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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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%."
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.
The fun fact with this accident was the number of people telling you so BEFORE the accident...
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. And when you check with the previous tsunami in 889 (around) it's exactly the same extend and the same level of flooding.
So it's not even telling so before...
It's just looking back at the previous shrine comemorative of the event and going back to the drawing board...
The bigger problem is that these irresponsible bean counting punks discredited the whole nuclear industry. Areva should ask compensation from Tepco because of potential reduced business opportunities.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Just because you flipped a heads does not meen you are overdue for tails. A 1 in 1000 year event remains that at any one year. Same goes for asteroids. We are overdue for a 1 in a million year event there as well. We are overdue on pole reversal, ice age and so on ...
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.
while the last huge tsunami at this place was 1100 years before... AND SO WAS FOOKING OVERDUE
While I appreciate what you are trying to say here, probability doesn't work like this.
The above statement reflects the same sort of erroneous thinking that is expressed by those folks who hover around roulette wheels thinking that if it comes up black 3 times in a row, the fourth time is now more likely to be red.
Not at all true, ...
C//
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!
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...
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.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That's only true when the annual probabilities are independent. In the case of asteroids, that's probably a reasonable approximation. But tsunamis are generated by earthquakes, and the probability that you have a large earthquake in year n is not independent of whether you had a large earthquake in year n-1. When, specifically, a quake is going to happen is pretty random, but energies build over time until released.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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."
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 :)
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.
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.
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?
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.