Oh No! Volcamo erupts in Japan sending ashe and rocks 2 ½ miles in the sky

How many natural disaster can one nation take?

I feel terrible for the people of Japan. Hopefully, everything will work out. But, it’s really challenging over there right now. If I remebrer high school geoloby, volcano eruptions can result in more land mass for Japan. Hmm, maybe that’s needed in Japan’s future?

TimesLive reports it was not immediately clear if the eruption was a direct result of the massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked northern areas Friday, unleashing a fierce tsunami and sparking fears that more than 10,000 may have been killed.

The 1,421-metre (4,689-feet) Shinmoedake volcano in the Kirishima range saw its first major eruption for 52 years in January. There had not been any major activity at the site since March 1.

Authorities have maintained a volcano warning at a level of three out of five, restricting access to the entire mountain.

In April last year, the eruption of the Eyjafjoell volcano in Iceland dispersed a vast cloud of ash, triggering a huge shutdown of airspace that affected more than 100,000 flights and eight million passengers.



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Engineer: Tough Japanese building codes worked

CBS News says strict standards did their job; Tall buildings there are designed to sway in temblor as a tree would in wind
Friday's earthquake in Japan was the world's fifth most powerful since 1900, but most of the nation's buildings are still standing in the wake of Friday's ultra-strong earthquake, having suffered only minimal damage.

How did they come through the shaker in such good shape?
Structural engineer Bill Faschan, who's designed cutting-edge commercial towers, hotels, sports stadiums and museums around the world, says some of the strictest building codes in the world were up to the task.

He noted on "The Early Show on Saturday Morning" that Japan is part of the Pacific's "Ring of Fire" of nations especially vulnerable to powerful temblors, which is why Japanese codes are so tough.

The Ring of Fire, he told co-anchor Russ Mitchell, is "a very active seismic center. It's one of the most active in the world. So it presents real challenges, particularly, to design major building structures."

Japanese building codes, Faschan says, "are very comparable to American codes. They bring together the best knowledge in the world to date on how to resist seismic events. And I think you've seen that in the behavior of the buildings in Tokyo."

That city's tall buildings literally swayed as the quake shook the ground.
"They're supposed to sway," Faschan pointed out. "The basic idea, particularly (for) a tall building, is it's supposed to act like a tree. A tree in the wind, it sways back and forth. And in a seismic event, it's very similar. Obviously, the ground (is) shaking as opposed to the building being moved back and forth by the wind, but (it's) the same idea. It's supposed to move. It's supposed to give."

Faschan says he's not surprised by the lack of damage in Tokyo, though, "There could be more severe effects in Tokyo (from a future quake) than we're seeing from this particular quake, because (this one) was at some distance from the city. There are faults that are closer that could have lesser energy released, but because they're closer, they have more impact."

He added he's impressed by how buildings in Tokyo held up, saying, "It's very satisfying for me to see that you can protect life in that way and that everything we try to do works."

Pointing to a model of a building he designed in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Faschan explained that, "It's not so much size, to use that term, but its height. In other words, if you have a short building, you can maybe imagine that it's pretty stiff. If the ground moves, it moves right along with it. But if you go back to the tree analogy, if you have a tall building ... this one at certain angles is very slender, so it acts like a tree. It will bend. It will give, and it won't break. So that's the nature of taller buildings. They're actually safer. You wouldn't necessarily think that."

Caught on amazing video: Skyscrapers rock during Japan's quake

I gotta give Japanese builders much kudos for erecting buildings that were able to resist such a powerful earthquake. I heard these structures are built on giant rollers to be earthquake proof.

It worked.

CBS News reports Amazing footage shows skyscrapers rocking back and forth in Shinjuku, Japan during an 8.9 magnitude earthquake.

The video was posted to YouTube where viewers are praising Japanese engineering and architecture.

The high-rise buildings were able to sustain the natural disaster which is the biggest quake to be recorded in Japan's history.

Red Alert: Nuclear Meltdown at Quake-Damaged Japanese Plant

I won’t pretend to know anything about this topic other than Japan endures earthquakes more often than anyplace in the world. With that in mind I think these nuclear plants throughout the country are built to withstand these kinds of circumstances.

Look for knee jerk-environmental nut cases to make hay over this incident as a rationale not to build more nuclear plants in the United States.

That would be wrong headed thinking.

Stratfor reports that a March 12 explosion at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, appears to have caused a reactor meltdown.

The key piece of technology in a nuclear reactor is the control rods. Nuclear fuel generates neutrons; controlling the flow and production rate of these neutrons is what generates heat, and from the heat, electricity. Control rods absorb neutrons — the rods slide in and out of the fuel mass to regulate neutron emission, and with it, heat and electricity generation.

A meltdown occurs when the control rods fail to contain the neutron emission and the heat levels inside the reactor thus rise to a point that the fuel itself melts, generally temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, causing uncontrolled radiation-generating reactions and making approaching the reactor incredibly hazardous. A meltdown does not necessarily mean a nuclear disaster. As long as the reactor core, which is specifically designed to contain high levels of heat, pressure and radiation, remains intact, the melted fuel can be dealt with. If the core breaches but the containment facility built around the core remains intact, the melted fuel can still be dealt with — typically entombed within specialized concrete — but the cost and difficulty of such containment increases exponentially.

However, the earthquake in Japan, in addition to damaging the ability of the control rods to regulate the fuel — and the reactor’s coolant system — appears to have damaged the containment facility, and the explosion almost certainly did. There have been reports of “white smoke,” perhaps burning concrete, coming from the scene of the explosion, indicating a containment breach and the almost certain escape of significant amounts of radiation.

At this point, events in Japan bear many similarities to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Reports indicate that up to 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) of the reactor fuel was exposed. The reactor fuel appears to have at least partially melted, and the subsequent explosion has shattered the walls and roof of the containment vessel — and likely the remaining useful parts of the control and coolant systems.

More details here




Lets pray that all this works out with minamal bad results.

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