defense facility outside of japan. the other thing is researchers spend a lot of time interacting with our colleagues across the world to improve construction. sean: can can you tell us what we are looking at at in these videos? i assume a mock-up of a quake and structural issues, correct? correct. a shaking table that simulates an earthquake load. that causes the columns to swayback and forth. in one case they are older buildings that are looked at. sean: okay. as far as it relates to when you have a full scale 8.9 in the case of yeah, i ll go to you on this, jay, i ll go to you on this. these facilities were prepared for an 8.2 quake. go ahead.
there s huge defense and depth on these plans. they were designed to operate through an 8.2 quake. they survived this earthquake the tsunami took out some of the back-up systems. the ultimate back of up has been the reactor containment which are working. seawater option was built into the plant. this was not anticipated. it is something you don t want to do. you don t want to put seawater into the facility. but it was planned as an ultimate back-up if you needed it and it is working. sean: we hearing meltdown. when we talk about nuclear anything, that i assume people s minds go towards nuclear explosion of some kind. there s no question about that sean. a meltdown is basically a nuclear engineering term which simply means that the heat from the radioactive decay is
digging trenches across faults that gives us an idea on average how often quakes occur, which is typically every several hundred years. in southern california on the san andreas fall it has been 300 years since the last big quake. sean: you are saying california on the san andreas fault is due, just based on southern california is overdue. well on average there s a major about every 150 years and it has been 300 years since the last one. sean: does that increase the likelihood it would be that much more devastating request many that s correct. the longer we go between earthquakes the more stress builds up and the cans of a larger quake and the chance of a larger quake is very real. sean: what magnitude are we talking about? if the whole fault breaks
people plus left homeless and dazed by the quake and tsunami. how are relief efforts going? shepard: frankly, they are not going as well as we could hope. there are believed to be 500,000 who are homeless. the problem is getting food and water to them. potable water and food and fuel. you mentioned thousands of bodies that have washed ashore. that happened, the tsunami wave as gruesome as it is to think about, 27 feet or so washed in. then [ inaudible ] sean: i think we just lost shepard smith who was ginning us from tokyo. we ll get back to him with our own adam housley in just a moment. we got shep back, welcome back. shepard: sorry sean kind of a windy morning here. it is believed that as that
using techniques not in the playbooks. fire trucks to pump seawater into the reactor which is going to destroy the reactor. has never been contemplated. it is not working well either which is why we are having sean: there s always a possibility margaret, let me bring you in. by all accounts, they even built this facility, built decades ago to withstand an 8.2 quake. there is, as i understand it a ton of redundancy and pretexts they put in place even and protections they put in place even envisioning a worst-case scenario. first, on behalf of the american nuclear society our hearts go out to what is happening in japan and the quake and the tsunami and the devastation. i especially want to congratulate and honor the workers at the plants whose families and homes have been lost, yet they ve stayed on-the-job. that said, you are right.