{"id":5309,"date":"2011-03-19T14:06:29","date_gmt":"2011-03-19T18:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/?p=5309"},"modified":"2011-03-19T14:09:05","modified_gmt":"2011-03-19T18:09:05","slug":"margin-of-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/2011\/03\/19\/margin-of-error\/","title":{"rendered":"Margin of Error"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
Trojan Nuclear Plant from the U.S. National Archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The New York Times article “Nuclear Agency Tells a Concerned Congress That U.S. Industry Remains Safe<\/a>” had a curious statement from Gregory Jaczko, of the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in front of Congress.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153U.S. nuclear facilities remain safe,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Jaczko\u00c2\u00a0told two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees<\/a>, which had originally planned to consider his agency\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s budget for the coming fiscal year at the hearing. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We will continue to work to maintain that level of protection.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0Reactors are designed to meet the challenges of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the most severe natural phenomena historically reported,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. For earthquakes, that means any that occur within 200 miles of the reactor, and a margin of error, he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jaczko sounds similar to the planning the Japanese did. Earlier I read a Wired Science article, Japan Quake Epicenter Was in Unexpected Location<\/a>, which said the Japanese looked to patterns in the past to determine the future. Therefore they expected a strong earthquake in the south where the Phillipine plate is overdue for a massive event.<\/p>\n

Japan has been expecting and preparing for the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153big one\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for more than 30 years. But the magnitude-9.0 temblor that struck March 11 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fourth biggest quake since 1900 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the catastrophe the island nation had in mind. The epicenter of the quake was about 80 miles east of the city of Sendai, in a strip of ocean crust previously thought unlikely to be capable of unleashing such energy.\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u0153This area has a long history of earthquakes, but [the Sendai earthquake] doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fit the pattern,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Harold Tobin, a marine geophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The expectation was high for a 7.5, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a hundred times smaller than a 9.0.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It sounds to me like, if in the United States the most powerful earthquake in the area of a nuclear reactor was a 7.5 magnitude event<\/a>, then a 9.0 could surprise those running it. Given a 9.0 is a hundred times more powerful and a broken reactor so dangerous, I would hope the preparedness is for the larger even where seemingly unlikely.<\/p>\n

The Haiti quake was “expected<\/a>“. However the Chilean, both New Zealand, and the Sendai earthquakes have all sounded unexpected. Of course, living on the Ring of Fire<\/a>, how can any earthquake be unexpected?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times article “Nuclear Agency Tells a Concerned Congress That U.S. Industry Remains Safe” had a curious statement from Gregory Jaczko, of the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in front of Congress. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153U.S. nuclear facilities remain safe,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Mr. Jaczko\u00c2\u00a0told two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees, which had originally planned to consider his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1203,999],"tags":[1946,1947,1945,1949,1948,1944],"class_list":["post-5309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astro-climate-geo","category-build-engineering","tag-geophysicist","tag-gregory-jaczko","tag-history-of-earthquakes","tag-nuclear-reactor","tag-nuclear-regulatory-commission","tag-sendai-earthquake"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1rUBW-1nD","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}