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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."
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.
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
Sigh. I submitted this story in a hurry this morning before I left for work; and I typed "one-in-a-million" when the part of my brain that isn't dead had meant to type "once-in-a-millenium," which is the actual argument TEPCO makes.
I hate getting old.
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?
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.
Yes. That such a big tsunami might occur within the timeframe that the nuclear plant was running might be a rare event, but tsunamis almost as strong had historically occurred along that coastline. This was not the first Richter M8+ earthquake and associated large tsunami along the Sendai coast. The Sendai Plain has sediment layers going back a few thousand years with previous events that inundated the area to several metres deep at the coastline. The plant protection was not adequate for the *known* events at ~1000-year scale. That's just foolish.
If TEPCO makes the argument that they shouldn't have to prepare for the possibility of a once-in-a-1000-year event during the operation of a plant running for almost 50 years, then they're crazy.
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.
The company decided a complete disaster was worth risking because it was only a once in 1000 years probability. Considering the risk, that was an irresponsible choice. Providing a robust cooling/shutdown system wouldn't have cost much more than the system they built. The plant would still have been lost but the gross amount of radiation leakage wouldn't have happened.
Well, they only needed to deal with flooding, as in,
1. put at least a few of the generators on that HILL behind the reactors
2. run WATERPROOF and reinforced cables (so they don't break if something falls on them) from those hill installed generators to each of the buildings
3. Make the most vital parts of the nuclear plant, the reactor building itself, water resistant (eg. doors open outside, not inside) with water pumps to catch leaks.
A plant like that should be under 10m of water, get water logged, but still not melt down. Heck, passively safe systems would work too.
So no, I don't agree that reinforcing Fukushima would have been a bad thing. It would have saved some money and a lot of grief in the long run.
Regardless, total compensation for the disaster is expected to be about 200-250 billion USD equivalent (yen). Japan is now burning through about 35-45 billion USD hard currency per year to replace nuclear power with fossil fuels and they are running short. So one Fukushima level disaster every 5-6 years is what nuclear power is saving in costs to Japanese economy. And that is why Japan without nuclear power is a dead economy.
As for the "environmentalists" saying doom and gloom, the entire effect of nuclear power disaster like that is quite local. Not good for Japan *people*, but completely unimportant from the world population. Heck, it could even be a positive thing for the natural world. Nature can reclaim 10s of sq. mi. of land simply because it is now undesirable by humans for a few generations. So I have now idea how so called environmentalists say nuclear power is bad.. If all goes right - it doesn't emit CO2 or toxins. If it goes tits-up, people leave the area and allow nature to thrive... I have yet to see an animal care if it has 1% or 10% increased chance of a tumor in its lifetime! It seems to care more if it gets run over by a car or shot or its habitat made into another Walmart.
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.
Your little brain freeze notwithstanding, that was an exemplary summary of a complex report. The mea culpa is also appreciated.
For those who want to read a little more, there's a very good article over at Ars Technica, which in turn links to the full English report from the Japanese parliamentary inquiry as well as an IEEE Spectrum account of the immediate aftermath.
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...
part of the human factor is we're absolutely never going to do this. it's not how we work. we learn by making mistakes, and we learn slowly.
In your opinion what is the threshold for acceptable consequences?
- 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!
You kind of missed the point of this whole review, didn't you?
As someone who lives in Japan, and in fact in one of the more radioactively contaminated areas outside Fukushima (which isn't that bad), I sure as hell want them to figure out what went wrong and fix it. They called it a man-made error, which in and of itself is an important step in saying that the whole system from the ground up needs to be revised. They even use the word colluded to describe the relationship between the NISA and TEPCO. These are the kinds of issues that can and should be addressed.
As for the power plants themselves, TEPCO all the other energy companies were given a free ride for years, avoiding having to make any upgrades or adjustments to safety regulations. Does that sound like the kind of nuclear industry you want running your power plants? The report even says that if the Japanese nuclear officials had improved the plants in line with the US standards adopted in the 9/11 report, they could have potentially survived these disasters without problem.
Finally, the kinds of flood and tsunami protections you are talking about WERE in place. They were completely overwhelmed, and there is no amount of further prevention other than living away from the ocean that would have saved lives. The Guiness World Record holder for the largest wave breaker was in Kamaishi, and that massive wall was cut in two by the ocean.
So maybe before going on a rant, you might actually read the report and see how important it is for fixing the corruption that has ruled the power industry monopolies for years.
If insurance companies are elbowing each other out of the way to get the contract to insure your factory / power plant;
because their income depends on accurately assessing the risk/reward factors.
Actuary is a very well paying profession, I hear.
Nobody wants to insure nuclear power plants. That's an indicator from an unbiased source that they are a bad idea.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
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...