Lessons learned from the earthquake in Japan

Lessons learned from the earthquake in Japan
EARTH WATCH
By GREG CLARYTHE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: July 20, 2007)
For me, the signature image from the Japan earthquake as it relates to our area was the president of Tokyo Electric Power bowing in apology to the mayor of Kashiwazaki for errors in reporting damage to the company's nuclear plant.
The Associated Press reported yesterday that radioactive material leaked undetected for days at the nuclear plant even as utility officials assured the public that damage was contained to the site, the company acknowledged.
Though government inspectors agreed that the amount of contamination was not a threat to public health, it was a team of inspectors who turned up some of the radioactive material that had gone undetected or unreported.
So far the news out of Japan has turned out to be better than it could have been, as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Wednesday night about the Consolidated Edison disaster a little closer to home.
But the Tokyo Electric apology underscores that no matter what the situation is, the public deserves to know what's really going on as soon as possible, especially where radioactive leaks are concerned.
And it begs the question of "lessons learned," as emergency officials call them, the insights we gain by looking at what happens to others.
When I blogged this week about the nuclear emergency on the other side of the world, Indian Point supporters wondered why "the usually levelheaded Mr. Clary" would even broach the subject of something similar happening here.
Thanks for the compliment, I guess, but it seems to me that talking about similarities and dissimilarities is a measure of the even-handedness necessary to help ensure that it doesn't happen here.
Lest anyone think it's wacky to wonder about something distant also happening in our backyards, consider Wednesday's explosion in New York City. Besides being a sobering flashback to Sept. 11, it was a vivid reminder that infrastructure disasters can happen anywhere and without warning.
First, let's look at the dissimilarities between Japan and here:
Japan is earthquake prone, less like New York than like California - where everybody is an earthquake expert of some sort, if only from personal experience.
The last significant rumble we've felt in this area was 1985, centered in Ardsley on the Dobbs Ferry fault, and that was an order of magnitude that would barely raise West Coast eyebrows.
Secondly, the radioactive water that spilled in Japan was in waste containers that were reportedly knocked over by the force of the earthquake.
Indian Point doesn't store its radioactive waste in such barrels, and when it goes to dry cask storage starting next year, the 100-ton canisters have been tested by dropping them from helicopters.
The Japanese utility's public information effort, despite the chaos, was what forced the aforementioned apology.
Since Indian Point got such a ration of public flak, along with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for delaying public announcement of a tritium leak at the site in September 2005, the plant has issued news releases on everything from unplanned reactor shutdowns to the discovery of the radioactive isotope strontium-90.
On the other side of the balance sheet are the similarities:
First and most simply, we're talking about radioactive waste. That's a big responsibility - in Japan or the Hudson Valley - and nobody will want to be the one bowing in apology if disaster strikes as quickly here as it did there.
Secondly, the idea that we won't have an earthquake that could cause extensive damage because we haven't in such a long time (1884 and 1737) doesn't hold water, at least at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Rockland, arguably the last word on earthquakes.
"The probability of that is low, but it's not zero," Leonardo Seeber, a seismologist at Lamont, said of a Japan-sized earthquake. "The earthquake issue should not be discarded as insignificant. It is usually given less attention than it deserves because of low probability, but it has high impact."
Indian Point has been built to withstand a higher-force earthquake than has been recorded in this area, but Seeber said that 300 years of history in the billion-year world of tectonic plate movement is too short a time span to project the future with much assurance.
"Even where geology doesn't alert you to earthquakes," Seeber said, "you can still have them."
Earth Watch runs every Friday. Send your ideas or comments to Greg Clary at gclary@lohud.com or 914-696-8566. For other environmental news, log on to the Journal News' blog - "The Nature of Things." It's available at http://nature.lohudblogs.com/