61–70 of 114 posts
Thank. Fucking. God. I am getting increasingly tired of explaining these points to everyone who asks me (currently in Tokyo). A well worded piece that I can just link to, very nice to see at the moment.
No thank Fucking engineers. God did the deed - engineers countered it. Given the few 1000s casualties against a Mag8.9 earthquake I think God lost this one
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re reactors: you're kidding yourself. The reacors that shut down regularly will be restarted, sure. But those where cooling failed will NOT run in a month or 3. Those where the core melted are gone beyond salvage. And patio11 is talking bullshit as well: the situation at Fukushiuma may not be a Apocalyptic Nightmare Scenarios yet , but the systems did not work "exactly as designed", the situation it's not under contr…
Since AFAIK they were designed to withstand a 8.2 earthquake, they pretty much exceeded expectation. And we can reasonably count on the standards being upgraded significantly after this. I like a lot the comparison of nuclear energy with airplane safety: when you look at the statistics, it's a lot safer. But when it fails, it makes the headlines.
I'd be very interested to learn what those specs actually said. If it really was a Richter scale value, it would logically have to be at point blank, which this quake wasn't. If so, the energy that hit the reactors may well have been considerably less than what they were designed for,
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in Lithuanian mass media coverage in one sentence is "Shit did hit the fan". And featured article in biggest news website this weekend is notice issued by National Nuclear Smth saying nuclear stuff shouldn't hit us. Probably. I haven't seen single article in local media saying how well Japanese survived the earthquake/tsunami. It's more about how shitty situation (usually with ever-rising dead/missing headco…
Shit did actually hit the fan. Several thousand people are dead. It could have been much worse but it is bad.
The result: more than 10 times the death toll in an (I think) much less densely populated area. The effort and money Japan is able and willing to spend on earthquake/tsunami preparation has most certainly had a big effect. Even if devastation in the worst-hit areas is complete, a lot of people probably escaped because of the infrastructure and drills.
Anyone with a mirror please?
The larger bug is, of course, using Apache when if this had been on Nginx I would be snug in my bed right now instead of getting paged. shakes fist
Perhaps someone can tell about about the perception of nuclear reactors in Japan after the earthquake. Is there any knee-jerk reaction calling for the demolition of all existing reactors and stopping of all plans, or do most people have the same reaction Patrick has, seeing this as somewhat of a success? Is there any hysteria about the current problems with some of the reactors?
Interest in the nuclear question is running very high. Japan historically has a complicated relationship with nuclear power, for all the obvious reasons. (Heck, I got freaked out when I saw the word "hibakusha" used in print today in a context not related to WWII.) I would characterize the tenor of reports I saw on NHK earlier as "visible concern" on the part of the anchor and "restrained professionalism" on the part…
Were there not repeated cooling system failure resulting cooling pumps running on batteries (that needed to be swapped every few hours)? This sounds to me less like "something working as designed" and more like scraping last fallback options. Releasing (lightly radioactive) steam to ease the pressure in a chamber they have no view or control over doesn't sound that much better either. Nor does the evacuation of 140,000 people "from the area around Fukushima".
All in all, based on the quotes of Japanese authorities that sip into the Reuters' feed - they did not have a situation under full control at several points. They handled it as professional as it's possible, no doubts about it, but it could've unfolded differently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shit did actually hit the fan. Several thousand people are dead. It could have been much worse but it is bad.
For a comparison of how bad it could have been, you just have to look 6 years back at Indonesia. The quake had pretty exactly the same strength, so I'd assume the tsunami was roughly as powerful. The result: more than 10 times the death toll in an (I think) much less densely populated area. The effort and money Japan is able and willing to spend on earthquake/tsunami preparation has most certainly had a big effect. E…
Between 100,000 and 300,000 people (the numbers are still very much unclear) were killed during the or in the aftermath of the much weaker earthquake in Haiti and if you look at other earthquakes you see similarly high death tolls – that tells me very clearly that Japan was extremely well prepared and I never for one second doubted that.
Anyone with a mirror please?
I'm getting hammered pretty hard (Jimmy Wales decided to retweet it), and discovered a bug in my Apache configs, but have fixed it. It should hopefully hold up. The larger bug is, of course, using Apache when if this had been on Nginx I would be snug in my bed right now instead of getting paged. shakes fist
There is a bit of overlap here with my comments on HN the last couple of days. I've had to explain it to 100+ friends, family, customers, clients, etc, so I figured I might as well polish it and put it somewhere public. At the risk of stating the obvious: I am not "HN's Japan Guy." There are many, many HNers in Japan. A few dozen of them make it out to the Tokyo meetups. There are many, many perspectives on this disa…
I live in Tokyo. On Sunday, I was looking at the buildings on the way to the train station. There were no visible cracks, except on a few old buildings which might as well have had the cracks before. Almost all businesses were open, etc.
Edit: as Patrick says, civil order continued. However, there were huge traffic jams and I witnessed a traffic argument turning violent. This is really rare in Japan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a comparison of how bad it could have been, you just have to look 6 years back at Indonesia. The quake had pretty exactly the same strength, so I'd assume the tsunami was roughly as powerful. The result: more than 10 times the death toll in an (I think) much less densely populated area. The effort and money Japan is able and willing to spend on earthquake/tsunami preparation has most certainly had a big effect. E…
Arrrg! Why is nobody understanding me? My intention was never to even hint at any deficiencies in Japanese preparedness. But, well, shit did hit the fan! I don’t know what else I should call the death of several thousand people. Those deaths were probably unavoidable and certainly no humans are to blame for them. Between 100,000 and 300,000 people (the numbers are still very much unclear) were killed during the or in…