Friday, October 24, 2008

Japan Nuclear Earthquake - No Records

I don't think anybody will take this as hard as myself, but I just found out that no accelerometer records survive from the big Japanese earthquake. This is the one that has shut down a nuclear plant forever. They were over-written by subsequent earthquake activity.

Now I will never find out the PGV, which is the most important thing. As well, this pretty well confirms that in-plant accelerometers never work when called upon. No wonder they can't get this plant back up!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They had the darn recorders set wrong, apparently. You can choose to write until memory is full, or overwrite. They chose wrong...

Harold Asmis said...

I am really sad about that. I also want the PGV for that Japan earthquake that produced the 6g acceleration!

A good seismic record could get a plant up sooner. If you had a constraint on PGV you constrain the chances of internal 'hidden' damage.