Huge 8.9 quake plus tsunami - Japan

Debris from Japanese tsunami could reach B.C. shore in days

Houses, fishing boats and small freighters carried by winds could already be nearing the coast, oceanographer says

The largest items swept out to sea following the Japanese tsunami in March could arrive on the B.C. coastline within days, oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer has predicted.

The main part of the 20-million-tonne debris field, equivalent in size to the state of California, isn't expected until about 2014. But houses, fishboats and small freighters, carried by wind, could already be close to our shores, Ebbesmeyer said.

"We just finished running a simulation with a drifter, a buoy that got lost in the area of the tsunami, and we find that the first of the debris would be here now," he explained.

Beachcombers along the west coast of B.C. should be on the lookout and report any unusual finds, he said.

A Transport Canada spokeswoman said contingency plans are in the works to deal with debris that might pose navigational hazards in Canadian waters.

Ebbesmeyer is a Seattle-based oceanographer, educated at the University of Washington, who tracks flotsam using computer models. He has consulted for multinational firms, working on projects such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

The March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan prompted Ebbesmeyer and fellow oceanographer Jim Ingraham to run computer simulations on the path of debris carried out to sea by the tsunami.

Debris moves faster if it is exposed to the wind, Ebbesmeyer said.

"People who base their results on satellite-tracking buoys get a slower speed than those of us who track Nike shoes and hockey gloves and airplane wings," Ebbesmeyer said.

Researchers Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner at the International Pacific Research Center in Hawaii are monitoring the debris field through both computer models and ship reports.

Hafner said Wednesday that windblown flotsam isn't part of his research. He said ocean currents will deliver a significant amount of plastic to this area in 2013 or 2014. The majority will remain in a North Pacific "garbage patch," where swirling currents surround a vast amount of seaborne junk.

The crew of a cargo ship near Midway Island spotted an 18-foot vessel in the debris field, Hafner said.

The Japanese have immense respect for belongings such as fishboats, said Ebbesmeyer, predicting an influx of Japanese tourists coming to B.C. to see washed-up debris. "When people find something on the beach, they are literally putting their hands on something that a family wants to know about," he said.

A Japanese fishboat that washed ashore in Prince Rupert several years ago has become a shrine to fishermen lost at sea, he said.

Tofino beachcomber Barry Campbell can relate. A few years ago, he found a sealed bottle on the beach containing a note written by students at a Japanese school.

He wrote to the school "and got a huge stack of letters from each individual class," most of them in Japanese.

Ebbesmeyer is asking anyone seeing floating debris of an unusual nature to take a photograph and send it to him through his website at flotsa metrics.com.

Special Report on the Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station

The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations has compiled a detailed timeline of events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The detailed report, prepared as part of the integrated response to the Japan events, was delivered on Nov. 11, 2011, to U.S. industry executives, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and members of Congress.

Reactor Core Melted Fully, Japan Says
Fuel Breached Vessel Floor, Operator Says, In Its Gravest Fukushima Status Report

TOKYO—Japan's tsunami-stricken nuclear-power complex came closer to a catastrophic meltdown than previously indicated by its operator—who on Wednesday described how one reactor's molten nuclear core likely burned through its primary containment chamber and then ate as far as three-quarters of the way through the concrete in a secondary vessel.

The assessment—offered by Japan's government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex—marked Japan's most sobering reckoning to date of the nuclear disaster sparked by the country's March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

But it came nearly six months after U.S. and international nuclear experts and regulators had reached similar conclusions. That lag echoes international allegations, in the tense weeks following the disaster, that Japan was underplaying the severity of the contamination and was slow to provide information to outside nuclear regulators.

"Uncertainty involved in the analysis is significant, due to the uncertain nature of the original conditions and data used," Tepco said in a report. It said the concrete "could have been penetrated",

theyre pumping nitrogen in to displace the oxygen so the hydrogen doesnt get the chance to explode again.

.......

there is currently no explaination in nuclear reactor science to explain how a high explosive event could have occured

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/contract/cr5525/#pub-info[/quote]