37
votes
Powerful quake rocks Japan, nearly 100,000 residents ordered to evacuate
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- Title
- Massive earthquake strikes Japan, triggering tsunami warning
- Published
- Jan 1 2024
- Word count
- 155 words
Damn, I'm sure something like this is traumatizing after 2011. Luckily it seems like the waves aren't going to be anywhere near as dangerous.
Around this time of year I usually spend all day watching TV with the in-laws. After the quake, every single channel was converted to disaster coverage with the word “run!” plastered on the screen. It’s quite unnerving, but as you said it would be way worse for survivors of previous disasters. Even today the smaller aftershocks are shown as alerts on the tv (this is standard practice).
But thinking positively, this demonstrates good disaster prevention policies being in place. Of course this is still orders of magnitude less than a 3/11 quake, so who knows how well we would weather that. The worst case tsunami forecasts didn’t come to pass as well (and warnings are now lifted). The fires might end up being the worse part, people near the epicenter (Wajima) might not have anything to come back to.
I saw this right before going to bed last night. Gave me a big start. I'm glad so far it doesn't seem as catastrophic as the 2011 earthquake so far, though I naturally expect the death toll to rise since it's still ongoing and they've barely started looking for survivors. There are photos online of one apartment building that's largely intact but on its side, which is just wild to me.
I found this article from the Mirror interviewing an expat who said it lasted a long time. He was 250 miles away from the epicenter, and said "it was one of the longest earthquakes I have ever experienced. The only comparable experience that I'd had was March 11, 2011, which I also experienced from the Tokyo area." That makes me wonder how bad it was at the epicenter. One chilling detail he mentions are tweets with locations and the hashtag "save me", believed to be from people trapped in rubble and such.
This feels like an ominous start to 2024.
So they got extremely lucky then...
I was going to post a hot take about how nuclear simply doesn't belong in Japan and why can't they learn their lesson. Then I looked at this article that summarizes the current situation of nuclear power plants in Japan. It looks to me like the future of nuclear in Japan is on a steep downward trajectory already, with the skyhigh costs of building new ones, the mandated 40 year maximum lifespan of a reactor, the aging workforce, and how 20 out of 50 have already been decommissioned, and about 20 are sitting nonoperational since 2011.
From what I've read that plant has been offline since 2011 pending safety checks. There had been concern that particular plant might be located over an active fault, and they only got that cleared up last March. This article from October states the company submitted a plan to reopen the first reactor in 2026. So it wasn't really a matter of luck that they were offline.
That said, the power situation in Japan is... tricky. There was a lengthy comment on here that went into great detail about the Japanese power grid in general. The original was deleted but someone archived it here. It's not about nuclear power and I will repeat that it's LONG, so you can skip to the TL;DR for the bullet points. The key details to know are that the power grid is a giant mess, running it is expensive and relies heavily on importing liquid natural gas, and any major renovations to the grid would cost trillions.
From what I can tell after a brief skim to refresh my memory, nuclear was one of their few options that doesn't require importing resources from other countries. Being dependent on other countries to supply resources for power is just asking for trouble. They at least know the nuclear plants already worked with the current infrastructure, so I can see why they'd want to reopen the existing plants if they pass safety inspections. It's the most affordable and feasible option available at the moment.
That makes sense, and thanks for that link, it was really informative. I wish that user stuck around and posted more like that, but I understand if they burned out writing such in depth comments, or if they perhaps caught themselves posting borderline sensitive information at times.
I believe there have been discussions about newer nuclear plants that are much smaller and resistant to damage, but the energy yield is still too small to be worth using at scale, if I remember right.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/OPcGh