Dude, your avatar totally sells that post.
Still haven't heard from some friends in the Sendai area, and I'm starting to really worry about that.
In reality the British designs and the Canadian designs are far more fault tolerant than American designs... but that's a paper to be written another day.
Yeah...the 1700 earthquake was really, really bad.
I'm hoping this doesn't ripple all the way to the New Madrid. Talk about an area totally unprepared to handle an earthquake as strong as what's hit it in the past...
I was thinking about New Madrid, too. If a quake the magnitude of Japan's hit, it would be bye-bye St. Louis, Little Rock, Paducah KY, and there would likely be damage as far away as Chicago.
Fascinating and extraordinarily helpful to have some clearly experienced input! Thank you for reg'ing and posting.
There is a nuclear plant near I live. Being a fireman I was given basic Nuclear Emergency Response training and later took more advanced training as it was offered. I am one of 4 people in the tri-county area authorized to enter the containment structure to perform man-down rescues. The plant has it's own team but they have to have a backup team in place... that's us.
On top of that I also took the Media Relations training when it was offered. They trained us to answer any questions that the media might ask and more importantly direct people to sources of information.
Then I have a father and two uncles who have worked in the nuclear industry... and they were Nuclear Navy before that... my mother worked at this plant as Health-Physics lab-worker until she had us kids.
...This kind of stuff is/was topical conversation around our table. I may not be a nuclear-engineer or even work there but I have learned enough over the last decade and a half to help alleviate some of the mystery and fear about these power plants.
Outside of experiments done in the 1950s there has never been a large-scale emergency at a BWR plant anywhere in the world. They have the proven track-record in that regard. Three Mile Island was PWR... that was a loss-of-coolant accident that caused a parital melt down.
Chernobyl had traits of both designs.
Most incidents occur at PWR plants because of the complexity of the system. British AGR plants have experienced isolated fuel melting due to refueling mishaps (Chaplecross)... and someone filled Hunterston Station with seawater by accident.
So as serious as the situation is at Fukshima 1 it is also a fascinating situation as this is the first large-scale failure of a BWR.
Thank goodness I have plenty of popcorn!
Now if they asked you to bring them some snapshots from inside the plant, maybe you could take offense at that. 
I wholeheartedly second that, Goji. And three cheers for helping the children get through this terrible event. I've never been in an earthquake, but I'm certain I would have been one of the criers.
