Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. We have probably a week and a half before we need to make the call so I am just going to keep an eye on stuff.

 

+1 but do you really have to talk so loudly in the library?

 

I edited my post, I thought you said you were there now, but in 2 weeks everything should be sorted out.

 

Oh no, sorry. I am still here in the bay area. We are supposed to leave in 2 weeks.

 

I saw on central coast news thhat people out here are buying up iodine tablets just in case and some stores have sold out even..

 

ooHH!! DINGDONGBINGBONGCHINGCHONG! oooHHH!!

 

Things like this remind people how unprepared they are. I'm sure stuff like this is happening all over.

 

From NEI, I bolded important parts

UPDATE AS OF 2:15 P.M. EDT, TUESDAY, MARCH 15:
An explosion at unit 2 of the ***ushima Daiichi plant earlier today has damaged the suppression chamber, which holds water and steam released from the reactor core. Personnel not directly supporting recovery efforts have been evacuated from the plant, with about 50 employees remaining, principally to restore cooling water in the reactors.

Later in the day, water level inside the unit 2 reactor was measured at 1.7 meters below the top of the fuel rods, but it was rising as workers pumped sea water into the reactor, reports said.

This tells me that leaking, if any is small. Radiation levels I hear from reports are near normal, so little or no steam is escaping and water levels are rising

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that an oil leak in a cooling water pump was the cause of a fire that burned for approximately 140 minutes. The fire was not in the spent fuel pool, as reported by several media outlets. Unit 4 was in a 105-day-long maintenance outage at the time of the earthquake and there is no fuel in the reactor.

When I heard this on the news, I could not figure out how a fire in the fuel pool at this unit was even possible, I guess I was correct with my reasoning

All four reactors at the ***ushima Daini power plant are shutdown and reactor coolant systems are keeping the reactors safe.

Residents have been evacuated from the area surrounding the facility and they have been given potassium iodide tablets as a preventive measure. The ingestion of the tablets can help prevent the accumulation of radioactive iodine in the thyroid.


The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sent 11 experts to Tokyo to provide assistance requested by the Japanese government. Two reactor experts were dispatched Saturday; others began departing Monday.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said today that nuclear energy is safe and important to the country’s energy portfolio. Americans “should have full confidence that the United States has rigorous safety regulations in place to ensure that our nuclear power is generated safely and responsibly.”

In testimony before the House of Representatives, Chu said: “Safety remains at the forefront of our effort to responsibly develop America’s energy resources, and we will continue to incorporate best practices and lessons learned into that process. He said the country must rely on several energy sources, including nuclear.”

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement, “I think undoubtedly they’ll (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) be taking a fresh look at the safety precautions and provisions that are in place, in light of whatever is learned from the Japanese. I hope that the Commission will quickly reach some conclusions about whether the safety precautions and provisions that it has insisted on are adequate for the future.”

 

Did you see that the entire country actually sank 2 feet and moved 13 feet closer to us? That's crazy.

It really supports the idea that all of the countries could have been one land mass at one point. That's why you see similar species and similar fossils on countries that there shouldn't be.

 

Yea, the plates are constantly shifting. So to think there was one landmass is not out of reach.

 

pangea? careful though, you don't want to get into the evo vs creation argument in here prob. creationists will argue that all of this evidence is simply to test your faith. you can't argue against it...

but yeah, the earth's axis shifted also, airports have to change their strip codes also because of the changing fields i think too

and the worry now is with shifting winds. you don't want to be downwind of this stuff. i really personally think that Japan officials have done and are continuing to downplay the severity and high danger of this to prevent widespread regional panic which could have further devastating effects to their economy, which dropped 10% just today alone.

 

Absolutely.

A really good family friend was a 10yr old girl on the base at Pearl Harbor during the attack. She passed away a while ago, but would be 80 or 81 today. She was a sweet woman, and her family was all killed in the attack but she never once said anything bad about the Japanese or any of our mutual Japanese friends. Of all the people to posses rage about this event, I would have thought she would be it. So there's a snapshot from someone else's life.

I would be careful to not mention Nanking - yes it's horrific, but.. The thing is, how many Americans do you think have actually even heard of the Nanking Massacre... If any of "those people" for example from the facebook picture posted before were to suddenly learn about the Nanking Massacre, we would see a whole new kind of crap that would appear to be racist intolerance but it's really just stupidity.

Exactly.

 

http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/20...ting-in-japan/

 

Yeah and also about the whole pearl harbor thing, they conveniently forget that we then dropped TWO ****ING NUCLEAR BOMBS ON THEIR CITIES. Not to mention the indiscriminately firebombing of tokyo and other cities that actually killed more people than the nukes. In all we killled between 500K-1 MILLION civilians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties since we were the only ones bombing japan, all those civilian deaths are ours.

we lost 2350 sailors and 68 civilians at Pearl Harbor. So even by the low estimate, by wars end we killed over 2000 Japanese civilians for every person killed at pearl harbor.

Yeah, Im pretty sure we can just about call that even then huh?

 

what about the firebombings of Dresden? there was no military installations there, just civilians...