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Merged 8.8 quake in Sendai, Japan

commandlinegamer said:
Reactor container intact:

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/77156.html
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That would be a great relief. Japan has enough on its plate as it is.
That said. I find the article a bit vague and contradictionary.
They talk about the explosion not occurring at the reactor, but say that the building containing the reactor has partially collapsed.
then they tell the containment vessel has sustained no serious damage but base this on radiation levels measured outside the facility.
And with all this the core is still partially melting.

I really hope everything will be allright, but I'm afraid they will not be.
Time will tell.
 
a_unique_person said:
Where does the hydrogen come from?
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If you heat water hot enough it dissociates into hydrogen and oxygen.

Wiki

Water, when heated to well over 2000 °C, decomposes to its constituent elements:
2 H2O → 2 H2 + O2

The compound with the highest known decomposition temperature is carbon monoxide at ≈3870 °C (≈7000 °F).[citation needed].
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You can guess what happens when the hydrogen cools down a bit as it gets into the wider atmosphere.

ETA: On the Badscience forum, someone has pointed out that zirconium is used, which will react with water to form zirconium oxide and release hydrogen if it is hot enough.
 
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erwinl said:
That would be a great relief. Japan has enough on its plate as it is.
That said. I find the article a bit vague and contradictionary.
They talk about the explosion not occurring at the reactor, but say that the building containing the reactor has partially collapsed.
then they tell the containment vessel has sustained no serious damage but base this on radiation levels measured outside the facility.
And with all this the core is still partially melting.

I really hope everything will be allright, but I'm afraid they will not be.
Time will tell.
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I know what you mean. It sounds very strange indeed.

From what I understand though there are some people in there doing a pretty heroic job* and who must be exposing themselves to incredible risks right now.


*Yes, I know there has been a JREF thread recently about the overuse of the word "hero" but I'm tempted to use it here.
 
Amongst all this tragedy, it's uplifting to realise that due to Japan's tsunami detection technology a far more devastating disaster has been averted.

ETA: Don't mind Plumjam. Great pith is all he knows, and when he tries to comment on serious issues he seems unable.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
ETA: Don't mind Plumjam. Great pith is all he knows, and when he tries to comment on serious issues he seems unable.
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lol


Anyway, can someone explain exactly what happened to Earth's axis? It says it shifted 4 inches. Does this mean the whole planet shifted :confused:
 
Bell said:
lol


Anyway, can someone explain exactly what happened to Earth's axis? It says it shifted 4 inches. Does this mean the whole planet shifted :confused:
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When I was walking home from the pub last night I could tell. It seemed like everything was off by about 4 inches.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
Amongst all this tragedy, it's uplifting to realise that due to Japan's tsunami detection technology a far more devastating disaster has been averted.
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Has it? I'd like to believe that's the case, but I'm not clear that people had sufficient time to evacuate the affected area. How much difference did the warnings make, does anyone know?

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Has it? I'd like to believe that's the case, but I'm not clear that people had sufficient time to evacuate the affected area. How much difference did the warnings make, does anyone know?

Rolfe.
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Yeah, I think in this case very little difference. There simply wasn't enough time to evacuate for huge numbers of people. The waves started coming in within somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes.

The only place where I wonder if it did make a difference was at Sendai Airport.

I've seen pictures of the massive flooding and I've seen some pictures of light planes piled up from the tsunami but I have no idea what happened to the big planes. Sendai does have a small number of international flights and if you look at pictures of the airport you can see it has an asphalt/concrete runway and a number of air-bridges to the terminal.

It is possible - and this is pure speculation - that some of the planes were able to take off and that the waiting passengers in the airport were able to get to higher floors before the tsunami came.

Still, the numbers of people who escaped are likely to be only a small proportion of those who would have been killed in a tsunami with no warning.
 
Rolfe said:
Has it? I'd like to believe that's the case, but I'm not clear that people had sufficient time to evacuate the affected area. How much difference did the warnings make, does anyone know?

Rolfe.
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The towns closest to the quake had about 15 minutes warning. How far did people have to go to get out of the tsunami zone? Was it walking a couple hundred meters to a nearby hill or several kilometers?
 
jayh said:
GPS nav units in Japan will need to be recallibrated?
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The units themselves will be fine, it's the maps of Japan which will need to be updated. Although in practice, 2.4m won't matter for most things.
 
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Here's an article talking about how a few seconds can make all the difference:

A one-of-its-kind early warning system provided seconds of advance notice to many residents of Tokyo shortly before a massive earthquake rocked the Japanese capital on Friday afternoon.

The system went into operation in 2007 and links more than a thousand seismographs across Japan. Each location is linked to a central computer that attempts to detect the weak but fast-moving primary waves that are generated by an earthquake and use them to triangulate the location of the quake and estimate its size.

The amount of warning provided depends on the distance from the earthquake's epicenter. Those closest to the source of the quake and susceptible to the strongest shaking get little or no warning. The warnings begin to make a difference around 50 to 100 kilometers from the epicenter of a strong quake, where up to 30 seconds warning can be provided.

That may not sound like much, but it's enough time to bring high-speed trains to an emergency halt, stop factory production lines and get schoolchildren under their desks.

On Friday afternoon, the system sprung into action and a warning flashed automatically on television screens. The first waves of shaking from the quake arrived in Tokyo about 10 seconds later, said people who had televisions on at the time.
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Check out the system as it worked on TV:
 
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Rolfe said:
They seem to have stopped giving these ridiculous death toll figures though. Saying 29 dead, or "the death toll has been raised to 45" and so on was pretty silly when we could all see the massive extent of the destruction. Even figures in the hundreds re obviously unrealistic. This is going to be in the tens of thousands, at least.

ETA: "At least 1,300" is now being broadcast. Would that it were so few.
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I'm afraid you're probably right. I thought so yesterday (US time) but subsequent reports got my hopes up that maybe the inundated areas really had been evacuated in the short time available, which would be an extremely impressive accomplishment. But now, NHK is reporting half the population of Minamisanriku (about 9,500) unaccounted for.

(Keep in mind that's second hand to me, various news agencies reporting what a Japanese TV station reported, so at least third hand from any official source, fourth hand to you via this thread.)

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
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