Resilient Japan

“Earthquake, tsunami, a nuclear explosion, all in just two hours…

You cannot think of a worse doomsday scenario. Shares of stock and the yen fall. No reliable casualty figures are yet at hand but you can bet more than 10,000 dead—just in one Japanese coastal town alone. The Japanese since childhood have been educated to cope with earthquakes and other calamities…The future of Japan is bleak, at the moment. The only bright spot is the legendary patience and resilience of the Japanese people.

By: Tony Lopez

It is triple whammy of the worst possible kind. At 2:46 p.m. on March 11, Tokyo time, an earthquake of 9.0 magnitude—the worst in 200 years—strikes 24km down the northeast region of Japan’s main island, and 370km north of Tokyo where skyscrapers sway in abandon. It triggers a tsunami as high as ten meters, sweeping away people, houses, cars, trains, container vans, buildings, even an airport.

The wall of water roars into the Pacific Ocean faster than a jet plane, pummeling the east coast of the Philippines and the west coast of the Americas.

In Japan, those who survived the earthquake and the ensuing tsunami are marooned in their flooded villages, for at least three nights, in chilly near-zero wind, without food, without water, without electricity, without communications, without adequate clothing.

The earthquake and the tsunami together disable the cooling systems of two aging GE-designed nuclear plants on the Japanese northeast coast in Fukushima. The earthquake forced the automatic shutdown of the plants and blackouts lasting for days.

The tsunami disables the generators that power the release of water into the reactors to cool them. Overheated, the reactors create in effect a nuclear bomb and release radioactive elements that waft into the air. If you breathe this air, you are exposed to radiation. Radiation destroys your body cells. You get cancer. You won’t know it until many years later, when you are about to die. So far, the radioactive air has wafted toward the sea. But it could change direction and reverse inland into populated areas, creating an environmental holocaust.

Also, this radioactive plume could grow and travel toward the Philippines. But our scientists see this possibility as remote. In such an event, the eastern coastal areas of the Philippines from Aparri to Davao may have to be ready.

The meltdown threatens the lives of up to 200,000 people within a 20-km radius. Radioactive releases of steam from the plants could go on for weeks, if not months. The Japanese government has declared an atomic emergency.

To my simple mind, a nuclear plant is like car engine with overheating radiator. The radiator overheats because there is not enough water to cool it. This in turn causes overheating of the engine which then cracks. Unlike a nuke plant, the engine does not release radioactive steam. But you have to uncap the radiator to release steam and pour water into it to cool it down. An overheating reactor has to release steam or it will explode.

In desperation, Japanese workers at two nuclear plants poured seawater to cool them. The idea was to disable them permanently. They are aging anyway, more than 40 years old. The brine doesn’t work. Heating continues, resulting in a meltdown.

The tsunami destroyed the sea walls surrounding the Fukushima plant, inundating the emergency diesel generators. Two hours after the earthquake, the generators shut down. Batteries then were used to power emergency cooling, until they ran down.

Inside the plant, relates The New York Times report yesterday, “there was deep concern that spent nuclear fuel that was kept in a ‘cooling pond’ inside one of the plants had been exposed and begun letting off potentially deadly gamma radiation. Then water levels inside the reactor cores began to fall. While estimates vary, several officials and industry experts said Sunday that the top four to nine feet of the nuclear fuel in the core and control rods appear to have been exposed to the air—a condition that that can quickly lead to melting, and ultimately to full meltdown.”

“The essential problem is the definition of “off” in a nuclear reactor.

When the nuclear chain reaction is stopped and the reactor shuts down, the fuel is still producing about 6 percent as much heat as it did when it was running, caused by continuing radioactivity, the release of subatomic particles and of gamma rays.”

“Usually when a reactor is first shut down, an electric pump pulls heated water from the vessel to a heat exchanger, and cool water from a river or ocean is brought in to draw off that heat.”
“But at the Japanese reactors, after losing electric power, that system could not be used. Instead the operators are dumping seawater into the vessel and letting it cool the fuel by boiling. But as it boils, pressure rises too high to pump in more water, so they have to vent the vessel to the atmosphere, and feed in more water, a procedure known as ‘feed and bleed’.”

Earthquake, tsunami, a nuclear explosion, all in just two hours.

Fires erupt everywhere. Toyota, Nissan and other major Japanese companies announce plant shutdowns.

You cannot think of a worse doomsday scenario. Shares of stock and the yen fall. No reliable casualty figures are yet at hand but you can bet more than 10,000 dead—just in one Japanese coastal town alone. The Japanese since childhood have been educated to cope with earthquakes and other calamities.

The future of Japan is bleak, at the moment. The only bright spot is the legendary patience and resilience of the Japanese people.

After all, Japan is the only country to have experienced two nuclear bombs, thanks to the Americans. The same Americans are helping the Japanese solve their nuclear problem.