8.8 earthquake hits Japan

Japans nuke safety plan is high on engineering/institutional controls but short on siting issues (and liquifaction). We wouldnt (well after Yankee and Salem close) allow any more nukes on soil that could be prone to turning into ketchup.
Ive always been paranoid about Yankee/and Salem 1 and 2 facing the tsunami "In a can" Isla Las Palmas.

Im not sure but the tsunamis did not reach the Fukushima plant did they? It was all done by shake duration

What do the jet stream patterns look like?
Could they pump in layers of boron based concrete to seal it up?
Wheres rap rap? he has skills in this .

I think the term "fully exposed" was supposed to mean that the fuel was completely without coolant within the containment dome, not that the containment dome itself was breached.

I'm just now recalling, as I was thinking about liquefactions zones, that an architect our firm worked with at one point conversed with us about a new mode of building over liquefaction zones in Japan. This was back in the eighties, and I forget the details, but it involved putting housing on a slab that would float.

I was interested more than usual in that our own old craftsman house (not on a slab of any kind, much less a special one..) was sited in the early 1900's a few blocks from a later designated liquefaction zone.

So now I wonder if that idea ever gained any traction in Japan or elsewhere.

Obviously it would be hard to do (or so I assume) for a set of nuclear reactors, but re housing, I do wonder.

Plant instantly shut down when shaking started but tsunami waves, coming in minutes after the earthquake, flooded basements where diesel backups were kept - not sure if they had already kicked in or not. Also not sure of location of spent fuel pools or status of their coolant circulation. Did you look at the Scandia report (link on previous page) - there seems to be some increased risk with the MOX fuel (in reactor 3) which was exposed for about 2 hours. Containment is expected to hold for all reactors, so mostly I wonder about financial fallout to nuclear power worldwide. Thanks. Sat pic of plant:

Back in 1985 when Mexico City had their huge earthquake, experts said Mexico City's damage was so widespread due to their liquefaction zone and what it's built on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Mexico_City_earthquake
"Another factor is that the old lakebed resonates with certain seismic waves and low frequency signals. This lakebed has a natural "pitch" of one cycle every 2.5 seconds making everything built on the bed vibrate at the same frequency. Unfortunately, this is the same “pitch” as a number of shallow earthquake waves. This resonance amplifies the effects of the shock waves coming from an earthquake far away."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_liquefaction

Also the issue was prevalent in recent killer quake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Belleville and East St. Louis, Illinois are built on silt backfill. In the early 1840s, an Army engineer--Robert E. Lee--was approached by citizens of St. Louis who were alarmed that the river was moving away from the St. Louis waterfront as a result of the 1811 earthquake. So Lee built two huge wing coffer dams (about one and a quarter miles long) on the Illinois side, which then back-filled with the silt brought down by the Mississippi. East St. Louis and Belleville are built on that backfill. It's only a matter of time until there's another earthquake there, but as geologically active zones go, it's rather quiet.

Boston waterfront high rises are built on silt, but it's not a high-seismicity zone. Wish someone would locate the spent fuel pools on the pic, though.

Out of curiosity, aren't they on that New Madrid Fault?

Germany and Switzerland have both announced that they are suspending current nuclear programs while they are reviewed. (Just head it on the radio machine . . . )

Boston's Back Bay was marshland that was filled in.

I could be wrong but I thnik Boston is on St. Lawrence faultline, which gets infrequent quakes about in the 2.5- 3.0 Richter Scale range (barely noticable).

That's the one. The 1811 earthquake was a doozy, but there weren't many white boys living there then, so it didn't get a lot of dramatic press. It caused the Mississippi River to start wandering all over the map, and another effect was to lead the river to attempt to rejoin the Achafalaya basin. The Old River Control Structure north of New Orleans was built to prevent that. Had the river been allowed to run it's course, New Orleans would no longer be on the river, and the river would head more nearly due south to the sea.

Yup..re Back bay was a marshy flat...with trainloads of fill from quarries in Needham, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Bay,_Boston

That New Madrid 1811 quake was so powerful it rang the chimes of the Old North Church 800(?) miles away.

Those were actually a series of earthquakes and aftershocks, with four main quakes being distinguishable. They are estimated to have ranged from magnitude seven to magnitude eight. They were "deep" quakes, and their effects have been traced over an area of more than one million square miles. For comparison purposes, the San Francisco earthquake effected an area of about 15,000 square miles.

Yes re New Madrid 1811-1812 quakes:

"The zone had four of the largest North American earthquakes in recorded history, with moment magnitudes estimated to be as large as 8.0, all occurring within a three-month period between December 1811 and February 1812. Many of the published accounts describe the cumulative effects of all the earthquakes (known as the New Madrid Sequence); thus finding the individual effects of each quake can be difficult. Magnitude estimates and epicenters are based on interpretations of historical accounts and may vary."

Video of Liquefaction at Chiba, Japan:

Neither country has any alternative so the announcement is meaningless, only designed to keep the green parties quiet. Meanwhile this is latest from Japan:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031405-e.html (link is latest release, excerpt from yesterday's; no update on the spent fuel pools)

I don't really have anything relevant to say or to report, been reading on the web about all these terrible events in Japan. It is just horrible and I feel bad for them.

mp4 video of first tsunami wave

The liquefaction area I was talking about is Marina del Rey. There must be many such fill zones, but in that case it is not all that many blocks south of Santa Monica, which had earthquake collapses as a result of the Northridge earthquake, a 6.7.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/events/1994_01_17.php

None of this is anywhere near as horrendous (though the Northridge quake was horrendous) as what is going on in Japan, but a reason to look at possible new ways to build well, if there are any, in the future, in liquefaction areas, wherever they are, but especially in areas by fault zones.