H5N1

Japan’s ‘Hail Mary’ at Fukushima Daiichi: An underground ice wall

Via The New York Times: Japan’s ‘Hail Mary’ at Fukushima Daiichi: An Underground Ice Wall. Excerpt:

FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI NUCLEAR POWER STATION — The part above ground doesn’t look like much, a few silver pipes running in a straight line, dwarfed by the far more massive, scarred reactor buildings nearby.  

More impressive is what is taking shape unseen beneath: an underground wall of frozen dirt 100 feet deep and nearly a mile in length, intended to solve a runaway water crisis threatening the devastated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan. 

Officially named the Land-Side Impermeable Wall, but better known simply as the ice wall, the project sounds like a fanciful idea from science fiction or a James Bond film. But it is about to become a reality in an ambitious, and controversial, bid to halt an unrelenting flood of groundwater into the damaged reactor buildings since the disaster five years ago when an earthquake and a tsunami caused a triple meltdown.  

Built by the central government at a cost of 35 billion yen, or some $320 million, the ice wall is intended to seal off the reactor buildings within a vast, rectangular-shaped barrier of man-made permafrost. If it becomes successfully operational as soon as this autumn, the frozen soil will act as a dam to block new groundwater from entering the buildings. It will also help stop leaks of radioactive water into the nearby Pacific Ocean, which have decreased significantly since the calamity but may be continuing. 

 However, the ice wall has also been widely criticized as an expensive and overly complex solution that may not even work. Such concerns re-emerged this month after the plant’s operator announced that a section that was switched on more than four months ago had yet to fully freeze. 

Some also warn that the wall, which is electrically powered, may prove as vulnerable to natural disasters as the plant itself, which lost the ability to cool its reactors after the 45-foot tsunami caused a blackout there.

Burning reactor fuel could have worsened the Fukushima disaster

Via Science: Burning reactor fuel could have worsened the Fukushima disaster. Excerpt:

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. 

Thanks to a lucky break detailed in a report released today by the U.S. National Academies, Japan dodged that bullet. The near calamity “should serve as a wake-up call for the industry,” says Joseph Shepherd, a mechanical engineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who chaired the academy committee that produced the report. 

Spent fuel accumulating at U.S. nuclear reactor plants is also vulnerable, the report warns. A major spent fuel fire at a U.S. nuclear plant “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., who was not on the panel. 

After spent fuel is removed from a reactor core, the fission products continue to decay radioactively, generating heat. Many nuclear plants, like Fukushima, store the fuel onsite at the bottom of deep pools for at least 5 years while it slowly cools. It is seriously vulnerable there, as the Fukushima accident demonstrated, and so the academy panel recommends that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear plant operators beef up systems for monitoring the pools and topping up water levels in case a facility is damaged. It also calls for more robust security measures after a disaster. “Disruptions create opportunities for malevolent acts,” Shepherd says.

Ecuador earthquake: Pedernales devastated and in ruins

Via ElComercio.com: Pedernales está devastado y en escombros.[Pedernales is devastated and in ruins] Pedernales, Wikipedia tells us, had a population in 2001 of 46,876. Excerpt, with my translation:

La gente deambula, llora desesperada y de dolor, pide ayuda… Son los sobrevivientes del cantón Pedernales, en la provincia de Manabí, que buscan a sus familiares, debajo de los escombros de bloque, hierro, madera y zinc que están por los suelos. 

People walk slowly, crying with desperation and pain, asking for help. They are the survivors of Pedernales canton in the province of Manabí, searching for their family members under the rubble of concrete, iron, wood and zinc.

Juan Carlos Pérez, fotógrafo enviado por este Diario a Pedernales, cuenta lo que vio al llegar a Pedernales, desde las 07:00 de este domingo 17 de abril del 2016.

Juan Carlos Pérez, photographer sent to Pedernales by this newspaper, reports what he saw on arrival, from 7:00 a.m. this Sunday, April 17.

Es desalentador. Solo hay destrozos de tanta casa y edificio caídos; casi nada queda en pie. Por ejemplo, el hotel Royal, de cinco pisos, estaba lleno con turistas. No se sabe cuántas personas, pero los que sobrevivieron hablan de 30 a 50 personas. No se sabe nada de ellas. 

It's discouraging.So many houses have been destroyed and buildings fallen, almost nothing has been left standing. For example, the Hotel Royal, five storeys high, was full of tourists. It's not known how many persons, but those who survived estimate 30 to 50 persons. Nothing is known about them.

Cuando aclaró el día, los habitantes comenzaron a regresar a Pedernales. La noche del sábado 16 de abril, cuando se dio el terremoto de 7.8 grados de magnitud, la población salió en la oscuridad hacia las zonas más alejadas y altas del cantón manabita, el epicentro de esta desgracia. Huyeron por miedo a un tsunami.

When day broke, the inhabitanst began to return to Pedernales. On the night of Saturday, April 16, when the 7.8 earthquake hit, people had gone out into the darkness to higher, more distant places in the canton, the epicentre of this misfortune. They fled out of fear of a tsunami.

Strong Ecuador quake kills at least 28

Via ReliefWeb, an AFP report: Strong Ecuador quake kills at least 28. Excerpt:

At least 28 people were killed when a powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Ecuador on Saturday, knocking down buildings in the country's largest city Guayaquil and cutting power in the capital Quito. 

Vice President Jorge Glas said that a state of emergency had been declared across the Andean nation. "We have 16 people dead in the city of Portoviejo, 10 in Manta and two in the province of Guayas," in the west of the country, Glas told a news conference. 

Police, the military and emergency services "are in a state of maximum alert to protect the lives of citizens." 

The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center also issued warning for the nearby Pacific coastline. 

"There is considerable (structural) damage in the area near the epicenter as well as points as far away as Guayaquil," Ecuador's Geophysical Office (IG) said. 

Media published photographs of a bridge and the roof of a shopping center that collapsed in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador's most populous city on the Pacific coast. 

President Rafael Correa, on a visit to the Vatican, sent a message of support on Twitter. 

"Authorities are already out evaluating damage and taking action" as needed," he said. 

Glas earlier said on Twitter that a national emergency committee had been activated. 

Tsunami warning  

With a depth of 10 kilometers (six miles), the quake struck at 2358 GMT about 173 km west-northwest of Quito and just 28 kilometers south-southeast of Muisne, according to the US Geological Survey, which monitors earthquakes worldwide. 

"Based on the preliminary earthquake parameters, hazardous tsunami waves are possible for coasts located within 300 kilometers of the earthquake epicenter," the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.

Fukushima five years later

Five years and one hour ago, I posted this item from The Globe and Mail: Tsunami advisory issued for north and central B.C. coast. Excerpt:

A tsunami watch that was issued for sections of the British Columbia coast following an earthquake in Japan has been elevated to a tsunami advisory. The advisory covers the north coast and the Haida Gwaii Islands, the Bella Bella and Shearwater areas and Vancouver Island from Cape Scott to Port Renfrew.

And there began a frantic morning as I tried to pull relevant data out of the information tsunami that swept the planet. The information is still rippling around us, but Fukushima has largely dropped from our awareness except on anniversaries like this one. An ongoing disaster ceases to be a disaster and becomes just a fact of life...like Chernobyl, and Ebola, and Syria, and the Central African Republic, and wherever society seems permanently crippled. When British Columbia gets its own big earthquake, we too will be briefly famous. But only briefly. 

Fukushima's ground zero: No place for man or robot

Via Thomson Reuters: Fukushima's ground zero: No place for man or robot.

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have "died"; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don't know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site. 

Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-metre high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods.   

Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get into its bowels to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods. 

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) , has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed. 

"It is extremely difficult to access the inside of the nuclear plant," Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning said in an interview. "The biggest obstacle is the radiation." 

The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.

But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless, causing long delays, Masuda said. 

Each robot has to be custom-built for each building."It takes two years to develop a single-function robot," Masuda said. 

IRRADIATED WATER 

Tepco, which was fiercely criticised for its handling of the disaster, says conditions at the Fukushima power station, site of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in Ukraine 30 years ago, have improved dramatically. Radiation levels in many places at the site are now as low as those in Tokyo. 

More than 8,000 workers are at the plant at any one time, according to officials on a recent tour. Traffic is constant as they spread across the site, removing debris, building storage tanks, laying piping and preparing to dismantle parts of the plant. 

Much of the work involves pumping a steady torrent of water into the wrecked and highly radiated reactors to cool them down. Afterward, the radiated water is then pumped out of the plant and stored in tanks that are proliferating around the site.

Welcoming a new Flublogian

Whether she agrees or not, I am drafting Dr. Susan W. Kieffer into the ranks of Flublogia through her site Geology in Motion, which is going into the Bloggers list.

Dr. Kieffer is a geologist and MacArthur Fellow, and the author of an excellent book, The Dynamics of Disaster, that explains the science behind earthquakes, tsunamis, and storms better than anything else I've read.

 

When climate change also means drastic changes in the conditions for global health, we need people like her. Long may she blog.

Japan: Fukushima No. 1 worker's leukemia officially deemed a work accident

Via The Japan Times: Fukushima No. 1 worker's leukemia officially deemed a work accident.

The health ministry Tuesday certified a man with leukemia as having suffered an industrial accident and being entitled to benefits after he was exposed to radiation as a construction worker at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, though it did not confirm there was a link between the radiation and the cancer. 

The man, now in his early 40s, is the first person involved with working at stricken facility to receive the certification for developing leukemia. 

He installed covers for the damaged reactor buildings at the plant between October 2012 and December 2013 before being diagnosed with leukemia, according to the ministry. He developed the disease while in his 30s. 

“While the causal link between his exposure to radiation and his illness is unclear, we certified him from the standpoint of worker compensation,” an official of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry said. 

Workers who are injured or become ill due to work or commuting can receive benefits under Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance. To receive compensation, they must submit claims to a labor standards inspection office, which will examine and pass judgment on them. 

For leukemia to be certified as an industrial accident caused by radiation exposure, a claimant must meet certain requirements, such as being exposed to radiation of at least 5 millisieverts in a year, and having developed the illness more than a year after they were first exposed to radiation. 

In the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, Tokyo Electric Power Co. installed covers over the damaged reactor buildings to prevent the further dispersal of radioactive material.

The earthquake that will devastate Seattle (and Vancouver, and Portland, and...)

Thanks to Patti Bacchus for tweeting the link to this report in The New Yorker, an excellent but disquieting article by Kathryn Schulz: The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle. Excerpt from a long article, and then a comment:

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. 

That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. 

The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest. 

Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. 

That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. 

Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

We worry a lot about the Big One here in BC. I wrote an article about the last one, in 1700, which Schulz also describes. And I reviewed an excellent book, Cascadia's Fault, which deserves wide readership—especially on the North American west coast.

Nepal earthquake: The very foreseeable future

We're not even a week into the aftermath of Nepal's earthquake, but the next few years are easy to foresee.

Shocked and appalled, the world scrambles to help just as it did after the Boxing Day tsunami, after Haiti's quake and cholera, and after West Africa's Ebola. Countries compete to deliver the most personnel and medical supplies. Newspapers in the West run full-page ads by NGOs: "We're helping in Nepal! Give us money!" 

The ads will be followed by lots of news coverage, mostly dealing with the hard luck of Westerners trapped on the slopes of Everest or posh hotels in Kathmandu, or with the selfless courage of Westerners helping the miserable Nepalis. We identify with our own folks, after all. All we know about the Nepalis is Sherpas leading rich Westerners by the hand as they pretend to climb Everest. Oh, and the amazing Gurkhas, renowned colonial soldiers who served the British Empire. But they're not really our sort, are they?

We will see predictable stories about the helplessness and corruption of Nepal's government, and then stories about how little real money actually reaches Nepal from the countries that have pledged millions. Sob stories produce both tears and promises of money, and both dry up very quickly. We will collect ourselves, and begin to shake our heads: Really, the Nepalis could do better, couldn't they? And then we wait for the next disaster.

Just yesterday, a writer in The Guardian noted that Nepal's dead and injured have one thing in common: they're poor. More affluent Nepalis live in better-constructed buildings that survived the quake. Poverty is also the common denominator for Haiti and West Africa—and even for the casualties of Katrina, most of whom were poor or old or sick or black, or all four. Rich white countries can take beatings and bounce back (or at least confine the misery to those citizens less rich, less white, and less covered by the media).

Haiti, already poor, still limps from the beating it took in the 2010 quake, and the infliction of now-endemic cholera just a few months later. West Africa will still feel the effects of Ebola at mid-century, even if the disease never returns. Nepal will enjoy the dubious attention of India and China until it's pulled into the orbit of one or the other, or ceases to be of political interest.

Meanwhile, we can expect fresh disasters. Unless they're in boring, non-strategic places like Sudan and the Horn of Africa, we'll pour aid into those disasters too, dispensing Band-Aids and feel-good stories in all directions. Nepal will be as forgotten as Haiti or post-tsunami Sri Lanka.

Globally, we are now something like the 1850s London of Dickens's Bleak House, when a handful of wealthy people thought they had sealed themselves off from the ignorant masses that sustained them. Dickens knew better: Whatever plague killed the poor would eventually find its way up the ladder to the rich. And when it did, it would serve the rich bloody well right.