[Janice D. Soderling]

I am sure this is on everyone's mind, but no thread has been put up about it, so I will.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/wo...ml?_r=1&emc=na

I don't know that we have any members in Japan, but we have members who have lived there and since we are an international community I'd be surprised if we didn't have other members who had friends there.

And indeed, it concerns us all.

[W.F. Lantry]

Janice,

I have friends in Tokyo, and in the North. It's one thing to say 'this is the end of nuclear power as we know it,' it's quite another to think that nuclear cloud is heading for Stu and his wife. On the other hand, Alex lives in Zushi. This morning, as he was typing, another earthquake hit. It just all seems so unrelenting, and then there are the countless lost. Another friend has a son and daughter-in-law there, and he hasn't heard from them. Everyone's hoping it's just because the power's out, as they're well away from the shoreline.

It's actually hard to focus on much else. And now they say another reactor's on fire. It seems to get worse from minute to minute...

Thanks,

Bill

[Allen Tice]

Food for thought: apart from the reactor problems, there is the historical example from 1707, when an estimated 8.6 level quake preceded the last major eruption by Fuji by about 49 days. Tokyo and the wider urban sprawl far exceeds anything present in 1707. It puts one in mind of the Lisbon earthquake that inspired Voltaire's Candide, and of course the possibility of a replay of Pompeii in the vastly overbuilt modern Naples area.
Here's one link more or less at random to the 1707 matter: Fuji.

On the matter of reactor use and design and what should be  vs. what is likely to be in New York or elsewhere, I am an interested amateur but wish to withhold comment.

[Richard Meyer]

The amount of death and destruction is staggering. How terrible for all the suffering humanity in Japan.

I haven't followed the news reports in great detail, but I did hear an American scientist/nuclear engineer being interviewed on TV the other day. As concerns the nuclear reactor meltdowns, this commentator said what surprises him most is that nuclear plants have emergency backup generators that are designed to take over and keep the core cool in just this sort of scenario, but for some reason they failed to operate in the Japanese plants. The man was quite amazed at this significant malfunction, especially since the Japanese are typically so efficient in such matters.

Richard

[Allen Tice]

I suppose I could allow this cold observation:

Whatever Can go wrong, Will go wrong; and given time and unexpected changes*, what Will go wrong, Shall go wrong.

It's those laughable Unknown Unknowns that get us every time.

*PS: A perfectly good example of a Known Unknown that has not been sufficiently discussed is the unknown effect of rising sea-levels from polar melting on the static pressures that ride on tectonic plates.

It is an open question, as far as I know, what the impact of the greater mass of seawater now appearing will have on previously "dormant" earthquake coastal faultlines, specifically the Ramapo Fault that is proximal to the Indian Point nuclear complex north of New York City.

[Jayne Osborn]

And now they've got SNOW to contend with, as well. How much more awful can it get?