Today marks exactly one year since the Great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami (東北地方太平洋沖地震).
Even though I am a long way away from Japan, both in terms of distance and in time, I still think of the country as my second home, and I still shed tears to think about what befell the wonderful people of my adopted country that day.
Yesterday's news from the IAEA that TEPCO engineers had managed to pull a mains power line to Fukushima #1's reactor #2 made a huge difference in my mood, despite the later correction saying that they'd started pulling a power line, not completed it. The lack of major new catastrophes, the apparent effectiveness of the water spraying from the SDF trucks, and a hefty dose of THE BLUE HEARTS helped too. It's funny, because yesterday's weather here was quite gloomy, and the weather of the previous days was bright and sunny, but in both cases my mood was exactly the opposite.
In other news...there seem to be an increasing number of blogs written by nuclear scientists, students, etc, stepping in to "fill the gaps", as it were, and explain the basics of nuclear fission and how nuclear power plants fit together. http://plainenglishnuclear.blogspot.com/ is one of them; it answered a lot of the lingering curiosities that were kicking around in my head ("How are they pumping seawater if they have no power?" etc.)
As an aside, though I've got a decent general-science-student's knowledge of how reactors and their safety systems work, I've been reading up on the details lately, as I'm sure many of us have. I love (for some value of "love") how the term "excursion" gets used in the nuclear literature (eg "power excursion" , "criticality excursion" ), as if the reactor had, you know, just snuck out to go for a nice stroll when nobody was looking.
In my high school days, I was an exchange student; I lived for a year in Maebashi, Gunma-ken, Japan (日本群馬県前橋市).
Although for various reasons I haven't kept in touch with anyone there, I've still been following matters very closely. Despite how long it's been, Japan still feels like my second home. My third host family's house is a bit more than a kilometer away from this radioactivity monitoring point, and they have relatives in Sendai whom we went to visit while I was there, so this all strikes pretty close to home for me.
When it comes to the problems at Fukushima #1, a lot of the foreign news coverage has been inaccurate, sensationalist, or both. It doesn't help that most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of nuclear power plants and ionizing radiation, so we don't have any context to evaluate what information we're given and try to deduce the scope of the dangers facing Japan. Moreover, the nuclear plant troubles may not be the biggest problem in the country right now -- there are still many people in Tōhoku with little or no food, water, gas, power, or heat, going on six nights now. Logistics are hugely problematic, with fuel being in short supply.
With that being said, here are some of the resources I've been using to keep up on what's going on:
Had a crummy day today, but this made me do a happy dance:
I found this picture on my hard drive, which I'd seen on a website but couldn't find again, and despaired of having lost forever. It reminds me of everything good about trains in Japan. *^_^*
Have I ever mentioned how much I like Japanese Beer Commercials? Actually, I shouldn't go so far as to say that. I don't actively dislike them like the ones we have here in North America. Why? Because almost without exception, they don't follow the Western Beer Commercial Standard: Guy in a Bar with Hot Women Draped All Over Him, or some other formulation that clearly shouts "Drink our swill and you'll get laid, stud."
( See the video spots... )Yeah, taste isn't the only reason I don't buy North American macrobrewed beer.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}