Archive for March, 2011

French Embassy Tells Citizens to Flee Tokyo Region

Reuters is reporting that the France has sent an advisory to its citizens, asking them to leave the Tokyo region:

“It seems reasonable to advise those who do not have a particular reason to stay in the Tokyo region to leave the Kanto (Tokyo) region for a few days,” a statement on the French embassy website in Japan said.

“We strongly advise our nationals not to travel to Japan and we strongly recommend delaying any voyage planned,” it added.

The U.S. State Department has issued a travel advisory for Japan, but the American Embassy has also emphasized that no evacuation of Tokyo residents is necessary:

U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos on Sunday urged U.S. citizens in Japan to follow instructions from Japanese authorities as misinformation has been spreading among the public about Friday’s devastating earthquake and its impact on nuclear plants.

Referring to the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant, where one of the reactors partially melted Saturday, Roos said in a statement that immediate evacuation was ordered to people who live within 20 kilometers of the plant, and emphasized, ”No other evacuations have been recommended.”

[hat tip to Ponta]

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Rolling Blackouts in Japan

As we speak, they are reading long lists of city names and times on Japanese television. The nuclear reactors in Fukushima provided a lot of the electricity for the Kanto region, so Tepco is experiencing power shortages. Starting on Monday, the entire region will experience rolling blackouts:

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has announced that rolling blackouts in the Kanto Plain, including Tokyo, will begin Monday.

It is Sunday now in Japan. Power is on in Tokyo now because there is less usage on Sunday.
Monday brings more demand so TEPCO will implement rolling blackouts.

TEPCO will announce the schedule later today.

The schedule being read on the TV is somewhat vague, but it seems that the rolling blackouts will be scheduled for the daytime hours. Large cities like Yokohama and Saitama are included in several of the time blocks they are reading – presumably only certain areas of those cities are included in the times listed, but it is not clear.

Of Tokyo’s 23 wards, only Arakawa-ku will be effected. It would seem that they are punishing Tokyo’s suburbs under the assumption that downtown Tokyo is where most of the important business happens. Nonetheless, this will certainly wreak havoc upon the Japanese economy, as many factories and offices are outside of the 23 wards.

Reports are saying that the situation could continue for “weeks.”

Related Document: Blackout Schedule (in Japanese)

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As Tsunami Approached, Town Officials “Held a Meeting”

The above photo shows the government offices of Otsuchi, a coastal town in Iwate prefecture that suffered heavy damage from Friday’s tsunami:

In Iwate Prefecture, north of Miyagi, many corpses were found Sunday morning under the rubble in Rikuzentakata. About 5,000 houses in the city had been submerged by the quake-triggered tsunami, and the city office has confirmed that only 5,900 of its population of about 23,000 had taken shelter.

The prefectural government said it was still unable to contact 1,167 residents, including 918 in the town of Namiem, boosting the tally of those unaccounted for in its latest data.

It also has been unable to communicate with the mayor and officials in Otsuchi after the town office was swept away by a tsunami while the mayor and town officials were apparently inside the building….

Why were the mayor and town officials inside the building at the time the tsunami struck? According to news reports, they were holding a meeting to discuss safety measures that should be taken. The town office was a two-story building only 1-kilometer from the shore, making it one of the worst imaginable places to sit down and have a discussion while a deadly tsunami was on its way.

At the time this blog entry was posted, the mayor and town officials were still missing. It is possible that indecisiveness at a critical time resulted in their deaths, as well as the deaths of many town residents.

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The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Nuclear Meltdown

Friday’s earthquake damaged a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, and the effort to safely shut down the reactors has been a top story on Japanese news broadcasts ever since. As of this posting, Tepco was still working to cool down reactors that have experienced coolant failures. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has said it is “highly possible” that one of the reactors has experienced a partial meltdown:

“Because it’s inside the reactor, we cannot directly check it but we are taking measures on the assumption of the possible partial meltdown,” he said.

Although there might be a partial meltdown and some radiation leakage, it apparently will not be as bad as Chernobyl:

The Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 reactor has a better “containment system than Chernobyl but on the scale of most reactors in this country, it’s not as strong as most of them,” said Ken Bergeron, a physicist and former scientist at the Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked on nuclear-reactor accident simulation.

“If the containment doesn’t survive, we have a worst-case scenario” of a meltdown, Bergeron said in a Saturday conference call with other U.S. nuclear scientists to discuss the situation.

Tepco has said the containment is intact.

[...]

Thousands of residents within a 20-kilometer radius of the reactor have been evacuated as a precaution. But Dr. Kemper of Florida State University said in a separate interview that in the event of a large-scale radiation leak, people should barricade themselves into buildings and seal the windows until evacuation crews arrive.

The specter of huge environmental fallout on the scale of Chernobyl is unlikely, though.

The Chernobyl reactor used carbon to slow down neutrons, a key part of the fission reaction. In that disaster, a fire ignited the carbon and created radioactive soot that was carried afar by winds.

The nuclear core in many modern reactors, including the ones in Japan, is enclosed by a steel containment vessel. Today’s reactors also use water instead of carbon to slow down neutrons, so there is no big danger of the emanation of radioactive soot from the Fukushima plant.

A full meltdown at the Japanese facility would still release radioactive gases, but those tend to dissipate in the atmosphere. For example, there was a small amount of radiation released in the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania, but post-release assessments suggested it didn’t have any real health or environmental impact. About half of the core melted during the early stages of that accident.

If the Japanese nuclear core were to melt, certain radioactive materials, such as iodine, strontium and cesium, would also be released. These particles are one-quarter the size of a grain of salt and can be carried by winds. The larger the grains, the more quickly they would fall out of the air.

Dr. Kemper noted that the wind tends to blow west to east in Japan, and so a good deal of the radioactive particles would drift out to sea. Consequently, there probably wouldn’t be much fallout in Japan’s densely populated areas to the south.

Unlike an accident that releases chemical toxins, a nuclear-plant disaster has one advantage: Radiation levels can constantly and precisely be measured.

Should we be terrified? No, says Glenn Sjoden, Professor of Nuclear and Radiological Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, in this interview with CNN:

Professor Sjoden says he doesn’t believe that people are in serious or mortal danger. That includes people who live near the power plant. He does not think anyone should panic about this.

But what if the experts are wrong? What if there really is going to be a huge meltdown, followed by a giant release of radiation into the atmosphere? Even if a horrible nuclear disaster did occur, it seems that our fears are far greater than the actual risks, argues David Ropeik in a Scientific American blog post:

We know from studying the survivors of (nuclear) bombings, who were bathed in horrific doses of high level radiation – far worse than anything that could come from the Daiichi plant (or that came out of Chernobyl) – that ionizing radiation from nuclear energy is a carcinogen, but a relatively weak one. The roughly 100,000 survivors of the two atomic bomb blasts are known in Japan as hibakusha, and they are honored, and given special rights.

They have also been extensively studied, and 66 years later, by comparing them to cancer rates among Japanese not exposed to radiation, public health researchers estimate that only about 500 of the hibakusha died prematurely from cancer due to radiation exposure. Radiation-induced cancer killed roughly half of one percent of the exposed population. (This research is done by the Radiation Effects Research Institute, a Japanese organization supported by international public health agencies)

We also know that many of the children of hibakusha women pregnant at the time they were exposed suffered horrible birth defects. Studies of the atomic bomb survivors have also taught us, however, that there is apparently no generational genetic impact from radiation exposure. Kids born to parents who got pregnant after the exposure, were normal.

Based on studies of atomic bomb survivors, the World Health organization estimates the maximum lifetime death toll from cancer due to radiation exposure from Chernobyl, of roughly 800,000 people, will be about 4,000.

So, even if those of us in the region are exposed to radioactivity on a Chernobyl-like scale, the actual number of people who develop cancer will be low. I suppose that should make some people feel less scared.

A couple scary pictures

Over on Google News, the images used by sites like MoneyControl.com are producing preview thumbnails that are enough to make viewers very uneasy:

There also seems to be a prankster out there that created a “fallout map” warning Americans of a radiation cloud that will be heading their way. Of course, it is a hoax, not actually based on real data:

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South Korea & China Send Rescue Teams to Help Japanese Earthquake Victims

Japan’s neighbors are coming to its assistance after a 8.9 magnitude earthquake devastated the Tohoku region on Friday.

South Korea has sent a rescue team to help with the relief efforts in Japan:

The five-member team together with two dogs and rescue equipments, is sent to Tokyo at the request of the Japanese government, Yonhap news agency reported Saturday.

Another 120 relief workers, medical personnel and three military transport planes are on standby to head for Japan, if more help is requested.

President Lee Myung-bak expressed sympathy and pledged full support to help the Japanese government to recover from the major undersea quake that triggered a vast tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan.

Early on Saturday, Masatoshi Muto, Japan’s ambassador to South Korea, met First Vice Foreign Minister Park Seok-hwan in Seoul and thanked Seoul for its support in relief efforts, ministry officials said.

At the meeting, Park said the South Korean government will “do everything it can” to help Japan recover from the quake.

And China has done the same :

The team is made up of 15 members and is expected to arrive at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport three to four hours later by an Air China chartered plane.

Yin Guanghui, an official of the China Earthquake Administration and also head of the team, said that the team’s main task was to search for survivors.

The team brought with them four tonnes of materials and equipments for search and rescue as well as power supply and telecommunication services, Yin said.

Several other nations, including Australia, Great Britain, Israel, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States, are also sending rescue teams.

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Earthquake Was “Payback” for Pearl Harbor

As thousands of people around the world responded to news of the earthquake in Japan with messages of sympathy, a small backlash took place on Twitter and Facebook. Many Americans started posting status updates saying it was “karma” or “payback” for the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. There were enough tweets along those lines to make “pearl harbor” a popular trending topic on Twitter:

It seems that no disaster is too grave for Facebook’s large population of assholes to say offensive things about. The newest thing is that people are taking to their Facebook statuses to say that Japan “deserves” yesterday’s tragic earthquake because it’s “karma” for Pearl Harbor. It’s happening on Twitter too!

Village Voice, Buzz Feed, and PZ Myers have all posted collections of Facebook screen captures that reveal the names of idiots who have posted anti-Japanese hate messages.

The trend now seems to be one of status updates expressing disgust at the people who previously made Pearl Harbor status updates, but as OpenBook shows, there are still people posting idiotic updates:

And a few fine examples of idiots posting on one of Facebook’s largest anti-whaling groups:

In a related story, insane conspiracy theorist Benjamin Fulford has posted a news update on his blog declaring that the Japan earthquake was actually the work of the United States’ super secret HAARP earthquake weapon:

The horrific earthquake weapon attack on Japan, resulting in 10 meter tsunamis along much of Japan’s coast line came from rogue elements of the U.S. government located in underground bases in New Mexico and Nevada, according to pentagon and CIA sources.

The next target will be the New Madrid fault line in the South-Western United States, according to threats originating from the Nazi George Bush Senior faction of the U.S. government.

A few comments on his blog have demanded proof of his claim. As usual, he has provided none.

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