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.'"

Comments

Re:Correct

[19thNervousBreakdown]

This is from the Christian Science Monitor.

Christians' (and all religious folks) minds are broken. Sometimes in very obvious ways, such as when they're giving tacit approval to the institutionalization of child sexual abuse by tithing to the Catholic church even after it was shown that they assisted priests in getting away with it. Sometimes in much more subtle ways. For instance, this guy seems to think there are absolute answers to everything. I suppose that's not such a big leap when you accept that there's an all-powerful all-knowing being. He says that they should have planned for the 15' tsunami regardless of the fact that it was a 1/10,000 year event because it happened. As in, it happened in the past. Therefore, they should have planned ahead for it. Because now that it's happened, the ... probability (I have a real problem applying this word to a past event) that it would have happened is 100%. Which they should have planned for.

He says that we should have an infallable way to cool every reactor, or we shouldn't have reactors. Well, I guess there can only be one reactor, because there's only one pope to go around blowing on these things to keep everyone safe, and the probability that two reactors would break at once is 100% once two reactors have broken at once.

Sorry. It sucks. I'm sure they did lots of things wrong at Fukushima. Maybe one of them was drawing the line at a once in 10,000 years event, maybe it should have been a once in 100,000 years event. But saying that we should have some guaranteed way of making things safe is ridiculous. Nothing is 100% safe, and you can never, ever predict everything that might go wrong. I'm sure my actual argument will be drowned out by the fact that I took the opportunity to take a stab at the religious, but hey, I've got the karma to burn and it needs to be said until we stop treating these delusional people as intellectual equals.

Re:Correct

[Chas]

Basically a "suitable" site can't be:

* within 1 light year of anything else
* actually engage in any sort of nuclear reactions
* use the standing nuclear infrastructure for anything
* produce any waste whatsoever. It produces clean drinking water, power, and air? BAD! BAAAAAAD!
* "actually" nuclear in any way, shape or form.
* use any technology that doesn't have at least 50,000 years of hardcore reliability testing
* offend anyone's delicate sensibilities in any way

Basically there is no such thing as a "suitable" site for these people. Because the second someone says "nuclear" their head turns off COMPLETELY (if it wasn't already off) and the first thing out of their yap-holes is "bombs" "Hiroshima" "Nagasaki", "Three Mile Island", "Chernobyl" and now "Fukashima".