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World Is Ignoring Most Important Lesson From Fukushima
mdsolar writes "Kenichi Ohmae, an MIT-trained nuclear engineer also widely regarded as Japan's top management guru, is dean of Business Breakthrough University. In the CSM he writes: 'Fukushima's most important lesson is this: Probability theory (that disaster is unlikely) failed us. If you have made assumptions, you are not prepared. Nuclear power plants should have multiple, reliable ways to cool reactors. Any nuclear plant that doesn't heed this lesson is inviting disaster.'"
Which is why modern reactors depends on gravity; which to the best of my knowledge has never been turned off.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Either there's an error in translation or the MIT trained nuclear engineer has forgotten what probability theory is.
Having multiple means of cooling a reactor sounds like a good idea, but that will only reduce the probability of disaster.
Corner cutting company policy results in result-based choice of assumptions. The theory is fine (and something that is unlikely can still happen, so even with correct assumptions there can be disasters.)
That's just the kind of reckless thinking that caused the failure in the first place. We must provide for EVERY contingency, no matter how unlikely!
For the children!
Or use a different type of reactor that doesn't rely on electricity for cooling. See any of Kirk Sorensen's liquid-fluoride thorium reactor talks on YouTube. His talk at Ted is a good 10,000 overview and only 10 minutes long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw
Probability theory HASN'T failed us ,it doesn't declare an accident as impossible.
For one
For two, accidents are unlikely - over the 58 years nuclear reactors exist (1954 in Obninsk was first) there hasn't been much significant disasters despite their wide usage. Hell, air travel has probably killed more people and noone's into banning airplanes.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But I think the most important lesson is that neither the nuclear power industry nor the regulators of that industry can be trusted to be at all truthful about the scope and scale of problems. They both have strong incentives to minimize the perception of such. This, more than anything, is the biggest and most important lesson that has broad applicability to almost any regulated industry.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
A few voices in reliability engineering and safety engineering (not the same thing!) have warned that if you start producing figures that show that you can go a million years or more without an accident, that doesn't mean your product is safe, it means you've overlooked something.
Not even an anvil can live up to some of the probability estimates people have come up with for deployed systems.
That said, there's still such a thing as intellectual dishonesty. Large scale blackouts in industrialized societies are a known phenomenon (1965 eastern US, etc.) and should have been taken into account even if Japan weren't prone to natural disasters. Rumor has it that there's a plaque in the hills above Fukushima that says in effect "Water has come up this high in the past, don't build anything you care about lower than this level".
don't use them at all.
Why does this not happen? Because the viable alternatives can't be metered or work to well.
i.e. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/07/wind-power-companies-paid-to-not-produce/
http://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/
Part of the article reminds me of the 'Captain Hindsight' from the Cthulhu / Coon and Friends episode of Southpark. The article basically says that the risk assumptions were incorrect and they should have prepared better and made better assumptions in order to prevent the meltdown.
I disagree in part with the premise article.
There are two approaches to taking something that poses a risk, and making it safe. The choices are prevention and mitigation In this case, the problem is that a Nuclear Reactor poses a risk of dangerous meltdown. The typical safety measures are to make sure that a melt down will not happen (prevention). That approach generally works, and all risk management calculations are based on the prevention working.
Prevention is great up until it fails. If we change the discussion to sex / pregnancy, prevention of the sort described in the article is using a Condom. Its great when it works, but condoms break. If the penalty for pregnancy is death, your still taking one hell of a risk.
I think that nuclear power is a technology worth pursuing, but I think that the safety measures should start from 'if this thing melts down as soon as we turn it on, what can we do to contain the damage'? If a nuclear power plant can be designed in a manner that guarantees that a meltdown event does not endanger anyones safety, then it can be called entirely safe.
Otherwise, they are only safe until they fail.
END COMMUNICATION
Fukushima taught me that Japanese Nuclear reactors may be too protected.
19,300 people died as a result of the tsunami. Fukushima has had minimal impact by comparison (573 related deaths thus far).
Diverting all of the safety protections away from the reactors (guaranteeing full meltdown of all 4) to add to safety protections around shoreline towns, oil refineries, chemical factories, could have saved thousands of lives reducing the 19,300 total.
Rod Taylor
Probability theory did not fail you. You failed at using probability theory. You provided garbage inputs to your probability of disaster, expected values of earthquake sizes, and expected costs of the disaster; so you have garbage results. These results provided you with false comfort in your low safety margins. End of story.
Events like that have been dubbed as Black Swans by author Nassim Taleb... The lesson is essentially as stated: probability theory only works for certain types of scenarios. He calls the realm of these scenarios 'mediocristan' and the realm of scenarios where extreme events can take place 'extremistan'. Examples: Average distribution of human height is relatively predictable, and in mediocristan. But try to predict how much wealth one person has from one to the next and you'll suddenly run into a billionaire and completely destroy your nice little data set from the last thousand people you looked at.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
'Management Guru'
Nothing to see here, move along.
This should be a study of how the bad design of a nuclear reactor can negate disaster planning.
Q: How did this reactor overheat?
A: They could not get power to the cooling pump because the diesel generators were flooded.
YOU HAVE A WHOLE F***** POWER PLANT. Route some power to the pumps. Who is the idiot that designed this.
The real most important lesson here is that you don't want to have anything to do with human factor if you want safety - human factor as in building a nuclear power plant in an earthquake/tsunami plagued region according to plans for your general US power plant not designed to handle either of those, human factor as in building the emergency (including sea water floods) electrical systems in the basement, human factor as in not checking critical power boards for 11 years...
I don't think there is anything wrong with probability theory, now matter how clever a theory is, it will never protect you from idiots failing to apply it properly.
Ezekiel 23:20
One of the big reasons mil-spec software and equipment costs so much is it has to be designed to function no matter what happens. In no other industry is there a requirement for a monitor to take a .50 caliber shell and keep running, for example, or for hard drives to survive multi-story drops while running (which is what happens when a ship crashes down a wave.)
I am absolutely stunned that reactors aren't designed to the same stringent "failure is not an option" standard, given the consequences of a failure. It can and should be done if you're going to risk meltdowns. Every possibility you can think of needs to be accounted for.
After all, we're not talking about just poisoning the people around a failed facility -- we're talking about the possibility of leaving kilometers of land completely uninhabitable for decades.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Modern reactors already do the things this guy is suggesting. This guy is decades late to the party. I'm sure there will be 100 comments saying this by the time I hit submit, but the real lesson should be to build new plants with modern reactors, so that once built the old ones can be decommissioned *after* the new ones are built. The kind of attitude this guy has (I'm sure his real motivation is just to get attention) obviously scares people into not wanting new nuke plants built.
On the other hand, he's not very specific in the TFA. Perhaps is real life he has suggested a specific way to retrofit existing reactors with backup generators? Or is he just regurgitating crap that we were reading the day after the tsunami?
And Business Breakthrough University? SERIOUSLY? WTF is that? It reminds me of all those high priced fat loss pills that were developed by places like the "fat loss institute." Apparently anyone can file a DBA with the word institute or university in it. Does anybody really regard this clown as Japan's top management guru? Or am I wrong and this guy is actually dean of an accredited university?
nuclear plants, just like any other type of powerplant in the past 50 years requiring a superfund site cleanup at taxpayer expense, arent designed to withstand natural disaster in the pursuit of human health and safety.
the safeguards are in place in order to continue to sustain profits and return dividends well into the inevitable federal investigation and limited financial penalty levied against them. At which time the scientific concept of probability will be regurgitated and mourned about as fervently as a dead cat. It is in this case statistical probability is being used to placate people in much the same way as god is used to placate those into faith over reason.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The most important lesson is the same as that from the financial crisis: when you create perverse incentives, people and companies take irresponsible risks. The result is predictable when you socialize risk by letting governments take on the downside by insuring nuclear disasters, protecting deposits and providing various forms of bailouts. Such de-coupling of profits, losses, responsibility and accountability lead to increasing and un-mitigated risk-taking.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
No it just showed that they made inappropriate assumptions about the prior distribution of catastrophic events.
There are lots of ways to incorporate uncertainty into this sort of model via Laplace smoothing, or other techniques.
Probability theory still works.
Stupid lesson.
Probability isn't failing us, human understanding of it is. Imagine something that can happen to you or someone else, doesn't matter what. It's one of those "once in a million years" things. How often do you think it really happens? Yepp, that's right, all the time. With a world population of over 7 billion, this "once in a million years" event happens to about 20 people every day.
As for nuclear reactor blowups, they actually happened pretty much on schedule. Someone did the math not too long ago. While the statistical security is impressive (something like "one catastrophic event every 20,000 years"), considering the number of world-wide nuclear reactors and the time they've been running, statistically speaking we're pretty much right on the money.
The only place where probability theory fails us is with the dreaded black swans - the events that are not only highly unlikely, but so extraordinary that nobody really thought of them. A tsunami in Japan isn't exactly one of them. They have so many tsunamis there that they have a dedicated tsunami warning system.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
probability theory did not fail us - our use of it failed us.
I am an MIT trained nuclear engineer than specializes in Probabilistic Risk Assessment. The first thing we should note is the PRA has had many benefits for the nuclear industry. Once you calculate the risk, and understand the contributors, you understand how to make things safer.
http://mydocs.epri.com/docs/CorporateDocuments/SectorPages/Portfolio/Nuclear/Safety_and_Operational_Benefits_1016308.pdf
The thesis of this article has a few problems, though the conclusion isn't horribly off base. The first problem is that he believe probability theory was applied to ignore the risk of the tsunami. The opposite is true. In fact, probabilistic hazard assessment of the tsunami showed the site to be horribly under prepared in 2006 (10% chance of exceeding the design basis in 50 years or about 1 in 500 per year [which is high for nuclear reactors]). There were even more studies in later years before the tsunami hit. This was just plain bad management and shows what may happen when you ignore updated risk information.
http://enformable.com/2011/10/new-exposed-scandal-shows-tepco-calculations-in-2006-showed-probability-of-worst-case-tsunami-dramatically-increased-10-over-50-years-utility-took-no-countermeasures/
The main point though, that no matter how unlikely a single event is (in this case a tsunami), you ought to have some countermeasures, is not bad. That is why PRA is used in combination with deterministic defense-in-depth measures at well designed, operated, and managed nuclear reactors. Mobile emergency diesels should be available to all reactors and are in the United States. This is a feature that Fukushima did not have. At the end of the day though, ceoyoyo is right. Even with multiple methods of cooling a reactor, you can not eliminate the possibility of core melt and release of radionuclides to the public. You can only ensure the release is acceptably infrequent. This brings us full circle to the fact that using probability theory to focus on the high risk stuff is good and that Fukushima failed to do this.
That being said, even in the case of passively cooled reactors such as fast reactors, massive earthquakes (1 in 1,000,000 per year or less), could destroy the water tank or piping required for passive cooling to take place. I would argue that while one should not ignore earthquakes and other rare external events below a certain probability. The burden would be onerous to use events below 1 in 100,000 per year as a design basis. This is in line with previous regulatory safety goal and can be seen in use in debate over the transition break size rule. A plug for my journal article is below. If you are wondering which author I am, the hint is that I am not the NRC commissioner.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0029549311008284
No, the lesson is that humans will:
* underestimate danger
* underestimate cost
* over-estimate value
The humans are the weak link.
The argument that probability failed us overlooks the fact that, although the Fukushima reactor was totally destroyed, the entire nuclear incident wasn't that big a deal. Compared to Chernobyl, it was nothing. Compared to the other damage caused by the tsunami, it was nothing. The real lesson here is that, thanks to design improvements since Chernobyl, a reactor can fail catastrophically and still not cause significant harm. I'm willing to bet that the ecological damage and human suffering caused by this worst-case scenario was significantly less than the damage caused by generating the power that the reactor generated over its lifetime via other means. And newer reactors are even better: less likely to fail, and less likely to cause significant damage if they do.
All of the warnings and precautions were recommended and rejected. There's a long list of extremely surprising things that Japan simply failed to do. Among these includes the ability to source power from other operating plants. They have no "power grid" to speak of either. It is obvious and demonstrable that in some cases the decision makers did the right things (see the neighboring plant that survived just fine) while others didn't. This all comes down to decision makers favoring saving money over nuclear safety. It's not that there was any systemic failure. The failure can be traced back to individual decision makers who elected not to do certain things.
If we get into a discussion about things like this some time in the future, I will be sure to include some intimate details about how a certain nuclear energy company is addressing requirements set forth by the NRC in response to Fukushima. I wish I could tell the world now but I need to stay employed. But once the deal is "in the past" I'll be sure to share some rather interesting experience and insight. Until then, I will say that it is VERY "unJapanese" to suggest that there was anything to learn from Fukushima.
This news is going on two decades old. No wonder Slashdot is losing market share.
You need experienced software engineers on a team that's designing a complex, safety-critical system, even if it's not "software." We are the people most familiar with failure scenarios of systems.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
"All the President's Heads" finds Professor Farnsworth sprucing up his family tree, eager to show anyone willing to listen - and plenty who aren't - all the amazing people he's descended from...
Illidan Stormrage demands that you design your nuclear reactors better!
There is some logic about reasoning about low-probability events here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110712221603/http://thedeadobserver.hostwebs.com/
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Whatever deaths have occurred in the meltdown, the long-term health effects and pollution to the local (and possibly remote, depending on ocean currents) biosphere are as of yet unknown. Similar to deposits being found from leaking oil-rigs, we'll probably see effects from this long down the road (how major they will be... who knows)
I ran a poker game for about 6 years. I have seen this before. Its not probability that failed, its your use of it that did. Low probability events happen with great regularity on the long run. A poker player that is willing to bet his entire stack on anything less than the nuts, even if there is only one hand out of the enitire deck that could beat him.... if he sees that situation enough times, he will still loose that hand that one time out of 250 or so.
So.... maybe you bet your whole stack in a tournament, but....you never sit down with your whole bankroll. That is just bad bankroll management....or bad risk assessment...whatever you wanna call it.
They don't call em 100 year floods because they never happen. They call em that because they seem to be of a size you only see every 100 years or so. However... you have to remember how the odds work. Just because he had pocket aces last hand, doesn't mean he doesn't this hand. What are the odds? 1 in 250 or so times 1 and 250 or so (assuming a good shuffle etc) ... pretty unlikely... but its happened to me.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
What Fukushima should have taught is that when the engineers spec a wall of sufficient height to block a tsunami, you flippin' build it. Or in general, when engineers say that you could kill a bunch of people or make a "forbidden zone" after an accident by not doing something, you should listen intently and take their advice seriously. TEPCO ignored their own engineers. Because "herp, too expensive."
It is also a demonstration of lack-of-oversight by the Japanese government over the decades. Because, you know, left to themselves, all industries are kittens and rainbows.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/15/nuclear-iaea-safety-idUSLDE77E0F720110815
--
BMO
If only they'd built it with six thousand and ONE hulls!
Fukushima had nothing to do with probability theory being wrong. Ask google scholar for "common cause failure nuclear" and the oldest citation on the very first page is from 1976. This is age old stuff.
Now look at the greenish boxes on this picture:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/images/110519_2_2.jpg
Those are 7 of the 13 diesel generators about to be flooded. Besides those, there was just one generator in the basement of each turbine building. Only one generator survived (in reactor building #5 - providing power for decay heat removal there and for reactor #6) and this is not surprising. Put all your eggs in one basket and you're in trouble when the basket drops.
The problem was a simple matter of not having enough generators and not putting enough distance between them. Following the most stupid and simple-minded rule imaginable - that of having a distance of 50m or 100m between each emergency generator and having at least 3 generators per reactor (in Germany there are at least 4 for each reactor), you would have ended up with generators on the hills behind the reactors, because there is no room for them anywhere else.
I have no problem with having emergency generators next to the coast or in a basement. Both are potentially sheltered positions from some sort of accident - just not from a tsunami. That's why you should have a diverse set of several emergency generators, if possible based on different designs. (What if you run out of diesel or your most recent diesel delivery was spoiled?)
All the better if you have a modern reactor, like the Russian AES-92 or AES-2006 designs (from 1992 and 2006 respectively) that can remove decay heat without any active systems. (That's right, the Russians a ahead of the game, thanks to not treating research in nuclear power as a waste of money, as it is in the US and EU.)
The most important lesson is if it can happen, it will. Aircraft are built with multiple redundant paths to survive when something fails. an example is Aloha Airlines flight 243: http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/2001/Jan/18/image2/localnews1_b.jpg No one expected the top of the cabin to come off in flight. But the design rules allowed the aircraft and passengers to land safely. Nuclear reactors need to follow the same rules.
"Don't Let Incompetent Twats Run Your Nuclear Reactors"? You'd think we'd have clued in on that one after three mile island and chernobyl. If someone wants to build their nuclear reactor on a flood plane and then put all the backup generators together in the basement so they won't be lonely, maybe that guy shouldn't be running a nuclear power plant. (Or a hospital in New Orelans.) Just sayin'.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Unforutnatly, it doesn't meet all of your criteria...
* only 8 light minutes from earth (closer than 1 light year)
* actually engages in nuclear reactions (although you didn't specify fusion vs fision)
* doesn't use current nuclear infrastructure (check!)
* produces lots of waste (e.g., low energy cosmic rays)
* is actually "nuclear" in the fusion sense (but not fission sense)
* uses techology that has billions of years of hardcore reliability testing (check!)
* generally doesn't offend anyone's delicate sensibility (other than basement dwellers and vampires)
For now, I'll keep this perfect place a secret, because as soon as people find out about it, people are gonna protest and want to have it shut it down...
The most important lesson here is one that goes out to all the nuclear fear-mongers: Absolutely everything could possibly go wrong did, and yet no one died. Western-plan nuclear plants have, in my view, been proven safe by this disaster. Compare the damage and loss of life from the far-overblown nuclear meltdown with the entire towns and tens of thousands of people who were washed away by the tsunami, and I think it should be apparent that nuclear reactors have far more business in tectonically active coastal regions than residential areas do.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Actually if you take the conclusion one way, one could say that not only probability theory failed us, but simulations are nothing but a feel good (cause to realize the chances, one takes the probability and models/simulates it).
Cause we all know simulations are just tweaking reality into what we want to hear (i.e. what we want to be fact). Right?
Nuclear power plants should have multiple, reliable ways to cool reactors.
They do. Trouble is: how do you define 'reliable'? If your plant is suddenly hit in the face with a 40-foot chunk of ocean, what do you do about that?
It's simple enough. It's just not possible. For any design you can come up with, someone can come up with a way to break it that is possible (though highly improbable).
... that, unlike most other sources of power - that kill multiple people every year - no-one died, despite the severity of the event.
Near the beginning of the article, it states that the Japan tsunami was "unexpectedly high." this is false. Upon closer review of the historiical data, it was identified that the Japanese inappropriately dismissed some of the large tsunamis from the historical data. This led the Japanese to underestimate the probability of a large tsunami and not design enough protection into the nuclear plant. When all the historical data is included, a tsunami of the size that hit Fukushima is not only probable, but expected to occur over the lifetime of the nuclear plants. If anything, Fukushima proves that the methods of calculating hazards are correct - provided you don't fudge the data. Fortunately for those in the US, nuclear plants are strongly regulated and this type of error would have been identified a long time ago.
Probability theory (that disaster is unlikely) failed us.
Nuclear power plants should have multiple, reliable ways to cool reactor
But that's still probability. Nothing can be guaranteed to work 100% of the time, it's just how many 9s you engineer it to (increasing the cost each time). Having multiple reliable ways just increases it from 99.99999 to 99.9999999 (example). The chance of all 10 separate cooling systems failing is not 0, it's just much less than 1 failing. And they would all be subjected to the same extremely unusual stresses (this is one of the largest quakes on record). They did have multiple ordinarily reliable cooling systems, just not enough of them.
The problem was a simple matter of not having enough generators and not putting enough distance between them
Height too. The generators were on ground level. It would have been relatively cheap to put some of the generators at the top of 50ft high reinforced concrete earthquake-proof buildings with pilings anchoring them 20ft into the ground, which would have put them well out of reach of any tidal wave we're likely to or unlikely to see there.
" Probability theory (that disaster is unlikely) failed us"?
Plugging in wrong numbers (probabilities) doesn't mean there's something wrong with probability theory. It's either someone got a wrong model, or someone weighed money greatly.
And this makes me remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law
TEPCO, Kansai E, JR East, JR West and a thousand others and even the Central Government of Japan exist dispite logic.
The only way that the people (other than the corporates and government beauacrats and politicians and the syndicates) can ride themselves of the pests is to rise up in civil war against the aforementioned.
Not sure that will happen anytime soon however.
Every article on Fukashima is a technical straw-man without considering this.
I'm sure statistical analysis of disaster scenarios, safety designs, cooling redundancy
is essential to modern reactor design and unfolding the unfortunate chain of events.... BUT
The main culprit in releasing the TBq, PBq or who the hell knows EBq of radiation in this event
WAS THE 68 TONS OF SPENT FUEL, ABOVE THE REACTOR THAT FISSIONED
So how about next time we design a reactor, we keep the hot active fissile material away from
the gigantic pile of slightly used, slightly less hot, slightly less active fissionable material ?
To boot the place where one would connect an outside generator to the power circuits for cooling was in the basement of the turbine building and therefore wet. So even if you had an emergency generator handy there was no place to plug it in according to reports from the time of the event. Clearly also you should ensure that after the water of the tsunami goes down, that the place you would plug additional generators in would be above residual water.
Pardon the ignorance but this seems so simple to me, what am I missing?
The problem in these reactors is that they are overheating, steaming, and venting in one way or another due to over heating because they can't power the pumps for the cooling systems to pump away the waste heat generated from decay and various residual things, right?
So if they have enough heat energy in them to melt down, why exactly do they not run their own generators enough to power cooling? I just don't get how a power plant can run out of power ... and then have a problem with too much power and no way to dump it.
It really seems like the solution to the problem is the problem itself. Okay so maybe you can't spin massive turbines for power generation, but theres no way you can't have a smaller secondary system that can run off the waste heat and no external power.
How can you have so much pressure that you're containment vessel is going to pop, but not enough to power the generators? I mean shit, have a secondary turbine powered directly off primary containment thats normally sealed off for the sole purpose of emergency cooling as a last ditch effort knowing the reactor will never be used again kind of thing, you don't have to worry about problems maintaining this emergency turbine due to radiation cause by the time you get to that stage you've accepted the reactor is done and you're trying to lessen the amount of cleanup you have to do, you're past the point of trying to prevent it.
I realize that I'm not coming up with new ideas or anything here, so whats wrong with doing these things, why don't reactors have this already?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Lots of people out there- this guy, Nassim Taleb, tons of economic pundits (usually not real economists), etc- are ready to blame probability theory for every mismanaged disaster situation out there. This is absurd-- even more so than "well, we had another Space Shuttle accident, therefore physics is a failed science."
The problems aren't with probability, they're with bad assumptions. One example: the Black-Scholes model for stock etc prices, which is taught as gospel in business and finance schools, makes the simplistic assumption that price changes are normally (i.e. Gaussian) distributed. That was a nice clean assumption to make for a toy model so the math would come out simply, but real-world price changes badly fail any normality tests- they're very leptokurtotic, i.e. very small and very big changes are both more common than with a normal distribution with the same variance. The result is that the model does considerably more harm than good, as it leads people to vastly underestimate some kinds of risks.
People claim that probability theory leads to people discounting unlikely contingencies- especially the combination of several individually unlikely factors - as not worth planning for. But it's not probability theory's fault that people make unwarranted frequentist assumptions, fail to take into account the increased possibility of error in multiple comparison tests, disobey Cromwell's Rule, overstate their certainty by using priors with insufficient entropy, or wrongly assume that events- esp. catastrophic events- are independent.
There are all kinds of horrid abuses of statistics out there. That means we need to do better at teaching people about probability and be more rigorous in rejecting badly done research; it doesn't mean we give up on a strong mathematical discipline which has made so many of the advances of the last hundred years possible.
In Fukushima they had "containment units" as well, albeit for a different reason and technology. In at least one reactor, those "unbreakable containment units" cracked open and started leaking radioactive water. I wouldn't put my trust in "containment units" if that all there is to stop radioactive crap from escaping.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe. There is no fool proof method to ensure cooling.
Which is why it is not possible to actually insure them. So they are subsidised.
Which is why nuclear energy is artificially cheap.
There are so many other inherently safe methods of producing power, that nuclear is ridiculous. Get over it already.
Fukushima did not have passive emergency cooling systems. The cores started melting in less than 24 hours after the SCRAM, because external electricity (to drive the water circulation pumps) went out and the tsunami knocked out the backup diesel generators as well.
Were any passive cooling systems in place like you describe, the meltdowns could not have occurred that fast.
The only problems with Fukushima were money and politics. It was already clear that the protective wall was too low and other plants had already increased theirs. At Fukushima it wasn't done because the company wanted to save money. The government failed because they should have done a better job checking what Fukushima failed to do. Probably some politician wanted a good job for himself in a couple of years or for some relatives so the critical reports were lost or dropped in the circular archive to keep relations with the company good.
This had nothing to do with technology. It's human failure again.
Exactly, Sir.
What the problem was, in a nutshell, is: a very low probability is not zero probability.
Someone will win the lottery sometime.
Someone will get hit by an asteroid sometime.
Someone will get ravaged by a monkey after which they will get torn to pieces by a rabid crowd of baldhead eagles, sometime.
The probability is low, but not zero. Therefore the event is POSSIBLE.
Of course, in management sciences (or should one say practises), if the probability 1%, it's assumed to be zero. Then one time out of a hundred something will happen, and there is NO protection against it.
"Not even an anvil can live up to some of the probability estimates people have come up with for deployed systems."
When we say "event X has a probability of only happen once per 1000000 years" that does not mean we think our gizmo (car/nuclear central/airplane / whatever)) can go 1000000 years, it only means any given years non cumulative there is a small probability of 1/1000000 that the event can happen, and so the risk is acceptable during the lifetime of the gizmo (years/decades depending on the gizmo). Pffft.
Why is this even a discussion? I mean how many people died in the tidal wave compared to the power plant going pop? How many people will die from chemical poisoning due to all the conventional facilities that were destroyed? But somehow, there is this discussion about Fukushima nuclear power plants that is a complete distraction.
Put it like this - when the Tsunami hit, do you remember all those oil refineries blowing up? How much crap came out of the huge black clouds, and is right now poisoning the poor people of Japan. But everyone has this crazy thing about Fukushima because it's nucular. Get over it!
Because of this complete misconception about the health risk of nuclear power compared to conventional facilities, thousands of people have been displaced - why haven't equivalent people been displaced due to the health risk from conventional facilities?
Far too many people put far too much trust in government, simply because they have convinced themselves they are getting the better half of the deal. What they forget is that every single person in the business of government works precisely for himself -- same as anyone else -- and yet again we have clear proof of it in the Fukushima disaster.
Bottom line: Profit was more important to the people running this show (which in large part means government) than safety.
... the probability model has just been wrong.
The major point of failure was the management.
The issue is not just about cooling, although this is the primary problem illustrated by Fukushima. It is about natural stability of the system. Industrial sized nuclear reactors are generally NOT stable systems so they use technology and human interaction to keep them stable. We could design in more natural stability, and some new reactor designs do just that by reducing the required technology and human interaction. However, these designs may or may not prove to be safer.
Personally I think what happened at Fukushima is actually shows that this kind of activity CAN be and generally IS safe. The magnitude of the earthquake was many times greater than the design was supposed to handle, yet the magnitude of the damage caused beyond the plant will likely end up fairly limited dispute the loss of containment on multiple reactors. It could have and should have been a LOT worse, given how far out of the design parameters the event was and how crippled the response turned out to be. The Fukushima engineers really out did themselves and should be proud of their work.
If this event shows us anything it is this: Emergency response plans and the equipment needed to execute them MUST be available both on and off site and transportation for offsite equipment MUST be possible in ways that don't require much infrastructure. it was totally possible to prevent the loss of containment after the earthquake and tsunami had the necessary equipment shown up in time. This equipment was delayed in transit for way to long and during that delay is when much of the damage took place.
The issue wasn't the plant's design being to weak to deal with the magnitude of the event, because in reality the plant DID survive the initial event fairly well. But the problem was the inability to provide the necessary power to keep the plant safe. This seems to be a planning and logistics problem to me and not a fault in the engineering of the plant. Had the power generation equipment been delivered in time, even in the face of an unplanned for event, the actual damage could have been limited to the plant site.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The problem was a simple matter of not having enough generators and not putting enough distance between them.
You trivialize things and miss the point.
The problem with what you propose - locating the generators in different places, etc - is that it greatly increases the chance that the electrical transmission lines will be disrupted. Longer distances also require more vulrnerable infrastructure like transformers.
I'd suggest the bigger picture issue is beancounters, cost and profit. Businesses don't want to spend on safety. They will shoot the messenger. Scientists can wave their hands all they like, but the beancounter is king.
I am surprised that nobody mentioned beancounters.
Isn't the real enemy the cost of safety, and the lack of ROI on safety investments? Especially for low-probability events.
Scientists and engineers can wave their hands all they'd like, but at the end of the day, cost is king.
And there will always be some crackpot available for hire who will undermine the best models, and the best science, just to make a quick buck and allow a design to be overly economized.
I'm getting pretty sick of people talking about how the technology failed, or the earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. It certainly didn't help, but the situation could have conceivably been put under control if TEPCO had even the slightest disaster planning prepared.
TEPCO did not have manuals for basic emergency procedures in the plants control room
TEPCO did not have safety equipment (protective suits, personal dosimeters, etc) stored on site
TEPCO did not have the equipment required to carry out emergency operations on site (eg. an air compressor to manually open a pneumatic valve)
TEPCO did not have any clear plans in place for severe emergencies
TEPCO had not run drills or training for disaster response
TEPCO didn't even have a clear crisis management, response and responsibility plan
Any single one of these points is horrific. All together, to me, it is just mind numbing that this isn't just happening at Fukushima Daiichi, but at 17 plants and many more nuclear material handling companies.
What is absolutely sickening about the whole situation is that a few documents and some very basic equipment, and the application of basic disaster planning essentials could have taken Fukushima from being what it is today to simply being a messy close-call. Had they been able to manually open the valves and provide even a small amount of power within a reasonable timeframe it would have been dramatically different.
Risk management isn't about throwing technology at a problem until you feel invulnerable, but nor is it about making excuses why you shouldn't have to bother. This failure was a simple results of a failure of policy and planning.
Anyone wanting solid sources for any of the above, feel free to ask, I'll get them. I just don't want to look them all up now :S
Here is a good start if you want to know more, again, I'm happy to source any claim in here too: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jeff-Kingston/3724
I'm sure that the technicians working at Fukushima Daiichi on the 11th of march would have been glad to fix a powerline, which they could have done in a few hours while the emergency systems were running, to reestablish all the cooling needed to prevent a meltdown.
Also, with "longer distances" I simply meant a bit more than the 30cm or so between the 7 generators you can see on the picture I linked to. Certainly not miles and miles.