Japan update from my good friend Rob in Tokyo.
My dear friend and mentor Rob, an American scholar of Japanese history living in Tokyo, wrote me today with a coherent and detailed first-hand account of the situation in Japan. I had a better sense of the dire situation in Japan after reading his email than from reading the evasive reports from Japanese government officials.
When I asked him if I could post his email in its entirety, he responded with a request to add the following:
The email I wrote might be taken as sensational, so I want to soften it a little before it goes out to an audience I don’t know personally. Here are the extra details people should know:
- The panic buying in Tokyo is over; all the housewives who wanted to stock up on extra food and toilet paper did so, and now the supermarkets are very quiet. Gasoline is available in Tokyo, but there are long lines at the gas stations.
- Tokyo is very calm. People’s tempers are sometimes a little short, but that is mainly because they are getting frustrated about problems with cancelled and delayed train service.
- One of the reasons people are calm is that the full implications of the nuclear crisis have not sunk in. This is the case partly because the media has not explained the implications of the crisis well but also because most Japanese people are fixated on the destruction due to the tsunami, which was catastrophic.
- The number of people in evacuation centers is now closer to 350,000 because some people have started to go home again.
- Finally, I really did fill the bathtub full of water but now my girlfriend swears she would rather die from thirst than drink from it. I’ll keep you posted.
Here is his email update:
Thank you all for your emails and your expressions of concern. Things have been quite eventful in Japan over the past several days and I have not had a chance to answer your emails individually so I hope you will forgive this mass email. It is the quickest way to let all of you know what is going on.
The earthquake last Friday was massive, and the tsunami that followed was incredibly destructive. Immediately after the earthquake there were almost continuous aftershocks for over two hours, and some of them measured above magnitude 7. Since then the aftershocks have gradually decreased, but we are still getting them. Rescue operations in northern Japan are still underway, and perhaps as many as 500,000 people are in evacuation centers in the north. The weather has turned cold and it is snowing, so it is cold up there, and in some evacuation centers they are running out of food and water. Gasoline is no longer available in the Tokyo area, but busses are still running here. In the north, busses have stopped running due to a lack of gasoline. New supplies are on their way so the situation should improve a little in a day or two.
The electric supply has been disrupted very badly in northern Japan. For historical reasons, the power supply in western Japan is 60Hz, and it the east (including Tokyo) it is 50Hz. The two zones cannot share power, so farther south, in the 60Hz zone, electricity supply is fine and has not been disrupted. In the east and north, about 30% of the electric supply was lost when all of the nuclear power plants automatically shut down. To deal with the power shortage, TEPCO, the electric utility in Tokyo, began to implement rolling blackouts a few days ago. Since nearly all of the trains run on electricity the uncertainty about power led most of the train lines to shut down on Monday. Since Tuesday they have been calibrating the rolling blackouts better and most train lines run for most of the day. Still, there are lots of stories of people who make it half the way home and have to get off the train because it can’t run any farther. Farther north, the Tohoku power company also had to implement rolling blackouts for the same reason, so the area affected by serious power shortages is very broad and it includes the areas most affected by the earthquake and tsunami.
Because of disruptions to the transportation system, due to power outages and damaged roads, the distribution system is not functioning well. In addition, there was panic buying in the stores on Tuesday, and now most of the stores are cleaned out of certain items. For example, you could not buy a roll of toilet paper if your life depended on it. Batteries are also gone, as is milk. But there is plentiful food in the stores (I saw lots of fresh meat, fish and vegetables yesterday). The situation is not critical here in Tokyo, but life has been disrupted.
There are two major disasters unfolding in northern Japan at the moment. The first are all of the people in evacuation centers who were displaced by the tsunami. If any of you are interested in making donations to disaster relief agencies here are a few links.
www.japansociety.org/earthquake (in New York)
http://japanearthquakerelieffund.jimdo.com/ (in England)
http://www.jrc.or.jp/english/relief/l4/Vcms4_00002070.html (Red Cross in Japan)
The second disaster is a meltdown at several nuclear reactors in Fukushima. The Fukushima Number 1 Nuclear Power Plant has 6 reactors. All of them are in trouble but three of them are in a critical state and one is near critical. Good information has been hard to come by, but the crisis began not with the earthquake but rather with the tsunami. A wave about 20 feet hight hit the plant about an hour after the earthquake. The wave was probably 30-50% higher than the tsunami wall they had built to protect the plant. Water flooded the basements of four of the reactors, and that is where the emergency diesel generators were located. All of the reactors shut down when the earthquake hit, and they rely on the diesel generators to keep the cooling systems running. When the backup generators failed, batteries kicked in, but they only had an 8 hour capacity. When battery power failed, the cooling systems stopped operating and the reactor cores at two of reactors started to heat up dangerously. Since then workers at the plant have been working ferociously and heroically to get the situation under control, but without electricity to run the cooling systems they have been unsuccessful. There have been several explosions at the plant, and now one of the reactors is in very serious trouble. The worst of the reactors is number 4, which was not in operation but it has a spent fuel pool in the building. As long as the spent fuel remained covered in water it was reasonably stable, but it appears that all of the water had boiled off as of yesterday, meaning that the spent fuel will start to heat up quickly. There was an explosion at reactor 4, and two fires yesterday. They are trying to add water to the pool, but it is probably too little too late. Radiation levels in Tokyo are already considerably above normal, but not dangerously high. The nuclear power plant is about 250 km (150 miles) away from Tokyo, and the situation is worse farther north and east.
It is hard for me to say what will happen next because I don’t have good information and i don’t know anything about nuclear power or nuclear disasters. This is already a major nuclear disasters, and it is hard to imagine that it will get better. It is more likely that the situation will get worse, perhaps much worse, in the next 48 hours. I can’t even say what the worst case scenario is, because none of the government or electric company officials want to create panic. The most likely scenario is that the spent fuel in reactor 4 will start to burn, and will release a large cloud of radioactive smoke and steam into the atmosphere. If that happens, a lot will depend on how long the fire burns and which way the wind is blowing. I have laid up food and water for a month so I don’t have to go outside the house just in case total disaster strikes. Let’s hope I don’t have to drink the water in the bathtub! As I was telling my brother Steve yesterday, it took awhile to calculate the volume of the bathtub, going from linear measurements in centimeters to liters and then to gallons. I added two tablespoons of chlorine bleach to the water and put the cover on the tub (there is a great cover that fits over the tub to hold in the heat). And yes, for those of you who are curious, I washed the tub out very carefully before filling it.
