Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Japan's Terrifying Day Saw Unprecedented Blown Roof Expose Tepco Fuel Rods, at Bloomberg.  The most thorough report I've read thus far:
The seabed off Japan had buckled along a 300-kilometer stretch of fault line. The upheaval hurled about 67 cubic kilometers of ocean at Japan’s coast, or enough to flood all of Manhattan a mile deep, according to estimates by Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado.
Within an hour the tsunami would smash into 860 kilometers of Japan’s coastline at heights the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated as high as 24 meters.
Akira Tamura, a 35-year-old control room manager at Dai- Ichi’s No. 2 reactor, was home on March 11 in Minami Soma on a day off. He was surfing Internet news sites dressed in sweat pants and a T-shirt, when the quake reached his area.
“Roof tiles went flying and crashing in the street,” he said.
After checking on elderly neighbors, Tamura jumped in the car and picked up his wife at the flower shop where she worked. He was forced to change route because main roads were flooded. His apartment was on higher ground out of the tsunami’s reach.
At Tamura’s Dai-Ichi workplace, the tsunami crashed over a 2.5-kilometer breakwater of 60,000 concrete blocks and 25-ton tetra pods as well as a 5.6-meter-high wall in the seabed in front of the site.
The plant, built on a layer of rock 10 meters above sea level, was pummeled by a wave as high as 15 meters that flooded parts of the facility in six meters of seawater before flowing back to the ocean, according to Tepco estimates.
Interviews with workers at Dai-Ichi that day indicate that as most staff had left and many of the Tepco technicians were inside buildings checking on reactors, few saw the waves arrive.
Witnesses say from higher ground behind the plant, the view was blocked by buildings. A Tepco engineer, who’d worked for the company for 30 years, was in reactors 5 and 6 after the earthquake and said he didn’t realize the tsunami had hit.
Also, today marks the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

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