Via Planet Gore;
What happened last March 11 wasn’t supposed to be possible. The seismic hazard maps didn’t entertain the idea of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the Tohoku coast of Japan.
But the Earth paid no heed to scientific orthodoxy. A massive slab of the planet’s crust lurched 180 feet to the east. It rose about 15 feet, lifted the ocean and tipped the Pacific’s waters onto the Japanese coast.
The quake and the resulting tsunami killed about 20,000 people, wiped out entire towns and triggered power outages and then meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
It also humbled the scientific community.
Oh, that’s unlikely.
“The seismic hazard maps didn’t entertain the idea of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the Tohoku coast of Japan.”
So Al is admitting that a scientific consensus can be wrong?
Some of these earth scientists are of subnormal intelligence. And of subnormal knowledge.
I see the Post article continues to peddle the meme about the Fukushima reactors having melted down. If I remember right, what actually happened was that the supply of cooling water to pools containing spent fuel rods was interrupted, allowing decay heat to build up, resulting in fires.
A serious event, to be sure, but not a meltdown.
Nah, it missed the scientific community. That’s an oversight we here at Alien-Earth Tectonic Enterprises plan to fix shortly.
My comment above is insufficiently unpleasant. I meant to say something about “moron earth scientists” talking to “imbecile reporters”. I still remember, back when I was involved with iceberg studies for oil development on the Grand Banks, giving an interview to a Globe and Mail reporter. I mentioned the “hundred-year wave” at the Hibernia site, a statistically well-defined (though physically somewhat dubious) concept, which when eventually printed ended up as “giant waves which sometimes roll over the Grand Banks.”
Oh the usual disclaimer: some earth scientists are bright people. I don’t wish to be haunted by the shades of J. Tuzo Wilson! The brightest I know personally also says the least.
“Humans can be gifted at perceiving patterns in nature. We can also imagine patterns that do not exist. We can focus our attention on too narrow a frame. It is the special challenge of earthquake scientists that they must contend with terrestrial forces that exist outside the frame of human lifetimes, or even the lifetimes of entire civilizations. Some geologic faults may endure thousands of years of strain before a catastrophic rupture.”
One of the reasons that the insurance industry is not agnostic, they still have a very strong belief in “Acts of God”.
You can have all the “Hell or highwater” you want, but you probably won’t enjoy it.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
I think it is obvious. The US government managed to downsize the earthqauke weapon that used to ride on the Space Shuttle and placed it on orbiting satellites. That’s why the shuttle was discontinued. Haiti and Fukushima were diabolical government plots to do something evil and bad.
(By the way, does anyone know where I can get a good deal on tin foil?)
The main component of the Japanese earthquack is how eagerly the anti-nuke luddites exploited it.
Remember these are th folks who sincerely cite “the China Syndrome” as a critical reason to ban nuclear reactors.
“the China Syndrome” is a preposterous Hollywood concept. It is not even to be considered as science fiction, it is as valid as CAGW.
“the China Syndrome” will not occur, has never occurred and cannot occur. Once a melting nuclear core melts through the bottom of the reactor vessel it is so contaminated it is sub-critical and forms a metal blob on the containment building floor…incapable of melting metal let alone concrete.
Canada is the perfect country for nuclear power, we’ve got uranium and we’ve got plenty of places that are far away from where people live. So in the unlikely event that a reactor does malfunction it could be a contained problem, so to speak. But no, we have to build giant wind farms and double the price of gasoline as our brainstorm. Oh well …
humbled = proved everything they already knew about Climate Change / Global Climate Disruption to be irrefutably true
Peter; think of the scrap steel there will be in the future, by then scrap will be 600 a ton and we will be chopping down bird blenders faster than they can “Vince slap chop” a bald eagle. So sad that there has been trillions wasted on this SCAM, the purveyors of it should have to tour hospital wards all day and homeless shelters/ food banks etc, to see what could have been helped with their stolen money, there is no shame anymore, Gore and Suzuki prove this continuously helped by short sighted,” vote for me, I’m saving the planet” politicians.
Gordinkneehill, thanks for helping set the facts right. No melt down, just fires. Apart from Chernobyl, never been a nuclear accident. Chernobyl being deliberate. Canada also has the safest reactor design on the planet. Any skeptics please do some critical reading.
Met a fellow some years ago who was involved with the Pickering reactor. Amazed at the safety features and redundancy built into the thing.
Do we design and build for the most likely case scenario or the absolutely worst case scenario? The former would be the most pragmatic, the latter? Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.
Actually, there is clear evidence of “meltdown” at Fukushima. The reactors overheated and failed. There was clear evidence that nuclear fission restarted AFTER the shutdown and that radioactive isotope only generated by fission, and having very short half-lives, were present in the air and water and that such emission was not coming from the reactor vessels. The temperatures in the reactors clearly reached the melting point of the fuel. No China Syndrome, as the provision of boron-laden seawater killed the fission reactions and allowed the units to achieve “cold shutdown”. However, no one has yet to actually enter the reactor buildings or observed if nuclear fuel melted through the reactor shells.
I spoke recently with a hydrologist/seismologist who does “disaster” research for a high-profile university in Asia. He claimed the first thing most professionals in the field say after a major earthquake is, “Well, that’s a surprise.” Could be a common room jest, but more likely not. According to this individual (and as noted above), of the three major quake zones in the “Ring of Fire,” Japan was not expected to receive anything near a 9.0M quake. The figures estimated by scientists sat between 7.2-8.0M. Tops. The guy concluded by saying experts know sh*t about either where or how large the next quake will be. It is what it is. (But they’re working on some cool ideas on how to mitigate the worst of ocean-based quakes, including drilling down into the shifting plates and pumping in water to ease the friction. Hey, it’s a start. No mention of wind turbines.)
Chernobyl was “deliberate”? They really set out to make that sucker melt? Call me dubious. I’d always understood that they made some real dumb decisions there that turned out disastrously badly, which is just not the same as “deliberate”.