiry. Along with scandals at other Japanese electric companies, this failure to ensure corporate compliance resulted in strong public criticism of Japan's electric power industry and the nation's nuclear energy policy. Again, the company made no effort to identify those responsible.

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Quote:

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TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), which operates the failing nuclear power plants at Fukushima, has a history of scandals associated with its nuclear power operations. In 2002, one set of such scandals became so severe that the president, vice president and chairman of the company all resigned in disgrace. Most disturbing in this regard is that the scandal related to TEPCO hiding evidence of cracks in the containment vessels of their nuclear reactors. Also possibly related to the current crisis is one report I have found of Toshiba providing faulty gauges that are used in monitoring the reactor coolant systems.

These comments date from 2006 and suggests that the 2002 scandal included the Fukushima Number One (or Fukushima Daiichi) unit number three, which had a hydrogen explosion Monday morning:

Quote:

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It is very intentionally late. Toshiba Corp should open it in 2002. 2002 TEPCO’s scandal began from many breaks of Fukushima phase I unit 3 by Toshiba Corp on Aug 23, 2002.

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Perhaps even more fascinating, though, is that this person claims that Toshiba supplied faulty gauges to TEPCO and that these gauges were used to monitor coolant flow to reactors:

Quote:

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When Toshiba Corp replaced meters supplied water for reactor ????? at TEPCO’s Nuclear Plant Fukushima phase I unit 6 in 1993, about the equipments Toshiba Corp altered examination data for TEPCO’s standard data. In Sep 2005 TEPCO ordered Toshiba Corp to confirm that and in Nov 2005 Toshiba Corp was heard the fact from 2 persons of Toshiba’s nuclear power design section.
But Toshiba Corp says the equipments are safty and Toshiba Corp doesn’t do the same in other plants. From Dec 2005 Toshiba Corp orders a 3rd company to check the examination about meters supplied water for reactor ?????

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This is a very important point, because the current crisis appears to have been exacerbated by problems with gauges in the coolant systems. From today’s New York Times:

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Workers inside the reactors saw that levels of coolant water were dropping. They did not know how severely. “The gauges that measure the wa

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CANTTAKESKY

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:00 PM

Quote:

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Originally posted by RionaEire:
CTS, I didn't really find your pilot-getting-boxcuttered comment worth a snicker, didn't seem funny to me.

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CANTTAKESKY

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:08 PM

Quote:

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Originally posted by Niki2:
I haven’t heard it go past 8.9...where did you hear/read that?

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NIKI2

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:25 PM

Yeah, I hadn't listened to the TV much yesterday (bad girl; too much internet time), but last night I heard it had been upgraded to 9.0. Jezus, each tenth is actually a BIG upgrade...a nine is something else!


Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off