>Tsunami Victim: Dog Rescued After 3 Weeks Adrift [VIDEO]

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Check out this little tsunami victim, a dog that somehow stayed alive on a floating pile of rubble with a roof on top for three weeks before the Japanese Coast Guard rescued him.

If a dog can stay alive under these conditions, couldn’t a human? That’s an important question, because there are still 18,000 tsunami and earthquake victims missing in Japan, with little hope for their survival.

How did this dog stay alive? While dogs and humans can survive for three weeks without food, they can’t go longer than a couple of days without water. Floating in the ocean off the coast of Japan, the dog was surrounded by salt water, but like a human in the same situation, that wouldn’t have kept him alive — according to the Department of Energy’s Ask a Scientist website:

Humans can’t drink salt water because the kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking salt water, you have to urinate more water than you drank, so you die of dehydration.

It must have been a rainy three weeks aboard this ragtag vessel, where small collected pools of fresh water must have kept the dog alive.

It’s probably too late for more survivors to be found, but it’s not too late for you to help earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan. Here’s how.

>Will earthquake mean a third lost decade for Japan?

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In 1990, Japan was the economic paradigm. Growth was outpacing every other leading country. Its car and electronics industries put the rest of the world to shame.
Even its banks were poised for domination. Economists were confidently predicting that in just 10 years, Japan would be vying with the US to become the world’s largest economy.
Roll the clock forward two decades and the picture could hardly be more different. Japan’s economy is one third the size of America’s and has been relegated to third spot behind China. Far from growing at record pace, it managed a woeful average of 1pc a year in the 1990s and no better in the 2000s. So began Japan’s “lost decade”, which swiftly became two. And there has been precious little evidence that a third would be averted.
Last week’s earthquake and tsunami struck after the slow devastation that has seen Japan’s economy derailed. In 1992, the debt-fuelled asset bubble burst – crippling the banks.
Rather than repair their balance sheets, policymakers allowed the banks to limp on. Credit was drained from the economy, just as its companies were challenged by low-cost Asian rivals.
Japan’s dependence on exports, for so long the secret of its success, became its Achilles heel as demand at home failed to pick up the slack. With slow growth came the peril of deflation, as falling prices deterred investment and increased the relative cost of borrowing.
The government’s debt burden is now more than twice Japan’s output and the country remains locked in a deflationary spiral. Making the crisis critical is its demographic burden. By 2050, the population is forecast to have fallen from 127m to just over 100m – leaving an economy with spiralling health and pension costs serviced by a shrinking working population.
Japan’s worst recorded earthquake will only add to its problems. Credit Suisse estimates the disaster will cost $171bn (£105bn) in economic losses, 3pc of GDP.
Although few predict a collapse back into recession, Royal Bank of Scotland economists warned that power shortages may “heavily damage business activities”, a period of “national mourning” would deter consumption, stock markets could fall and yields on government debt would rise, making the reconstruction programme more expensive.
The effect on the economy is expected to be largely similar to the Kobe earthquake of 1995, though Credit Suisse thinks it will be less than half as expensive as the damage has been to less economically significant regions.
In 1995, no one thought the downturn in Japan’s fortunes would be anything other than temporary but the underlying trend proved to be stronger than any force of nature. In the immediate aftermath of Kobe, growth slumped but rebounded sharply afterwards as the rebuilding programme provided an effective fiscal stimulus. Once back on track, the economy then continued its slow decline.
RBS predicts a similar path this time, downgrading its growth forecasts for the first half of the year but expecting “upward pressure [in the second half] on increased public investments in reconstruction”. Stephen King, HSBC’s chief economist, also noted: “It is hard to see the underlying picture changing.”
There is more reason to be worried now, however. Takuji Okubo, chief economist at Société Générale in Tokyo, said the economy’s weakened state means the authorities will be able to afford only a third of the 3 trillion yen (£22bn) emergency budget set aside after Kobe. Unlike then, the government is already considering raising its 5pc consumption tax.
Other surprise developments may play out. Japan’s public debt is 98pc domestically funded. Further borrowings to pay for the relief effort are likely to be “in the spirit of a war loan”, Mr King said, as the public and companies repatriate cash to rebuild the nation. Money is already flowing back to Japan, putting pressure on the yen.
A higher yen would be damaging for the nation’s exporters, which could negatively impact the economy. The Bank of Japan has already taken measures to offset those forces, doubling its “money printing” programme to 10 trillion yen.
Optimists hope the crisis will reinvigorate the country, giving policymakers cover for necessary reforms. The Kobe experience, and the Niigata earthquake of 2007, offer little support for the theory. More likely is that the Sendai disaster will derail efforts to build on last year, when Japan produced a rare positive record – the fastest economic growth of the G7 industrialised nations.

>Earthquakes 101: How they happen

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The horrifying images of destruction out of Japan make the scope of Friday’s disaster all too clear. A magnitude 8.9 earthquake and resulting tsunami left devastating damage.
Why and how do such temblors happen?
It all has to do with plates that make up the Earth’s crust moving around, seismologist James Gaherty, a Lamont associate research professor at Columbia University explained to “Early Show on Saturday Morning” co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis.
“Most earthquakes occur on the boundaries of the very large tectonic plates that make up the outer rigid crust of the earth,” Gaherty said. “These plates are all shifting around relative to each other, in many places moving fairly rapidly, inches per year relative to each other, and they push against each other, some places going underneath, other places rubbing past each other. So, the western part of the Pacific Ocean, for example, the ‘Ring of Fire’ (earthquake hotbed along the Pacific Rim) — that all takes place on these tectonic boundaries. That’s where we get these earthquakes.
“In this part of Japan, basically, the Pacific Plate is trying to move underneath the Earth’s crust where Japan sits. … It’s moving down underneath, constantly building up pressure as it tries to move underneath and, in this case, it releases that pressure, and these very large earthquakes occur in a very large area along the entire length of the coastline of Japan … on the order of 200 miles along the length and 100 miles offshore, all sliding on one large fault at the same time.”
The pace of mega-quakes seems to be picking up, Gaherty continued. “These kinds of events are very well-understood in Japan. The fact that they have large events on the order of magnitude 8 is something they’ve had many times over their history. This one is a little bit unusual in that we’re not necessarily expecting something quite as large as this. These mega-quakes, more like a magnitude 9, are very rare, even over geologic history looking back. We have a hard time finding evidence of them. We’ve observed now three, really, in the last six years, since Sumatra. So we seem to be in a period of very active occurrence of these. But how the really big quakes develop is something that we’re really trying to understand.”
Why such an active period now? “It’s probably just random statistics. … There were events in 1960, 1964, that are about this magnitude. But then, there was kind of a quiet period of about 40 years. We’ve now entered a period where this kind of activity has (increased) again.”
The Ring of Fire is as active as it is, Gaherty said, due to “those tectonic plates and how they’re moving relative to each other. The Pacific Plate happens to be a large, coherent plate that’s moving at a fairly high velocity relative to the other plates around it. So it’s continually interacting with it. On the Western side of that system, in Japan … it’s pushing underneath. Those are the kind of earthquakes that tend to be the largest, and also tend to be the kind of earthquakes that are pushing, moving material up and down that cause tsunamis. That’s one of the reasons why it’s such a destructive part of the system.”
And the Earth’s crust isn’t finished with Japan this time around, either. “There are going to continue to be large aftershocks of this earthquake,” Gaherty said. “We would expect, for typically a rule of thumb, for the largest aftershock after a big earthquake like this, it’s about one magnitude unit smaller. A magnitude 8 earthquake can still cause a significant tsunami. Certainly not of the devastating level of this one. But still something to keep an eye on.
“These things propagate out very efficiently from the earthquake. … The energy travels very efficiently in the water, and so we do tend to see these spread out over the entire basin of the Pacific, and they can affect regions very far from the event.”

>Damage at two Japan nuclear plants prompts evacuations

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After the tsunami damages the cooling systems at five reactors in northeastern Japan, officials take steps to avert the possibility of a meltdown.
Japanese officials struggled Saturday to avert the possibility of a meltdown at two major nuclear power plants whose emergency cooling systems were damaged by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami.
Emergency officials ordered the evacuation Saturday of all civilians within a six-mile radius of the Fukushima No. 1 plant, which is about 150 miles northeast of Tokyo, after its normal backup cooling systems failed and it became necessary to release radioactive steam to relieve pressure that could cause an explosion.
Several hours later, authorities revealed that cooling systems at the Fukushima No. 2 plant, a few miles south, had also failed, and evacuations were ordered around that plant as well.
In all, five reactors at the two plants were damaged.
Radiation levels in the control room at Fukushima No. 1 were reported to be as high as 1,000 times normal, while levels outside the plant were said to be about eight to nine times normal, indicating some leakage of radiation had already occurred.
Shaking from the magnitude-8.9 earthquake triggered an automatic safety procedure at 11 of Japan’s 55 commercial nuclear reactors. At those plants, control rods were plunged into the cores, where the radioactive fuel rods are kept, to bring electricity production to a halt.
But the cores continued to produce massive amounts of heat that needed to be cooled.
The cooling system must continually pump water from a large pond that surrounds the core through a set of towers that keep the water at a safe temperature. Otherwise, the water will boil off, the fuel rods will melt, and there is a possibility that radioactive material will escape from the reactor’s containment dome — a so-called meltdown.
“If they can’t get adequate cooling to the core, it could be a Three Mile Island or worse,” said nuclear physicist Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is working to improve the safety of nuclear power. The loss of coolant at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania for only 30 minutes led to a 50% meltdown of the core in that 1979 accident.
The pumps normally obtain electricity from the grid. But the Fukushima prefecture’s grid was badly damaged by the tsunami, cutting power needed to cool the fuel rods. Though reactors have diesel emergency generators to provide backup electricity, those at Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 also were apparently damaged by the tsunami.
The reactors have backup batteries, and operators used them to restore the flow of coolant at the No. 1 plant. But those batteries have a life of no more than about eight hours, experts said.
Officials of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Saturday they had obtained more batteries and may use military helicopters to fly them to the site.
Authorities said that pressure had already built up inside the containment building at the No. 1 plant to about 50% above normal and that they had begun venting radioactive gas into the atmosphere, although they said there was no danger from the release.
“Rising containment pressure is not a good sign that they have things under control,” Lyman said. “We need to get better information from the Japanese about what is going on, but the few things that are coming out are very worrisome.”
The reactors at the two plants use some of the oldest nuclear technology, dating to the 1960s. “These first-generation boiling-water reactors have the least margin of safety of any reactor design,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a Princeton University physicist and former White House advisor.
Without electrical power to circulate water inside the core, the cooling water would begin to boil off, he said.
But despite the dangers, some experts said the nuclear plant operators should be able to add new cooling water and keep the core fully immersed while it cools down.
“It doesn’t sound like we are in meltdown mode,” Von Hippel said.
Jim Walsh of MIT’s Center of International Studies agreed that these reactors will probably be OK. But there are other facilities in Japan that produce enriched fuel for reactors and manage highly radioactive waste, some of which are in remote areas in the north, “and no one has said ‘boo’ about them,” he said. “It’s not inconceivable that some of them have had problems. The story may continue to unfold in the next few weeks.”
Long before the problems created by the tsunami, a series of serious incidents in Japan’s ambitious civilian nuclear power industry over the last decade have raised concerns about its attention to safety and the role of government regulators.
The history of Japan’s nuclear incidents includes a pattern of problems being kept secret or passed off as far less serious than they actually were.
In 2007, several electric utilities admitted covering up accidents, including one that experienced an uncontrolled nuclear reaction inside a reactor while it was shut down for maintenance. The same year, Tokyo Electric Power Co. — which operates the two Fukushima plants — apologized for a radiation leak caused by an earthquake at a plant that had not been built to withstand a quake of that magnitude.
In 2004, five workers at a nuclear plant in western Japan were killed when a corroded pipe burst and sprayed them with boiling water and steam, revealing flaws in safety procedures.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Friday that American nuclear reactors are not vulnerable to the sequence of events that overtook the Japanese reactors because regulations here take into account the specific vulnerabilities at each plant under the most extreme conditions possible.
In the case of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, operated by Edison International in northwestern San Diego County, a 30-foot seawall protects the plant and its emergency generators from the maximum theoretical tsunami that could hit the site, said regulatory commission spokesman Scott Burnell.
Edison International spokesman Chris Abel said the seawall is just one of several redundant systems meant to ensure power for an orderly shutdown in the event of an emergency.
In Japan, the shutdown of the 11 nuclear reactors affects perhaps 8% of the country’s electrical generating capacity. Most of those plants should be able to go back on line within a few days, though it may be longer before repairs can be made to damaged power lines that carry electricity from the plants to consumers.