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Fukushima Nuclear Worker Accidentally Toggles Off Cooling Pumps
An anonymous reader writes "A Tepco employee carelessly pressed a button shutting off cooling pumps that serve the spent fuel pool in reactor #4 — thankfully a backup kicked in before any critical consequences resulted. The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools, filled nearly to capacity as they are with over 12,000 spent fuel rods? From the article: 'The latest incident is another reminder of the precarious state of the Fukushima plant, which has suffered a series of mishaps and accidents this year. Earlier this year, Tepco lost power to cool spent uranium fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi plant after a rat tripped an electrical wire.'"
It was homer simpson who did it.
Didn't he write The Iliad?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
That seems like the sort of function that should be designed with a multi-step process to execute, to eliminate precisely that kind of error. How in the world did that get implemented?
I suggest one more step in the process might be effective.
They need a slight reconfiguration of the Cooling Pump Switch. It would be relatively cheap, and pretty much idiot proof.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.