Weekend linkage

Here's some weekend reading/listening for you.  I really should do this more often so you can see what I'm looking at:

Saudi Arabia going ahead with building 16 nukes:  Even after Fukushima they have decided to go ahead.

Why didn't Fukushima #2 (Daini) meltdown as well?  Very interesting ideas as to why the second power plant complex did not have the problems #1 (Daiichi) experienced.  It may be merely luck and location or it may be the newer powerplant designs.

Nuclear regulatory issues.  Obviously a very large problem as a 'captured' regulator can allow serious problems to develop.

Carmen Reinhart discusses financial repression in developed economies.  If you think short term rates will rise shortly I think you are wrong.  Financial repression is a broad term but a clear example is keeping short term interest rates below inflation (a negative real rate) This slowly inflates away the debt problem.  Will America and Western Europe be able to pull it off?

China's empty cities, again -- A more recent article on Ordos' empty new city

China's debt writeoffs are just the beginning -- The opera of excessive credit growth and very lax underwriting standards is starting to get to the good part.

Japan Nuclear Update: Fear and Loathing about Fukushima

It hasn't taken very long for the charlatans and plain fear mongers to try to capitalize on the situation in Japan. I recently saw a banner ad on my web site for a company shilling a supplement to prevent radiation injury to Americans. I am not going to link to the company and give them free publicity.

To be very clear:
YOU ARE IN NO DANGER IF YOU LIVE IN ALASKA, HAWAII OR THE CONTINENTAL US.
The EPA agrees with me without using all caps.
A professor from Berkeley agrees with me.

Those who have a memory longer than a year may recall two nuclear weapons detonated OVER Japan a few decades ago. The amount of nuclear radiation emitted from those events were several orders of magnitude higher than the current situation yet we didn't have anyone dying in America did we?

This chart from http://xkcd.com/radiation/ has been floating about showing the relative levels of radiation and I think one should really take a look at it to put some of the news reports in context.  One problem is our instruments are so sensitive that its very possible in America to detect the slightly elevated levels of radiation that have made it to our shores.  Then again, getting on an airplane would provide a much higher dose but that doesn't seem to be mentioned at the same time the TV breathlessly tells you the clouds of nuclear radiation are coming this way.

Plutonium:
There's been reports plutonium has been found on the grounds of the Fukushima power plants and we should all hit the panic button  Plutonium is a natural by product of the normal fission cycle which occurs in a power plant. What they didn't mention in the first reports is the scale of the plutonium concentration and that matters a lot. For some sanity I suggest you listen to this interview:
http://georneys.blogspot.com/2011/03/14th-interview-with-my-dad-nuclear.html

Tepco came out with some clarification of the Plutonium and it's not something to worry about
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11032812-e.html


Finding people in Japan:
The red cross has another site for finding people in Japan here:
http://www.familylinks.icrc.org/web/doc/siterfl0.nsf/htmlall/familylinks-japon-eng
I mentioned another site run by Google a couple days ago.

Predictions for cleanup taking 30 years:
I ran across a Bloomberg article predicting it will take 30 years and billions to clean this mess up. I link to it so we can see how accurate they are. I find it odd to make such predictions when the smoke hasn't even settled.

There's an interesting presentation by Arevea floating around which appears to give a good timeline of what has happened. Of course this is a theory regarding the damage of the cooling torus but it does look like a possible reason for the elevated radiation readings in the water.
https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg4hcz37_289dr9g62f6

I'm not trying to sugar coat the issue in Japan which is still volatile and dangerous but please respond to any positive or negative news reports with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Real time radiation data?

Internet trolling pays off again.  I think I've found some (semi real time) radiation data sites.  My Japanese is limited to the auto translate function in Google Chrome but it appears there are some locations still publishing radiation data. I'm not quite certain of the units due to the translator but you can see peaks and valleys in the data and the peaks are not too much worse than the valleys. It also appears they liken 50,000 to a chest xray, or at least that's how Google Chrome is translating it....

Google map with locations  (The locations near the plant are offline it appears)
Ibaraki Prefecture page  (southwest of powerplants)
Recent Data

Japanese nuclear situation interviews

Again the power of social media reveals itself.  There is a multi part interview series here
http://georneys.blogspot.com/2011/03/third-follow-up-interview-with-my-dad.html
of a retired Navy and civilian nuclear engineer which I highly recommend you listen to.  He does an excellent job laying out the facts of what we know and don't know as time has progressed through this emergency.

I'm not going to comment/report/speculate on the current news of the moment regarding the nuclear situation in Japan as its changing so often and right now the news flow from Japan is sparse as it is night time over there.  In a few hours we'll have another update on what is going on.  If you listen to the interviews above you can get a sense of the unfolding situation and how Mr. Mervine predicted the fuel rod storage problem.  Hopefully the 3 active plants will be successfully cooled down and the fuel rod storage situation in the 3 (#4,#5,#6) non active plants will be contained.

You can follow the blog's author on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/#!/GeoEvelyn

Real time Geiger counter in Tokyo

While trolling around the internet attempting to find hard data on what sort of radiation levels we are seeing in Japan I found this site where someone is graphing radiation levels in real time in Tokyo.
 http://park18.wakwak.com/~weather/geiger_index.html

The site is in Japanese but you can translate it using google translate or other services available on the web.   While the graph shown does show an increase in radiation levels it is only ~4 times the background level which is very minimal.  This is good news compared to the other reports coming out of Japan regarding the radiation leaking from the stricken nuclear plants.  It is important to get factual data about what sort of radiation levels are being detected and where and unfortunately it has been hard to find so far.

 If you can pass along any quantitative data I'd appreciate it.


ht: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/15/fukushima-15-march-summary/#comment-115804

News and Photos of Japanese destruction

The news and photos out of Japan are incredibly powerful.  Here's a bit of what I've found:

http://totallycoolpix.com/2011/03/japan-hit-by-massive-earthquake-and-tsunami/
http://totallycoolpix.com/2011/03/the-japan-earthquake-and-tsunami-aftermath/

The site fades in and out and I'm guessing it is due to massive traffic to the site. The photos are stunning. Here's a few samples:

While I have not heard anyone separate the damage between the two events it appears the tsunami did more damage. I was watching CNN a few minutes ago and the official body count is approximately 1,600 but they have just found another 2,000 bodies so I'm certain the toll will rise as the days progress.

Video:

Keeping up to date:  There are some English based news sources in Japan

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/index.html

On Twitter:

https://twitter.com/W7VOA - Voice of America reporter on the ground.

Nuclear power plant situation:  This is an ongoing event and so separating the facts from rumor or speculation is a challenge.  What we know right now is there have been explosions at  Fukushima Daiichi plants #1 & #3.  Before you panic it appears this was due to the venting of hydrogen from the inner core which mixed with oxygen and exploded.   When the earthquake hit the nuclear power plants immediately shut down by dropping their control rods.  The problems started when the backup generators failed due to the tsunami and could no longer run the pumps cooling the reactor cores.  (Even after a shutdown there is a massive amount of residual heat which must be shunted away from the core)  In an attempt to prevent the central core from breaching they vented gas to bring the pressure down and release heat which then released the hydrogen and it blew off the exterior structure.  

 So far it appears the main central core which actually holds the fissable material is still intact.  Fortunately the prevailing winds are blowing any radioactive gas east offshore and into the ocean.  Right now they are flooding #1 reactor with seawater and boric acid to cool the reactor.

I have simplified this description a bit but if you want the technical details I suggest you go to:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/12/japan-nuclear-earthquake

which has quite a bit of technical information and a continuing discussion of the ramifications.

I'm not making any predictions as to what happens but the central core appears to be still intact and considering what is has been through is actually pretty impressive.  They still need to cool both cores and keep them from breaching. I'll be watching this closely over the next few days.

Update: Here's a video of plant #3 exploding