Strong quake and tsunami hits Japan

[Wiregeek]

thank you, clone brother. I have delivered this precise point, at full yell, multiple times today.
"No can brain today. Want cheezeburger."
From NGE: Nobody Dies, by Gregg Landsman
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5579457/1/NGE_Nobody_Dies

[ordnance11]

*tugs at earlobes*

Spud my man, in my old job (which happens to be environmental monitoring), if things get exciting, something has gone very wrong.

What has been dismaying to me right now is the human element. TEPCO is very near the tipping point..if they haven't passed it already. Berk and everyone else keeps pointing out that the technology will hold. Every branch decision I'ved read so far suggested a suboptimal response so far...even if it's the only response.

What I had been kibbitzing about is that the folks on the ground had better starting gearing up for the worse case scenario because thinking it ain't gonna happen means when it does happen, you'll lose valuable time. The range of responses right now over there is pretty slim.

Ask any veteran who has ever been involved in a FUBAR. The best time to react to it is before it happens. Assume and plan for the worse and hope for the best. Now that I have set my piece, I'll clam up now, It seems to be upsetting some of you folks.

But on the bright side, this would make a very good master's thesis. See there's an upside to the situation already for me!
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Sofaspud]

I've had jobs involving *managing* crisis situations, albeit not at the same scale.  But ask any veteran -- the worst thing you can do in a crisis is panic.
Which is the tone you are projecting.
The problem is that your 'worst case' and the real-world worst case are two different things.  As Berk has so ably pointed out, as innumerable others around the web have pointed out (including those who already *have* their master's, in this very field) this is not a Chernobyl event.  It cannot become one.  And if it's worse than Three Mile Island (a debatable point), it is so only in scale, not in impact or type.
By focusing on erroneous facts, were you in charge, you'd be hampering rather than helping.  The people on the scene are doing as well as, if not better than, anybody else possibly could.  Throwing warm bodies at the problem won't help at this stage, because right now by all accounts the site is in reaction mode.  You can't be proactive when you have insufficient resources, and the resource they need is not human bodies.  They need reliable power more than anything else.  However, so does the rest of the country.  So it comes down to triage, and the simple math is that the worst scenario that these reactors can produce is less impactful than abandoning rescue efforts elsewhere.
The media probably won't acknowledge that because it doesn't make for a good story.  But any veteran should see it right away.

--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs

[ordnance11]

Let me just say this then I really, really shut up.

Throwing warm bodies at this point would be moot because they just evacuated the workers from the site. Are they coming back? *shrug* I hope so because if they can't come back, that's end game IMO.

What I have been stating is that I'm seeing a series of suboptimal responses. I'm not saying this will be Chenobyl event with certainty. But the responses so far and the results that's coming out is not that encouraging. Raging at me for being a Cassandra is not going to change that.

It's not going to affect me personally because I'm about as far away as you can get from Japan. If you want to blame me for for Monday morning QB, I plead guilty.

So that's it. I'll say no more on the subject.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Berk]

I've been busy today, so I haven't had much of a chance to check on things.

This mess at Fukushima-1 is not the real story, no matter what anyone on the news is saying.  It's not exactly sunshine and rainbows and little fluffy bunnies, but it isn't the real tragedy.

It's still winter, and it's cold in Japan right now.  There are a lot of people without homes, living in shelters.  Nobody knows when they're going to get another shipment of supplies in.  Nobody knows when the lights are going to go out next.  There are a lot of people who have to deal with the reality that they don't have a home, or a hometown, anymore.

This is what ten meters of water does to a coastline.
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead

[Black Aeronaut]

I can clearly pick up on what both of you are saying. One is saying, "Stay calm, stay cool, and have faith in the abilities of your equipment." The other is saying, "Humans can and will make mistakes - it is inherent in our nature. Therefore, let us take no chance. Instead, let us take every precaution possible."

I agree with both statements. Now is not the time to panic. However, we've already seen that Murphy is running roughgshod, so in all honesty we can no longer afford to leave anything to chance.

The equipment in question maybe doing it's job for the moment. But has anyone honestly made an up-close inspection of the reactor cores since the quake? Or even the concrete 'catch-pans' that are supposed to contain molten core material? So far, all we have to go on are measurements taken from outside the containment vessels. That not fully reassuring to me.

Here's an idea. Why don't we use one of those robots that EOD units are so found of using? That way we can get a look inside the containment structure without risk of human life.

Most of all, I feel we need more technicians on the scene. Right now, all the other reactors in Japan are shut down. Surely some of the operators and technicians from the inactive, unaffected sites would be willing to help their colleagues in need. And I don't want to hear a word about it being impossible to get people there. They have helicopters. They can use them. And they can avoid the radioactive fallout quite easily - it's what the Navy has been doing by moving most of their ships to the western side of Japan, and they still manage to get their humanitarian missions accomplished.

[Logan Darklighter]

I've been busy today, so I haven't had much of a chance to check on things.

This mess at Fukushima-1 is not the real story, no matter what anyone on the news is saying.  It's not exactly sunshine and rainbows and little fluffy bunnies, but it isn't the real tragedy.

It's still winter, and it's cold in Japan right now.  There are a lot of people without homes, living in shelters.  Nobody knows when they're going to get another shipment of supplies in.  Nobody knows when the lights are going to go out next.  There are a lot of people who have to deal with the reality that they don't have a home, or a hometown, anymore.

This is what ten meters of water does to a coastline.

*Looks at link.*

I can't think of anything to say that doesn't involve endless rolling repetitive expletives. 

EDIT:
Something that I've seen before struck me as apt. A quote from "The West Wing" that came to mind while I was getting pissed off reading about some truly SICK FUCKS who seem to think that this is some kind of divine punishment from God on the Japanese.
"Haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito? ... Cruciatus in crucem! Eas in crucem!"
("Am I to believe that these are the acts of a loving God? A just God? A wise God? ... To hell with your punishments! To hell with you!"(literally - "may you go to a cross"))

[ordnance11]

Well, if you're looking at a silver lining, it would be that the Japanese are an orderly and disciplined society. Thank God for that. Not one peep of any looting or rioting. Unlike some some disasters I'd care to name.

Berk, as far as the relief effort goes, I'm not too worried about it. The Japanese have a very good disaster-preparedness set-up. The Kobe quake is proof of that. Though the scale involved right now is daunting. The U.S Marines are prepared to move out to staging areas as soon as the Japanese government can figure where to stage and use them. Military civil engineering units are is what needed now. Particularly electricity generating and water purification machinery. Logistics units to move what is needed to the affected areas. Body recovery and disposition is also critical. You need to recover these dead persons as soon as possible otherwise your looking at the possibility of an epidemic. So also mobile medical units. A great number of caskets and body bags. The time lag is going to be longer than usual, but that can't be helped.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[ordnance11]

I can clearly pick up on what both of you are saying. One is saying, "Stay calm, stay cool, and have faith in the abilities of your equipment." The other is saying, "Humans can and will make mistakes - it is inherent in our nature. Therefore, let us take no chance. Instead, let us take every precaution possible."

I agree with both statements. Now is not the time to panic. However, we've already seen that Murphy is running roughgshod, so in all honesty we can no longer afford to leave anything to chance.

The equipment in question maybe doing it's job for the moment. But has anyone honestly made an up-close inspection of the reactor cores since the quake? Or even the concrete 'catch-pans' that are supposed to contain molten core material? So far, all we have to go on are measurements taken from outside the containment vessels. That not fully reassuring to me.

Here's an idea. Why don't we use one of those robots that EOD units are so found of using? That way we can get a look inside the containment structure without risk of human life.

Most of all, I feel we need more technicians on the scene. Right now, all the other reactors in Japan are shut down. Surely some of the operators and technicians from the inactive, unaffected sites would be willing to help their colleagues in need. And I don't want to hear a word about it being impossible to get people there. They have helicopters. They can use them. And they can avoid the radioactive fallout quite easily - it's what the Navy has been doing by moving most of their ships to the western side of Japan, and they still manage to get their humanitarian missions accomplished.

They're probably rotating technicians in and out to spread the dose. As far as robot inspectors go, it's a good idea but not practical yet. Radio frequencies aren't going to go far inside the containment building. You could use a tethered line to transmit commands, but that would mean still having to send an operator inside the containment building. Either you're exposing the operator(s) to radiation. What you really need is an autonomous robot. Does EOD or DOD have any in stock?
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Jorlem]

Is there some reason that they can't tether the robot to a radio receiver that is outside the area where radio won't penetrate? That way, the humans would only need to go far enough to deploy the reciever and the robot, back out, and send the robot in deeper.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

[Berk]

The main reason I've heard for not sending in a robot has to do with radioactivity doing nasty things to most modern electronics.
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead

[paladindythe]

The main reason I've heard for not sending in a robot has to do with radioactivity doing nasty things to most modern electronics.

Assuming you could shield the robot itself, shielding the control line is a whole different issue. The only transmission medium that's impervious to electro-magnetic interference is fiber-optic, which is rather too delicate for the task. Even the military's take on fiber-optic cable has to be treated gently.
At the risk of oversimplifing, a cable (or wireless through the air for that matter) provides a connection of the other side of the connection can reliably tell the 1's and 0's apart. As cables get longer, and the voltage of the transmission gets less and less (from resistance of the wire), it gets more and more difficult to tell those 1's and 0's apart. (There's always some level of 'white noise' in an electrical system, so that if the voltages get too weak, they get lost in the noise.)
  

[ordnance11]

Does NASA have any spare Mars rovers? Those things would be engineered against radiation. Outfit one with an X-Ray/Gamma Ray imager and had it go autonomously inside would do the trick. But that also takes time.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[paladindythe]

ordnance11 wrote:

---

Does NASA have any spare Mars rovers? Those things would be engineered against radiation. Outfit one with an X-Ray/Gamma Ray imager and had it go autonomously inside would do the trick. But that also takes time.

Since NASA has a rather limited budget these years, I imagine not. But I could be wrong. A lot of these ideas boil down to "neat but not worth the cost for a contingency plan".
It's been said (I forget by who) that our current risk management techniques work well until you get to "extremely rare but catastrophic" events. A seperate (financial) example would be the morgage backed security collapse in 2008. We (as a civilization) haven't figured out how much is enough in these situations.
    

[Dartz]

Cheapest and most effective robot is the Mk-1 Homo Sapiens. Tellingly, it hasn't gotten bad enough for them to send their people in to the heavily radiation affected areas yet. The situation at the plant is stable enough that it can be abandoned for stretches and not be expected to destabilise quickly.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Jorlem]

If the problem with the tether is signal degradation, couldn't repeaters be attached to the cable to boost the signal? I'm sure there are ways to deal with signal corruption as well. Off of the top of my head, maybe sending the signal in triplicate, and the comparing between them to determine the intended signal could work, though I'm sure there are much better methods that I'm not thinking of.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

[ordnance11]

paladindythe wrote:

---

ordnance11 wrote:

---

Does NASA have any spare Mars rovers? Those things would be engineered against radiation. Outfit one with an X-Ray/Gamma Ray imager and had it go autonomously inside would do the trick. But that also takes time.

Since NASA has a rather limited budget these years, I imagine not. But I could be wrong. A lot of these ideas boil down to "neat but not worth the cost for a contingency plan".
It's been said (I forget by who) that our current risk management techniques work well until you get to "extremely rare but catastrophic" events. A seperate (financial) example would be the morgage backed security collapse in 2008. We (as a civilization) haven't figured out how much is enough in these situations.
    

 I remember they had spares in case the ones in Mars went goofy and they have to figure out a fix on earth. Whether those were scrapped or not is the question. Money at this point and time should not be a problem.
  
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[SkyeFire]

A few points:  those Mars rovers (speaking of Spirit and Opportunity here -- the new rover I'm less read up on) are NOT made for the kind of intense radiation they would encounter inside the reactor pressure vessel.  Even the kind of cosmic-ray exposure they get on Mars, which lacks a decent atmospheric shield, is far less.  The radiation is also quite different -- inside the reactor you're going to run into more neutrons and alpha and beta particles.
These rovers also are completely inadaquate to the terrain.  They are very, very slow, had to have their routes plotted out in great painstaking detail, and generally made a few meters/day, unless my memory is really failing me.  And those tiny wheels can't handle much at all in the way of obstacles.
Also, calling those rovers "autonomous" is... quite an exaggeration.  Imagine a RC toy robot that has just enough smarts to keep you from driving over the edge of a cliff that you can't see through the onboard cameras.
And one last thing:  getting one of those rovers, or some other robot, into the primary containment would involve opening the pressure vessel, wouldn't it?  And leaving it open to let the tether pass through, since we've already discussed the unlikelyhood of wireless operation.  That's not an action I would want to take without a much more pressing, specific need -- just to eyeball the vessel from within probably doesn't warrant it, unless the external monitoring methodologies show something that they would really benefit from getting eyeballs on inside the hot zone.
And, frankly, even if they got a rover of some sort into the core and found a crack or something in the containment, what good would it do?  It's not like they can send in a welding crew to fix it.  Either the graphite melt-capture bed below the primary containment captures the melting-down core (if that happens), or it doesn't.  If it fails... well, I'm not sure there's anything humanly possible to do about it at this point.

[ordnance11]

Nah, you don't have to go inside the containment vessel. Just get inside the containment bldg. Have get close to the containment vessel (touch it with a probe actually) with a gamma/x-ray imager and take a scan of the vessel and the floor below it. Find out if they're still intact and there are no fractures or weaknesses in the either one and how bad has the fuel melted. We didn't know how bad the reactor at TMI was damaged until they opened it up and found out half the core has melted. We got techniques now that'll enable to look inside without disturbing the containment..or the floor.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[ordnance11]

I disagree. Its not getting worse... we're just beginning to get better INFORMED about how bad it really IS.

As to the issue of heavy lift, BA... the issue there is that there just arnt THAT many HL capable helos period. And to carry that sort of load you take a hit on range and speed, normally heavy gear is moved by ground because its just not feasable to move it any other way.

Star Ranger may had hit this one on the nose. The head of the american NRC just issued a statement. I'm not going to announce this one. You folks can look it up. But I found distressing and interesting is that the bad news is all coming from foreign sources. Not the Japanese government. Not certainly TEPCO. There is a disturbing parallel between the start of the Gulf Oil disaster and BP's press statements in the beginning before the U.S government took over. Maybe it's the need for consensus of what to put out. Maybe it's the need to save face in front of Japan and the world. But it makes me wonder..just how bad it really is?
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Shader]

Some related news:
Straight from my last update of Twitter... and its about 6 hours old....

MarcianTobay
Marcian Tobay




by ransim










NCSoft donates a full month of annual profits to disaster relief for Japan. http://bit.ly/hjwKFO

Where can I help?

[Star Ranger4]

Hrrm... I dunno Hue. Do you already have all the expansion packs? if not this'd be a great time to buy em (if you have the resources)
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[ordnance11]

Assuming the pumps in the reactors are still in good working order and all they need is electricity, why not send a ship or ships to supply the power. If you want, send the Ronald Reagan offshore and anchor her (him?) and send an electrical cable toward the plants. You got two nuclear reactors in the ship and you can spare one easily for the power. Be one hell of a decontamination job afterwards, but it'll work as well as using a fire hose to fend off a mine (which means very well).
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[paladindythe]

Assuming the pumps in the reactors are still in good working order and all they need is electricity, why not send a ship or ships to supply the power. If you want, send the Ronald Reagan offshore and anchor her (him?) and send an electrical cable toward the plants. You got two nuclear reactors in the ship and you can spare one easily for the power. Be one hell of a decontamination job afterwards, but it'll work as well as using a fire hose to fend off a mine (which means very well).

If raw power is not an issue, then likely voltage / current requirements would be. Plus, you're talking about floating a (big) power cable through at a couple of miles of ocean, not an easy task in the best of times...
  

[ordnance11]

ordnance11 wrote:

---

Assuming the pumps in the reactors are still in good working order and all they need is electricity, why not send a ship or ships to supply the power. If you want, send the Ronald Reagan offshore and anchor her (him?) and send an electrical cable toward the plants. You got two nuclear reactors in the ship and you can spare one easily for the power. Be one hell of a decontamination job afterwards, but it'll work as well as using a fire hose to fend off a mine (which means very well).

If raw power is not an issue, then likely voltage / current requirements
would be. Plus, you're talking about floating a (big) power cable
through at a couple of miles of ocean, not an easy task in the best of
times...
No need to float it. just drop into the seabed and lay
it out. That would be the safest way to do. you Don't have to worry
about strain relief at either end..well maybe at the ship end.
Voltage/current requirements? Heck, GE has a team of retired and current
engineers advising TEPCO. A few of them were probably navy nuclear
engineering weenies. They should be able to kludge together something
from existing stock. Doesn't have to be prefect. Just have to hold long
enough for TEPCO to bring a power line in.   
 
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell