Yesterday’s wave, reminiscent of Hokusai's masterful woodblock print, blew past Japan's shoreline defenses of harbor breakwaters and gigantic four-legged blocks called tetrapods, lifting ships to ram through seawalls and crash onto downtown parking lots. Seaside areas were soon emptied of cars and houses dragged up and back out to sea. Wave heights of up to 10 meters (33 feet) are staggering, but before deeming these as unimaginable, consider the historical Sanriku tsunami that towered to 15 meters (nearly 50 feet) and killed 27,000 people in 1896.
Nature's terrifying power, however we may dread it, is only as great as the human-caused vulnerability of our civilization. Soon after Christmas 2004, I volunteered for the rescue operation on the day after the Indian Ocean tsunami and simultaneously did an on-site field study on the causes of fatalities in southern Thailand. The report, issued by Thammasat and Hong Kong universities, concluded that high water wasn't the sole cause of the massive death toll -- 230,000 people dead. No, it's buildings that kill -- to be specific, badly designed structures without escape routes onto roofs or, in our greed for real estate, situated inside drained lagoons and riverbeds or on loose landfill. In today’s Tohoku disaster, an ultramodern Sendai Airport sat helplessly flooded on all sides while nearby a monstrous black torrent swept entire houses upstream.
Other threats are built into the vulnerabilities of our critical infrastructure and power systems. The balls of orange flames now churning out of huge gas storage tanks in Ichihara, in the prefecture of Chiba, might never have happened if technical precautions had been properly carried out.
Most people assume that the meticulous Japanese are among the world's most responsible citizens. As an investigative journalist who covered the Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake and the Tokyo subway Sarin gas attack, both in 1995, I beg to differ. Japan is better than elsewhere in organizing official cover-ups.
The recurrent tendency to deny systemic errors -- "in order to avoid public panic" -- is rooted in the determination of an entrenched bureaucracy to protect itself rather than in any stated purpose of serving the nation or its people. That's the unspoken rule of thumb in most governments, and Japan is no shining exception.
So what is being silenced after yesterday’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake on orders from the Tokyo government? The official mantra is that all five nuclear power plants in the northeast are locked down, safe and not leaking. The cloaked reality is that at least one of those -- Tepco's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant -- is under an emergency alert at a level indicative of a quake-caused internal rupture. The Fukushima powerhouse is one of the world's largest, with six boiling-water reactors.
Over the decades, the Japanese public has been reassured by the Tokyo Electric Power Company that its nuclear reactors are prepared for any eventuality. Yet the mystery in Fukushima is not the first unreported problem with nuclear power, only the most recent. Back in 1996, amid a reactor accident in Ibaraki province, the government never admitted that radioactive fallout had drifted over the northeastern suburbs of Tokyo. Reporters obtained confirmation from monitoring stations, but the press was under a blanket order not to run any alarming news, facts be damned. For a nation that has lived under the atomic cloud of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, total denial becomes possible because the finger on the button is our own.
Japan has vast untapped reserves of offshore wind energy, the only practical alternative to nuclear power and fossil fuel. Yet the nuclear lobby, coal companies and oil majors have strong-armed the government and industry to stubbornly refuse to invest in advanced and efficient turbine engineering, including magnetic-levitation rotors that eliminate the need for energy-sapping bearings. At certain stages of societal evolution, there arrives an unmistakable message to leave behind our worn-out security blanket and surf the wave of the future. The tsunami is just such a signal arising from the ocean's depths to awaken Japan, as a global technology leader, to push much faster into a cleaner, greener and safer world.
Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, has covered the earthquakes in San Francisco and Kobe, participated in the rescue operation immediately after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and led the field research for an architectural report on structural design flaws that led to the tsunami death toll in Thailand. He wrote a longer version of this article for New American Media.
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doggone
1 year ago
I gotta hope you are wrong
And maybe the local "powers that be" have had good advice from their think tanks.
I simply can not get over the images of the massive waves with houses, cars and boats and fire flooding over buildings and fields.
Nothing I have built could withstand
(I have a significant number of local buildings to my (credit) responsibility)
KevinC
1 year ago
Defend this
I am waiting for our resident Dr. Strangeloves to defend their beloved nukes now. Please, the floor is yours.
seth
1 year ago
notice the natural gas fire
Lotsa folks getting burned alive in the greenies favorite wind backup system - natural gas.
Locating backup generators so a tsunami can flood them. Now that is really dumb. In any case maybe some minor reactor damage.
Hopefully the management will be fired.
Otherwise standing outside a one of these 1950's design era nukes for 100 days would be like getting a chest xray.
DPL
1 year ago
Management may get fired but
Management may get fired but if the leakage is as bad as we hear, a lot of citizens will die.
Stewart MacKenzie
1 year ago
Citizens dying
Seth knows better - it will be just like a chest Xray!
Seriously, this points up the big flaw in nuclear power - humans are not intelligent or capable enough to ensure critical accidents will not happen, nor that spent fuel can be safely stored, nor even that uranium can be safely mined without contaminating water supplies.
As I write I have just heard there was an explosion at one of the plants - it is going from bad to worse.
seth
1 year ago
bananas
Actually, Mackenzie you know zilch.
"Japan’s Asahi Shimbum newspaper reported that radiation levels per hour in the area near the front entrance of the No. 1 Fukushima plant reached 0.59 micro Sievert,
Normal exposure rate is 0.23 microsieverts per hour in La Paz, Bolivia. Mackenzie will never visit I'm sure. 2 hours in La Paz is like one hour at the front gate this AM of Fukushima.
12 bananas produces about 1 microsievert of radiation. So Mackenzie stand in front of the Vancouver library close your eyes and pretend its a nuke plant. Now eat 7 bananas, tell us how it feels.
While yur at it give us the the number of folks burned alive in the area by the your preferred power source - natural gas.
Also we'd love to hear about the deadly toll of toxic waste from the areas chemical plants now polluting the soil forever.
Report back ASAP
The explosion was a hydrogen leak that damaged the outside of the building. It has nothing to do with containment which is well under control.
This accident shows the many layers of nuclear safety work just as well as predicted, just like they did at 3 mile island where the reactor was damaged but nobody injured.
This reactor is a 1950's design slightly upgraded in the 60's. All Gen III+ nukes and all Candu's have passive coolant systems which would have avoided this problem.
The accident puts enormous shame on the Japanese people that the systemic corruption endemic in their culture would have allowed a well known corporate bandit to get away obvious uncorrected maintenance flaws that put the plant and the area in harms way. This sort of graft would result in summary execution in China.
Stewart MacKenzie
1 year ago
Seth, your psychic powers are amazing!
Considering noone else seems to know exactly what is going on at the Fukushima facility, and a meltdown has not yet been ruled out.
"The blast at the Japanese nuclear facility came as plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) was working desperately to reduce pressures in the core of the reactor.
The company has had a rocky past in an industry plagued by scandal. In 2002, the president of the country’s largest power utility was forced to resign along with four other senior executives, taking responsibility for suspected falsification of nuclear plant safety records.
Earlier the operator released what it said was a tiny amount of radioactive steam to reduce the pressure and the danger was minimal"
Which is, of course absolutely believable, given this company's spotless record for openness and truth!
seth
1 year ago
Behind the news
As always Stuart you are a day late and a dollar short.
I go by real science not junk stuff you greenies see to prefer.
I am monitoring the situation hourly. My preferred source is the Japanese nuke regulator and the IAEA.
Stewart MacKenzie
1 year ago
the Japanese nuke regulator
Is it possible this source has been coopted by being a key part of a system in which:
"the systemic corruption endemic in their culture would have allowed a well known corporate bandit to get away obvious uncorrected maintenance flaws that put the plant and the area in harms way"
and is as reliable as, say, the BC Ministry of Mines when it comes to putting money ahead of environmental protection?
Stewart MacKenzie
1 year ago
[1:20 p.m. ET, 3:20 a.m. Tokyo]
"Authorities have begun radiation exposure testing around Fukushima prefecture where three people - randomly selected out of a group of 90 - have tested positive for radiation poisoning, according to Japan's government broadcaster, NHK."
realisticman
1 year ago
seth
People against nuclear power will not be interested in any facts. They will go on about wind and solar. Why not do a quick calculation and tell us how many wind generators would be needed to replace just one of the nuclear plants.
the real ODB
1 year ago
Seth, the broken record
Give it a rest with the "nuke as an answer to all our problems" crap. This is an overpriced (yeah, I've read your cornball price stats a million times) and environmentally destructive industry from start to finish. And when the shit hits the fan, the "great nuke" industry can only stand back and hope for the best. And for the sake of the Japanese (and the rest of the world's population), hopefully no serious problems will arise at these plants. As a "greenie" and therefore an obviously unintelligent, pinko commie scumbag, (just ask any libertarian, free market capitalist) I in no way favour natural gas as anything but another environmental disaster. As has been shown yet again, the earth holds lots of energy. Now if we could get rid of the status quo that still lives in the 19th century we might actually be able to advance our energy needs. on the bright side, the disaster capitalists will be having a field day over this and Japan's GDP will increase faster then the temperature of a disabled nuke plant!
Stewart MacKenzie
1 year ago
Long term thinking?
People shilling for nuclear power will not respond to arguments they cannot answer. They continue to use red herrings and sophist tactics to distract from inconvenient facts.
Many hide behind internet "handles" and use personal attacks as a routine tactic - trying to kill the messenger rather than deal with the message.
The obvious corruption, greed, and ever growing incompetence in governments and corporations means no huge, potentially toxic or damaging project can be safely taken on, even if this were possible 50 years ago.
The "tsunami of incompetence" resulting from decaying standards of performance and behaviour in all the affluent societies, includes the construction industry, health care, education, social services, the pulp industry, and probably all other areas of our techno addicted society.
The rot starts at the top, where a generation of privileged, arrogant, greedy, driven, and somewhat responsible and competent managers and executives has been replaced by a generation of spoiled rotten MBAs with all the negatives of their fathers but none of the positives. In essence, all our socially dominating institutions are being run , more and more, by self centred fools who can't find their backsides with a six person search party and GPS, and don't care, as their advancement has almost nothing to do with performance, but depends on networking, schmoozing, taking more training at the employer's expense and using connections and even previous screwups as career advancement tools.
This is reflected throughout society, and is one reason we will see more and more serious failures of support systems around the globe - a good reason to be suspicious of those pushing more and more intensive production and use of energy rather than serious changes in lifestyle and energy consumption.
As long as we have a motor racing industry, and fools driving their gas guzzlers from the flat lands into the mountains towing machines they use to burn more gas driving straight up mountains so as to trigger avalanches which bury them, and believe it is all OK because "It's FUN", we aren't going to find long term solutions.
Stewart MacKenzie
1 year ago
.....12,180 bananas/hr?
Pasted from NHK World:
High level of radiation observed at nuclear plant
Fukushima Prefecture says a high level of radiation has been measured near the Fukushima Number One nuclear power station.
The prefecture says the radiation level rose to 1,015 mircrosieverts per hour on Saturday.
One hour of exposure to this amount of radiation is equivalent to the permissible amount of radiation an ordinary person receives in one year. It is about twice the level that requires power companies to notify the government of an emergency situation.
The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency says the power station's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, observed the radiation level near a gate on the hillside of the plant at 3:29 PM on Saturday, before an explosion was reported at the nuclear plant.
Saturday, March 12, 2011 18:43 +0900 (JST)
seth
1 year ago
More nonsense
As usual our resident greenies here spew the cloud of disinformation at such levels that the Koch bros would blush. Like Greenpeace, WWF, and Sierra, they are defacto shills for natural gas companies.
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