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Japanese Parliament: Fukushima a Man-Made Disaster
Bootsy Collins writes "The predominant narrative of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has been that the accident was caused by a one-in-a-million tsunami, an event so unlikely that TEPCO could not reasonably have been expected to plan for it. However, a Parliamentary inquiry in Japan has concluded that this description is flawed — that the disaster was preventable through a reasonable and justifiable level of preparation, and that initial responses were horribly bungled. The inquiry report points a finger at collusion between industry executives and regulators in Japan as well as 'the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture.' It also raises the question of whether the failed units at Fukushimi Daiichi were already damaged by the earthquake before the tsunami even hit, going so far as to say that 'We cannot rule out the possibility that a small-scale LOCA (loss-of-coolant accident) occurred at the reactor No 1 in particular.' This is an explosive question in quake-prone Japan, appearing in the news just as Japan begins to restart reactors that have been shut down nationwide since the disaster."
stop blaming random "acts of God" for setups man created.
example: I stack 36 pounds of plutonium blocks in the back yard because I want to send ten atoms to all my friends. I just so happened to use an aluminum pan to hold it, and also tossed in a little polonium and a beryllium copper golf club because that crap was in my way.
and the town blows up.
what kind of "act of God" was that?
same thing for Fukushima.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I would rather the government built and ran them. I trust government workers to stick to engineering spec and scientific guideline more then a company where a CEO will make a larger bonus by putting off storage costs another year.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think /. is turning Japanese, I really think so.
Anyone who thought a tsunami hitting Japan was one in a million need to have there head examined.
Or as least, have their math examined. This was just a issue of bad statistical calculations, along with bad disaster planning.
This just confirms two major an so far insurmountable problems that people have been pointing out.
1. No amount of upgrades will deal with chronic underfunding, poor management and incompetence. New designs don't deal with these problems either because it is next to impossible. There has to be ongoing maintenance and investment, and you have to have a firm date for decomissioning which you don't extend past. All the time for-profit businesses are running the plants this is impossible, even with the existing massive subsidies.
2. The best reactor designs in the world are only good up to about a 7.9 on the Richter scale. The epicentre of this one was a long way from Fukushima but may still have damanged it. If there is one closer to a nuclear plant the outcome is basically undefined and we are just crossing our fingers.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
there are lots of reports out and coming, and lots of boiling down hundreds of pages of complex investigation into 20 column-inches, from which, boiled with a pinch of pepper and lots of HappyTalk, you get a 20 second news story.
there are already lots of pages of technical shortcomings, outright ignorance, wishful thinking, dotcom business plans, and pinhead idiots in custom suits strutting before and hiding afterwards trying to protect their secret overseas banking accounts in the wild over this.
Fukushima is pretty much a complete cluster-fuck, a manual of "don't do this" in every direction.
but the Japanese way is one or two men take the blame, grab the sword, and everybody else moves happy through the streets now that the demons are purged.
this report points out the 800-pound gorilla in the corner, whistling past the graveyard, hoping to not attract attention.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There has been a tsunami that killed over 10000 people and demolished multiple cities and dozens of chemical plants and factories. If this was a man-made disaster where the fuck was the planning to prevent it? Why are we still talking about the nuclear plant, where at most a couple of dozen people will die in the next hundred years?
Sure, we could have done more to prevent the damage in Fukushima, like build units from a newer generation (fukushima daichi's sister plant survived the same tsunami, but was slightly younger and thus had much less problems), have better oversight, regulation, emergency response etc. However, that is like asking what could have been done better about shark deaths in Nevada ("noone expected it to happen", "zomg, sharks!"), and totally ignoring deaths by drugs abuse, cancer, transportation accidents and cardiovascular causes in the meantime.
The point is, reinforcing Fukushima would have been a waste of money and effort, money and effort that would have been better spent on building better flood barriers to protect places where people actually live.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Why didnt they warn the operators beforehand, that sounds like negligence.
See how that works?
It's a some-hundreds-of-pages report, so I wouldn't have expected you to have read it; but is it too much to skim the summary that TFA kindly provides?
The report's punchline is that TEPCO fucked up, and nuclear oversight and response are deeply rotten on both the operator and the regulator sides due to chronic regulatory capture and fecklessness. Honestly, that's a conclusion even more difficult to fix than some sort of design problem. Machines can be repaired. Deep cultural rot is much harder to root out, and makes it very likely that, even where solutions do exist, they will not be reliably enacted.
It's really about the most damning conclusion that the report could have arrived at...
I'm honestly surprised by this.
Not the "it was human error, TEPCO fucked up and could easily have avoided the disaster" part. That was completely expected. I was suspecting as much before they even had it shut down.
Nor am I surprised about the "collusion between industry and regulators". That was also a given.
What I *am* surprised about is that they're admitting to it this quickly. I expected it to be a decade or two before TEPCO or the government would admit that anything but the earthquake/tsunami were to blame. And that they're even blaming their own culture of discipline... wow. That's some harsh self-criticism.
Wait, what?
You do realise that the problem here was that the "free market" produced a corrupt business which then bribed the government to look the other way, yes?
You do realise that removing regulation doesn't take away the ability to bribe the government to look the other way, yes?
You do realise that all an individual needs is to balance risk/reward for himself, not the business he works for, yes? The goal is not "business profit", it's individual profit.
Libertarians are stupid. I say that in the nicest possible sense: they're a regular combination of ignorance and low intelligence. They don't really think through what they say. I don't think that they would be able to, even if you helped them to train their minds to think in greater depth.
That's an example of government doing it. Many areas of the former East Germany are toxic cesspools because the government didn't care about proper waste disposal.
When a company does this it has to answer to the government. When a government does this it, in theory only, has to answer to the people. But you have probably noticed how little accountability the government has to the people lately.
Before commenting on this story, people might want to re-read the story about the Onigawa power station's survival that was posted here last March. There's pretty clear evidence that at least some managers of Japanese nuclear-power stations understood the tsunami danger and prepared for it. So the main questions should be: Why wasn't this understood by the entire management chain? And what are they doing to make sure they're preparing for the next such disaster?
I'd think that people in Japan should be checking on which of their power system's managers are busy studying this and related stories, and putting those people in charge of the surviving plants. If they don't, then it's just going to happen again at some unknown future date.
Similar comments would apply in most of the other volcanic zones on the planet. Here in the US, we might be checking to see which managers of critical infrastructure on the West Coast are aware of the story and studying it. We may not have the 1000-year history that the Japanese have, but we do have geological information about similar events along our coast.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The design for the reactor in question was actually American.
Yeah the problem was 100% human. On the contrary, nuclear technology is 100% safe.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Indeed. And there are quite a few of these "well engineered" pieces of crap in the USA.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
- points out that $pet_ideology "predicted" this outcome.
- points out some flaws in a system that is != $pet_ideology
- propose $pet_ideology as solution
- completely ignore any other flaws than $pet_ideology might entail
seems good to me!
nice! but how'd the Israelis cause the tsunami? that's pretty clever of them to blame the earthquake though.
It's not a independent investigation, but parlamental - which is reason I don't buy it, because politicians always want to look better in public eye. And current public attitude is fear of nuclear. So let's make it to look like human error, nevermind that it hasn't killed anyone directly, and it was once in a lifetime event.
Mistakes, errors - that's all there. But I would pick a independent scientists and management specialists to vet out them, not politicians.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The kicker is that those two are not independent:
The report's punchline is that, because of human/cultural problems, the technology actually deployed will never be as safe and reliable as the technology theoretically available with today's body of engineering and technology knowledge.
So, whatever the state of the art is, unless the broken human factor is fixed, the actual nuclear facilities actually fully of zesty isotopes will always be less safe than the state of the art would suggest, even in a fairly high-budget situation like Japan.
That's the real kicker. Even if technology could save you(I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable of the state of the art to say whether it actually could or not), you won't take it up on that offer, so having broken humans ensures that you will end up dealing with incompetent responses to the breakage of sub-optimal technology...
No, I'm not talking about political parties. What I mean is, you need some group who are separate and independent from the people responsible for building and operating the reactors, mines, oil wells, etc, who are your regulators. The trick is keeping the regulators from becoming corrupt and losing their independence.
What I mean is, it doesn't matter whether private companies or government, whoever is building and running dangerous facilities NEEDS someone else who is independent looking over their shoulder or they will become complacent, and eventually an incident will occur.