Nuclear Disaster In Japan Could Have Been Mitigated, Say Industry Insiders 204
Hugh Pickens writes "Some insiders from Japan's tightly knit nuclear industry have stepped forward to say that Tepco and regulators had for years ignored warnings of the possibility of a larger-than-expected tsunami in northeastern Japan, and thus failed to take adequate countermeasures, such as raising wave walls or placing backup generators on higher ground. 'March 11 exposed the true nature of Japan's postwar system, that it is led by bureaucrats who stand on the side of industry, not the people,' says Shigeaki Koga, a former director of industrial policy at the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry. Eight years ago, as a member of an influential cabinet office committee on offshore earthquakes in northeastern Japan, Kunihiko Shimazaki, professor emeritus of seismology at the University of Tokyo, warned that Fukushima's coast was vulnerable to tsunamis more than twice as tall as the forecasts of up to 17 feet put forth by regulators and Tepco, but government bureaucrats running the committee moved quickly to exclude his views from debate as too speculative and 'pending further research.' Then in 2008, Tepco's own engineers made three separate sets of calculations that showed Fukushima Daiichi could be hit by tsunamis as high as 50 feet. 'They completely ignored me in order to save Tepco money,' says Shimazaki."
Re:But so could anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Any disaster could be averted with extra millions and millions spent on it, it's just balancing risk and reward.
Come on, don't be dense. The claim here is precisely that they weren't balancing risk and reward - they were overweighting their own immediate gains and underweighting the future risks, which were mostly to other people.
Re:Crank or coverup (Score:5, Insightful)
Universal flaw in The System (Score:5, Insightful)
true nature of Japan's postwar system, that it is led by bureaucrats who stand on the side of industry
Not just in Japan, but everywhere. Bureaucrats and politicians are in the deep pockets of corporations and don't give a rancid wet fart about "The People" - then they spew so much bullshit at The People to get elected.
As you could see in Onagawa and Fukushima Daini (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course the disaster could have been mitigated, just by proper placing of emergency generators and having enough of them. 2 per reactor is just not enough, having one of them right next to the coast and the other in the basement in a tsunami-prone area is even worse so.
Common cause failure has been discussed for decades. Those discussions weren't heeded in Fukushima Daiichi, they were in other countries and they were in the other two power plants.
Re:But so could anything (Score:5, Insightful)
In economic terms it is called "externalizing". Shifting risk to others is the hallmark of capitalist economies. The same is true of any enterprise. If you have a risk, find a way to shift the cost onto someone else. The public is always a good place to shift the risk to. If you get caught with your pants down it is easy enough to declare bankruptcy and emerge a "new" entity to continue shifting the risk. These plants aren't going anywhere and given today's energy demands will be up and running in no time.
Re:Crank or coverup (Score:5, Insightful)
After the fact there's no shortage of people telling you they told you so.
But if somebody tells me a grand total of 13 different backup-generators dotted around the site and five battery-backups might all simultaneously fail due to various reasons he would have an extreremly hard time convincing me.
Engineer or not, if his story depends on assuming a whole chain of unlikely events I'm probably not going to believe him. It's just human nature.
Re:Universal flaw in The System (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just in Japan, but everywhere. Bureaucrats and politicians are in the deep pockets of corporations and don't give a rancid wet fart about "The People" - then they spew so much bullshit at The People to get elected.
Capitalism crushes everything in its path, including democracy and common sense.
Recovering Regulator Comments (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Crank or coverup (Score:5, Insightful)
But if somebody tells me a grand total of 13 different backup-generators dotted around the site and five battery-backups might all simultaneously fail due to various reasons he would have an extreremly hard time convincing me.
Replace "dotted around the site" with "all the in the same basement". And the depletion of all battery backups again was not independent, with a direct causual link both to the upstream generator failure, as well as the disruption to roads and infrastructure which delayed the arrival of additional resources.
http://www.blog.voximate.com/blog/article/1058/failover-backup-systems-redundant/ [voximate.com]
"The risk analysis may calculate the risk of each backup generator failing and then estimate the risk of all of them failing simultaneously by multiplying each generator’s risk of failure together, concluding that the risk of them all failing simultaneously is statistically very, very low. However, such an analysis assumes that the backup generators are all independent systems. As this crisis has demonstrated, the backup generators were NOT independent of each other. Because they were all in the same coast-side, sea level location, they all shared the common vulnerability of being shut down simultaneously by the same tsunami. Therefore, the actual risk of them all failing simultaneously due to a tsunami was equal to the risk of a single one of them failing due to a tsunami. Since all thirteen backup generators in actual fact failed when hit by this tsunami, the risk that each backup generator would fail when hit by a tsunami of this size appears to have been 100%."
Re:Balancing risk vs. reward indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop being afraid of nuclear.
Deaths per terawatt-hour for all energy sources [nextbigfuture.com]
I live in the Netherlands. We have two nuclear powerplants here, plus a bunch of them close enough in Belgium and Germany. If one of these plants has a serious accident, it could harm millions of people. And even if it isn't a medical problem, as we might be able to move all those people to safer places, the socio-economic problems will be enormous, and the problems we're facing with Greece now will be small compared to this. Look at Japan, where they considered evacuating Tokyo last year. They didn't make this public until recently, but think about that. What if they had to leave Tokyo and stay out for the next 50 years?
There is no other energy source that can create problems on such scale in such a short time.
Re:Balancing risk vs. reward indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
consider this : if any of these in Holland/Belgium/Germany/France have an accident on fukushima scale, the economy of about 50 million people would be destroyed; taking the rest of the world's economy down with it.
Would You Buy A House (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a choice between two completely equal houses.
One a single block away from a nuclear power plant. The other without.
Everything else being equal, would you live in the house with the nuclear power plant down the street?
Would you live there if you were raising small children?
Would you live there with a beloved wife, GF or your parents living with you?
Not a good comparison (Score:2, Insightful)
If we could live as a modern civilization without power plants at all I'm sure everyone would like that.
but we can't.
Thus, the question is:
You have a choice between two completely equal houses.
One a single block away from a nuclear power plant. *** The other a single block away from a COAL power plant. ***
Everything else being equal, would you live in the house with the nuclear power plant down the street?
Would you live there if you were raising small children?
Would you live there with a beloved wife, GF or your parents living with you?
and with these options in mind, I'd take the nuke every day of the week.
Penny-wise and Pound-foolish, as the saying goes (Score:5, Insightful)
And this disaster is costing Tepco and the Japanese government at least Billions of dollars, quite possibly upwards of a Trillion dollars when all's said and done.
If I were an owner, I'd rather like to protect my investments from Billions of dollars of permanently destroyed plants, cleanup and damage (property and potentially health related) claims by making a few millions of dollars of investments.
For every penny they saved before, they are spending hundreds of dollars now.
Re:Universal flaw in The System (Score:4, Insightful)
Capitalism crushes everything in its path, including democracy and common sense.
Yeah, a nuclear disaster would never happen in a non-capitalist country!
Re:Would You Buy A House (Score:4, Insightful)
Everything else being equal, would you live in the house with the nuclear power plant down the street?
No, but not because of the point you're getting at. Nuclear plants are usually built in industrial areas, and the aesthetics of the area would prevent me from building/buying a house there. They are usually catastrophically ugly.
Take a place like Chalk River, Ontario, however, and I'd have no problem living there, despite the proximity to one of the largest nuclear research labs in the world, and multiple test and production nuclear reactors. Chalk River is in an earthquake-prone area (had a 5.0 not that far away a year ago, and the geological record shows that they've had up to an 8.0 in the past, not to mention being in an area with a lot of leda clay, which has been known to amplify the effects of an earthquake), though it's too far inland to be at any kind of risk for a tsunami.
If the nuclear reactor in your example were somehow rendered invisible, and wouldn't be an eyesore, then I wouldn't have a problem living near it at all. They tend to over-engineer these things, and pay very careful attention to the amount of radiation at curbside. While there's risk associated with a 9.0 earthquake, I'm equally likely to die in said 9.0 earthquake itself. Statistically speaking, I'm far more likely to die from a car accident than I am in a nuclear accident, and I absorb more ionizing radiation during a 5-minute cell phone call than I would spending an entire day next-door to a nuclear plant. Why aren't you asking if people would be willing to drive their car to work, or order a pizza on their cell phone?
We can argue until the cows come home about whether they made design mistakes in Fukushima. There's almost certainly things they could have done differently, but hindsight is always 20/20. Nuclear energy on the whole is quite safe. I'd certainly rather that they were using renewable alternatives, as I'm a tree-hugging dirt-worshipper, but nuclear energy produces a lot less pollution than the non-renewable alternatives, and that pollution causes much more harm to my health on a daily basis than the radiation from a nuclear power plant would.
Re:But so could anything (Score:2, Insightful)
That is the goal of capitalism
^^^^^ The (mindless rhetoric)/meaning ratio of this post approaches infinity.
Re:Universal flaw in The System (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just in Japan, but everywhere. Bureaucrats and politicians are in the deep pockets of corporations and don't give a rancid wet fart about "The People" - then they spew so much bullshit at The People to get elected.
Capitalism crushes everything in its path, including democracy and common sense.
Funny. I thought capitalism was the only viable economic system that has fostered modern democracy for the last 2 centuries. Stupid history got it all wrong.
The chance of getting hit wasn't that small (Score:4, Insightful)
If the tsunami was a 1 in 1000 years event, then the chance of one of the Fukushima reactors to get hit by it during their lifetime was about 3.5%, which is high enough to cause concern.
Engineering for failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, some companies and governments don't understand how to respond to failure analysis. Rather than dismissing a once in 1000 year flood or a 9.8 rated earthquake, they must design the system to fail safe in that event. For example, there are nuclear reactor designs that continue to cool the fuel even when all power is lost. Or, if the pressure vessel is breached, there should be an intentional weak spot which will direct radioactive steam and fuel through a known path to minimize radiation release and mix the fuel with materials to slow/stop the nuclear reaction.
Look around and you'll see a mix of responses to failure analysis. The Space Shuttle was poorly designed in that it didn't provide a method for the crew to escape easily and quickly. The Apollo system had an emergency tower rocket that would pull the whole capsule and crew off and away from the giant bomb beneath it.
Commercial airliners can continue to fly when all engines have failed or have run out of fuel.
Our huge dams will fail catastrophically because it is hard to cost effectively build something that can withstand a 10.0 rated earthquake while holding back all that water. Smaller dams would be one response.
Can you build something like the Dubai tower that will fail safe? The fact is that safety is a choice. We choose to build skyscrapers because land in specific cities is very expensive. Are they as safe as a sine story building? No.
People need to balance cost and safety. But too often a relatively small cost which would improve safety is dismissed. What would it have cost to move the diesel generators at the nuclear plant? What did it cost to put airbags and seatbelts in cars? What about having seats face backwards in a plane? Little things can increase survivabity, yet we still don't do them.
Re:Crank or coverup (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But so could anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously the risk was that they lost their entire investment, and then that very thing materialized. What can happen here is a sort of delusion, where the assessors of the risk only see the reward, and not the actual risk.. even to themselves. That's why you need objective third parties, even when the risk is only to your business. The fact that there were lots of other people being risked only makes the inability to actually assess risk properly that much more dangerous.
Re:Balancing risk vs. reward indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Your measure of merit for equivalency (deaths per terawatt hour) is dubious.
Re:Balancing risk vs. reward indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
People are not allowed back to Chernobyl area because, in the end, the reactor was left wihtout cooling for too long.
See a pattern here?
It's not the tsunami's, or crew making 'human errors', it's the inherent nature of the reactors to go critical and melt when left without cooling. And there's more ways for that to happen than any engineer has ever imagined... even algae growth in the seawater used for the secondary system can force the engineers to shut down the reactor before they run out of cooling water...or heat wave that preheats the same water.
So many external parameters completely out of the control of anybody.
Re:Crank or coverup (Score:3, Insightful)
And the number of idiot saying it was a 1 in a 1000 year event... while the last huge tsunami at this place was 1100 years before... AND SO WAS FOOKING OVERDUE.
Umm, I'm not sure you understand how probability works...
But then again, tectonic drift isn't random. Energy built up from hindered movement eventually has to be released and the historic record does say something about how the plates in a region tend to behave...
Re:Universal flaw in The System (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, a nuclear disaster would never happen in a non-capitalist country!
That is not true, so I guess it's a good thing I didn't say, suggest, or imply it.
Re:Nice straw man you've built, there. (Score:5, Insightful)
Deaths per terrawatt hour is not a useful metric. Even if that number is certain to be higher with everyone favorite whipping boy, coal or oil, natural gas, solar whatever there is very little that can go wrong with those which would render a large area unlivable all at once. The deaths and health costs they create are spread over time. Society can budget for and deal with those costs and even cope with the occasion colamity.
With neuclear on the other hand the absolute costs might be less but the potential to have bear them all at once exists and it could very well be a back breaker for any society, that is the prespective you have to use.
Think of it like this cancer will over time do more harm to your body than a bullet but you can live with and treat most cancers for a long time, that might not be the case with the bullet.
Will melt down if power lost (Score:5, Insightful)
What worries me are all those reactors which will melt down if there's a full station blackout. This is a generic problem with all GE Mark I reactors [nytimes.com], like Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania. One hour to core damage, 14 hours to meltdown. This has been known since 1972. The US still has 23 such reactors.
There have been some fixes over the years. Fukushima had the emergency venting fix, but it didn't work because, with no power, the vents couldn't be operated. The NRC has insisted that all US Mark I reactors have extra Diesel generators and pumps beyond the original complement. On at least one occasion, they've been needed.
Chernobyl didn't melt down. (Score:4, Insightful)
Chernobyl was and is still the worst nuclear disaster because it didn't melt down, it blew up. Reactor 4 was supposed to be used for an experiment but was shutdown before the experiment could take place. However to try the experiment, the reactor was started up without letting the Xenon-135 decay to the point were the reactor could be started safely.
Nevertheless the reactor was started in a VERY unstable state, it soon "burned through" the Xenon-135 and the reactor power output rose to ten times it's rated limit and the containment vessel exploded, blowing fuel across the countryside. Following that, the moderator, graphite, burned spewing even more fuel into the atmosphere.
Chernobyl was human error, avoidable but human error. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster [wikipedia.org]
Now if there had been serious fires in the spent fuel pools at Fukushima, Chernobyl would have paled in comparison.