Engineering calculations are fine, but they are just as good as the
starting data and assumptions, and here one thing has struck me as
odd.
On the same pacific shore just couple of hundred kilometers south of
Fukushima (50 km south of Tokyo) is Kamakura Daibutsu, the second
largest bronze statue of Buddha in Japan, about 13 meters high. It
was casted around 1300, and initially housed in a temple. Buddhist
temples are massively built, and they are rather immune to
earthquakes. However, in 1495 a tsunami wave wiped the temple off,
and the Daibutsu has been standing in open air since then.
The site of the Daibutsu is about one kilometer from the shoreline,
slightly uphill. It is in a valley like buddhist temples often are,
but the valley is not a very narrow one. A wave capable of destroying
the twentysomething meter high temple around the statue must have
been mighty indeed, at least similar than the one that hit Fukushima,
if not even larger.
Apparently this experience has not been taken as the starting point
in the calculations.
I really hope the "the 50" can finally get their beasts tamed; the
catastrophe is already bad enough as such without a nuclear accident
getting totally out of hands.
--Kari Kuutti
Universty of Oulu, Finland
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