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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.
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".
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
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.
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.
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
This news is going on two decades old. No wonder Slashdot is losing market share.
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"
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.
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...
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?