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Time lapse Japan day-by-day earthquake map — 2 Comments

  1. That map is a very impressive presentation of so much activity. Could you feel every quake that overlapped Tokyo? Is the new big tower holding up? I’m impressed there is so little worry about buildings and water lines in Tokyo with all that going on.I’m glad your food supply is normalizing. I hope it means that the homeless can receive adequate supplies. There may be problems, but its a tribute that things haven’t degraded like New Orleans (where there were days of warning).Having the reactor issues going while there is so much physical devastation seems like stress beyond stress. I read that the design goal for reactor effects for events beyond their design parameters is that the effects should be negligible compared to the event itself. It remains to be seen, but with thousands killed by the tsunami, the rule may hold. I feel that one benefit (!) of Fukushima is to display to everyone clearly the deal with the devil we are making with for-profit nuclear power. Chernobyl didn’t do it because those reactors were “different” and “primitive”. I’m afraid if we all want iPhones this is the deal we will make. Maybe at least we can do it better with this lesson.The nuke 20 miles from here was designed for three or four reactors and only built one. They have a cooling pool for 4 reactors and wanted to earn money by storing spent fuel from other reactors. When I learned about the active cooling required with open air fire the alternative, taking on more spent fuel just seemed egregious. Without a permanent waste storage site, well, we should keep the fuel we benefited from, but jeeze, not more. It is the tension between profit and safety in nuclear power that freaks me out.

  2. I do believe I felt every quake that overlapped Tokyo. Seriously, last Friday and Saturday it felt like it was non-stop quakes.The new tower, the Sky Tree, is ok. They even continued construction on it this week! There was some damage at the top of the older Tokyo Tower though.I’m afraid you are right that we all are part of the problem (I say while sitting here typing into my large screen iMac with my iPhone charging and iPad sitting close by).The cost is seeming far too high now, with hundreds of thousands of evacuees, radiation levels beyond allowed limits in milk and spinach, and not to mention the diversion of rescue resources desperately needed to deal with the huge humanitarian relief effort needed for the quake and tsunami victims. When calculating the total loss, how much of the total will be due to the inability to dedicate sufficient resources to the quake and tsunami struck areas because we have to stop Fukushima from turning into Chernobyl?In addition the entire plant now is useless and the best case scenario calls for the entire 40 hectares being covered by sand and concrete.Nuclear power zealots might, at the end of the day, say, “well very few died from the power plant accident,” thus entirely missing the point.doug

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