Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Disaster In Japan Could Have Been Mitigated, Say Industry Insiders
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."
Given any position, in a large enough world, there exists at least one crank proposing everything, therefore there exists evidence for .. every position. This is not really very informative.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Stop being afraid of nuclear.
Deaths per terawatt-hour for all energy sources
Any disaster could be averted with extra millions and millions spent on it, it's just balancing risk and reward.
Now apply to Justin Bieber and/or the heat death of the universe.
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.
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.
There's a very simple explanation for Bieber:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia
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.
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.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
As a former (environmental) regulator, its always difficult to find the balance between enforcing guarantees against everything imaginable at whatever cost, and providing a balance against the business people who want to pump profits and stock on a quarterly outlook. Regulators are a risk-adverse bunch and tend to think first of how they will look if something goes wrong, and can be guilty of considering every possible scenario as a mandate, which can bankrupt a business. But most businesses also have people who look first and foremost at the impact of a new cost on earnings and the next quarterly stock report. Japan has a bit of a reputation for erring on the side of business, but the important thing is that the lesson is in the press and if anyone else has any OTHER suggestions from their engineers, they should probably take a second look... or people will trust the regulators.
Gently reply
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2716225&cid=39299941
Especially those of us living in Japan. Nothing new in this article.
I live about 90 miles from the Fukushima plant and yes, this affects me greatly. About 100,000 people are still living in temporary housing. The economy is in shambles. Our business electric rates are about to skyrocket up 17% and gasoline is about US$6.65 a gallon. With only two reactors online in the entire country, our power situation is going to get desperate if oil costs continues to go up.
It will take a decade to rebuild, and where exactly do you rebuild? The same place, just to see it destroyed again?
You want a real story? This earthquake was not a once-in-a-millennium event. Here is an article from National Geographic about a massive tsunami in the same area in 1896. That's about 100 years ago, not a thousand years ago!
Let's face it, humans are stupid. Particularly the one who "govern."
We're lucky that no one was killed in Fukushima, but our luck ran out on earthquakes and tsunamis. We still have quakes almost every day, and for the first second or two, we don't know if it will be another big one.
Every bad event could probably have been mitigated. Hell, my first marriage could have been mitigated, and that was a rotten disaster.
It is not restricted to capitalist economies.
Have to remind people that Chernobyl, still ranked as the world's worst nuclear disaster happened in the Soviet Union.
Wait for the first Chinese nuclear accident and it will be a whopper. Somehow they managed to copy technology from the West yet stripping out safety measures that exist, aka the high speed train technology they stole from France, yes improperly implemented and stripped out safety features.
Shifting risk to others is the hallmark of all economies.
FTFY
It's the hallmark of human enterprise in general, regardless of culture, society, government, or economic system.
Irregardless to design, implementation, or governance. Look at the blog post. End of story. We don't need to do anything else or ask any questions.
If you are critical or skeptical about anything nuclear related, you are simply afraid. The technology itself is simply safe and no other factors will ever mitigate that. All designs, implementations, and governance structures are equally safe. Now STFU, and give your money to the industry.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
If you look back through history you find out that the greatest threat is from our the leaders. Which is pretty much the point of the constitution.
Deleted
They had 600 year old stone markers saying 'Tsunami Danger. Do Not build below this point." The did it anyway. Not only did they build there, they built the top of their seawall below that point.
a terrible day for the people of Japan! earthquake followed by tsunamis that resulted in leaking nuclear generator! any government program may not be repeated event
Let's not forget this kind of thinking and denial was present at the Chisso Corporation, with the mercury poisoning scandal during the 70s in Minamata, Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease
Jonathanjk.com
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?
A large asteroid will certainly strike the earth in the next million years. It is about 99.99% certain. Now to protect ourselves we must build a mass of 1 million nuclear weapons ready for instantaneous launch to intercept the asteroid when it is 90 million miles away. The cost of this program is 100 trillion trillion Euros and must be undertaken immediately. All unnecessary human life must be eliminated in order to afford this undertaking. All third world countries will be first eliminated. That will be followed by eliminating the uneducated and poor in all other countries. The probability of creating a successful nuclear shield is .00001%. Let's get started! Get it? Anyone can declare a risk and anyone can declare a solution. When the risk is low enough and the cost of prevention high enough, common sense says to ignore it. You are going to die. That is 100% certain. What are you waiting for?
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.
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.
It's easier to just rally people around "nuclear power is bad and inherently dangerous" than to actually step up and take responsibility to do it right.
I still kind of wonder about this one thoguth: it was a horrible disaster - I'm not taking away from that, but this was one of the top ten most powerful earthquakes on record with a pretty devastating tsunami as a follow-up act.
I would think this was just about the worst possible scenario. Considering the extreme nature of the event that led to the nuclear disaster, it sort of makes me feel like nuclear energy isn't really as scary as folks seem to make it out to be.
Maybe I just don't know enough about nuclear energy to be properly scared enough, but I feel like I know enough about it to not be as scared as the anti-nuke folks want me to me.
The Digital Sorceress
That is the goal of capitalism
^^^^^ The (mindless rhetoric)/meaning ratio of this post approaches infinity.
Not much to write, other than, "yes". Bonus if I can get cheap heat and hot water from the waste heat from the nuclear plant. (See "Cogeneration" and "District Heating").
I might consider otherwise in a place subject to Tsunamis, but we don't get many of those in Ohio (Lakes Erie might be able to generate a small tsunami, but I don't think the Great Lakes can generate anything quite like the ocean, and we're about a thousand miles inland from the nearest ocean, with a large mountain range between us and the beach).
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.
How about we DON'T build nuclear reactors right on the freaking COAST in an area that we know has been hit with tsunamis in the past and is definitely going to be hit with more in the future - it's only a matter of time.
The quoted article correctly identifies that the individual probabilities of failure were in fact highly coupled and not independent random events. The last statement is a common error though. Just because a tsunami of this size caused each of the generators to fail, does not mean that a tsunami of this size was certain to cause a failure. Because all statistical problems can be phrased as D&D problems (core 2 rules of course), this could be stated that the tsunami needed a 2 to hit and got it, but there was always that 1 it could have rolled and some series of odd but finitely possible events would allow the generators to continue operating. In this case it was not a d20 but a d1e6 or higher, still with a 2 to hit, but the possibility it could have missed does not go to zero simply because it didn't miss.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
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.
Regulators completely compromised by (pick your energy) industry players and utterly derelict in the performance of the job the public expected, and desperately needed them to perform. Film at eleven.
It's always easy to cherry pick, and with 20/20 hindsight, find someone whose predictions matched or exceeded what actually happened. Or, to put it another way - if the tsunami hadn't over topped the wall, those being lauded today would instead be laughingstocks for crying wolf.
But, proceed with your Two Minute Hate anyhow.
Afaik Chinese are mostly copying Russian tech in this regard, just like they do with weapons.
Care to guess what my reason would be?
They have little to do with the nuclear plant.
Here's why: Most of them are built near water sources, and you know what that means? The house would be in a flood zone.
Pass. I don't want to live somewhere like that. The nuclear power plant is almost irrelevant. I'm worried about the water. I'd have the same problem with the site if it were coal, or hydroelectric, or nothing at all.
I suppose if the geography were right, I'd be ok with it, but all things being equal, that won't happen.
It ought to work well as a scarecrow, too.
I also didn't say — or imply — anything which you attribute to me. The simple fact is that other sources of energy — ridiculously and absurdly, even solar — have more deaths per TWh than nuclear. It's a simple fact.
If we're serious about addressing the world's energy needs while moving away from fossil fuels, nuclear MUST be a part of the discussion, because it's not all going to be wind farms, hydro, and solar panels.
It's about energy density. But be my guest and keep vilifying nuclear in the face of the evidence. And speaking of "dense", in case you don't get it, this doesn't mean there shouldn't be safety and oversight. It means we should look at the true risks of nuclear vs. the long term risks from other energy sources, particularly fossil fuels...not only in terms of deaths (which, compared to other energy sources, are minimal), but the risk from unstable geopolitical situations, wars for resources, and so on.
It's not like we're going crazy building new plants in the US; we just approved the first new nuclear plant in three decades. That's ridiculous. Meanwhile, China has at least 25 reactors under construction, with many more planned...
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.
Only TEPCO's nuclear power stations suffered heavy damage by tsunami in Tohoku's coast. Japan Atomic Power Co's Tokai NPS and Tohoku Electric Co's Hamaoka NPS survived the quake and tsunami with minimum damage. Hamaoka survived despite being closer to the epicenter, and Tokai NPS didn't get much damage thanks to heeding the advice of experts in 2006-2007 that said their seawalls were too low for the tsunamis that could affect the coast and raised them. TEPCO did nothing. It was TEPCO's regulatory capture and negligence what made this ecological and economic disaster to happen.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Even though the decisions were made by politicians and businessmen to save money, in the end, it's the engineers who get blamed for "not doing their job" or "being incompetent."
Just like IT, where all our pleas and warnings go unanswered, and we're expected to put in buku overtime to fix the resulting disaster when it eventually does happen like we predicted for months or years before.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
To mitigate, assumes knowledge of the topic and knowledge toward mitigation of the topic.
In this case the Federal Government of Japan, TEPCO, and all contractor and engineering companies have apply demonstrated a profound lack of knowledge toward the topic, which negates any knowledge on their part toward mitigation of the topic.
We can substitute, Nuclear Energy Technology, or any other noun or phrase for 'topic'.
In all cases, knowledge, is profoundly abscent.
If Fukashima was not a 1960's era Generation 2 reactor (which it was) and instead a Generation 3 reactor like the EPR or AP1000, this whole thing would have been avoided. Why? Generation 2 designs always required active cooling, and when the tsunami hit the back up generators were destroyed so cooling could not have been provided. But Generation 3 uses passive cooling, no back up generators were required because electricity wasn't needed to cool the reactor.
When it comes to generating the energy our civilization needs we really don't have too many options. Either we shiver at night in our cold, dark, small solar/wind powered mud huts as the environmentalists want, or we utilize an abundent and energy dense sources of power like uranium.
Whether you call it Regulatory Capture, Crony Capitalism, or "The Golden Rule" (Whoever has the gold makes the rules.), it still comes down to people with decision-making authority seeing and hearing what they want to see and hear rather than paying attention to reality.
On the other hand, the UK (in a fit of what I can only describe as mindblowing insanity) has its nuclear weapons plant in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas in the country, and indeed of the planet. A really good disaster at Burgefield would lay waste to some of the most expensive housing in the UK and cause the evacuation of millions of people. Compared to living in the relevant part of the Home Counties, I would far rather live next to the perimeter fence at Dungeness.
People are simply piss-poor at assessing risk, or the entire population for ten kilometres around Burgefield would be marching on Parliament, demanding the cancellation of Trident, and engaging in massive civil disobedience.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Yes, always. But the tsunami protection at Fukushima wasn't adequate for *historical* tsunami along that coast. How much of a "risk and reward" is it if you can't handle an earthquake frequency on the order of 1 in 1000? Over a 40+ lifetime of a nuclear plant, it's just dumb not to have protections for that kind of scale. The only other rational solution is not to build there if it is too expensive to protect for historical events of that scale. This is a known risk, not something well beyond past experience. They gambled for ~40 years with odds that were pretty good (rare event) and then lost.
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.
You would be a rather exceptional owner, then. The overwhelming evidence is that today most owners/corporate management optimize short-term profits at the expense of long-term issues.
Afaik Chinese are mostly copying Russian tech in this regard, just like they do with weapons.
Going by Wiki, this is incorrect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#China
They've got a bunch under construction that use French tech from the 90s (CPR-1000), and then they have the AP1000 and EPR which are American and European, respectively. Finally a trio of CNP-600 which I'm not sure what they are... So definitely not Russian tech.
Thanks for piquing my curiosity, though :)
And the burned hand teaches best. Children do not understand the dangers. Your hypothetical odds are way off. Perhaps you shouldn't play with sharp knives either, except in D&D. The odds against disaster rested almost entirely on the odds that a tsunami wouldn't happen. Because they were not prepared, the odds of a nuclear disaster were very high once the earthquake happened. And the earthquake and tsunami themselves were going to happen some year, it was only a matter of when.
And why were they not prepared? Not because we didn't know about the possibility. Not because they weren't warned, repeatedly. And not because the warnings were just so much hysteria and not based on hard facts, no. We had good information and solid science. You can't even really chalk this up to blind optimism. Their behavior goes beyond that. They were willfully ignorant, greedy fools. And a whole lot of innocent people paid for that.
We shouldn't play with nuclear power. Too many adults have demonstrated that they aren't mature enough to be responsible. For those who don't carefully keep the knives out of reach of kids, a few cuts are no big deal. Even an accidental amputation of a finger is not the end of the world. If steamship lines make a practice of charging recklessly through ice fields to save a few measly hours on an Atlantic crossing, the consequences of a disaster, while tragic and devastating to the company, will not wreck the economy. But millions of cancer cases and the loss of large areas of land for centuries is too high a price to pay. Suppose Tokyo had gotten irradiated. For that reason, we shouldn't allow fools to show the world the hard way that nuclear power will not be used responsibly.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
"Proactive" is a lot easier said than done.
Preventing a problem before it becomes a problem means making a sacrifice of economic resources that could have been devoted to problems that are problems right now. So, you have to make a very strong case to justify the preventative measures.
Then, when the bad thing fails to happen, you are blamed for having wasted valuable funds that could have been more productively applied. Or, in many cases, your efforts were effective in preventing the bad thing from happening, which results in the same accusation that the investment didn't need to be made (since the bad thing didn't happen).
Combine these disincentives with the typical protection-against-consequences that decision makers enjoy, and you can see why these sorts of problems are rarely, if ever, dealt with until after people have died.
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, 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.
If they were on the industries side, they would have protected it. Now the global nuclear power industry is feeling the pain and Tepco has been exposed as being incompetent .
It's not even on the side of the industry; it's on the side of the quick buck.
Were they on the industry's side, they would have had the long-term health of the nuclear power industry in mind, and be striving to make the public perception of nuclear power match the reality of properly-maintained systems. Instead, the few major nuclear accidents which have occurred taints the perception of ALL nuclear installations across the board, pushing us back toward fossil fuels when instead we should be expanding the use of the latest-generation nuclear reactors, be investing in development of single-home and neighborhood-capacity dorm fridge-sized reactors, and also investing in large-scale thorium reactors. Instead, anything involving the word "nuclear" is now very unpopular politically, and wind power and solar power which are woefully inefficient in the real world are receiving political backing and government subsidies.
They are on the side of only their own personal wallets and get rich quick schemes, not on the side of the industry at all.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
What lessons were learned from this? Was it that it is best to be proactive about flooding, that these things should be flood-proofed and self-contained in case of extreme emergency (ie. a tsunami)?
NO! The lesson that they learned was "nuclear is too dangerous".
It is like breaking an arm in a fall when riding a bike, and then deducing that any exercise is too hazardous for one's health.
PS. 2 generators per reactor is fine, considering they can be tied from another reactor. The problem is, the buildings for the generator and for the reactor were not flood proof. IMHO, those should be flood proofed to 100m under water. You know, submarine-type doors, water proof containment building. Semi-water-tight doors that open to OUTSIDE, with sump pumps powered by emergency generators would have done the job too.
Not only were the flood walls not high enough but they failed to account for the ground settling because of subsidence. As a result of the earthquake, the actual ground d5opped by as much as five feet in areas. Lets assume that you barely made the flood wall high enough lets say 3 feet higher than the tsunami. Part of the problem was the base of the flood wall was now 5 feet lower than it was before the earthquake. The result would be that the top of the flood wall is now 2 feet lower than the tsunami.
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
Now if there had been serious fires in the spent fuel pools at Fukushima, Chernobyl would have paled in comparison.
They didn't know it at the time, but they could have just kept the reactor running as a source of power for keeping the pumps working.
In the future, build nuclear plants underwater. That way they are already prepared for tsunamis.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The "owners" are the shareholders who were clueless about the risks. Everyone told them everything was just fine. The owners trusted their assets to the "managers" who put their short term interests (profit) ahead of protecting the assets.
This is how modern capitalism works. The managers (high paid execs) get the profits, everyone else gets the shaft. (Wall street managers did very well before and after the 2008 crash... asset owners... not so well.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Chernobyl had many problems, but risk shifting wasn't one of them.However, like Japan, it was a failure of management rather than technology (though the technology was poor as well in Chernobyl).
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.
Why, if the cost of an accident is borne by the taxpayer? If not, you ask the government for a bailout since the cost is much too high for you.
Now, if seppuku was still required you'd have a point, but if the worst consequences for you are having to apologize in public and a golden handshake you'd be stupid to reduce profits (and your bonus) by investing in safety.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It is not restricted to capitalist economies.
Or to economies. It's a people thing.
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.
So a country rebuilt by the USA after WWII ended up with an industry based oligarcy? How surprising!
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Obviously the risk was that they lost their entire investment, and then that very thing materialized.
"Hold on a second! This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it!"
Scarily enough, this was a case where even taking off and nuking the site from orbit wouldn't have helped.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Japan was not "rebuilt by USA" in any significant way. US barely kept the Japanese from starving for a few years past WWII. The biggest US contribution to the Japanese economy post-WWII was military spending for the Korean wars, but, of course, they got things in return for that.
Everything could be mitigated .... once you have the information needed to design the mitigation.
Unless some kind of rule was ignored, we can debate from hell and back about what could had and just waste time blowing hot air.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/fallout-at-a-former-nuclear-weapon-plant.html?_r=1&hp
It's like the BP pipeline spill in Alaska. Originally the engineers who designed and built it said the whole thing need to be ex-rayed and inspected periodically (I don't recall the period but it was like 5 or 10 years). After the spill, they found only 20% of it had ever been inspected. Various managers would cut certain department budgets by an arbitrary percentage to save costs and earn bonuses, and the cuts would be kicked down the line to managers who did not have the authority to question them. In the end, cutting the maintenance budget meant that large sections of pipe would never be inspected, and a leak was a foregone conclusion. But the arbitrary nature of the cuts meant that the managers had no idea that's what they were ordering.
This is hardly an isolated incident of it. People count on a kind of institutional intelligence to catch these things, but it's actually all a fantasy. Once you take the authority to make decisions away from the people doing the work, things inevitably fall through the cracks. Sometimes even surprisingly large things, like inspecting a pipeline or maintaing adequate flood protection goes completely unnoticed by upper management.
hindsight is a marvelous thing. if these "insiders" really knew anything they would have done more to prevent such a catastrophe. otherwise their negligence would make them accessories. nobody likes to be a whistleblower, but to sit on info and then come out and say "i told you so" after the fact is just fucking retarded.
i think they're full of shit.
humans make mistakes, and many are greedy, lying, ignorant and negligent, so don't say i didn't warn you about all future catastrophes.
Chernobyl is opening back up for people to live there, of course it is the outer most part of the cut off zone. They have to follow strict guidelines as far a diet, and where they can go, going further into the cut off zone would lead to exposure of radiation levels.
The Tepco plant is no where close to the Chernobyl accident, because the Chernobyl accident was the reactor itself that exploded, Tepco could have the same happen, in fact Chernobyl and those involved were worried that because the reactor exploded and the fuel was molten and fully exposed to the open, another explosion could have set off a nuclear reaction one of the biggest nuclear (accidental) explosions more then the 100MT bomb Russia set off. No one can say for sure if the Fukushima plant would have had the same fate, I would like to see how the plants and cooling off building were built, the Chernobyl plant had good (not great) basement system to contain the molten fuel from getting into the earth and ruining the ground water for years.
If Tepco had simply ran there power lines underground for the back up cooling system, and set the backup cooling systems above the sea, we would not even be talking about this. But the earthquakes could have cause those to fail, piping gets ripped apart as an example.
The explosions in the Tepco plant were for build up of hydrogen gas within the (poorly built) containment buildings, having a solid venting system could have prevented this (I am not sure about there venting systems, just thinking out loud) the reactors had venting systems but those were electronically controlled and due to power loss they were unable to open them, when they needed to quickly open them. Chernobyl used materials in there reactors that they knew to be very unstable, adding to the problem, it is very likely if they used safer more stable materials the explosion would not have happened.
This story is old news PBS and Frontline ran a follow up to investigate what happened, why and how it could have been avoided. Tepco was warned several times during there story that the barriers were insufficient and that history had showed waves reaching heights far beyond the barriers. This is a 50/50 deal, they warned of another hurricane like Katrina but it was a one out of hundred year storm, the same with the Tsunami that hit Japan. So for the typical Tsunami the walls were good. But the once in a hundred years scenario the walls were not.
There were a couple thousand give or take nuclear power plants around the world that number has gone down. But during that time the only big named events were Three Mile Island, (in my opinion is a joke, if it was not a US plant the media would not have given a shit) and Chernobyl. Yes it is likely that other accidents were avoided from nuclear plants around the world that never saw the light of day from the media. But nothing like Chernobyl happened before or since, Chernobyl was an experiment gone wrong not a natural disaster. They were trying to cut the time down between a plant failure and there backup cooling kicking in, it is said they tried this at other plants without incident. The wanted to use the turbines wind down to supply and kick the backup systems in within 9 seconds, I think it took close to 60-80 seconds possible more for those backup cooling system to hit max RPM and supply the proper amount of water.
In any of these accidents they failed to warn citizens of the impending danger that may occur, but in doing this you cause mass panic and your problems only get worse. I try to stay 50/50 over this, not going to far to the left or right over what could have been done and what was not done.Saying that the area could have been finished like Chernobyl is a little extreme, when you consider the differences between the two plants. You can praise Tepco and Westinghouse for building and running solid plants, with the proper stable materials.But you can also shun them for not going even further considering the natural activity that plagues the area.
They do have two VVER reactors, which are Russian (Soviet) PWRs. Apparently they weren't particularly happy with them though, so everything since has been European or American designs.
Severe slip of the mind, I shouldn't post in the morning after working a double shift. I meant Tohoku Denryoku's Onagawa NPS that was far closer to the epicenter, see Japan's Atomic Industrial Forum map of situation of NPS's in Japan:
http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS02_1330597193P.pdf
Now, Chuden's Hamaoka NPS is in the process to being reinforced against tsunami and quakes, at least it is what the company says.
http://hamaoka.chuden.jp/english/provision/index.html
Aside the dunes, the operator plans to build a 18 m tall sea wall behind the dunes, and increase the eight of dunes to 20 m; they claim that the station is designed to withstand a quake of 1000 gal with the reinforcement work that ended in march 2008, well above the japanese standard of 800 gal. Certainly, all this work is not done by the goodness of the owner's hearts, but doesn't make sense to the company to not try to quell the claims of Hamaoka being called the most dangerous nuclear power plant in Japan, better try to convince citizens of the safety and security of the station and restart operation instead of keeping it in cold shutdown.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Be careful of making straw men; they burn easily.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Well public apologies often induces suicide as a secondary effect, loosing face in public is something they take rather serious
Now apply to Justin Bieber and/or the heat death of the universe.
That's Justin Beaver. Don't you know nothin'? Just ask any of his fans.