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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 think /. is turning Japanese, I really think so.
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.
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.