The Most Difficult Job In The Universe
It has to be plumbing, since in less than a year I have watched highly paid petroleum scientists, engineers, and technicians spend months to fix a leaking pipe, and now I’m watching nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians trying to get water into a building.
The BBC reports that Japan raises nuclear alert level
Japan has raised the alert level at its quake-damaged nuclear plant from four to five on a seven-point international scale of atomic incidents.
The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi site, previously rated as a local problem, is now regarded as having “wider consequences”.
…Japanese nuclear officials said core damage to reactors 2 and 3 had prompted the raising of the severity grade.
The 1979 incident at Three Mile Island in the US was also rated at five on the scale, whereas the 1986 Chernobyl disaster was rated at seven.
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Further heavy snowfall overnight all but ended hopes of rescuing anyone else from the rubble after the 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami.
Millions of people have been affected by the disaster – many survivors have been left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food; hundreds of thousands are homeless.
The national police say 6,911 people are known to have died in the disaster, and 10,316 are still missing.
…Water in at least two fuel pools – in reactor buildings 3 and 4 – is believed to be dangerously low, exposing the stored fuel rods.
This increases the chance of radioactive substances being released from the rods.
I keep hammering on reactor 4 because, in addition to spent fuel rods, the pool has the live rods that were moved there from the reactor vessel for maintenance. There are more rods, and more active rods in that pool.
The Navy moved US vessels earlier in the week because their radiation alarms activated 100 km off the coast, so TEPCO’s estimates on radiation can not be relied on as accurate. There are also reports of passengers from Tokyo setting off radiation alarms at US airports.
The USGS section map clearly shows the huge number of aftershocks in the area. The map only events for one week, so the 9.0 ‘quake is no longer displayed, but hundreds of others are. This obviously complicates recovery efforts, as things are being shaken constantly, and sleep is nearly impossible.
2 comments
Looked at the section map, and those earthquakes are STILL coming at an average of one every 15 to 30 minutes! I know that every earthquake has aftershocks, but this thing is unreal. It doesn’t sound like the tectonic plates are anywhere near settling down yet. Could the plates be getting ready to make another really large move, I wonder?
See what you mean about these people not being able to get any sleep.
The big problem is that there are four plates involved – the Eurasia and Pacific plates are separated by fingers of the North American and Filipino at that point, so you really are dealing with multiple major fault lines. It is going to take a long time for all four to readjust. If the map wasn’t so covered with events you could see the fault lines on the map.
People are beginning to “crash” from the adrenalin high of the initial period, and their reflexes are set to flee outside with each new quake. It is worse than normal, because you don’t automatically filter out the small quakes, something that people who live in earthquake areas tend to do.