Why all the failures to natural disasters?

Yes, but intensity goes down exponentially. After a few of years, you need sensitive instruments just to tell anything happened!

Why not? Again, it goes down very fast, and the actual 'quarantine area' is pretty small, at least the area with actual effects. The "Weill, we don't know, so we shall put a ring around the Torah" area will of course be much larger! ;-)

Those are all on the North America plate. Take a look at the map.

Maybe, so you need to get a fire department pumper truck out to pump in more water... What's the big deal! 8-)

Only psychologically. The actual land will be just fine!

Charlie

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Psychologically plus measurable radiation will permanently destroy land value. It's simple supply and demand.

Actually, dental x-rays are concentrated in the region of your mouth. They're called "dental" x-rays for a reason. ;-)

More like a few hundred years.

It's junctions of Pacific/N.America plates. They are still capable of 9.0 regardless.

New faults are always discovered after the fact.

Tiny water guns are not enough to fight big fire.

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Abolition of slavery was a 'little political dispute' ? Think before you speak...

In a disaster, we need all the power/energy to help other victims. Plannings to draw more resources away from other area to help save the storage pools is just unconscionable. What don't we spend a little more money to secure them first?

Depends on the compound. The strongest radioactive emitters tend to last the shortest amounts of time.

Well, yes, it will. And it was around before you and your parents and grandparents and Julius Caesar and the first amoeba ever existed. It's a fact of life in a universe abundant with immense thermonuclear reactors.

Why can you "never" eat or drink? You seem to think that the alternatives are zero radiation or deadly radiation. It doesn't work that way. If you want zero radiation you are simply going to have to find another universe to live in and figure out a way to get there.

So tell us, how much of the problem at Fukushima was earthquake damage and how much was tsunami damage.

The military is not an emergency response service and it is certainly not trained to repair nuclear reactors.

You seem to have this childlike faith in the abiliity of the military to easily do things that teams of trained engineers with decades of experience find difficult.

If you want a reactor blown up, the military will do a fine job of it. If you want one fixed, not so much. Sure, the Navy has good nuclear engineers, but they are mostly far out at sea running reactors, and the reactors they run are tiny compared to the ones that electric utility companies use.

Oh, you were talking about property values, not utility.

For what isotope released at Fukushima would that be the case?

So?

If you have a fire call the fire department, putting out fires is what they do. What do fires have to do with anything under discussion?

Replying to yourself again... ;-)

Do you know how much water a pumper truck can pump? It ain't a water gun! And the imprortant thing is that there are other resources, such as fireships (probably just a few miles south in San Diego!) portable generators (Pendleton probably has a few), shipboard generators, etc. that could all be used without taking any resources away from more general emergency services.

And, why not water tight doors on the emergency generator room?

Charlie

Clarke, Of course the military is an trained emergency response service. Were you in the military? Until recently, that was their main purpose, and still is for most of them. Plus, we are talking about San Onefre, which has the San Diego naval base just south. Plenty of those naval nuke engineers there, let me tell you! They are not all out at sea...

Charlie

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Just adding opinions.

They would be good for pumping seawater. But seawater is corrosive and probably created more problems. They stopped using seawater after a while. So, having seawater next to the reactors make no difference in emergency.

For normal op, circulating flesh water to the sea is just as good.

So, why have the reactors and storage tanks next to the sea? The reactors will be down in 10 years, but the storage tanks will be there forever.

The walls have to stand up to a certain amount of pressure _after_ being exposed to the design maximum earthquake. One good crack and the watertight doors don't help.

And if it's a fossil-fueled generator the room can't be all _that_ watertight--it has to have a way for air to come in and exhaust to go out.

And all these various methods that you propose work fine if they can be gotten to where they are needed. If there is vertical shift between the firehouse and the power plant or a bridge goes down the fire engine can't get to the power plant even if there was no tsunami covering the road with debris.

So lemme get this straight. According to you the purpose of the military is to fix broken buildings and sift through the rubble pulling out civilian survivors and repair busted civilian reactors and whatnot no part of their job includes breaking the buildings in the first place and turning them into rubble.

So why _does_ the military have all those bombs and artillery shells and missiles and the like? Why do they have more tanks than ambulances and more aircraft carriers than hospital ships, if their main purpose is emergency response? And why do the Marines have to borrow their medical personnel from the Navy?

I'm sorry, but you clearly have a very weird view of the nature of the military. Or else your idea of "emergency response" is to drop a bomb on something.

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You miss the point that the military have to keeping doing their jobs while the enemy is busy breaking building around them."Damage control teams" are an essential part of any military organisation.

It may be secondary to fighting the enemy, but if your logistics can't keep on supplying the front line, the front line can't keep on fighting (at least not in a way which has much chance of success).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ummm.. no, like I said, you haven't been in the military, have you?

Yes, their primary training is to kill people and break things, but they also have a lot of resources that work marvelously well in helping people out in emergency situations. Resources such as mobile hospitals, portable shelters, kitchens, large amounts of mobile supplies, all terrain vehicles, including trucks, helicopters, etc. are all remarkable nice to have when things hit the fan. As well as a lot of young, strong bodies that are used to hardship and long hours, as well as discipline. And of course, when you talk of National Guard troops, you are even more trained for emergency response.

Charlie

...

Actually it doesn't.

One of the old tricks for freshman physicists was a question about plotting the total activity of a sample of U235.

Anyone plotting what looked simple exponential decay failed.

A sample of pure U235 actually *increases* in activity.

The explanation: a sample of "radioactive material" is a bunch of products, each decaying exponentailly. In a typical case slow decay "mothers" can have high decary rate "daughters". So it's quite possible to have short 1/2-life products hang around a long time because their mothers have low activity.