CNN An 8.8-magnitude earthquake has struck Japan

[minionofmidas]

Give that man a Darwin Award!

[minionofmidas]

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

[minionofmidas]

Tokaimura is not remotely comparable - totally different processes and dimensions. (Note that they only evacuated the facility's immediate surrounds back then - they're evacuating a ten kilometer zone now). While how almost everything that can go wrong, did go wrong there makes it, as it were, a Micro-Chernobyl.
You're of course right that another Chernobyl, while on the cards by now, remains quite unlikely.

[minionofmidas]

Japanese nuclear power stations already have what's sometimes claimed to be the world's highest safety standards. It's not as if the Japanese never noticed there was something inherently problematic about the world's most earthquake-prone country being also one of the most reliant on nuclear energy. I suppose having to import all of your fossil ressources does that.

[minionofmidas]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

Matchu beat me.

[minionofmidas]

Well, it is not (yet?) another Chernobyl. Not entirely clear yet what's happened, of course, but it looks pretty bad.

[minionofmidas]

It'll just go "safety precautions against earthquakes here are even weaker than in Japan", without going into details about just how bloody unlikely such an earthquake is over here.
Remember "what if the terrorists crashed a passenger jet onto a nuclear power station"?

[minionofmidas]

Lol, okay. Who was the idiot pointing that out (it's true, of course... but consider the magnitude of our quakes.)

[minionofmidas]

http://www.ausgestrahlt.de/

Database Error

The current username, password or host was not accepted when the connection to the database was attempted to be established!

For the benefit of our non-German readers... the Neckarwestheim protest has been planned for a long time and is nothing to do with earthquakes.

[minionofmidas]

Yeah, on third try it works fine here too.

[minionofmidas]

They don't really know what happened exactly yet - this is as much as they can confirm (and could for most of the day, really).

[minionofmidas]

As usual, Franzl is way ahead of the curve...

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1625603.php/Germany-promises-inspection-of-German-nuclear-plants

Except it wasn't the people he was referring to who did that...

[minionofmidas]

http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE72B08H20110312

Yeah, more like it. Still includes your usual bizarre errors, just like just about any story about another country's convoluted interior politics of course, and leaves out the whole issue of questionable (to put it mildly) constitutionality, not that that'll get decided before the elections of course.

And that "securtiy check" is still a weird little stunt that noone in the opposition asked for or is giving any credence to... it's probably tailored to a very specific subset. Uninformed CDU-leaning anti-nuclear-leaning people (since pro vs anti nuclear is pretty much frozen at round about 43-57 for twenty years - facts ceased to matter, on either side, a long long time ago - such people must obviously exist.)

[minionofmidas]

My guess is it was backup system that has failed.

But the backup system has been running for most of the past 36 hours right? I mean, is there a point where the core is cooled and we don't have to worry about any coolant systems?

There should be, yeah. Unless all sorts of chain reactions have been happening inside that we don't know about.
Basically, a lot of the info we're getting is still conflicting, and a lot of it is wrong, and it is not entirely clear which. (Though some are evidently correct or correctish.) So take everything here with a pinch of salt.

[minionofmidas]

Beet, they are already saying no risk in the US:  http://www.komonews.com/news/local/117860469.html

but that's no risk based on what has happened so far, not what could happen.  I wouldn't discount the map beet posted

You should.

[minionofmidas]

But what is "safe"?  Nuclear plants are viewed as unsafe, because when the worst happens, it involves **GASP** radiation.  And that word strikes fear into the hearts of people.

As anything that can make an area (though not an area on the other side of the planet) permanently uninhabitable bloody well ought to.
Not claiming that people have a particularly good understanding of radiation, of course.

[minionofmidas]

French nuclear agency disagrees with Japan's assessment that Fukushima is a level 4 incident on the INES scale and says that it is rather a 5 or 6. This would make it as bad or worse than Three Mile Island without reaching Chernobyl levels.

Merci, Capitain Obvieux.

[minionofmidas]

It's a nuclear power plant's cooling tower. It's not a photoshop. I forget which real German nuclear power plant it is, might even be a closed-down one.
Of course, how cooling towers came to be the iconic image of nuclear power plants I have no idea, but that's the way it is. The huge Staudinger power plant (near Hanau) has a huge cooling tower looking much like that and quite visible from the motorway, and lots of people mistake it for nuclear. It isn't.

So, Tepco is really good at covering up the "accident" (everything's under control) ...

yo, you do realize that is a cooling tower in your sig, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with nuclear power generation?

So it's misleading, much like your signature.

[minionofmidas]

The winds are blowing WSW inland/towards Tokyo for the next 2-3 days. Jezus, they can't catch a break.

Plus a possibility of rain.

[minionofmidas]

Yeah, apocalypse would appear to be cancelled. Of course, with 18,000 presumed dead, what actually happened is bad enough.

[minionofmidas]

I care, I just don't care about the forum discussion anymore.
Besides, they're just confirming what I've more-or-less-known for two weeks.