Quote Originally Posted by liegeprime View Post
The news tonight was showing a town minamusisomething whatever , it was completely wiped out except for the hospital... terrible!
Minami Sanriku

Quote Originally Posted by liegeprime
and Meltdown in the nuclear power plants, tsktsktsk..... the news says that if it did , the radioactive material could cause a whole lifetime of cancers to those exposed..... and last even beyond their lifetime.......
There seems to be conflicting reports coming out as to whether or not the generators actually gone into meltdown or not. There was certainly an explosion, but not necessarily a meltdown. One of my colleagues told me that apparently the nuclear power plant in Fukushima is a very old one and built on outdated technology and was actually scheduled to be decommissioned next year! There's another nuclear power plant that was closer to the epicentre of the quake, but there was no explosion or danger of meltdown because it has newer technology and something like 6 different backup generators, whereas the old Fukushima plant only has 2 back up generators and a back up diesel engine -- all of which have failed. Thus they're now flooding the plant with sea water in a desperate attempt to cool the damn thing down (but apparently it's not working)!

The government's already evacuated everyone from a 20km radius of the plant and has already scanned nearby residents and given them medication just in case. Hopefully nobody's been adversely effected by any radiation, and if the plant does meltdown, then at least there won't be anybody near it (the last thing anyone wants is another Chernobyl).

We had 65 students and several teachers visit our school from Japan today, although they're from Okinawa which didn't even feel anything (although these students and staff were already in Australia when the quake happened). But nevertheless everyone was passing on their concerns to them and we observed 1 minute silence this morning. I spoke to some of our students who have family in Japan -- so far noone's been hurt. One student whose family is in Tokyo said that they went without electricity for a while, but otherwise everyone's okay. Another student said that the phone lines were all jammed calling into Japan and they had to keep calling for 6 hours before getting through. That would have been an excruciating wait.