Japan Tsunami

Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant had one of the country's worst safety records and was crammed with more uranium than it was designed to hold, it has emerged.

American engineers who masterminded the building had not intended for spent fuel to be housed inside the 'flimsy' shells of the reactor buildings that were rocked by the earthquake on March 11.

But the reactor buildings at the plant held the equivalent of almost six years of the highly radioactive uranium fuel rods produced by the plant when disaster struck.

Damaged: The Fukushima power plant had one of the worst safety records for nuclear facilities in Japan and was crammed with uranium rods when the quake struck, documents have revealed

Meltdown: The nuclear disaster has constantly threatened to spiral out of control with workers being regularly evacuated from the plant

Officials within the Japanese government, the power company and the nuclear watchdog are now likely to face tough questions about why the spent fuel roads were stored inside the building.

 More than 18,000 people are believed to have been killed by the earthquake and tsunami tidal wave that swept through the country leaving a trail of destruction in its path.

Details of the fuel storage at the power plant emerged in the records a presentation by Tokyo Electric Power Co to a conference organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

 The cascade of safety-related failures at the Fukushima plant is already strengthening the hand of reformers who argue that Japan's nuclear power industry will have to see sweeping changes from the top.

Between 2005 to 2009 Fukushima had the highest accident rate of any big Japanese nuclear plant, according to data collected by the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization. The plant's workers were also exposed to more radiation than their peers at most other plants, the data shows.

Wreck: A satellite image shows the damage at the power plant

On Sunday, Japan continued its battle to avoid large-scale nuclear disaster. Workers restored electrical power to parts of the plant and brought down radiation levels with a marathon water-spraying operation that, among other things, finally flooded Reactor 4's waste-fuel pool.

But the latest incidents add to a record of safety sanctions and misses at Tokyo Electric - more commonly known as TEPCO - that date back a decade and continued into the weeks before the quake.

Under two weeks before Fukushima Daichi was sent into partial meltdown, the power company had told safety regulators it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment at the plant, including a backup power generator, according to a filing.

Nuclear industry analysts say an even more pressing question concerns the storage of fuel rods. It is said that Japan's safety regulations may have given the power company too much room to manoeuvre as it sought to contain costs.

When the quake hit, almost 4,000 uranium fuel assemblies were stored in deep pools of circulating water built into the highest floor of the Fukushima reactor buildings, according to company records. Each assembly stands about 3.5 meters high and even a decade after use emits enough radiation to kill a person standing nearby.

The spent radioactive fuel stored in the reactors represented more than three times the amount of radioactive material normally held in the active cores of the six reactors at the complex, according to Tokyo Electric briefings and its presentation to the IAEA.

When the tsunami wiped out the plant's emergency generators, the water in the spent-fuel pool adjacent to the No. 4 reactor could no longer circulate, and fresh water could not be pumped in.

  

A much safer but more costly option would have been to build far stronger separate buildings designed specifically for nuclear storage but the plant has been subject to a cost-cutting drive under its chief executive Masataka Shimizu.

The crisis, which has seen more than 45,000 residents evacuated and a country filled with the fear of a nuclear Armageddon, has focused attention on the plant's safety procedures and its history of failed checks.

Rods in the pools began to overheat, causing the water to evaporate as steam and exposing parts of the radioactive rods to the air—a critically dangerous situation. The heat spawned fires and the roof above the pool was partly destroyed, letting radiation out.

The build-up of used fuel rods in the Fukushima reactor buildings has complicated the response to the continuing crisis at the complex and deepened its severity, officials and experts have said.

That has been especially the case at the No. 4 reactor, which was out of service at the time of the quake and had some 548, still-hot fuel assemblies cooling in a pool of water on its upper floor.

There was also fresh nuclear fuel 'parked' in the reactor waiting to be used.

That reactor, which erupted into explosive flames twice last week, triggered a warning from U.S. officials last week about higher risks for radiation from the stricken plant than Japanese officials had disclosed.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said the spent fuel was vulnerable because it was protected only by the relatively 'flimsy' outer shell of the reactors and reliant on a single, pump-driven cooling system. 

Storage of spent nuclear fuel is a controversial area. Many residents living close to sites proposed for storage facilities strongly object to the buildings amid fears of the radiation.

A medium-term storage facility for waste from Fukushima Daiichi being built in the small village of Mutsu in northern Japan is not scheduled to open until 2012. The plan had been for that facility to hold 20 years worth of spent fuel.

More than 60 per cent of the uranium stored at Fukushima Daiichi made it through the quake and tsunami without being destabilized because it was kept in a separate pool built in 1997 and in a number of metal casks that do not rely on outside power, Japanese nuclear safety officials said.

But the location of the remaining fuel storage pools - on the highest floor of the reactor buildings - exposed the fuel to additional risks because the pools would have swayed more in the quake and could have lost water through sloshing or leaks, experts say.

As workers at the plant scramble to restore power to the plant and test pumps and other safety equipment, the main focus of the safety response has been to keep water in the storage pools by shooting sprays of water from a hastily assembled battalion of high-powered fire trucks.

The water in the pools serves as both a coolant and a barrier to radiation. When the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods is exposed to air, it can erupt into flames.

Fukushima Daiichi had over time been pushing the limits of the plant's capacity to store uranium fuel on site, according to a Tokyo Electric presentation from November 2010 and now circulating among safety experts and environmental critics.

The Tokyo Electric researcher who prepared that presentation on the safety of spent fuel at the complex, Yumiko Kumano, could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for TEPCO declined to comment on its fuel storage decisions and whether they contributed to the crisis.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant is Tokyo Electric's oldest nuclear facility, and it has been the site of a series of high-profile safety lapses going back a decade.

In 2002, TEPCO admitted to safety regulators that it had falsified safety records at the No. 1 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi. In 2003, TEPCO shut down all of its 17 nuclear plants to take responsibility for the false safety scandal and a fuel leak at Fukushima.

In 2007, after a powerful quake hit the area near TEPCO's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata, the utility was slow to report two radiation leaks and miscalculated the amount of radiation released in a third incident.

Japanese regulators have also come under fire. In 1999, a study commissioned by the U.S. Energy Department determined that workers at Japan's Tokaimura fuel plant had been given insufficient training before they accidentally touched off an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction. Three workers were severely injured in the incident, which forced tens of thousands to evacuate.

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency was established in 2001 in part because of that criticism. But critics have questioned whether it has enough distance from the industry it regulates or the resources it needs. The agency's records show that it has about two field inspectors for each of Japan's 54 nuclear plant

Tsunami Detector Through Seismic Wave

Reports from Sri Lanka after Sunday's tsunami say that despite the enormous number of human casualties—116,000 deaths and rising, at last count—many animals seem to have survived the tidal wave unscathed. At Sri Lanka's national wildlife park at Yala, which houses elephants, buffalo, monkeys, and wild cats, no animal corpses were found on Wednesday. (Yet according to Reuters, the human devastation there was as tragic as elsewhere: Only 30 of the 250 tourist vehicles that entered the park on Sunday returned to base.) Did Yala's animals sense the oncoming tsunami and flee to safety?

There's a good chance the wildlife knew trouble was on the way. History is littered with tales about animals acting weirdly before natural disasters, but the phenomenon has been hard for scientists to pin down. Sometimes animals get crazy before a quake, sometimes they don't. Here's what we know: Animals have sensory abilities different from our own, and they might have tipped them off to Sunday's disaster.

First, it's possible that the animals may have heard the quake before the tsunami hit land. The underwater rupture likely generated sound waves known as infrasound or infrasonic sound. These low tones can be created by hugely energetic events, like meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, and earthquakes. Humans can't hear infrasound—the lowest key on a piano is about the lowest tone the human ear can detect. But many animals—dogs, elephants, giraffes, hippos, tigers, pigeons, even cassowaries—can hear infrasound waves.

A second early-warning sign the animals might have sensed is ground vibration. In addition to spawning the tsunamis, Sunday's quake generated massive vibrational waves that spread out from the epicenter on the floor of the Indian Ocean's Bay of Bengal and traveled through the surface of the Earth. Known as Rayleigh waves (for Lord Rayleigh, who predicted their existence in 1885), these vibrations move through the ground like waves move on the surface of the ocean. They travel at 10 times the speed of sound. The waves would have reached Sri Lanka hours before the water hit.

Mammals, birds, insects, and spiders can detect Rayleigh waves. Most can feel the movement in their bodies, although some, like snakes and salamanders, put their ears to the ground in order to perceive it. The animals at Yala might have felt the Rayleigh waves and run for higher ground.

Why would they instinctively flee to higher ground—the safest place to be in the event of a tsunami? Typically, animals scatter away from a place where they are disturbed. So, in this case, "away" may have meant away from the sea, and incidentally, away from sea level. Or maybe it's not as accidental as all that. It's easy to imagine that one of evolution's general lessons is: If the ground beneath your feet starts moving, move up and away as fast as you can.

What about humans—where were our red flags? Humans feel infrasound. But we don't necessarily know that that's what we're feeling. Some people experience sensations of being spooked or even feeling religious in the presence of infrasound. We also experience Rayleigh waves via special sensors in our joints (called pacinian corpuscles), which exist just for that purpose. Sadly, it seems we don't pay attention to the information when we get it. Maybe we screen it out because there's so much going on before our eyes and in our ears. Humans have a lot of things on their minds, and usually that works out OK.

Eruption of Iceland

The plume of ash and steam from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano reached 17,000 to 20,000 feet (5 to 6 kilometers) into the atmosphere on May 10, 2010, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image

Jagged flecks of ash spewed into the air may have boosted the effects of the 2010 eruption of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which paralyzed flights across Europe, a new study finds.

The ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull caused turmoil in the air for nearly a month. Still, the eruption was a relatively small event. For instance, the plume never reached more than about 6 miles (10 kilometers) in height, and the volcano only spewed out about 9.5 billion cubic feet (270 million cubic meters) of ash over the course of several months, while some eruptions can spew out many times more than that in the span of a single day.

The reason that Eyjafjallajokull had such widespread influence was due to how the volcano's ash spread unusually far and stayed for an oddly long time in the atmosphere. To learn more about why this was, a group of scientists collected ash samples from across Iceland.

The researchers found that at Eyjafjallajokull's vent, upwelling magma violently reacted with nearby glacial water. This rapid cooling made the magma contract and fragment into fine, jagged motes of ash. Near the end of the eruption, equally fine, porous ash was generated when small gas bubbles trapped in the molten rock expanded as the magma neared the surface.

The investigators found that the median width of all the ash grains was less than 1 millimeter wide. Starting about 6 miles (10 km) from the vent and moving outward, particles smaller than 16 microns — about a sixth the width of a human hair — became more than 20 percent of the mix.

Computer models suggest the irregular shapes of these jagged and porous ash grains made them less aerodynamic, increasing how long they spent aloft. This helps explain why a small eruption still impacted a large area.

It was not a big eruption, but still it caused problems over Europe and the Northern Atlantic according to researcher Piero Dellino, a volcanologist at the University of Bari in Italy. It means that our complex society is not prepared to face natural hazards. We have to therefore learn from this lesson, considering that other volcanoes in Europe can produce much bigger eruptions — see, for example, historical events of Vesuvius.

Dellino noted that their research took place well after the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, which might call their findings into question.

It is impossible to monitor in real-time the content and concentration of fine ash in the eruption cloud at that moment, Advance science and technology is neede in order to get data as soon as possible after eruption initiation.

The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 4 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth.

Landslide In Malaysia

 The 2003 Bukit Lanjan landslide in Malaysia:

Although Malaysia is not a mountainous country (mountains and hills are less than 25% of the territory), slope failures are a common phenomenon there. According to The Sun OnLine, there have already been a number of landslides only this year. So, why is this natural disaster so common in the country? We have come up with some answer, that is, a list of major landslide causes. You can correct us or add some causes to the list. Here it is:

1. Weathering. In tropical countries like Malaysia, weathering is always a cause. The weathering agents are: 1) changes in the daily temperature from 23 degrees (C) to 35 degrees. 2) Rainfall, which is also the major trigger. There are two rainy seasons in Malaysia: from April to October (the south-west monsoons), and from October to February (the north-east monsoons). The average annual rainfall is more than 250 cm.

2. Soil Properties. Due to the tropical climate and rainfalls, bed rocks are heavily weathered, resulting in residual soils. This type of soil, which is considered weak from the geotechnical point of view, is commonly found on hillsides and slopes. When unsaturated, residual soil has a cohesion due to suction, however, during rainfall the suction typically drops to zero, a process that is followed by buildup of excess pore pressures. As a rainfall continues, the excess pore pressure exceeds a certain threshold, the strength of soil dramatically drops, and a landslide is triggered.

3. Human Activities. This seems to be the major cause of landslides in big cities. Unfortunately, there is no geotechnical control over slope development works all the time, and some construction firms don't seem to observe safety standards for slope engineering practice. As a result, a strong rainfall can trigger a landslide on such slopes. There are a few pictures to illustrate the point. I found them in Here’s why Penang should ban hill-slope development.

Trail of destruction: Since the Bukit Antarabangsa landslide tragedy, residents in such areas have been up in arms against possible recurrences of a similar tragedy if nothing is done to halt further developments

Role of Engineer.

We believes that engineering plays an important role in hillside development. As most of the major landslides in Malaysia were caused by errors in design and construction.

Many times, retention walls were not built to specification and would collapse, he pointed out. One of the design and construction errors that occurred was a lack of understanding of soil mechanics. It is quite common to have mistakes in the laboratory because of untrained technicians and sometimes people just don’t understand the numbers.

There was a need to have site personnel with sufficient knowledge and experience to supervise the site and control construction. A strong undergraduate education was also important to produce good engineers. The authorities should provide transparent and consistent guidelines for project application and approval.

An audience member commented that the geology of an area must be understood before engineering comes into place. There is no denying the importance of the geologist but we should not over emphasize it. Only a small percentage of landslides are due to geological factors.asdasd