The Fukushima accident was preventable
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The Fukushima accident was preventable
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Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#2It's a long read, here's a link to an article that summarizes some of the study's findings.
http://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable...
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#3In hindsight all accidents are preventable.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#4As I understand it, the Fukushima plant was never designed or rated to sustain such a large earthquake or tsunami. If this understanding is correct, we should not have expected it to survive the damage, and the problems were not with the design, but perhaps with the specification (depending on whether you think this should have been foreseen).
It seems to be a common thread with all tragedies and disasters that people suffer from hindsight bias, and believe that this specific case should have been foreseen. It is not clear what the cost of building everything to sustain all similar low-probability events would be, and whether doing so would be statistical murder.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#5In hindsight all accidents are preventable.
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Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#6In hindsight all accidents are preventable.
> The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings.
I think the main point is that the damage wasn't caused by a freak storm that no one could have predicted. It was caused by a series of mistakes that we shouldn't have made with the knowledge we had at the time.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#7Isn't every accident preventable in hindsight since you know exactly what the failure mode was?
If they'd built the generators on a hillside that was washed away in a mudslide the article would read "Critical backup generators were built on unstable hillside despite warnings from scientists".
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#8As I understand it, the Fukushima plant was never designed or rated to sustain such a large earthquake or tsunami. If this understanding is correct, we should not have expected it to survive the damage, and the problems were not with the design, but perhaps with the specification (depending on whether you think this should have been foreseen). It seems to be a common thread with all tragedies and disasters that peopl…
Here's a key phrase from the abstract that suggests more than hindsight bias is involved in the report:
The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings.
Another one:
Three, the hazard analysis to calculate the maximum probable tsunami at Dai-ichi appeared to have had methodological mistakes, which almost nobody experienced in tsunami engineering would have made.
So there is sense in which they are pretty strongly pointing at regulatory failure.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#9[deleted]
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#10As I understand it, the Fukushima plant was never designed or rated to sustain such a large earthquake or tsunami. If this understanding is correct, we should not have expected it to survive the damage, and the problems were not with the design, but perhaps with the specification (depending on whether you think this should have been foreseen). It seems to be a common thread with all tragedies and disasters that peopl…
Here's a key phrase from the abstract that suggests more than hindsight bias is involved in the report: The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings. Another one: Three, the hazard analysis to calculate the maximu…
When it was built or after? This plant was built in the early eighties. The article doesn't state if it violated the ideals of then or more recent knowledge.