Of course they have to say that. If they admitted how dangerous nuclear power is, the bribes required to force the taxpayer to build new plants would be simply enormous .
Literally no one died of radiation due to Fukushima.
The Fukushima accident was preventable
31–40 of 112 posts
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#32Of course it was, as were things like the explosions afterward. However, management always gets in the way--either up front, because there is profit pressure, or on the backend, because there is profit and/or political pressure. This paper covers the up front failures. However, backend failures, like spraying water on the core ( NOT one of the established procedures because calm engineers knew that the reactor could…
The point that it's organisational and management issues which so frequently seem to be behind major disasters -- four of the larger nuclear accidents (Fukushima, the earlier Japanese criticality incident at Tokaimura, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island), as well as numerous other large-scale industrial accidents, of which energy systems play a large role: the BP Gulf Oil spill, Exxon Valdez, Banqiao Dam (China, 1975), rec…
I have to second Perrow's Normal Accidents. I read it first in college and I've kept my copy sitting on my desk ever since as a reminder. (I joke-not-joke that, if I ever run a startup, every employee gets a copy on their first day.)
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
This report directly disagrees with Further, at the time of its commissioning, the tsunami it experienced was accepted by the best engineering data at the time to be impossible. Directly. This part uses scare quotes to describe the 'quality' of the work: Its initial application was based on the 3.122 m measurement local tsunami height (above Onahama Peil (O.P.) reference sea level), observed during the 1960 Great Chi…
British use of quotes is typically distinguished from American, in that where emphasis using language from the original document is intended, those words are typically quoted. You'll see this extensively in BBC headlines. They're not "scare quotes", to quote you. They're direct quotations, for emphasis .
Those quote marks are in the report to indicate sarcasm.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea with building safe systems is not to imagine what could cause subsystem X to fail, but to figure out how to cope when subsystem X fails. The most obvious design failure at Fukushima was not "how big a tsunami we should protect against" but not asking "how will we cope when the seawall fails". If the critical backup generators had been in a bunker designed to protect them from a seawall breach, the disaster w…
Although it's been a very long time since I did engineering that could actually kill people, this idea that you focus on what can go wrong and how you mitigate it has stuck with me and has proved useful in lots of things. Having said that, the next questions are usually: what is the likelihood of it going wrong and what is the cost of mitigation? I don't envy the people making those decisions on something like a nucl…
At some point, you do assign a probability of systemic failure threshold, as nothing is perfect.
The idea behind orthogonal backups, however, is that since they are independent, very high reliability can be achieved with low reliable components. For example, if you've got a main with 90% reliability, and a backup with 90% reliability, the combined reliability is 99%. This can be a lot easier and less expensive to achieve than making one component 99%.
The backup generators could have a cheap extra seawall built around them, or could have simply raised them up on a 10 foot platform, or built them with snorkels like a jeep designed to cross streams.
Building a heftier main seawall would have been an order of magnitude or two more expensive.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#35Of course it was, as were things like the explosions afterward. However, management always gets in the way--either up front, because there is profit pressure, or on the backend, because there is profit and/or political pressure. This paper covers the up front failures. However, backend failures, like spraying water on the core ( NOT one of the established procedures because calm engineers knew that the reactor could…
The point that it's organisational and management issues which so frequently seem to be behind major disasters -- four of the larger nuclear accidents (Fukushima, the earlier Japanese criticality incident at Tokaimura, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island), as well as numerous other large-scale industrial accidents, of which energy systems play a large role: the BP Gulf Oil spill, Exxon Valdez, Banqiao Dam (China, 1975), rec…
You cannot engineer out human nature.
You can do a lot to minimize the effects of human nature or even utilize it. You just need to build systems for humans not some abstract ideal. Case in point, the giant Menu inside a fast food restaurant has a lot of counter intuitive properties designed to alter people’s behavior. It's not pretty, but it works. Note, we are talking about the masses of humanity not just those you select or train etc.
Now, doing the same for complex systems is hard. But, clearly there are ways to improve.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#36As 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…
The next nuclear accident that will occur in the world is 100% preventable, and without any hindsight bias I will tell you exactly how... after it occurs.
/s
(seriously, if you want me to take a claim seriously that accidents are preventable, talk about what we are doing wrong today, not in the past.)
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The next nuclear accident that will occur in the world is 100% preventable, and without any hindsight bias I will tell you exactly how... after it occurs. /s (seriously, if you want me to take a claim seriously that accidents are preventable, talk about what we are doing wrong today, not in the past.)
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience.html
The point of that link being, there are people that are thinking about what the problems are and working to fix them, so it is sort of glib to demand that such things be done.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
This report directly disagrees with Further, at the time of its commissioning, the tsunami it experienced was accepted by the best engineering data at the time to be impossible. Directly. This part uses scare quotes to describe the 'quality' of the work: Its initial application was based on the 3.122 m measurement local tsunami height (above Onahama Peil (O.P.) reference sea level), observed during the 1960 Great Chi…
British use of quotes is typically distinguished from American, in that where emphasis using language from the original document is intended, those words are typically quoted. You'll see this extensively in BBC headlines. They're not "scare quotes", to quote you. They're direct quotations, for emphasis .
I've definitely noticed that. I often misread BBC headlines as scare-quotes at first, which is sometimes funny. Two on there right now: Ministers 'in listening mode' on tax credits; 'Autonomy' plan for Scottish Labour.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The next nuclear accident that will occur in the world is 100% preventable, and without any hindsight bias I will tell you exactly how... after it occurs. /s (seriously, if you want me to take a claim seriously that accidents are preventable, talk about what we are doing wrong today, not in the past.)
Engineers at TEPCO did tell them what they were doing wrong at Fukushima Daiichi. They were ignored:
"In 2008, TEPCO did two sets of calculations, one based on the Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion (HERP) fault models which suggested tsunami height estimates of 8.4–10.2 m relative to the reference sea level. Another one based on Satake et al. [47] produced 8.7–9.2 m tsunami height estimates which were also apparently dismissed [32]. TEPCO ignored them, claiming there was ‘no wave source model’ for the former, and it required a tsunami deposit investigation for the latter [32]. In 2009, new estimates using updated bathymetry and tidal data yielded a 6.1 m tsunami height [12,32]. This was not followed-up and was only reported to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) on 7 March 2011 [48]. A post-event study [48] asserts that ‘a senior NISA official has confirmed to us that NISA neither ‘commissioned nor reviewed’ numerical studies of tsunami run-up at Fukushima Daiichi’."
The reason you only hear about these issues after an accident occurs is not because they could only be predicted in hindsight, but because no-one cared about the predictions until after the accident.
Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if you agree that the findings are unsustainable or not. Two things that the IAEA had established were that 1) Fukishima survived the earthquake as designed, and was in the process of shutting down when the tsunami hit. 2) The tsunami disabled primary and backup power to the cooling systems which was the proximate cause of the failure. Further, at the time of its commissioning, the tsunami it experienced…
This report directly disagrees with Further, at the time of its commissioning, the tsunami it experienced was accepted by the best engineering data at the time to be impossible. Directly. This part uses scare quotes to describe the 'quality' of the work: Its initial application was based on the 3.122 m measurement local tsunami height (above Onahama Peil (O.P.) reference sea level), observed during the 1960 Great Chi…
I believe I misquoted the IAEA, but I did find the actual report [1] which talked about the Tsunami hazard. As reported it was "Fukishima's tsnumani vulnerability has been regularly updated with the latest accepted methodology." (and I relayed that as meeting the standards of the time) but the actual report also concludes that the methodology was insufficient because it did not consider beyond the most recent few hundred years.
But perhaps more importantly this is a great example of how complex these things can be. The "accepted methodology" and by that they mean the one the regulators hold them to, failed to consider a more geologically relevant time span (thousands of years versus hundreds of years).
My understanding of the situation was that the regulators said "Tell us you have accounted for tsunamis" and TEPCO said "We have, using the accepted methodology, here are the results."
So when did we know the methodology was wrong or insufficient? A lot of people had access to what TEPCO filed and their rationale over the 40+ years of operation. I'm interested if there was a concerted effort, pre-disaster, to get the methodology changed.
[1] "While the tsunami hazard assessment ha d been periodically updated at the Fukushima nuclear power plant taking into account the latest accepted methodology in Japan, the magnitude of the tsunami hazard was underestimated because it was based solely on historical data on relatively recent events (occurring within the past few hundred years). " -- https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/protection040912.pd...