Not only that, how far can you realistically run in 20 minutes if you're out of shape, elderly, or taking children with you?
And that's assuming the powers-that-be get the warning that the wave is incoming, react immediately, and broadcast the warning to everyone in the coastal cities in a negligible time. And it's assuming people don't panic, or try to meet up with family members at work, or get caught in the inevitable clusterfuck of a traffic jam that would result.
But fuck, it's their fault if they can't sense an incoming tsunami and sprint up a mountain in twenty minutes.
dude. the whole fucking ground is shaking and buildings collapsing. This isn't your pissy little Cali earthquake, this is the biggest earthquake Japan has seen in DECADES. In twenty minutes, you wont even get from underneath the table/doorway/whatever you hurriedly jumped under when this shit cause you'll be too confused or expecting aftershocks. Not to mention even thinking about evacuating.
Koki is as koki does.
Last edited by Yakoob; 23rd Mar 2011 at 22:28.
Some interesting footage of people leaving Otsuchi - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJLT0tm-jWw
Weird thing is Japanese people are the most prepared people on the planet when it comes to earthquakes, yet a few could run away or get a hint about a tsunami coming next (since they always have them in big quakes).
did you even bother reading like the ten posts before yours?
Are you saying the country which spends millions of dollars on earthquake training of its citizens didn't teach them that an earthquake in a middle of the ocean will cause a tsunami?Originally Posted by catbarf
Hindsight is always 20/20, but then again I don't live in a coastal area prone to earthquakes so I didn't really think about it till recently. Yet I managed to reach the following conclusion:
After a quake when you're not dead you can assume two things:
1) it's a local, weak(otherwise you'd probably be dead) quake.
2) it's a strong quake that happened far away.
And you can do one of two things:
a) nothing
b) assume the quake might have been in the middle of an ocean and drive and will cause a horrid tsunami wave so drive, bike, jog or even walk(you can cover well over one klick in twenty minutes) inland or towards nearest high ground or towards nearest building that isn't made out of cardboard and wait there for an hour just to be sure
Your choices are 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b. Want me to draw it for you?
But thanks for all the replies anyway guys. Gives me a bit of an insight how the death toll reached 20k.
Give it up, Koki. What you said was just fucking stupid.
We know about 10k dead so far and 10k missing, but out of how many who were potentially at risk? If 2 million, then 99% made it to safety.
The area around and to the North of Sendai is a coastal plain without much high ground. Good luck running away from there. The tsunami penetrated up to 10km inland in some spots.
I used to travel to Japan and from what I remember the major population centers are protected by breakwaters and seawalls, and throughout the coastal areas there are various kinds of tsunami shelters which range from water tight buildings to platforms on concrete pillars to parking garages. I don't think they were supposed to evacuate because it's futile for whole towns to empty that quickly.
I'm sure some people were clueless and didn't do what they were supposed to, and I'm sure some were disabled, elderly, etc. and couldn't go anywhere, and I'm sure some were just complacent. But probably the biggest thing is that they weren't prepared for a tsunami this big. The town of Otsuchi had a tsunami wall and you can see in the video that the water level was already above the wall before the main part of the tsunami even hit. Fukushima had breakwaters or seawalls in front, but they're also useless against something this big. I'll bet quite a few tsunami shelters were taken out too.
You need a hug Koki, that's all.
But of course my friend, I just wanted to underline it once again.
I'm so stubborn.
The entire nation got an earthquake warning instantly. It even popped up all over national tv interrupting shows and a parliamentary broadcast. The earthquake in Tokyo, which is relatively far away from the epicenter, went on for 5 whole minutes. 5. They don't usually last anywhere near that long and who knows what the people in the north experienced.
That's 5 minutes to crap yourself, a few minutes to collect yourself, and then a mad rush if you realise that a tsunami is coming. I'm sure a tsunami warning went out pretty much instantly too but unless you're just running for yourself and not trying to help anyone, get in touch with people you care about and so on you're not going to just up and run like mad. I suppose it makes sense for Koki though since, you know.
Also, majority of the Japanese population is on the elderly side (which is actually a big concern in Japan), not exactly the types to just get up and run...
5 minutes to crap yourself if you didn't fell by the earthquake shake that is (this was one of those quakes where you cannot stand on your feet and fall, maybe badly and hitting something along the way, or some furniture falls on you and you might have to struggle for a while to get out, if you can do the physical effort, or else you're screwed).
Glad we established now that thousands of Japanese didn't die because they were too stupid to run away. Not that anyone without Koki's sense of self-importance actually believed that. Now we can discuss how they could be so stupid to build reactors at the shore line. Mmmaybe because they need a lot of water to cool them? Well damn. But why didn't they build them in an earthquake free region?
...
This could go on and on. The motivation behind such smartassery is transparent: If you can show they were just being stupid Japs, that makes you smart and proves a disaster like that could never happen to you. Nevermind that you probably have at least a dozen hightech products of these stupid people in your house. Or that you're harking back to racist cynicism while they die. As long as you don't have to change your own comfortable position it's all good.
I never said anything about that kind of thing, in California there are nuclear reactors, and two in Chile (another 8+, 9+ quake zone), another bright idea under the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors
I wanted to blame the government really, for not educating the people better, but if you want to put it this way...
But why didn't they protect them from a tsunami? I believe that was my actual question.Now we can discuss how they could be so stupid to build reactors at the shore line. Mmmaybe because they need a lot of water to cool them? Well damn. But why didn't they build them in an earthquake free region?
Yeah, your bleeding heart whining does seem to drag on.This could go on and on.
So what's it like having no soul? Do you get a monthly check?
They had 7 minutes to run to the higher ground lying roughly a half mile inland after a severe earthquake, dipshit. All the government educational videos in the world can't prepare you for something like that. Your best case scenario is to hope to find a tall, sturdy building, get on the roof, and pray.
Ladies and Gentlement, Koki - the best human being in the universe.
It's Japan, I don't think there exists an earthquake-free zone. But I do agree about the shoreline thing.
At the same time, though, I always try to stop myself from jumping on a reactionary armchair response like this ("they built it on a coast? how retarded are they!") I mean, it's not like some dude in a suit just says "lets built it there cause the view is pretty." You get a huge panel of engineers, geology experts and nuclear scientists who probably spend a good few months (if not years) researching the optimal design and location for a plant. If building on a shoreline was utterly retarded, I'm pretty sure someone would have pointed it out at some point. But they still built it; so even though we bitch about the stupidity of their choice, I'd wager there is some good, solid reasons behind it.
I'm not discounting short term effects, it's just that nuclear power has short-term, long-term, extremely long-term and inconceivably long-term risks.
Compared to the persistent danger of certain waste products of nuclear power, the effects you list are short term by several orders of magnitude, decades and centuries compared to millennia and eons.
We must remember that half-life doesn't mean the risk vanishes. It diminishes but it persists.
A generation is normally considered to be twenty years. Cesium 137, like other radioisotopes, causes genetic damage. So while it would “only” directly effect three or four generations, its indirect effect would be transmitted to many more than that.
Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. That's 1,200 generations that could be directly affected. Given that some toxic radioisotopes have half-lives measured in millions of years, 5000 generations is an understatement of the deferred risk, not an exaggeration.
Nuclear power could indeed reduce atmospheric CO2. Unfortunately hubris, greed, neglect and ignorance guarantee that serious nuclear accidents will occur more frequently than we'd care to admit. Given the time scale of the contamination, can we justify burdening people in the deep future with invisible poisons? Isn’t the deferral of risk to subsequent generations the reason we are still mired in fossil fuel?
Last edited by Nicker; 27th Mar 2011 at 02:46.
That's speculative. The damage from ionizing radiation is random and not targeted to particular DNA chains, so theoretically it would increase the overall rate of common birth defects just like alcohol, drugs, and other poisons do. But the impact to subsequent generations would be no worse than other causes of birth defects. It wouldn't breed a race of mutant humans like in science fiction movies.
And there's still no conclusive evidence of human birth defects caused by radioactive fallout. We've studied Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors and found no significant increase in birth defects among their offspring. For Chernobyl, the most scientifically authoritative study to date concluded that there were no reproductive or inherited effects. There have been smaller studies which found higher rates of birth defects in some regions impacted by Chernobyl compared to European norms. But unfortunately they haven't collected data on the parents' radiation exposure and didn't control for other risk factors for birth defects such as alcohol, diet, mental health, general poverty. So it's still not certain that nuclear accidents cause first generation birth defects, let alone inherited ones.
The primary health risk is cancer in parts of the body where radioisotopes accumulate due to natural body chemical processes, such as Iodine in the Thyroid. I don't think the typical radioisotopes accumulate in reproductive organs, which may be why they haven't had more significant reproductive effects.
It is an exaggeration. Here are a few reasons why:Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. That's 1,200 generations that could be directly affected. Given that some toxic radioisotopes have half-lives measured in millions of years, 5000 generations is an understatement of the deferred risk, not an exaggeration.
1. Radioactivity is inversely related to half-life. Long half life = slow decay = low radiation level = less dangerous. For example, you can handle enriched Uranium or Plutonium in your hands without shielding. Also, the long lived isotopes decay by alpha particle emission, which is much less harmful than beta decay.
2. Plutonium and Uranium tend to remain in the fuel rods because they are heavy and not water soluble and don't escape into the environment in significant quantities unless the core explodes. A core explosion happened at Chernobyl but would not happen at Fukushima due to the reactor design. In contrast, burning coal releases lots of radioactive Uranium and Thorium.
3. Because their oxides aren't water soluble and aren't involved in any metabolic processes, Plutonium and Uranium don't tend to be absorbed into the food chain. And if they are ingested, they generally pass right through the digestive system without being absorbed. The bigger risk of exposure to these elements comes from inhaling particles in dust and smoke, but that's a short term risk. Note the Plutonium released into the environment by above ground nuclear testing can be found in soil and sediment layers all around the world but poses no health risk.
Almost all the health risk from a nuclear accident comes from the fission products which beta decay, and generally the shorter the half life, the more dangerous. Of those, Iodine-131 is by far the worst because it's highly radioactive and concentrates in one place in the body. Cesium-137 poses the primary long term risk, with a half life of around 30 years.
Then how do we justify killing people now AND burdening people in the future with other power sources more risky and damaging than nuclear? Also, what do you mean by "more frequently than we'd care to admit"? By my count, we've only had two accidents so far that posed a health risk. We can go through the numbers again comparing the human & environmental impacts of nuclear power compared to other sources. But nuclear accidents would have to occur far more frequently to make it an interesting comparison.Nuclear power could indeed reduce atmospheric CO2. Unfortunately hubris, greed, neglect and ignorance guarantee that serious nuclear accidents will occur more frequently than we'd care to admit. Given the time scale of the contamination, can we justify burdening people in the deep future with invisible poisons? Isn’t the deferral of risk to subsequent generations the reason we are still mired in fossil fuel?
BTW, I personally think there as much or more hubris on the anti-nuke side from being impervious to logical and scientific argument.
.Chernobyl raised mutations 600%
Children of the "liquidators" - those drafted in to clear up the Chernobyl disaster - suffer seven times the mutation rate of offspring whose parents were not exposed to radiation, research published today by the Royal Society shows.
The "unexpectedly high" mutation rate, discovered by using DNA fingerprinting techniques, means that a significant proportion of the world's population doing jobs where even low-level radiation is present are exposing their unborn children to increased risk, the researchers say.
Families in which one child was conceived before the accident and one later were tested, along with control groups from areas with no radiation exposure. The increases in mutation rates as a result of the parents being exposed to ionising radiation was "highly significant", the paper says.
You forgot my favourite part: "The new findings show that the radiation from the stricken Ukrainian reactor affected the sperm of fathers, leading to mutation in the DNA of the children. None of them showed physical deformities, because the DNA changes were slight, but the long-term effects are not known."
So, we have an article from the Guardian with a headline containing the word MUTATIONS and the fun number 600%!!!!! None of it means anything. There might be a potential increase in the chance of perhaps contracting a form of some disease. And their sperms are flying wonky.
lols at "unexpectedly high" because you know that's not a quote, it's a euphemism.
wow, must be getting really desperate. They are admitting more shit.
Japanese authorities say efforts to control Fukushima’s overheated reactors will take months and during that time radiation will continue to leak into the environment, extending a nuclear emergency that already ranks as the most serious in a quarter-century.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...FiB_story.html
Don't you be putting the word mutation in this equation.
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