The Small Earthquake that can bring Italy down

Two relatively small earthquakes have hit Italy in May, the first one hit on the 20th of May with a magnitude of 5.9 and caused 7 dead and thousands of citizens abandoning their homes, then on the 29th of May another earthquake struck in the same area with a magnitude of 5.8 adding another 17 dead to the toll and a further 8000 fleeing their home, this time most of the victims were workers caught by the earthquake while at work in factories and warehouses that were destroyed or badly damaged by the cumulative effect of the second strike.

It is estimated that more than 3000 enterprises and factories have been damaged by those two earthquakes, after the first earthquake on the 20th of May all factories were checked for damages and were granted green light to resume production, unfortunately workers died under the rubble of crumbling warehouses when the second earthquake hit at 9 am on the 29th.

This time of course production in the factories has been stopped undefinetely until all structures are thoroughly checked for damages which could take months.

If we check a seismic map of Italy this area was considered as a safe one not requiring special precautions when building since no earthquake had been registered in the last 400 years.

Historically there was an extremely long series of earthquakes that struck the region in the 16th century and that went on for many years with hundreds of medium-low intensity earthquakes but not further activity since then.

It is true that most probably even if the area was highlighted as prone to earthquakes little would have changed in building practices, even critical areas prone to major earthquakes in Italy are still building with no seismic fail safe; corruption, carelessness and lack of rules are all ingredients to buildings being raised cheap and fast; ready to fall and boost the reconstruction business when disaster strike.

After all Italians still remember the laughs of joy of corrupt builders when informed of the earthquake of Aquila in 2009, transcripts of their phone calls were intercepted by Police in relation to bribery charges to former Berlusconi government officials.

Reconstruction is a major business for Italian builders; it boosts revenue and margins and incentivates them to build as bad as possible in order to increase the base of possible candidates, furthermore since even in case of proved negligence not even a builder has ever gone to prison, there is not even fear of retribution. This morally repulsive and economically destructive (for the society not for the builders) attitude has been dominant for many decades and it can explain why the most recent buildings are the first to collapse during an earthquake even before centuries-old historical buildings.

News of the first strike briefly appaered on major international news while the second one was mostly unreported although it has the potential of accelerating the Italian economic crisis to new heights and consequently affect the entire eurozone economy.

Let us be clear if terrorists would decide to cripple the economy of Italy they would have chosen the same area; destroy or paralyze the industrial production of The Emilia Region is equivalent to destroying 1-2 % of the Italian GDP with a consequent spiralling of the crisis.

This area alone is the backbone of Italy's industrial system, firms producing almost everything from biomedical to mechanics to food processing, current damages are 2 billion euros but aside from this a prolonged production shutdown will cause immense stress to the Italian tax revenue with a consistent shortfall and an almost sure missing of the budget parameters requested by the European fiscal compact.

If earthquakes will go on for months or even years as geologists are predicting, those factories that were already deeply affected by the global economic crisis will be out of business causing a major blow to an already crumbling Italian economy.

Pity that a similar earthquake in places such as Japan or California would have been just a small inconvenience with little or no damages.

 

Fukushima disaster meltdown amid media silence

Radioactive xenon has been detected at the Fukushima nuclear plant, indicating that nuclear reactions are still occurring and that the worst and totally unreported nuclear disaster is going to haunt Japan for a long time.

BusinessWeek notes that the Japanese government has confirmed the existence of radioactive xenon:

The detection of xenon, which is associated with nuclear fission, was confirmed today by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, the country’s atomic regulator said.

NHK reports:

The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant says it found in the facility’s No.2 reactor radioactive substances that could have resulted from continuous nuclear fission.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, said on Wednesday that it detected xenon-133 and xenon-135 in gas taken from the reactor’s containment vessel on the previous day. The substances were reportedly in concentrations of 6 to more than 10 parts per million becquerels per cubic centimeter.

Xenon-135 was also detected in gas samples collected on Wednesday.

Radioactive xenon is produced during nuclear fission.

The half-life of xenon-133 is 5 days, and that of xenon-135 is 9 hours.

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The utility also says it wants to take a close look at the situation of the plant’s No.1 and 3 reactors.

Bloomberg writes:

“Given the signs, it’s certain that fission is occurring,” Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at Tepco who regularly talks to the media, told reporters in Tokyo today. There’s been no large-scale or sustained criticality and no increase in radiation, he said.

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It’s possible there are similar reactions occurring in the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors, the other cores damaged at the station, Matsumoto said.

“Melted fuel in the No. 2 reactor may have undergone a sustained process of nuclear fission or re-criticality,” Tetsuo Ito, the head of Kinki University’s Atomic Energy Research Institute, said by phone. “The nuclear fission should be containable by injecting boron into the reactor to absorb neutrons.”

The New York Times points out:

The unexpected bursts — something akin to flare-ups after a major fire … threaten to increase the amount of dangerous radioactive elements leaking from the complex and complicate cleanup efforts, raising startling questions about how much remains uncertain at the plant….

The plant’s owner admitted for the first time that fuel deep inside three stricken plants was probably continuing to experience bursts of fission.

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It is impossible to determine exactly what state the fuel is in, given that even an intact reactor can offer only limited gauges in the form of temperature, pressure readings and neutron flow, but not visual observation. That lack of clarity is one of the most resonant lessons of the Fukushima disaster, where those trying to guide the response and assess the danger operated by what amounted to educated guesswork.

In reactors of the design used at Fukushima, that chain reaction is normally stopped when the operator gives a command to insert control rods, which rise up from the bottom of the core and separate the fuel assemblies. But when the cores of three reactors at Fukushima melted, a large part of the fuel presumably formed a jumbled mass in the bottom of the vessel, and without a strict gridlike geometry, the control rods cannot be inserted. Some of the fuel has escaped the vessel, experts believe, and is in spaces underneath, where there is no way to use control rods to interrupt the flow of neutrons.

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The three reactors — together with spent fuel rods stored at a fourth damaged reactor — have been leaking radioactive material since the initial disaster, and new episodes of fission would only increase their dangers.

“Re-criticality would produce more harmful radioactive material, and because the reactors are damaged, there would be a danger of a leak,” said Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, whose prescient warnings about nuclear safety have won him respect in Japan.

Mr. Koide holds that the nuclear fuel at the three reactors probably melted through containments and into the ground, raising the possibility of contaminated groundwater. If much of the fuel was indeed in the ground early in the crisis, the “feed and bleed” strategy initially taken by Tokyo Electric — where workers pumped cooling water into the reactors, producing hundreds of tons of radioactive runoff — would have prevented fuel still in the reactor from boiling itself dry and melting, but would not have done anything to reduce danger from fuel already in the soil — if it got that far.

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Tokyo Electric does not deny the possibility that the fuel may have burrowed into the ground, but its officials say that “most” of the fuel likely remains within the reactor, albeit slumped at the bottom in a molten mass.

But even in their most dire assessments, some experts had not expected even bursts of re-criticality to occur, because it was unlikely that the fuel would melt in just the right way — and that another ingredient, water, would be present in just the right amounts — to allow for any nuclear reaction. If episodes of fission at Fukushima were confirmed, Mr. Koide said, “our entire understanding of nuclear safety would be turned on its head.”

Some nuclear experts have debated for months whether nuclear reactions might be continuing, either in the fuel inside the reactors, or in the spent fuel pools at the plant. They have pointed, for example, to the continued reports of short-lived iodine in the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 3.

A former nuclear engineer with three decades of experience at a major engineering firm … who has worked at all three nuclear power complexes operated by Tokyo Electric … said that tiny fuel pellets could have been carried to different parts of the plant, like the spaces under the reactor during attempts to vent them in the early days. That would explain several cases of lethally high radiation readings found outside the reactor cores.

“If the fuel is still inside the reactor core, that’s one thing,” he said. But if the fuel has been dispersed more widely, then we are far from any stable shutdown.”

Global nuclear risk map

The recent Fukushima Daiichi crisis has reopened the nuclear debate. Risk analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft has produced a global map of nuclear power stations, revealing the vulnerability to seismic, tsunami and storm surge risk of these facilities and the levels of energy security risks that countries face in the long-term.
The highest concentrations of seismic risk are concentrated around the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’. Japan clearly stands out as having the highest concentration of nuclear facilities in an active seismic area, however Taiwan, South Korea and mainland China also have nuclear plants in areas exposed to either seismic or tsunami and storm surge hazards.
Further risks exist in the potential destructive power of storm surges. The eastern seaboard of the United States and northern coastal Europe are exposed to storm surges from intense low pressure weather systems (either tropical cyclones or severe extra-tropical cyclones). There are nuclear power facilities located in each of these regions and construction of these facilities will need to account for the storm surge potential.