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NRC Emails Reveal Confusion In Aftermath of Fukushima
mdsolar writes "The Washington Post is reporting on the NRC response to the Fukushima disaster. Aspects include an abusive relationship with Steven Chu, a secret database on fuel pool fires that was not shared, and a Washington Two Step on Vermont Yankee. Pretty sordid."
The NRC website has a bunch of documents relating to their response and attempts to consult the Japanese government (it might take a few months to work through). On a related note, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ran a retrospect on the nuclear situation in 2011.
Fukushima was designed to withstand earthquakes of greater magnitude than had been recorded in that area, and tsunamis larger than had been recorded in that area. In what way do you believe they were under-engineered (using the best available data at the time of their construction, of course.)
Sort of true. However, later study on the area's geology indicated that there were tsunami's much higher than originally planned for. TEPCO decided not to do anything about that because it would have involved a multi million dollar upgrade to the sea wall.
Further, there was later damage to suggest that the reactor did suffer significant damage during the quake, thus damaging the assumption that the original design and engineering was adequate.
Of course, this would have been a technical footnote in some brief stuffed in a disused lavatory had someone had the presence of mind not to put all the backup generators in the basement.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I can tell you with a very high level of confidence that the Japanese engineers were fully-aware that an earthquake plus tsunami on this scale was exceedingly likely at some point in the lifetime of the reactor and have been for over 20 years. I can also tell you that they were fully-aware of the requirements for avoiding the disaster that happened. What I CANNOT tell you is that meeting those requirements prior to the earthquake met the requirement of being the lowest-cost solution across all possible events.
It's just too bad that the rest of us cannot be as confident about the stuff you pull out of your ass.
Personally, I think they were in the wrong. I think they could have, and should have, made the necessary adjustments according to the data they had. However, whilst I may think this, I cannot KNOW this from what information is public.
In other words, you don't have much of a reason to believe they were in the wrong. It's just something you do.
we can only make wild guesses in the dark.
Which I see you did.
I wonder why people keep trying to shoehorn every accident of nuclear power into the format of the plot from the China Syndrome movie? Fukushima got hit by a way out of spec disaster. And given that, the obsolete plant design, and the chaos after the earthquake and tsunami, it failed pretty gracefully.
If this sounds familiar, it may be because you might have read a similar post of mine a few weeks after the disaster. Nobody has been able to show in the meantime that TEPCO or the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency did anything wrong with respect to protecting the plant against an earthquake and tsunami from the time that the Fukushima nuclear plant was built on up to today. The only truly questionable event was delaying the decommissioning of the plant, but that makes some sense given the difficulty of making new nuclear plants (several Japanese nuclear plants under design or construction were cancelled in the late 90s and early 00s).