EARTHQUAKE FORECASTING UPDATE – Posted by EQF on March 19, 2011

This is an update on my earthquake forecasting efforts for people who are following those efforts. And there are some additional comments.

--- Latest Earthquake Advisory – This has now been cancelled. No major earthquakes appear to have occurred since several special groups of EM Signals were detected around March 15, 2011.

Either the signals were pointing to Japan aftershocks, or to volcano activity possibly in Japan, or perhaps to some future earthquake. In any case, for those types of signals the active time window that I am specifying during which I recommend that people watch for seismic activity is only about 5 days.

--- Earthquake Forecasting Program – The file generation update work for the computer program that is being used to generate my earthquake forecasting charts etc. on my Data.html Web page is done. Now I need to get the program running again and then generate current charts. With luck that will all get done before Monday, March 21, 2011.

--- Earthquake Research Bulletin Board – That effort is moving along fairly well. Most of the work should be done this weekend for the general computer code that runs the bulletin board. And the program should then work efficiently on both my PC and Web site. That will make updating posts at the site a lot faster and easier. Next, a Password reading feature needs to be added to the program. Then it will still be a while before the program is actually up and running at my Web site. Some decisions need to be made regarding where to store various files and directories.

COMMENTS REGARDING OTHER TOPICS

--- My earlier stated opinions regarding why governments can’t predict earthquakes are still my active opinions. This is about the most absurd international example of backwards science that I have ever seen in my entire career. Books could be written and probably will be regarding how ridiculous all of this is and the tragic toll in human lives that is resulting year after year from this bizarre situation. Scientists around the world should be ashamed that this type of thing could and does happen.

I do actually have several degrees in the physical sciences and many years of work as a professional analyst and even a number of years as a disaster mitigation professional. If you can’t tell that from the data and computer programs at my Web sites then I would have to propose that you don’t know very much about science. Or perhaps you simply don’t care.

Past humanitarian efforts have helped people around the world. One important and totally successful international humanitarian project not related to earthquakes got finished earlier this year. And two others not related to earthquakes are presently underway. High level U.S. and state government officials were formally notified about one of those two earlier this year.

--- Earthquakes Can Be Predicted – Statements that people keep making that they can’t be predicted are in my opinion totally out of touch with reality.

Unfortunately, one of the main problems is the fact that no single forecasting method appears to produce data that are sufficiently accurate and selective that that one method by itself can be used to predict every earthquake. Instead, data from multiple types of forecasting programs likely need to be combined to generate accurate and timely forecasts. And the various forecasting groups around the world seem to all be determined to just head off in whatever direction they choose. Getting them to work together to generate accurate forecasts appears to be virtually impossible at the moment. I am hoping that my new bulletin board will help with that.

--- Finally on this – Another earthquake researcher and I created the bulletin board systems that eventually evolved into this present EarthWaves board and the Yahoo EarthWaves board. So, people posting notes here could be regarded as my guests of a sort. I did that work so that some progress could be made in the area of earthquake forecasting. And if you don’t like my notes regarding what needs to be done with regard to moving forward then why don’t you just post on some other bulletin board or start your own?

However, I will also add that now that my new bulletin board is running all of those obnoxious comments are not causing as many problems. Some are almost even amusing they are so ridiculous. And, I haven’t seen any foul language used lately, a sign that some things are improving.

--- Nuclear Plant Problems In Japan – It took a lot of reading, but a picture eventually began to emerge regarding why they were having all of those problems.

*** Their nuclear plants need to have water constantly circulating to keep their reactors and old fuel rods cool even when the reactors are not running. However, when a reactor is not running it cannot generate any power to run the water pumps. So, the power plants use other active reactors at a plant or their electric lines to pull in power from other suppliers when a given reactor is not running.

It sounds like when the earthquake occurred, all of the nuclear reactors in Japan went into an inactive state. So, each plant where there could be as many as six reactors had to pull in power over the power lines from other sites such as oil fired power plants.

However, because of the earthquake and tsunami, some of those power lines were damaged or destroyed. And as a consequence, the water pumps in the nuclear plants had no power to run them and the water ran out for the fuel rods in both the reactors and the spent fuel ponds. Some of fuel rods melted. Others caught fire and released radiation. Hydrogen gas was generated. And it ignited and destroyed some of the structures and damaged others.

They have now reportedly run new power lines into at least one plant so that they can import power and get the water pumps running again.

*** So, why didn’t they spend the money necessary to have backup diesel generators at the plants to keep the water pumps running in case of an emergency???

You can probably answer that question fairly well yourself.

*** Why didn’t the regulatory agencies in Japan demand that the nuclear power companies purchase and maintain those backup generators in each plant?

That probably has to do with what I believe is probably the extraordinary amount of influence that Japan corporations such as power companies have on their government regulatory policies etc.

*** Here is the most absurd part of all. – The Japan government appears to me to have simply let the people running the power plants go off on their own during the emergency. The power plant people appear to me to have refused to provide government and emergency response personnel and the general public with critically needed information regarding what was happening in the plants. So, those hydrogen gas related fires etc. kept occurring and no one outside the plants knew what was taking place until they saw a given building suddenly disappear.

*** Will either the earthquake forecasting or nuclear power plant situations in Japan improve as a result of all of those things? – I would be surprised if they did.

*** Could that same nuclear power plant sequence of events take place here in the U.S.? – It is probably not as likely because I believe that U.S. plants store the spent fuel rods in a different manner. They might have better backup power plans for emergencies. And perhaps most important, the U.S. general public and Congress would probably not allow the power plant companies to just make some excuses after such a series of events and then simply continue with “business as usual.”

These are personal opinions.