The largest earthquake in Japan. Earthquake in Japan - the strongest in the history of the country (updated!)

Earthquakes in Japan: history and consequences of earthquakes, strength of character of the Japanese people, new earthquakes in Tokyo.

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A Japanese proverb says "Earthquakes, fires and father are the worst punishments." It is not surprising that earthquakes are in the first place in this list - Japan is located at the junction of the Asian and Pacific tectonic layers, the friction of which often causes tremors. Every year, the Japanese islands experience thousands of small shocks, and sometimes devastating earthquakes of monstrous magnitude occur. In March 2011, the whole world watched the catastrophe off the east coast of the island of Honshu - the earthquake that occurred in the Pacific Ocean was the strongest in the history of Japan. Coastal areas were badly damaged by a powerful tsunami, but the capital of the country, located 373 km from the epicenter, was not destroyed.

Earthquakes in Tokyo

It should be noted that modern Tokyo is one of the most earthquake-proof cities in the world. Residents of Tokyo know that their city stands at the intersection of four tectonic plates, so they practically do not pay attention to 3-4 minor earthquakes a year, which are very scary for visitors. Most skyscrapers are built with tremors in mind and are designed so that the energy of the shock is extinguished without destroying the building.

So, for example, the I-Land Tower skyscraper is installed on special shock-absorbing pillows, the second building of the Tokyo government turns around its axis during tremors, and some other high-rise buildings stand on special rails on which they travel from side to side (for a distance literally a few centimeters, of course).

Another earthquake in Japan?

Shocks of magnitude 1.5 (on average) occur daily in Tokyo and, thanks to earthquake-resistant structures, do not affect the flow of life in the city. However, if a really strong earthquake occurs, then all these measures will be useless. Unfortunately, such a threat is real. Moreover, the latest forecasts from the University of Tokyo indicate a 50% chance of a magnitude 7 earthquake in the capital area in the next 4 years. In this case, the damage can be colossal: tens of thousands of people will suffer and hundreds of thousands of homes will be destroyed. The economic damage of such an event for the whole of Japan, which has not yet had time to recover from the consequences of the 2011 disaster, should not be underestimated.

The next day

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There are many sad pages in the history of Tokyo, when the city literally disappeared from the face of the earth and was reborn from the ashes like a Phoenix bird. One such disaster was the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. Then Tokyo and 10 other nearby cities, including Yokohama and Yokosuka, remained in ruins. And two decades later, the newly built city was practically destroyed by a large-scale bombardment by American air forces, which left more than a million residents of Tokyo homeless on the night of March 9-10, 1945.

Strength of character and psychology of the Japanese people

Surprising is the speed with which the city was restored each time. Already in 1964, Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics - the whole world saw modern sports complexes built in a short time, a television tower - today's symbol of Tokyo, monorails. The secret here lies, apparently, in the national Japanese character. Perseverance, patience, a developed sense of duty - these are the main character traits of the Japanese.

In Japanese, there are many expressions for expressing duty, literally they are translated as follows: “it is impossible not to do it”, “it will be bad if you don’t do it”, etc. It is believed that an enterprise that has not been restored within three days after the collapse there is simply no future.

During the days of the 2011 disaster, the media often wrote that there was no looting in the disaster zones, that, despite the scale of what happened, there was no panic in society, just as there were no people distraught with despair. The courage and endurance of the Japanese people is what first catches the eye in the reports from Japan of those days. The Japanese, like no other, are able to overcome the difficulties that arise in connection with natural disasters and stoically accept the blows of fate. One can only hope that they will not have to prove this skill once again, and predictions that one of the next underground strikes will cause the Japanese islands to completely disappear from the world map will remain the plot for disaster films.

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Thundered Friday, March 11 off the east coast of Japan. As a result of this strongest earthquake in the history of the country, a tsunami 7 meters high hit the coast of Japan, sweeping away everything in its path - buildings, ships, cars, people ... The damage from the disaster is incredible.

(Total 51 photos)

1. The tsunami caused by the earthquake rushes to the Sendai airport in northern Japan on March 11. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

2. Surrounded by water, Sendai Airport in Miyagi Prefecture after a violent tsunami and one of the strongest earthquakes in the history of the country. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

3. Residents evacuated from the buildings of Tokyo in the central park of Shinjuku. Following Friday's quake, a tsunami warning extended to the entire Pacific Basin except for the US and Canada. (Reuters)

4. Planes and cars among the wreckage after the tsunami in Sendai. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

5. A tsunami sweeps away houses in the town of Natori on March 11. A series of aftershocks followed the quake, and a tsunami warning was issued that eventually hit cities along the east coast of Japan. (Reuters)

6. The tsunami that hit the residential area of ​​Natori in Miyagi Prefecture. (Reuters)

7. A tsunami forms near the port in Oarai, Ibaraki Prefecture. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

8. Seismologists on the background of the diagram showing the power of the earthquake in Japan. The picture was taken at the office of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. On Friday, March 11, Japan was hit by the largest earthquake in the history of the country. (David Moir/Reuters)

9. The map of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the full force of the tsunami caused by the earthquake. The state of emergency warning has extended to all countries of the Pacific Rim, except for the central part of the United States and Canada. Hawaii and Mexico fell under this provision. (NOAA/Tsunami Warning Center/)

10. This bathymetric data map shows the topography of the ocean floor. The image shows the entire Western Pacific Basin. Pay attention to how the Japanese islands rise sharply from the ocean. Other coastal Asian territories have much more gradual rises. Islands and mountain ranges in the ocean also influenced the nature and speed of movement. In the open ocean, tsunamis move at speeds up to 800 km/h. It is this momentum that creates such a destructive force when the waves crash on land. Tsunami waves traveled thousands of kilometers after the earthquake and hit the shores of Japan and Hawaii, but the latter managed to avoid damage. While the sirens were blaring and the authorities hastily evacuated the population in the low parts of the island, the waves changed their direction at the harbor of Waianae around 3:24. (NOAA/handout)

11. A house on fire near the Sendai airport after a powerful earthquake. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

12. Rescuer among the rubble and burning buildings after the strongest earthquake in the history of Japan. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

13. Approaching tsunami off the coast of the city of Natori in Miyagi Prefecture. The strongest earthquake in 140 years struck off the northeast coast of Japan on March 11, triggering an equally powerful tsunami that swept away everything in its path. (Reuters)

14. Earthquake-induced tsunami off the coast of Ivanum. (Kyodo News/Associated Press)

15. Fishing boats and cars after the tsunami in the port of Onahama in Fukushima Prefecture. (Fukushima Minpo/AFP/Getty Images)

16. Waves hit houses and cars in the town of Kesennuma in Miyagi Prefecture. (AFP/Getty Images)

17. Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kann (center) during tremors at a meeting of the upper house of parliament in Tokyo. (Toro Hanai/Reuters)

18. Broken windows in the building after the earthquake in Tokyo. (Reuters)

19. Rescuers rush to the building after reports of casualties in the financial district of Tokyo. After the earthquake, there were several tangible aftershocks and a powerful tsunami that hit the coastal cities of the country. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

20. Aerial view of the movement of the tsunami in the Naka River in Hitachinaka, Ibaraki Prefecture. (AFP/Getty Images)

21. Houses, cars and debris washed ashore by the tsunami in Kesennum. (Keichi Nakane/Associated Press/The Yomiuri Shimbun)

22. Houses swept away by the tsunami near the Sendai airport. (Reuters)

23. Passers-by hiding in blankets in a park in Yokohama after a strong earthquake. (Shuji Kajiyama/Associated Press)

24. A map-checking girl tries to find directions in a hotel lobby after subway and train traffic was suspended in Tokyo. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

25. Evacuated people after the earthquake in Tokyo. (Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg)

26. A shopper is looking for groceries on the almost empty shelves of a Tokyo store after people have sold out because they can't go home after the earthquake. (Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)

27. Hotel workers sit in horror at the entrance to the hotel in Tokyo. (Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press)

28. Left without transport, residents watch the news after the earthquake at the railway station in Tokyo. (Hiro Komae/Associated Press)

29. Residents evaluate the damage on the road in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture. (Fukushima Minpo/AFP/Getty Images)

30. Workers inspect a collapsed section of the road in Satta, Saitama Prefecture, after the earthquake. (Saitama Shimbun/Associated Press/Kyodo News)

31. An employee of the Shinagawa station directs the movement of passengers after the earthquake in Tokyo. (Hiro Komae/Associated Press)

32. Police put torches on the road in Honolulu. Thousands of people in Hawaii were evacuated from their homes after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake hit the coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami. (Lucy Pemoni/Getty Images)

33. Puipui Faletoy (background center) with sons Daniel (left) and Fletcher in a parking lot in Oahu, Hawaii. This site was prepared as a Red Cross center for possible victims of the tsunami. (Rebecca Breyer/Associated Press)

34. School students in Indian Ahmedabad pray for the victims of the earthquake in Japan. (Amit Dave/Reuters)

35. Passers-by on the destroyed road after the earthquake in Urauasu, Chiba Prefecture. (Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty Images)

36. Natori coast after a powerful tsunami. (Kyodo News)

37. Tsunami sweeps away houses in the city of Natori. (REUTERS/KYODO)

38. People look at the consequences of the tsunami in the port of Kesennuma in Miyagi Prefecture. (AP Photo/Keichi Nakane, The Yomiuri Shimbun)

39. Destroyed buildings after the tsunami in Iwaki. (REUTERS/KYODO)

A natural disaster led to the development of a severe accident at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima-1 (Fukushima Daiichi). During an earthquake, the external power supply was lost. The nuclear power plant did not provide for protection against the effects of a tsunami on the plant. As a result, the incoming wave flooded the diesel generators, which were located at each of the power units of the nuclear power plant below, in the part flooded with water. Diesel generators are designed to ensure the operation of the station's cooling system when the external power supply is turned off. After the tsunami at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, only one diesel generator remained in working order, with the help of which, in the absence of an external power supply, it was possible to provide cooling for two reactors and two pools of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). Therefore, no severe accident occurred at the fifth and sixth power units of the station. At other power units, after the failure of diesel generators, overheating and melting of the active zones occurred, a steam-zirconium reaction began (an exothermic chemical reaction between zirconium and water vapor, proceeding at high temperatures), as a result of which hydrogen was released. The accumulation of hydrogen in the rooms where the reactors were located led to a series of explosions that destroyed the buildings.

The consequence of this was the release of radioactivity into the environment, after which radioactive substances were in drinking water, vegetables, tea, meat and other products.

The total amount of iodine-131 and cesium-137 after the accident at the nuclear power plant amounted to 900 thousand terabecquerels, which does not exceed 20% of the emissions after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, which amounted to 5.2 million terabecquerels.

For six months after the accident, there was an increased content of radionuclides in food not only in Fukushima Prefecture itself, but also in areas remote from it.

Within a radius of up to 30 kilometers or more from the station, 146,000 residents were evacuated.

During the liquidation of the consequences of the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, almost 40% of the three thousand Japanese military, police and emergency personnel received an exposure dose exceeding the annual norm of one millisievert.

As a result, the east coast of the Japanese island of Honshu has shifted 2.5 meters to the east.

The number of dead and missing is 20 thousand people. About 93% of those who died were victims of a giant wave.

The damage that the giant tsunami caused to the Japanese economy, transport and infrastructure, not counting the costs associated with the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, amounted to 16.9 trillion yen (about $ 215 billion).

126 thousand buildings were completely or half, 260 thousand were partially damaged. The area of ​​land to be decontaminated was 13 thousand square kilometers, or 3% of the entire territory of Japan.

To investigate the facts related to the accident at the nuclear power plant, an independent expert commission was created, consisting of lawyers and nuclear scientists and not related to state structures. In preparing its report, the commission heard the testimonies and opinions of 300 people who had a direct bearing on the events of March 2011.

On February 28, 2012, the report of the commission concluded that the Japanese government, headed by Prime Minister Naoto Kan, acted inefficiently in eliminating the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant. The commission noted that the government of the country had to face a situation that was not taken into account by the previously developed rules of action in the event of an emergency. At the same time, ex-premier Naoto Kan (resigned on August 30, 2011) detailed management of the actions of the liquidators as useless and creating unnecessary delays in the process.

The Japanese government has approved a plan to eliminate the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, drawn up by Japanese experts and designed for 30 years. The complete liquidation of the accident, including the dismantling of the reactor equipment, will take place only after 40 years.

Emergency work at nuclear power plants by specialists from the Tokyo Energy Company (TEPCO). In autumn 2011, a protective dome was built over the first power unit, whose roof was destroyed as a result of an explosion, to prevent atmospheric pollution by radiation. In the fall of 2015, the dome was dismantled, which made it possible to begin the removal of the debris that had formed inside the power unit. In 2019, TERSO plans to start removing 392 spent nuclear fuel rods.

One of the unresolved problems at Fukushima-1 is the accumulation of radioactive water. A system has been created at the nuclear power plant that consistently purifies large volumes of water from various radioactive elements, primarily cesium and strontium 90.

However, the operating stations at the emergency station do not allow to clean the waste from the dangerous radioactive isotope - tritium. The liquid purified in this way is stored in ground tanks. Nearly a million cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste accumulated at Fukushima-1 at the end of 2015.

The amount of radioactive water at nuclear power plants daily due to the ingress of groundwater from a hill into the underground rooms of emergency units, where they mix with highly radioactive water. To partially solve this problem, since September 2015, the station operator began to scoop up groundwater before it enters the underground premises of power units, purify it from radionuclides and discharge it into the ocean.

Another acute problem is what is happening at the station of radioactive water. The largest post-accident leak at a nuclear power plant occurred in August 2013. Then there was a leak of 300 tons of radioactive water with a concentration of strontium of about 80 million becquerels per liter from a tank where radioactive water is stored after cooling the reactors. The Atomic Energy Regulatory Committee has assigned the leak a third level of danger on the INES scale.

To prevent the release of radioactive liquid into the ocean along the entire coastline of the station in 2012-2015, there was a steel protective wall, which has a length of about 780 meters and is buried in the soil by about 30 meters.

The Japanese Minister for Disaster Recovery said that the level of radiation background in the area up to 80 kilometers from the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant has decreased by an average of 65% over the five years after the accident, in large cities of Fukushima Prefecture it does not differ from the world's megacities . At the same time, he noted that the recovery in the coastal areas of Fukushima is very late, in fact, it has only just begun.

Five years after the accident, the evacuation regime and the ban on visiting were lifted from part of the territories that were exposed to radiation contamination, but the settlements closest to the station still remain uninhabitable.

After the tragedy at Fukushima-1, the UN on new standards for the construction of nuclear power plants and demanded transparency in their work. Nuclear power plants have undergone stress tests and safety checks around the world.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources

March 11, 2011 in northeast Japan, which was officially named the "Great East Japan Earthquake". An earthquake of this magnitude, according to scientists, occurs in this country no more than once every 600 years.

The height of the wave and the area that was under water surpassed all scientific calculations and the so-called computer simulations that simulate the development of emergency situations based on the embedded data.

Natural disaster led to the development of severe (Fukushima Daiichi). During an earthquake, the external power supply was lost. The nuclear power plant did not provide for protection against the effects of a tsunami on the plant. As a result, the incoming tsunami wave flooded the diesel generators, which were located at each of the power units of the nuclear power plant below, in the part flooded with water. Diesel generators are designed to ensure the operation of the station's cooling system when the external power supply is turned off. After the tsunami at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, only one diesel generator remained operational, with the help of which, in the absence of an external power supply, it was possible to provide cooling for two reactors and two pools of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). Therefore, no severe accident occurred at the fifth and sixth power units of the station. At other power units, after the failure of diesel generators, overheating and melting of the active zones occurred, a steam-zirconium reaction began (an exothermic chemical reaction between zirconium and water vapor, proceeding at high temperatures), as a result of which hydrogen was released. The accumulation of hydrogen in the rooms where the reactors were located led to a series of explosions that destroyed the buildings.

The consequence of this was the release of radioactivity into the environment, and then in drinking water, vegetables, tea, meat and other products.

The total emissions of iodine-131 and caesium-137 after the accident at a nuclear power plant, which does not exceed 20% of the emissions after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, which amounted to 5.2 million terabecquerels.

The first phase of this plan, which started in mid-December 2011 when the Japanese government announced the completion of the cold shutdown of the reactors, will take two years. During this time, the extraction of spent nuclear fuel from spent nuclear fuel pools will begin. In total, 3,108 rods are stored in these pools.

The second stage will last 10 years, its main task will be the extraction of nuclear fuel from the reactors themselves, which will end in 20-25 years. Complete dismantling of reactor equipment will take place only in 30-40 years.

In October 2012, for the first time after the accident, specialists from TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, were able to inspect the upper floors of the first power unit of the station destroyed by the explosion using four special cameras placed on a balloon. In addition to cameras, a dosimeter was also installed on the balloon. that the radiation level in the area of ​​the second floor of the building is 150 millisieverts per hour, and in the area of ​​the fifth floor - about 54 millisieverts per hour. This radiation background allows the decommissioning of the power unit, both with the help of robots and with the short-term involvement of people.

January 29, 2013, the Japanese government to restore the country and the areas affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami up to 25 trillion yen (about 277 billion dollars). The restoration budget, passed in July 2011, was expected to cost 19 trillion yen ($211 billion).

In addition to the immediate problems of the affected areas - the restoration of infrastructure, administrative buildings and schools, redevelopment and reorganization of settlements, it is planned to allocate funds to strengthen the earthquake resistance of public schools throughout the country and create more effective tsunami protection in coastal areas of Japan. In addition, the state intends to be more actively involved in the process of eliminating the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant and decontaminating the lands affected by radiation.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti