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The Fukushima accident was preventable

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Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#41

Post by nickff »

monochromatic wrote: post #25
bsder wrote: post #22

Of 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…

> Reactors should not be for-profit. Maybe. The motivations are different for a government project, but I'm not convinced that they're better.

Yes, this point is the basis for 'public choice' theory.[1]

The levees in New Orleans were government built and maintained; should we not take the failures there into account before we rush to judge the private sector for Fukushima?[2] The other problem with blaming private actors for problems at Fukushima is that (as far as I can tell) they followed all the standards and regulations as required by the regulators responsible for public safety, which seems to indicate that if anyone was at fault, it was the government regulators.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_levee_failures_in_Greater...

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#42

Post by Karunamon »

Avshalom wrote: post #31
jessaustin wrote: post #17

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.

As much as the parent comment is content-free, direct deaths aren't the only thing to consider. There's also cancer and other diseases that can be caused because of the increased radiation in the area, including that which got into the food chain.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#43

Post by logicallee »

makomk wrote: post #39
logicallee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

if our title read "Nuclear power plants are still being run recklessly, and the next Fukushima-like accident is likely 100% preventable today" it would get my attention, and I would read what the claims that we need to be doing are.

small statistical disagreements about experts on the other hand, are hard to take as seriously.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#44

Post by FussyZeus »

Here's something about the real world: Things break. Shit happens. We can sit on a chair now and look back and point out all the things that could've been done better, and I honestly don't see the value in it.

When the World Trade Center was built, it was designed to withstand the impact of a common airplane at the time and remain structurally sound. The engineers didn't envision a 757 being flown into them, and so they fell. Does that mean they were engineered poorly too? 9/11 would've been prevented if we built additional structure around the WTC each year to accommodate newer, larger, heavier aircraft, but at what point do you rule safety cost as too high to be justified?

On the same note, Fukushima survived a storm massively larger than it was ever meant to. It still failed, but it did so in a way that prevented any direct deaths. As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened.

How about we just agree to say we got lucky this time and do better in the future?

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#45

Post by Avshalom »

Karunamon wrote: post #42
Avshalom wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally no one died of radiation due to Fukushima.

As much as the parent comment is content-free, direct deaths aren't the only thing to consider. There's also cancer and other diseases that can be caused because of the increased radiation in the area, including that which got into the food chain.

Yeah... the number of those deaths is estimated at somewhere between 0 and 100. Which is to say such a tiny number that it won't be empirically distinguishable from normal fluctuations.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#46

Post by jakeogh »

bsder wrote: post #22

Of 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…

"sat on their hands, done nothing"

That's how it should be, but in this case not doing anything was not an option. The passive (gravity fed) cooling system on the first reactor to melt had it's valve's almost closed when they lost power. Seems like a bad design to even have valves on it but I'm not a Nuclear Engineer.

And people at Daini were able to prevent meltdowns by hand-laying miles of high current cable. Reasonable documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9wDRHZHP0

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#48

Post by Someone1234 »

bsder wrote: post #22

Of 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…

> However, backend failures, like spraying water on the core (NOT one of the established procedures because calm engineers knew that the reactor could dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen)

I cannot find any other information on this claim and I just read the main Wikipedia article, this article, and the Wikipedia timeline.

Didn't the hydrogen explosions start before they started spraying the reactor/building with fire trucks anyway (March 12th Vs March 17th respectively)? According to the timeline it did.

So while hydrogen explosions definitely occurred due to an overheating core, it is specifically laying blame at the use of emergency water to try and cool the core that I am asking about. It does not seem accurate.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#49

Post by Karunamon »

Avshalom wrote: post #45
Karunamon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as the parent comment is content-free, direct deaths aren't the only thing to consider. There's also cancer and other diseases that can be caused because of the increased radiation in the area, including that which got into the food chain.

Yeah... the number of those deaths is estimated at somewhere between 0 and 100. Which is to say such a tiny number that it won't be empirically distinguishable from normal fluctuations.

I said diseases, not deaths. Cancer isn't always fatal, but they impact the quality of life for the sufferers as well as putting an economic burden on the healthcare system.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#50

Post by jandrese »

ansible wrote: post #24
PaulHoule wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read closely you see that the accident was so bad because of one simple problem. If a nuclear reactor has a cooling failure, the fuel will eventually heat up and then melt down. To prevent this you have to keep water circulating around the reactor core. It doesn't take a huge amount of energy to do this, but it does take some. If the power goes out at the station and they can't get emergency power, the outcome…

If a nuclear reactor has a cooling failure, the fuel will eventually heat up and then melt down. To prevent this you have to keep water circulating around the reactor core. This is the one simple problem. There are now reactor designs that are passively fail-safe. So that even if all the pumps and everything stop, it will still not result in an explosion or otherwise serious release of radioactive material. I don't k…

In fact Fukushima had a passive cooling system, but the valve to it was mostly closed when the power was lost and nobody knew how to open it or even check its state.
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