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The Fukushima accident was preventable

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Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#51

Post by mikeyouse »

FussyZeus wrote: post #44

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 t…

> As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened.

There are hundreds of square miles still in the exclusion zone and some 80,000 people haven't been able to return to their homes.. I'd say a nuclear meltdown that displaces tens of thousands of people and costs several hundred billion dollars to clean up qualifies as a 'disaster'.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#52

Post by keypusher »

craigching wrote: post #47

> causing the third most severe accident in an NPP ever. I thought this was the second most severe nuclear power plant accident. Obviously Chernobyl is the first, so what is the second according to this article?

Hmm. According to the International Nuclear Event Scale, there have only been 2 events at the most severe level (7): Chernobyl and Fukushima. There was 1 event at a rating of 6, which was a Soviet explosion in 1957. There was also the Three Mile Island accident, which cost a lot of money to clean up (~$1 billion) but I don't think the severity was anywhere near Fukushima.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#53

Post by seanflyon »

maxerickson wrote: post #20
ChuckMcM wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

> the tsunami it experienced was accepted by the best engineering data at the time to be impossible.

I find that hard to believe. It was the 4th largest earthquake in the last century and doesn't make the Wikipedia list of "Megatsunamis". It was more a question of how long between such extreme events than if such an extreme event could occur.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#54

Post by bsder »

Someone1234 wrote: post #48
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…

It seems I stand corrected. It looks like the hydrogen was a result of the dissociation of the zircalloy.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#55

Post by hamiltonkibbe »

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 .

Just like the bribes required to force the taxpayer to allow the sale of cigarettes, right?

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#56

Post by ars »

dredmorbius wrote: post #28
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…

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. This isn't a root cause for which there are technical solutions.

Have you heard the saying: In the future they will be staffed by a man and a dog. The man to feed the dog, and the dog to bark at the man in case he tries to touch anything.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#57

Post by worik »

Really this is silly. People who advocate nuclear power do not understand the difference between "risk" and "uncertainty".

"Risk" is where the probabilities of occurrence can be estimated and the consequences predicted.

"Uncertainty" is the set of other things going wrong.

Nuclear risk can be managed: We can contain a nuclear pile, we can design piping to withstand wear and sopply redundancy.

But with a nuclear power station if some thing unforeseen happens to the containment vessel the consequences are ruin and effectively unbounded catastrophe.

A coal burning stations are dirty polluting monstrosities (at their best) but it is all risk.

Not that I am advocating coal, I am not! But nuclear is no replacement. We are much better to do without energy than build nuclear power plants.

But the main incentive for nuclear power is making materials for bombs, IMO

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#58

Post by thaumasiotes »

mikeyouse wrote: post #51
FussyZeus wrote: post #44

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 t…

> As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened. There are hundreds of square miles still in the exclusion zone and some 80,000 people haven't been able to return to their homes.. I'd say a nuclear meltdown that displaces tens of thousands of people and costs several hundred billion dollars to clean up qualifi…

Eh. A traditional disaster kills people.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#59

Post by jrjr »

Could have all been avoided. Japan's power consists of Fiefdoms and no cooperation from adjacent working power sources at that time.

They could have run an "extension cord" and saved themselves from the entire mess.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#60

Post by vesinisa »

nickff wrote: post #4

As 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…

The authors argue that there were very serious and repeated shortcomings in the methodology used to estimate the highest possible flooding caused by a tsunami.

The plant was designed for 6-meter tsunami from an M=7.5 earthquake, but what actually hit them was a 13-meter tsunami from an M=9.0 quake. I understood it's international standard practice to consider worst-case events from historical record spanning thousands of years in nuclear plant risk analysis, and it is known that almost as strong earthquakes hit Japan in 1933 (M=8.5) and 869 (M=8.6), for example. A plant by a different company just 100 km north of Dai-ichi was built for a 13-meter tsunami, so there was little consistency in what preparations the tsunami analysis actually induced, and the regulator seems to have been indifferent to these disparities. Further, there were for some reason no mandatory "safety margins" in tsunami level precautions to offset modelling inaccuracies, unlike in precautions for the earthquake ground shock – eventhough computational models for tsunami levels were and remain much less accurate than the ground shock models.

Although by 2000s the shortcomings of tsunami analysis like the one done for Dai-ichi were already well-known, a methodologically-flawed further analysis by TEPCO in 2010 failed to introduce any new recommendations – against the published opinions of their own scientists. The cost of relocating the diesel generators higher up in the building would have been just in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, rather than millions.

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