CNN An 8.8-magnitude earthquake has struck Japan

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I watched some of this unfold last night in the middle of the night... pretty awesome destruction (I, of course, use that word in its literal sense).

My thoughts and prayers are with the Japanese people.  They are probably the most quake/tsunami prepared nation on earth... and even so... nobody can prepare for something like this.

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Fuck. Fingers crossed against a Chernobyl repeat, but it's looking pretty scarily realistic by now.

Indeed.

5 plants are actually in states of emergency with the Fukushima plant resulting in evacuations.  Radiation levels are 1000 times normal in the core room and were reported earlier to be 8 times the normal level at a gate leading to the plant campus.

Officials are still saying that a Chernobyl-like event is almost 100% unlikely at this point... but just a few hours ago they were assuring everyone that there was nothing to worry about... and now they're evacuating up to 10 km out.

I should add:  Unlike Chernobyl, which resulted in the evacuation of thousands... but was a relatively isolated area... a similar event in Japan would have much more devastating consequences.

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This from the Watts Up With That Climate Blog of all places:

Fukushima fuel cores are melting at 2000C and dropping onto steel floor. Steel melts at 1500C. Could still be brought under control, but Four other Fukushima nuke reactors are struggling with similar problem. If multiple meltdown begins, it will be uncontrollable.

 http://twitter.com/#!/dicklp

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Also there are reports of panic buying at supermarkets and there have been rumors of power cuts after 6pm (though those seem to have been debunked)

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F**k nuclear energy !

Perhaps. You also have to think about all of the industrial chemicals that were/may have been released. The cascading effects on this are real bad.  The US has been putting in place plans for secondary effects in the National Infrastructure Protection Plan, but we would be equally and probably more devastated from what happened in Japan today.  If that theorized Mid Atlantic fault ever had something of this magnitude the East coast would be royally f#ed.  A fault also runs through 125 st in Harlem and under the Indian Point Nuclear reactor just north of here.

Here's a map of the hazard of earthquakes in the U.S.


Memphis is a disaster waiting to happen.

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Though there's always a tendency for clusters (from our point of view) of really nasty seismic activity to happen along the same plate boundary.

I refuse to believe that these quakes are unrelated.  It's like that ubiquitous desk toy with the hanging metal balls.. when you knock one into the next.. the force is carried through to the ball on the other end.

Such a dramatic shift in the earth's crust which can be measured in meters (including the 8 foot shift of the island of Honshu will have equal consequences somewhere else.  All we can hope for is that the new stress point is more spread out and thus results in a series of smaller quakes rather than one huge one.

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I don't know if it's been reported here... but there was another large explosion at the plant, thought to be caused by a buildup of hydrogen in the other reactor.

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Radiation increasing.  All workers evacuated.  Japanese government - Fox


This has to be a full meltdown. 

What can be done?  Dump stuff from above (via heliocopter?)

Nothing, for now.  Let it meltdown, which might stop the reaction. 

The US should send all of their unmanned drones from Afghanistan or whereever to drop coolants. We could do something useful with the hundreds of billions a year that we waste on these dumb wars.

A literal drop in the bucket.  Each one would probably carry less than 100 gallons of water.

I was thinking about fire boats, but I don't know if they'd have the range.

They are considering helicopter drops, but I'd suspect you'd need thousands.

They took the helicopter drops off the table quite quickly.

Any of the ideas in this thread are really not going to work.  The reason is that it will result in water being poured in at a very high pressure...

The thought is that the force of the water hitting the exposed nuclear fuel rods could displace them enough to touch the rod next to it... which would likely result in a nuclear reaction.  Then we'd really be fücked.

As of now, all of the workers have abandoned the facility.  There is nobody at the plant now because radiation levels are simply too high.

Pretty much all hope is lost... this thing is gonna melt down completely and there will be massive releases of radioactivity. 

It's pretty much a worst case scenario... and even the experts are starting to say this will be much worse than Chernobyl.

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It seems the workers were allowed to return again (probably different workers?).

They're desperately trying to build a road to the plant so that fire trucks can get there and pump water into the areas that need it.

Arnie Gunderson was already saying this event is much worse than Japanese officials are letting on... calling it a likely 6 on the nuclear accident scale (which runs 1-7... Chernobyl was the only 7 event).

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I am outraged at the US media and our leaders in Washington for going along with the official Japanese statements.  Since Saturday, it has been obvious to any half-brained observer this situation was out of control and was a full-fledge international emergency of first order.  A true leader would have stood up to Japanese nationalistic pride and refused to distinguish between American and Japanese until this crisis was over.

Obama has stood idly by during defining events in Iran, Egypt, Libya.  That past inaction may be excusable, but now he has stood by while Japan, a nation we remade in our image, crubles in the span of a week due largely to events beyond their control.  They needed our best effort last Saturday, whether they wanted it or not.

Well, some elements of our government weren't buying the bs put out by Japan.  The Pentagon called bull honkey on the official storyline when the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan got irradiated in transit to Japan.  That's a big deal for a crew operating a nuclear carrier.