TEPCO Educates The NAS

The U.S.'s National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is studying the Fukushima accident in order to reach conclusions on improving U.S. nuclear power plant safety.  A delegation from TEPCO and from the U.S.'s Institute for Nuclear Power Operations gave the NAS committee a briefing yesterday which is summarized here.


You can watch videos of the briefings here.

Related to my last two posts on measurement problems is the fact that earthquakes are very difficult to predict.  We can easily measure them once they do occur, using seismographs, but what we really want to measure is the buildup of stress in the lithosphere in order to predict where the next quake is likely to occur.  We don't currently have a means to measure those stresses.

Here is a seismograph feed from the U.S. Geological Survey.