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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.
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.
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.
And what I see in your posts is the disingenuous use of a very incomplete picture that considers only one statistic, the number of deaths. By that measure, Hurricane Andrew was insignificant. After all, Andrew killed only 39 people, not much more than one person going postal.
Consider instead the area of land that was rendered unfit for other uses for years. For nuclear power, that's thousands of sq km. Coal mining has been done in a reckless and damaging manner, so it could probably not be said to be zero. Then there's the contamination of groundwater by fracking. And oil spills. But we don't have to get fuel that way. For other sorts of energy, it's zero. At any time, we can remove a dam and put the flooded land back to any other use we want. You should also remember that hydroelectric generation is just one purpose of dams. They also tame floods and store water for the dry times, enabling more agriculture.
Or consider the economic costs. What will the total cost of the Fukushima disaster be? Could be more than $1 trillion. Nuclear does not do so well on that.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Hamaoka survived despite being closer to the epicenter
Dude, what kind of bullshit are you spreading? Fukushima is 156 kilometers from the epicenter, and Hamaoka 565 kilometer. Ignoring costal geometry completely. (Fukushima is close to the epicenter, on the eastcoast of Honshu, Hamaoka is far away, sheltered on the southcoast of Honshu.)
Apart from that, Hamaoka 1 and 2 are permanently shut down since 2009 because of failures in the emergency cooling system in one of the units. Units 3, 4 and 5 are shut down since may 2011, because of very serious concerns over their safety in case of an earthquake. Not helping in convincing otherwise are the 16 incidents in which leaks led to unplanned shutdowns. Hamaoka has been called the most dangerous nuclear plant in Japan. 2 days after their final (?) shutdown CEPC had to announce that 400 tons of seawater has leaked into the primary condensor of unit 5, and five days later they had to announce that seawater has leaked into the primary containment (the reactor vessel itself). Hamaoka has a sand dune as protection, able to withstand a 26 ft tsunami. Fukushima was hit by a 43–49 ft tsunami.
No links, google it yourself, and find your own opinion. ;)