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Posts Tagged ‘earthquake’

Reactor Rupture Could Slow Japan Plant Stabilization

May 12, 2011 Comments off

globalsecuritynewswire

Coolant is escaping through a newly discovered opening in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s No. 1 reactor pressure vessel, a development that could slow efforts to prevent potential further radiation releases from the Japanese facility, Reuters reported on Thursday (see GSN, May 11).

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power learned the container held less water than previously believed following repairs to monitoring equipment this week; the tank’s fluid quantity was roughly 16 feet short of the depth required to fully submerge atomic fuel if the material had remained in its intended position. The six-reactor site was severely damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people dead or missing in Japan.

“There must be a large leak,” Tokyo Electric Power official Junichi Matsumoto said to reporters on Thursday. “The fuel pellets likely melted and fell, and in the process may have damaged … the pressure vessel itself and created a hole,” he said.

Ongoing water transfers have successfully curbed the escaped fuel’s temperature, though, and workers would keep pumping fluid into the system, Matsumoto said. The container’s water quantity suggests the rupture is likely several centimeters across, indicating the fuel might have made contact with the air early in the crisis, he said. The vessel’s surface heat level has Read more…

DHS Claims al-Qaeda May Replicate Fukushima Disaster

May 12, 2011 Comments off

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 12, 2011

Instead of lessening terrorism, the supposed assassination of Osama bin Laden may result in a deliberate Fukushima-style nuclear disaster, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

On May 5, a Department of Homeland Security official at the Pacific Regional Information Clearinghouse in Hawaii presented a report entitled “Recreating Fukushima: A Possible Response to the Killing of Usama Bin Laden – The Nuclear Option.” It stated that “the death of [O]sama Bin Laden may serve as an impetus to apply lessons learned from Fukushima to attack the United States or another Western country.”

This would be accomplished, the report explains, by reproducing the failure of the electric supply that pumped cooling water to the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The official use only report says “the earthquake and tsunami in Japan were ‘acts of nature,’ but a catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdown could potentially be engineered by Al Qaeda” by Read more…

Alignments, Comet Elenin & Earthquakes – Scientific Proof (27th April 2011)

May 11, 2011 Comments off

Earthquake deaths increasing worldwide – UN report

May 10, 2011 Comments off

tvnz

Earthquake deaths increasing worldwide - UN report (Source: ONE News)Charlotte Bellis took this photo in the Christchurch CBD shortly after the quake struck. – Source: ONE News


Fatalities from earthquakes are increasing worldwide but the chance of dying in a weather-related disaster is diminishing the United Nations said today.

The UN report also claimed economic losses from catastrophes are rising in all regions often due to a lack of investment

Damage to infrastructure – schools, health centres, roads, bridges – is soaring in many low- and middle-income countries despite improvements in many early warning systems, it said in the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction.

Rich countries are also increasingly exposed, with damage on the rise following floods in Australia and earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand already this year, it said.

“Progress is mixed,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in the report.

“The recent events in Japan point to new and catastrophic risks that need to be anticipated,” he warned, referring to the earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan last March that triggered the worst nuclear crisis in 25 years.

Disasters have already caused more than $300 billion in losses so far this year, roughly the same as in all of 2010, a UN Read more…

Bad News from NASA: Proof That Comet Elenin Is Affecting Earth

May 4, 2011 4 comments
Dees Illustration

Dr. Mark Sircus, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

This is going to be the most extraordinary communication so fasten your seatbelts; we are in for a rough ride. I have known in my heart for months that I would have to make a communication like this but had no idea it would be this soon. Back in January, while investigating the underground city that is alleged to have been built under the new Denver Airport, reported on by the former governor Jesse Ventura, I put the puzzle together and came to the conclusion that a planetary event was in store for us in 2012.

Today I am presenting rock solid information; it does not get any better when NASA is your source. What you are about to read and see is happening. Last night, looking at a NASA mathematical model of comet Elenin, I found out that a large celestial body has already penetrated the solar system and is on course for a near and possibly horrific encounter with the earth in the fall of 2011. What we do not know is the size and mass of comet Elenin though I have no doubt that it is known by Read more…

Oil Crisis Just Got Real: Sinopec (Read China) Cuts Off Oil Exports

April 22, 2011 Comments off

zerohedge

As if a dollar in freefall was not enough, surging oil is about to hit the turbo boost, decimating what is left of the US (and global) consumer. Xinhua, via Energy Daily, brings this stunner: ” Chinese oil giant Sinopec has stopped exporting oil products to maintain domestic supplies amid disruption concerns caused by Middle East unrest and Japan’s earthquake, a report said Wednesday. The state-run Xinhua news agency did not say how long the suspension would last but it reported that the firm had said it also would take steps to step up output “to maintain domestic market supplies of refined oil products”. Oh but don’t worry, those good Saudi folks are seeing a massive drop in demand… for their Kool aid perhaps. “Sinopec would ensure supplies met  the “basic needs” of the southern Chinese special regions of Hong Kong and Macao, but they also should expect an unspecified drop in supply, Xinhua quoted an unnamed company official as saying.” Now… does anyone remember the 1970s? Read more…

Dead fish wash ashore north of Los Angeles

April 20, 2011 1 comment

Is this the age of megaquakes?

April 19, 2011 1 comment

msn

Kyodo / Reuters

Buildings tossed together by the tsunami is seen in Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan March 12, 2011. Scientists are asking if another megaquake will strike in the next six years.

By John Roach

First there was the earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra in 2004. Chile was shaken and lashed violently a year ago. Japan is still reeling from the twin disasters on March 11. It seems as if the Earth has woken from a long slumber and is violently re-jiggering its plates. Is there any truth to the notion?

The question of megaquake clustering, which I explored in the days following the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, was a hot topic of conversation Thursday at the Seismological Society of America’s annual meeting in Memphis, Tenn., according to various media reports.

There, Charles Bufe, a seismologist retired from the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, said the spate of recent megaquakes is very similar to a string of seven magnitude 8.5 or greater quakes that struck between 1950 and 1965. The intervening decades, he noted, were quiet.

Bufe and USGS colleague David Perkins analyzed the clustering and concluded that Read more…

Secret Weapons Program Inside Fukushima Nuclear Plant?

April 19, 2011 Comments off

globalresearch

Confused and often conflicting reports out of Fukushima 1 nuclear plant cannot be solely the result of tsunami-caused breakdowns, bungling or miscommunication. Inexplicable delays and half-baked explanations from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) seem to be driven by some unspoken factor.

The smoke and mirrors at Fukushima 1 seem to obscure a steady purpose, an iron will and a grim task unknown to outsiders. The most logical explanation: The nuclear industry and government agencies are scrambling to prevent the discovery of atomic-bomb research facilities hidden inside Japan’s civilian nuclear power plants.

A secret nuclear weapons program is a ghost in the machine, detectable only when the system of information control momentarily lapses or breaks down. A close look must be taken at the gap between the official account and unexpected events.

Conflicting Reports

TEPCO, Japan’s nuclear power operator, initially reported three reactors were operating at the time of the March 11 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Then a hydrogen explosion ripped Unit 3, run on plutonium-uranium mixed oxide (or MOX). Unit 6 immediately disappeared from the list of operational reactors, as highly lethal particles of plutonium billowed out of Unit 3. Plutonium is the stuff of smaller, more easily delivered warheads.

A fire ignited inside the damaged housing of the Unit 4 reactor, reportedly due to overheating of spent uranium fuel rods in a Read more…

March 9.0 Japanese quake set off tremors around the world

April 19, 2011 1 comment

ouramazingplanet

earthquake magnitude comparison

The earthquake that launched a series of disasters in Japan in March triggered micro-quakes and tremors around the world, scientists find.

The catastrophic magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off the coast of the Tohoku region of Japan March 11 set off tremors mostly in places of past seismic activity, including southwest Japan, Taiwan, the Aleutians and mainland Alaska, Vancouver Island in Canada, Washington state, Oregon, central California and the central United States. It was unlikely that any of these events exceeded magnitude 3.

Researchers noted, however, that temblors also were detected in Cuba. “Seismologists had never seen tremor in Cuba, so this is an exciting new observation,” Justin Rubinstein, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at Menlo Park, Calif., told OurAmazingPlanet.

Part of the excitement of the find is the insight it could add into the inner workings of earthquakes.

“Studying long-range triggering may help us to better understand the underlying physics of how earthquakes start,” explained seismologist Zhigang Peng at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Quakes where normally quiet

Most of these micro-earthquakes and tremors occurred in places that already had high background levels of seismic activity, including California’s Geysers Geothermal Field and the San Andreas Fault. Some of the quakes occurred in low-activity areas, such as central Nebraska, central Arkansas and near Beijing.

“Seismologists generally think of the central U.S. as relatively Read more…