Net Sees Earthquake Damage, Routes Around It

davidwr writes "Japanese internet outages mostly healed themselves within hours. While some cables remain out, most computers that lost connectivity have it again. From James Cowie's blog: 'The engineers who built Japan's Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning." Reader Spy Handler points out another article about how redundancy and good planning are preventing disaster at Japan's troubled nuclear reactors, despite media-fueled speculation and panic to the contrary.

Comments

Damage has been done, hello oil and coal...

[mlts]

Even though the Japanese reactors did their job to contain against a meltdown, it looks like nuclear power progress will be set back another 20-30 years due to the fearmongers pointing to this.

The loss of life can't be ignored. For people that were not affected by loved ones killed by it, the rest of the world will also be feeling this disaster in Japan for generations to come. Especially the fact that the anti-nuke crowd now possesses another "kill point" to keep nuclear power dead. This essentially clinches the fact that our kids and grandkids will still be having their lights powered by coal, and their cars by oil.

Re:Damage has been done, hello oil and coal...

[macshit]

I wasn't aware that Japan had nuclear reactors, it was a really dumb idea for them to do. In the US the few nuclear reactors we have are designed so that if power is lost to the core the control rods fall into the core and the fuel rods fall out and the reaction stops. The problem is that if a reactor like that suffers and earthquake you can end up in a position where the rods get jammed and the assurance of an automatic shutdown disappears.

From what I've gathered it's a bit of a moot point as these reactors were apparently built upside down such that they have to have constant power to keep the reactor offline.

Note that the Japanese reactors at Fukushima which are currently melting down are a U.S. (General Electric) design, and the oldest (1 and 2) were actually built by GE... This design is apparently quite common in the U.S. as well.