PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD New supercomputer simulations of 21st century-sized cataclysms should be run to see if sea walls are high enough to protect cities and important assets like nuclear reactors from tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters.
The sea wall protecting the nuclear reactors at Fukushima in Japanese was breached by a recent tsunami because its height was calculated with 1960s geology, according to Mary Olson, a scientist at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. If modern supercomputer simulations were rerun, then the current nuclear disaster could have been averted with more technologically advanced sea walls.
"It survived the earthquake—it was the tsunami beaching the sea wall that caused all the damage," said Olson. "The Fukushima Power Plant was built around 40 years ago, when plate tectonics was a radical idea. As we learned more about what causes large earthquakes, a re-evaluation was never done—if it had been then they would have seen that the sea wall was too low."
According to Olsen, similar sites around the world need to re-evaluate the height of their sea walls as well as their earthquake preparedness using the latest tectonic-plate simulations.
Japanese company Okumura used extensive supercomputer simulations to design its Metallic Roller Bearing, which allows the ground to shake back and forth under a building without transferring that energy upward. (Source: Okumura Corp.)
Japan already leads the world in earthquake preparedness, which was mostly successful in protecting its large buildings. Tough building codes in Japan require that large structures take advantage of the latest earthquake mitigation technologies. After supercomputer simulations, a prototype is first tested on a building-sized "shake table," such as the E-Defense test center in Miki, Japan. The final test, however, has always been the hundreds of real earthquakes that Japan has every year.
A two-pronged approach mitigates earthquake damage in Japan. The first method dissipates wave energy inside a buildings structure by using especially engineered dampers. The second method isolates the structure from the seismic waves by mounting the entire building on two-dimensional roller bearings, effectively letting the ground shake back and forth under the building without transferring that energy upward into it.
Now Japan needs to apply its engineering expertise to tsunami protection, particularly at its remaining 49 nuclear reactors around the country. Each should be re-evaluated with up-to-date supercomputer simulations to see if their protection from tectonic-plate sized earthquakes and the resulting tsunamis is adequate, according to Olson.
Smarter cities around the world will hopefully take the disaster in Japan as a wake-up call to update their own tsunami assessments using modern supercomputer simulations that validate whether their sea wall design is adequate. The Katrina disaster in New Orleans demonstrated that if the United States had replaced its antiquated earthen levies, it could have averted the disaster caused by that hurricane. New levies are finally being built to protect New Orleans, but every city worldwide should insist that its tsunami, earthquake, hurricane and other natural disaster preparedness is brought up to 21st century standards.
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