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Japan's Tsunami 2011 (pg. 42)
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| VDub |
Has everyone lost interest in this story???
You too John??
How about now Gera???
Today's status...
I thought from early on that they should use concrete pumps to inject water with precision...
I guess they were just waiting for everything to settle down a bit... |
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| geroin |
| quote: | Originally posted by VDub
Has everyone lost interest in this story???
You too John??
How about now Gera???
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i didn't lose interest, i lost interest in arguing about it, too time consuming and pointless. |
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| E2EK1EL |
Magnitude 6.5 earthquake rattles eastern Japan again; tsunami alert issued
March 27, 2011 00:03:00
The Associated Press
NEW YORK, N.Y.—A magnitude-6.5 earthquake shook eastern Japan off the quake-ravaged coast on Monday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reported, prompting Japan to issue a tsunami alert.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries, but the Japan Meteorological Agency announced that a tsunami of up to a half meter may wash into Miyagi Prefecture.
The tsunami alert was localized to Japan. The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said no wave was expected in Hawaii or on the U.S. west coast.
The alert was prompted by a quake that the U.S. Geological Survey measured at 7:23 a.m. Monday Japan time near the east coast of Honshu.
The USGS said the quake was 5.9 kilometres deep.
A magnitude-9 quake off Japan's northeast coast on March 11 triggered a tsunami that barrelled onshore, triggering a humanitarian disaster that is thought to have killed about 18,000 people. |
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| The Potter |
There are currently some hearings going on into the expansion of nuclear power in Ontario. It is pretty absurd that they are not delaying these, in order to see if anything can be learned from the Japanese crisis. Looking at those events in a positive light, they present a golden opportunity for other countries to potentially improve safety and contingeny planning.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011...824143420110318
By the way, I wouldn't always defer to the wisdom of nuclear 'experts', as evident by the farcical behaviour in Tokaimura. Nuclear power companies are prepared to cut corners, which is a tad retarded when you are dealing with the most dangerous substance on the planet:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00...s/player?page=1
The high-tech giants of Silicon Valley are supposedly making great strides with renewable technologies. Due the huge costs involved with nuclear plant safety, some companies are arguing that if just as much investment had been put into clean energy, things like solar power would be a lot more successful, without the huge downsides of nuclear power. |
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| VDub |
^^^
You never know when we may get a 9.0 earthquake in Ontario triggering a 20' high tidal wave from the lake...
We should close down both Pickering and Darlington. Just in case... |
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| E2EK1EL |
Home news
Radiation in seawater, soil may be spreading in Japan
March 28, 2011 00:03:00
SHINO YUASA
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOKYO — Workers at Japan’s damaged nuclear plant raced to pump out contaminated water suspected of sending radioactivity levels soaring as officials warned Monday that radiation seeping from the complex was spreading to seawater and soil.
The coastal power plant, located 220 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, has been leaking radiation since a magnitude-9.0 quake on March 11 triggered a tsunami that engulfed the complex. The wave knocked out power to the system that cools the dangerously hot nuclear fuel rods.
The frantic effort to get temperatures down and avert a widening disaster has been slowed and complicated by fires, explosions, leaks and dangerous spikes in radiation. Two workers were burned after wading into highly radioactive water, officials said.
On Monday, workers resumed the laborious yet urgent task of pumping out the hundreds of tons of radioactive water inside several buildings at the six-unit plant. The water must be removed and safely stored before work can continue to power up the plant’s regular cooling system, nuclear safety officials said.
Contaminated water inside Unit 2 has tested at radiation levels some 100,000 times normal amounts, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.
Workers also discovered radioactive water in the deep trenches outside three units, with the airborne radiation levels outside Unit 2 exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour — more than four times the amount that the government considers safe for workers, TEPCO said Monday.
The five workers in the area at the time were not hurt, spokesman Takashi Kurita said. The pits are designed as pathways to allow workers to lay out drainage pipes or electrical wires.
As officials scrambled to determine the source of the radioactive water, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the contamination in Unit 2 appeared to be due to a partial meltdown of the reactor core.
A TEPCO spokesman said the presence of radioactive chemicals such as iodine and cesium point to damaged fuel rods as the source. However, pressure inside the containers holding the reactors was stable, indicating any meltdown was only partial, spokesman Kaoru Yoshida said, suggesting that the core remains largely intact.
New readings show contamination in the ocean has spread about 1.6 kilometres farther north of the nuclear site than before. Radioactive iodine-131 was discovered just offshore from Unit 5 and Unit 6 at a level 1,150 times higher than normal, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told reporters.
Japan’s nuclear watchdog, the Nuclear Safety Commission, said Monday its members — government-appointed experts who monitor the atomic industry — believe the radioactive water came from the containment vessel. It did not clearly state that the primary containment vessel, which protects the core, had been breached.
It could take weeks to clear out the radioactive water, said Gary Was, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Michigan.
“Battling the contamination so workers can work there is going to be an ongoing problem,” he said.
Edano, the government spokesman, urged residents to stay out of the 20-kilometre evacuation zone around the nuclear complex, saying contaminants posed a “big” health risk. He was responding to reports that people had been sneaking back in.
Meanwhile, a strong earthquake shook the region and prompted a brief tsunami alert. The quake off the battered coast of Miyagi prefecture in the northeast was measured at magnitude 6.5, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. No damage or injuries were reported.
Scores of strong earthquakes have rattled Japan over the past two weeks, adding to the sense of unease across Japan, where the final death toll from the March 11 disasters is expected to top 18,000 and hundreds of thousands remain homeless.
Confusion at the plant has intensified fears that the nuclear crisis will last weeks, months or years amid alarms over radiation making its way into produce, raw milk and even tap water as far away as Tokyo.
TEPCO officials said Sunday that radiation in leaking water in Unit 2 was 10 million times above normal — an apparent spike that sent employees fleeing. The day ended with officials saying the huge figure had been miscalculated and was 100,000 times above normal, still very high but far better than the earlier results.
“This sort of mistake is not something that can be forgiven,” Edano said sternly Monday.
TEPCO Vice President Sakae Muto promised better readings.
“We will work hard to raise our precision in our work so as not to repeat this again,” he said at a news conference.
The crisis did not interrupt a yearly rite much loved by the Japanese: the start of the cherry blossom season.
Cherry trees typically begin blooming in the south in March, in the capital days later, and in the chilly north in April — the signal that spring has arrived.
Pink and white buds began appeared at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on Monday, the country’s meteorological agency said. |
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| E2EK1EL |
Home wheels
Global auto crisis worsens as Japan shutdowns drag on
March 28, 2011 00:03:00
Elaine Kurtenbach and Sharon Silke Carty
ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOKYO—The auto industry disruptions triggered by Japan’s earthquake and tsunami are about to get worse.
In the weeks ahead, car buyers will have difficulty finding the model they want in certain colours, thousands of auto plant workers will likely be told to stay home, and companies such as Toyota, Honda and others will lose billions of dollars in revenue. More than two weeks since the natural disaster, inventories of crucial car supplies — from computer chips to paint pigments — are dwindling fast as Japanese factories that make them struggle to restart.
Because parts and supplies are shipped by slow-moving boats, the real drop-off has yet to be felt by factories in the U.S., Europe and Asia. That will come by the middle of April.
“This is the biggest impact ever in the history of the automobile industry,” said Koji Endo, managing director at Advanced Research Japan in Tokyo.
Much of Japan’s auto industry — the second largest supplier of cars in the world — remains idle. Few plants were seriously damaged by the quake, but with supplies of water and electricity fleeting, no one can say when factories will crank up. Some auto analysts said it could be as late as this summer.
Hitachi Automotive Systems, which makes parts such as airflow sensors and drive control systems, is waiting for its suppliers to restart while dealing with its own problems. Its plants are without water and gas, and have rolling electricity blackouts. Workers are repairing crumpled ceilings, fallen walls and cleaning up shattered glass. A spokesman said he doesn’t know when its plants will reopen.
The uncertainly has suppliers, automakers and dealers scrambling. And it exposes the vulnerability of the world’s most complex supply chain, where 3,000 parts go into single car or truck. Each one of those parts is made up of hundreds of other pieces supplied by multiple companies. All it takes is for one part to go missing or arrive late, and a vehicle can’t be built.
When General Motors briefly shut a pickup plant in Shreveport, Louisiana, due to a lack of parts, it caused the partial closing of a New York factory that supplies engines for those trucks. Sweden’s Volvo has warned that its production could be disrupted because it is down to a week’s worth of some parts.
Car buyers will soon see higher prices and fewer choices. Some car colours will be harder to get because a paint pigment factory in Japan was damaged and shut production. As a result, Ford is telling dealers to stop ordering “tuxedo black” models of its F-150 pickup and Expedition and Navigator SUVs. It’s also shifting away from some reds. The moves are precautionary, Ford said. Chrysler told dealers it was temporarily restricting orders of vehicles in 10 colours.
That worries some dealers, especially when popular colours like black could be in short supply
“It’s hard enough to sell a $60,000 Navigator in this economy,” said Fortunes O’Neal, general manager at Park Cities Ford in Dallas. “We don’t want to have to tell customers, ‘You’ve got to pick another colour.’”
Customers also face rising prices for models like Toyota’s Prius, which is made only in Japan. Fears of falling supply have some dealers driving a hard bargain with customers who want the fuel-efficient hybrid as gasoline prices rise. Recent discounts of 5 to 10 per cent on that car are disappearing.
Japanese carmakers, who have shut most of their domestic plants, are warning that some of their overseas factories will stop running, too, in an effort to conserve supplies. Toyota and Honda expect shutdowns at North American plants. Honda said production could be interrupted after April 1. Even though most of its parts are sourced in the region, a few critical ones still come from Japan.
Goldman Sachs estimates the shutdowns are costing the Japan automakers $200 million a day, which adds up to $2.8 billion for just the past two weeks. Each week of continued shutdowns costs $1.4 billion. By comparison, Toyota made $2.3 billion in all of 2010, and its sudden acceleration recalls cost $2 billion. The cost of damage from Japan’s natural disaster could dwarf that recall, which was considered Toyota’s biggest crisis ever.
Much depends on how many spare components automakers have in stock — which is probably very few. Japan’s automakers spearheaded lean manufacturing, under which parts are delivered to plants the same day they are used. Automakers are still receiving parts that were put on ships weeks ago, but those supplies will dwindle.
After the earthquake hit, car companies began the long process of figuring out which parts are in danger of running out. That means figuring out where every piece in every part comes from.
“Everyone is putting on the brakes a little bit and taking a look to see where they are affected,” said Paul Newton, an analyst with IHS Automotive.
Companies will shut down plants as soon as some parts start running out, which could start happening in the next four to six weeks, he said. “You will see it happen almost daily.”
IHS Automotive predicts that one-third of daily global automotive production will be cut because of supply chain disruptions. That means about 5 million vehicles worldwide won’t be built, out of the 72 million vehicles planned for production in 2011.
To get a feel for the supply chain, consider a car radio. It’s made up of hundreds of pieces from all over the world. The display may come from a supplier in Japan, while the wiring and circuitry originate in Korea. The plastic knobs could come from a company in China, and the metal structure that holds it all together is shipped from India.
All those parts come together at different times: The wiring and electronic components are installed into the metal frame. Then that piece is shipped to another supplier, who snaps on the plastic face and knobs. The radio could pass through three or four suppliers before being put on a ship, where it will spend weeks at sea heading to its final destination: The assembly plant.
“This isn’t just as straightforward as assembling the iPad 2,” said Brian Johnson, an autos analyst with Barclays Capital.
An example of Japan’s importance in auto parts: its suppliers make many of the electronic components that control music systems and the sensors that monitor fuel levels and airbags.
Although most Japanese auto parts makers are not located in the areas that were inundated by the tsunami, between quake damage, electricity outages and water cutoffs, many factories in the region have remained paralyzed ever since.
Suppliers could be up and running again in April, but it could take until May or June for the entire supply base to be back.
Some car manufacturers, meanwhile, are considering shifting operations to deal with the crisis. Nissan, for example, is thinking of moving some of its engine production to Tennessee from Japan.
But those shifts won’t be easy. First, lean inventories make it hard for automakers to suddenly change sources of supply. And plants that build car electronics, for example, have stringent safety requirements and exacting high-tech specifications that limit a company’s flexibility, said Christopher Richter, an industry analyst at CLSA Asia Capital Markets. A supplier for the computer chip that triggers an air bag, for example, can’t be switched quickly.
But car executives can keep this from becoming a total disaster: They can allocate scarce parts to their more popular or profitable vehicles, keeping those assembly lines running while slowing down the less profitable ones.
That’s what many people believe GM did when it decided to close the Shreveport plant, because dealers have ample inventory of both trucks made there, more than two months’ worth.
Newton said car companies will do their best to keep producing the cars people want.
“It’s quite a lot to prioritize, but they’ll do it,” he said.
Kurtenbach reported from Tokyo and Carty reported from Detroit. David Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report. |
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| The Potter |
| quote: | Originally posted by VDub
^^^
You never know when we may get a 9.0 earthquake in Ontario triggering a 20' high tidal wave from the lake...
We should close down both Pickering and Darlington. Just in case... |
Don't be so daft. Try giving the subject matter a tad more intelligent thought. Did I say that there would be a similar earthquake and tsunmai? No. Does that mean that lessons cannot be potentially learned in other areas, such as how to best to deal with over-heating nuclear reactors (e.g. whether using seawater as opposed to freshwater does more harm than good, due to the corrosive effects of salt) and the best response to radiation emission? No. In case you don't know, nuclear meltdowns and radiation leaks are not solely caused by earthquakes and tsunamis :rolleyes: |
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| VDub |
My source update...
It's a little bit long but informative...
This is what I'm going with guys...
Take it or leave it... |
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| VDub |
| quote: | Originally posted by The Potter
Don't be so daft. Try giving the subject matter a tad more intelligent thought. Did I say that there would be a similar earthquake and tsunmai? No. Does that mean that lessons cannot be potentially learned in other areas, such as how to best to deal with over-heating nuclear reactors (e.g. whether using seawater as opposed to freshwater does more harm than good, due to the corrosive effects of salt) and the best response to radiation emission? No. In case you don't know, nuclear meltdowns and radiation leaks are not solely caused by earthquakes and tsunamis :rolleyes: |
I've always liked that word, daft...
I suppose I'm just tired of so many people comparing our situation to theirs is all...
Of course there are many lessons to be learned but I think that our technology is advanced enough that we should not have to delay any new installs because of what happened in Japan...
Anyway... Sorry for being 'daft'...
Lol |
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