If only my parents had bought me this when I was little!
Okay so judging by the computer clock I have 12.5 minutes to finish this post and get it up, which may give you a hint why most of my posts seem rather … thin … lately. I have to jam them all up before the web cafe closes or walk several miles in the rain to get to the nearest 24 hour cafe and then pay another $2 for lousy coffee or $5 in the case of the nearest cafe, which has a two-drink minimum and NO I AM NOT EVEN JOKING so is it any wonder I’m having an emo breakdown? It’s only Monday by a few minutes and I’m already three days behind in posts.
So let me tell you about the time I had an emo meltdown on my one and only celebrity follower. Well, I have some celebrity journalists following me, thank god, because validation from writers better than one’s self is always welcome, but I have only one Actual Movie Star Follower, and that’s John Cusack. I’d tell you about him, but I don’t have time and you DO have google, so knock yourselves out.
It happened after I’d stayed up too long liveblogging Japan (for which I did get on the front page of Google for “Japanese Earthquake” for a time at least; I do think I did a good job, but GOD who can blog that for long without going ever so slightly insane, eh? I ask yez) two nights in a row and gotten an email from a friend in Hawaii mentioning the two quakes he’d had while he was replying to my email of a few minutes ago. Oh, swell.
Then I heard about the reactors.
That’s about when I DM’d my one and only Genuine Celebrity Follower, a man I know through conversations of about 420 characters total. And nothing is to be deduced from that purely coincidental number.
And what did I say to this near-stranger? “Do you ever have one of those days when you think the end of the world is actually here already?”
So, yeah, I’m apparently That Fan. Mother would be so proud.
On that note, here are your emo links for an early Monday morning. I should drink more, at least I’m a happy drunk.
The worst, at least the worst I can imagine, has happened. After some 22 hours of trying to regain control of the overheating Fukushima No 1 nuclear reactor power station in Futuba, there has been an uncontrolled explosion and reports of injuries.
Background on the Japanese earthquake and tsunamis here. After the incidents, the regular electrical grid went down and the backup power at the Fukushima plant failed, resulting in an inability to pump coolant around the heated nuclear material, a function which is absolutely essential to safety. Since then, temperatures have risen at the plant even as intrepid workers have struggled to pump in cooling water via other means. Not long ago, they lost the battle.
There are reports of at least four workers injured; none of the injuries appears life-threatening, according to sources.
Japanese media said officials had detected caesium, one of the elements released when overheating causes core damage, around the reactor at Fukushima No 1 plant in Futuba, 150 miles north of Tokyo.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company said it did not believe a meltdown was underway but Ryohei Shiomi, an official with Japan’s nuclear safety commission, said that it was possible.
Experts and authorities played down the dangers of a Chernobyl-style disaster, saying they believed a partial meltdown was controllable. The government urged people to remain calm.
Officials had earlier evacuated 20,000 residents living within 10km on the plant on the orders of the prime minister, Naoto Kan, who had inspected it via helicopter. Experts told Associated Press that the risk area was 6km….
Earlier in the day a Japanese nuclear safety panel said radiation levels were 1,000 times higher than normal in a control room and eight times normal just outside the plant. Workers were frequently changing shifts.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company has also reported problems with a second reactor at the plant and declared an emergency at the Fukushima No 2 plant.
Japan’s NHK TV showed before and after pictures of the plant. They appeared to show that the outer structure of one of four buildings at the plant had collapsed after the explosion.
The Tokyo Electric Power Co, the plant’s operator, said several workers had been injured.
Cooling systems inside several reactors at both the Fukushima plants stopped working after Friday’s earthquake cut the power supply.
Japan’s nuclear agency said on Saturday that radioactive caesium and iodine had been detected near the number one reactor of the Fukushima 1 plant.
The agency said this may indicate that containers of uranium fuel inside the reactor may have begun melting.
Air has been released from several of the reactors at both plants in an effort to relieve the huge amount of pressure building up inside.
Mr Kan said the amount of radiation released was “tiny”.
Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate the area near the plants. BBC correspondent Nick Ravenscroft said police stopped him 60km from the Fukushima 1 plant.
Analysts say a meltdown would not necessarily lead to a major disaster because light-water reactors would not explode even if they overheated.
UPDATE: here is more scientific background on the nature of the risk, via Dave MacDonald.
Nuclear experts across countries have warned that the situation could become grave if the fault at the Fukushima plant was not fixed soon. Cham Dallas, a professor of disaster management at the University of Georgia, has told CNN that the plants were likely to get “both thermally hot and radioactively hot” since the reactors had to be shut down.
Another nuclear physicist Dr Walt Patterson told The Sun: “It is the sort of thing that nuclear engineers have nightmares about…If the core is uncovered, then those rods at the top may get hot enough to melt themselves.”
Which would be what you call a “worst-case scenario.”
My faint hope is, there’s nothing more to report by tomorrow morning. My somewhat less faint hope is that eventually this becomes a coastal version of the Land of the Wolves.
UPDATE:
UPDATE: Bloomberg has the best roundup of information at this point. It was a hydrogen leak, not a steam explosion, which caused the event.
Winds in the area of the Fukushima plant are blowing at less than 18 kilometers per hour mostly in an offshore direction, according to a 4 p.m. update from the Japan Meteorological Agency.
The government earlier today widened the evacuation zone around the reactor to 10 kilometers from 3 kilometers, affecting thousands of people. The evacuation zone will be maintained at 10 kilometers from Dai-Ni plant and will be extended to 20 kilometers from Dai-Ichi plant, said Toshihiro Murakami, spokesman for the Fukushima prefecture government.
“When the pressure starts building up, the emergency procedure is to start venting,” Dave Lochbaum, director of the nuclear safety project at the Union for Concerned Scientists, said in a telephone interview. “They’ve essentially entered a beat the clock game. As long as there is no fuel damage, there will be radioactivity, but it will be very low.”
The plant’s operators need to connect to the electricity grid, fix emergency diesel generators or bring in more batteries to power a backup system that pumps the water needed to cool the reactor, said Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who has worked at nuclear power plants for 17 years.
Nuclear Meltdown
The air cooling system in the containment building probably failed due to the power loss, allowing pressure to increase inside, Lochbaum said.
Lack of adequate cooling for a reactor may cause a core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A meltdown could potentially breach a reactor’s containment building, releasing massive amounts of radiation, according to information on the agency’s website. The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania resulted in a partial meltdown, without a breach in the containment building, according to the commission.
People in Waikiki are being evacuated because of the expected tsunami from Japan. The airport is closed. And my friend in Hawaii is calmly emailing me over some abstruse WordPress embedding code.
I’ve tried the gigya shortcode in about every configuration I can come up with and I can get the player, but not the video itself. Their embed code is strange compared to others. Have you tried vodpod?
Panos is the undisputed gigya guru, so you might post in the forums. I don’t see a contact form on his blog.
Funny they had warning sirens at 8pm here, but I did not hear them. I did hear the ones about 9:20pm though.
I felt “compelled” to go grocery shopping this afternoon. I could have waited a few more days, but it was a strong urging. Glad I did now.
And we just had a 4.5 earthquake followed shortly after by a 3.3.
Fasten your seatbelts.
Aloha
TO which my response is an understandable:
You mean you JUST had one? Just now?
And the calm reply:
Yup, just a few minutes before I sent the previous emails, we had two earthquakes.
Aloha
And my un-calm reply:
Jesus Christ GET OFF THE INTERNET! Step away from power sources, dude! Priorities! You have to live long enough to have me over for merlot!
Although now I need a Martini!
UPDATE: oh wait, there’s more!
I’m up on the hill and safe. I’m off grid on solar and we had a bright sunny day so I have plenty of juice. My hand crank/solar radio is right here tuned to a radio station that plays a song and then does an update, then plays another song, then another update.
Wave heights for Kona, down the hill from me, are expected at a meter high, but they could be 5 to 15 minutes in length so they could push a good ways inland…
Ten earthquakes in the last hour +/-. Most 1 to 2.
When Kilauea was cranked up earlier this week we were getting 25 or so per day. Most barely felt where I am.
Aloha
Yeah. Make that Martini a double. How am I supposed to sleep when my friends are calmly prepared for the Apocalypse. I bet he could take the Four Horsemen single-handed, and recycle the evidence.
Additionally: stuck in Twitter jail because I’ve tweeted too much this past hour about the Japanese quake and tsunami. Thanks, impersonal, automated ceiling on server loads.
Seriously, has anyone seen a woman answering to “Whore of Babylon?” BE PREPARED.
While official reports only list one five32 deaths at the moment, as you can see the toll from today’s earthquake and tsunami is bound to be a great deal higher, sadly. Estimates are in the thousands, but with widespread power outages, information is sketchy. Phone and SMS service are intermittent in many areas, and there are blackouts in a wide area.
Japan Earthquake Tokyo Fires
I will be updating this post as long as I’m awake, so try refreshing every fifteen minutes or so. I’ll be up another hour I guess. Sorry, done for the night. There are resource links in the post for updates.
Japanese 7.9 Earthquake epicenter
Twenty minutes ago Japan, still recovering from yesterday’s 7.2 quake, was hit with another: this one a 7.9 UPDATE 8.8 8.9 fully large enough to be called The Big One, on the Richter scale, severe by any measure. There is a warning along the coast for 10-foot metre tsunami waves, but as the epicenter was east of the landmass, the affected regions should be highly localized, unlike the tsunami in Thailand a few years ago. As you can see from the map below, the next landmass to the east is Canada. UPDATE: there are two tsunami waves, and one was measured at 33 feet.
Japanese Earthquake world map
Honshu is Japan’s larges island, directly west of the epicenter: as you can see from the map above, there have been 38 registered quakes in the immediate region in the last 24 hours. The two large red squares are yesterday’s 7.2 and today’s 7.9, and the red line is a fault line. Today’s quake did damage in Tokyo, halfway down the island, while the earthquake was towards the northern tip
Sandra Barron has uploaded a picture of her kitchen after the quake:
Japanese Earthquake kitchen
And two more moving updates:
and
Now THAT is thinking ahead.
And, finally, a report from the somewhat-mainstream media:
Here is footage of a family evacuating their home in Sendai, showing how hard it hit them. What’s most astonishing to me is how incredibly long it lasts, as well as how quickly they get out of the house. But why are they the only ones outside?
The tsunami has hit, and it is serious. Buildings in Iwate-ken have been swept out to sea. The Philippines has been put on tsunami alert. Predicted zones of affect: Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima, Chiba, Ibaraki.
Planes have been grounded and trains stopped across Northern Japan.
There are fires in Chiba, Tokyo and Yokohama.
The epicenter was only 10km off Miyagi
There have been landslides which have buried some people in the northern regions.
At times like these, a good reporter with the instincts of a great editor makes all the difference.
Steve Herman
@W7VOA ÜT: 37.562444,126.975594
Voice of America (VOA) Bureau Chief/Correspondent, based in Seoul, mainly covering NE Asia (Korean peninsula & Japan).
Here is video of the tsunami and consequent landslides.
and a map showing expected arrival times of the tsunami. Remember, the farther from the epicenter, the less intense the wave is likely to be. Current swells are reported at 3/4 meter, implying a 10 foot wave in Hawaii, although that remains to be seen. Hotel visitors in Waikiki are being told to move to the 5th or higher floor and wait for instructions. The west coast of North America is on tsunami alert, but that doesn’t mean it WILL hit (the last one was three inches!) just that we should be wary.
Japan Earthquake tsunami travel times
And here is absolutely unbelievable footage of a huge whirlpool that formed in the port of Uzumaki about two hours after the quake. If you look closely, you can see that there is a boat caught in there, absolutely unable to escape. I can only hope there are no people on board.
And if you’ve been Following me on Twitter (and I appreciate it) know that I didn’t go dark voluntarily. Twitter put me in Twitter Jail for tweeting too many times. I may not be able to get back on tonight, and besides, my laptop is literally overheating, I’ve got five livestream tabs open, two youtubes, so much going on. And my brain is just about as fried.
raincoaster 