Godzilla! Huge Earthquake in Japan

A magnitude 6.6 quake has now struck in central Japan, AP news agency reports, causing Tokyo buildings to sway. It is not clear if this is connected to the earlier quake and aftershocks. More on this as we get it.

1915: More from NHK on that new quake: It struck Japan's mountainous Niigata prefecture in the west of the main Honshu island at about 0400 Saturday (1900 GMT Friday), the broadcaster says.
 
After the quake triggered a power outage, a backup generator also failed and the cooling system was unable to supply water to cool the 460-megawatt No. 1 reactor, though at least one backup cooling system is being used. The reactor core remains hot even after a shutdown.

The agency said plant workers are scrambling to restore cooling water supply at the plant but there is no prospect for immediate success.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said the 40-year-old plant was not leaking radiation. The plant is in Onahama city, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo.

If the outage in the cooling system persists, eventually radiation could leak out into the environment, and, in the worst case, could cause a reactor meltdown, a nuclear safety agency official said on condition of anonymity, citing sensitivity of the issue.

Another official at the nuclear safety agency, Yuji Kakizaki, said that plant workers were cooling the reactor with a secondary cooling system, which is not as effective as the regular cooling method.

Kakizaki said officials have confirmed that the emergency cooling system — the last-ditch cooling measure to prevent the reactor from the meltdown — is intact and could kick in if needed.

"That's as a last resort, and we have not reached that stage yet," Kakizaki added.
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I suspect another 6.X just happened because my room is swaying violently right now. More than usual for the recent aftershocks.


L. Spiro
 
Man, the latest pictures from NHK from the BBC looks like Japan has been firebombed. There's fires burning all over the place.
 
so after we burned tokyo to the ground in WWII, they rebuilt with more wood?

facepalm!

also Triple, shut the fuck up. Read the 2nd to last post on the last page.

The experts on the news are fucking sensationalist faggots

nothing is going to happen by or to the reactor
 
that last quake you felt was on land on the western coast, far from all the other quakes

140_40.gif
 
Venting Radioactive Gas

Boiling Water Reactors generate power by heating steam in the Reactor Pressure Vessel to the point where it boils, and then sending this steam through turbines to power a generator.

The water in this loop isn't released to the environment, since it is slightly irradiated. When turbine parts are replaced, they are handled as low-level waste due to the water running through them.

This water/steam mixture is what is building pressure inside the RPV. Typical BWRs have pressures around 7 to 8 MegaPascales (Pressurized Water Reactors, which doing boil inside the RPV, typically reach 15+ MPa). This gets higher as the temperature rises and the steam has nowhere to escape too. Another problem with this situation is that the super-saturated and pressurized steam prevents cooling water (emergency coolant usually sprays from above) to reach the fuel before it's flashed to steam itself.

This is the "radioactive steam" that must be released. It is not radioactive in the sense that there are fission fragments loaded all up it in, it is radioactive in the sense that it's been irradiated by being run through the core directly. You would absolutely not want to drink it (well, it's de-mineralized, so that's a bad idea anyway), as it likely contains high volumes of tritium and potentially leaked fission fragments that managed to tunnel through the fuel cladding into the coolant channels (very low probabilities though!).

However, it is not like how the Simpsons showed it would be (Homer on Disability episode, where radioactive steam venting immediately killed crops in a circle).
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LGBR said:
funniest facebook comments from some of my homies so far:

"shit that earthquake woke me up"
"earthquake....!? really...!? i didn't feel anything...!!"
"Holy shit! There's a fire on top of the tsunami. Now that's badass."
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not funny or amusing
 
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