Anyone in Japan? Tsunami alert - any more news ? PLEASE

[RatherBeOnThePiste]

DH who gets these things has had a tsunami alert for Japan. Does anyone have any more info? Itsjust breaking news about the massive earthquake at the moment.

I know, nobody can move on because of the nuclear problem. A Japanese friend of mine up in Kansai running a Marathon to raise money I feel I should stop naval-gazing, although there's not much I can really do with a baby

Good point about the trees. If you have seen footage of atomic bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site the trees bend like anything but are not broken, compared to the buildings which are totalled.

Here is a link to a map with environmental monitoring dose-rate info on it for the whole of Japan. The unit used is the Gray which for the context of looking at relatives levels can be thougbt of as essentially the same as the Sievert. I haven't seen any levels of concern on it whenever I've checked it.

I also read today that the earthquake's destructive energy rated as a 9 was equivalent to a 474megaton atomic blast, 39 000 times more than the one detonated at Hiroshima. The Fukishima plant was built 40yrs ago to withstand a 7.9 earthquake presumably with some upgrades over the years. This doesn't mean to say it can't withstand higher than 7.9, but that is the level it was designed to withstand with the desired level of engineering confidence.

Heart
Sorry, it is a private forum that a group of friends and I set up a couple of years ago - we met on an open forum became friends then left in search of more privacy. We just chat nonsense about how much weight we haven't lost yet. I don't really know any German fora - I only really use MN these days.

Seth
Glad that your DB is going home.

Sakura
That is interesting - with the trees.

DH's office has sent an email stating that their office was not damaged, none of the personnel were hurt and things are going pretty much as normal despite the power shortages. They are sending some foreign staff home, but because of the shortages of food, water, fuel etc. and the fact that tht international schools are closed. Their local staff can work from home if necessary.

How is everyone doing over there now? Are things still up in the air, or is it coming under control more? I saw that they have resumed pumping seawater onto the fuel rods to keep them cool.

Hope you're all ok - stay safe.

they've got fire trucks outside the plants pumping seawater into them. much more efficient than the helicopter fiasco

This is from Kyodo News by Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and an adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy in the 1990s.

"Alvarez's claim that there are no good options left for addressing the crisis is evidenced by the risky approach Tokyo has taken to cooling the reactors.

When combined with the high heat at the reactor site, the seawater currently being poured on the facilities could destroy their cooling pumps or even corrode the containment vessels holding the plant's nuclear fuel, increasing the difficulty of containing the radioactive material.

''This is what you call the last-ditch stuff,'' Alvarez said, noting that the severity of the crisis had taken the standard, safer options for responding ''off the table.''

In the short term, Alvarez expects that even these extreme measures will be unable to stop the crisis.

''It doesn't appear at this time that they are working. The accident is likely to unfold over a period of weeks,'' he said."

The other thing is that Fukushima has 24 times as much nuclear fuel on the site than Chernobyl did at the time of its accident.

The absolute priority is to stop a fire starting and then spreading throughout all the nuclear fuel at Fukushima.

According to Associated Press there is 3400 tonnes of spent fuel rods and 877 tonnes of fuel in the reactors at Fukushma. Chernobyl had 180 tonnes in total.

They absolutely have to get water in the plant in the next few days or bury it in thousands of tonnes of sand, concrete and boric acid. They just cannot let this drag on any longer.

it's a shame they can't just drop several tons of lead on it in molten form, isn't it. Or freeze it all with liquid nitrogen. It's not as if it's ever going to be functional again, so it doesn't matter how extreme it is so long as it WORKS.

Would sand, concrete and boric acid be enough, Beenbeta? What does the boric acid achieve in that scenario, I'm intrigued.

Boric acid is a neutron 'poison' that slows down the rate of nuclear fission. It is what is dissolved in the spent fuel pools. It stops a nuclear chain reaction starting up between fuel rods in the pool while they cool.

Some types of reactors have Boron control rods that drop in between the fuel rods that are used to control the reactor. Some have boric acid disolved in the coolant too.

They did entomb Chernobyl in sand, boric acid and concrete except they didnt do it very well and the whole thing is unstable. There is a plan to create a concrete sarcophagus on rails to roll over the whole Chernobyl site but the Ukraine wants other countries to fund it. At the moment there is a risk Chernobyl could start emiting radioactive material into the environent again.

Oh good. That's just what we need.
Thanks BeenBeta - I didn't know that about boric acid, I just knew it was good for killing cockroaches.
HOpe they've got enough of it then to do the job.
What happens in a vacuum with nuclear fuel rods - obviously they need air to burn, but do they keep reacting in a vacuum? Just thinking about other stupid solutions now, like dropping an enormous vacuum jar over the whole lot except of course you couldn't suck the air out because it's radioactive so it still wouldn't work.

Hope someone come up with a solution that works very soon.

There has been a risk Chernobyl could release more material ever since the main event finished. It has never been satisfactorily enclosed. There is no way Ukraine can fund it themselves, let alone have the manpower/skill to do it themselves - they have been well shafted with it after Russia left them to it.

Hi all. Sorry been AWOL for a while. I am still down in Shikoku with the kids, staying with my DHs parents. We were planning to go back to Tokyo at the weekend but DH is away on business in China next week and now with all the water alerts, as well as the few strong shakes over the past few days, they are all wanting us to stay here another week. My school (work) is closed for another week anyway, so weve decided to stay until next Thursday.
To all of you in Japan - STAY SAFE.

Good idea Penny - what's the local news saying about the radiation levels now?

Well, am with in-laws who refuse to let me put NHK on in English so am guessing a lot of whats being said on the local news, but there is no risk as far as I am aware here in Tokushima. Friends and (trusty) reports in Tokyo say things are fine there too - with regard to radiation. Ironically, all those who fled back to their home countries have in doing so exposed themselves and their kids to a way higher level of radiation by taking 12-hour flights. Some of the media reports in the UK have been scandalous and some journalists should be held to account for the sensationalist rubbish they have written. They have terrified the living daylights out of family and friends in the UK with their mis-reporting and I shake with anger now even thinking about some of the things Ive read over the past week.
Thankfully, I have a few reliable sources I go to for updates, so I am limiting my research to them, for my own sanity!

Thinking of you all in Japan. Penny that is what would have been my deciding factor to staying or going re radiation on flights.

Hi!

Just popping quickly on to this thread to say hello from Tokyo :) I've only just joined MN so still finding my way around.

I'll come back later as I've got to go and find milk... not great shortages here, but still some things are hard to find.

Love to all affected by this catastrophe

Hey, Penny, nice to hear from you - glad you are doing OK. My friend who had taken her pre-school DCs for an early spring break in Aichi, arrived back in Kanagawa yesterday.

Hi and welcome to PeriPathetic! I live down on the coast in Zushi, near Kamakura.

Nothing's really changed here, my DCs went to school as usual, and are now on spring break. We have milk, loo rolls, even tissues in the shops now. Petrol is easily available again (after transportation problems caused rationing and queues at the pump).

The only thing that is impossible to get here is....NATTO!! (apparantly the factories that make the little plastic boxes for these smelly,fermented beans, are up north and out of action...)

The radiation levels here (as monitored in Yokosuka at the US navy base) are raised slightly from normal, but are decreasing each day. They do however spike when it rains...which luckily has been very infrequently over the passed 2 weeks.

Take care all!

Hi TanteRose :) and thank you for the welcome.

I got my stone lantern and tsukubai from Zushi, lovely place!

Managed to get a couple of litres of milk, yay me. But ugh, natto! But yeah, pretty much back to normal. Lots of small shops and restaurants have closed though, hopefully temporarily.

DDs school has been closed, so she's causing me much angst by being at home full time