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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."
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.
there's a big difference between a crank somewhere in the wide world, and your own engineers that you hired for their expertise related to your enterprise.
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.
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.
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/
"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%."
Stop being afraid of nuclear.
Deaths per terawatt-hour for all energy sources
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.
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.
Oh, but people aren't allowed back to Fukushima or the surrounding area not because of the tsunami. It's because of the reactors were left without cooling too long.
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.