The Fukushima accident was preventable

Post by BurningFrog » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 12:42 PM UTC

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…

Remember that this was the biggest earthquake to hit Japan in over 1000 years of known quake history.

It hit in a pretty ideal spot to generate a big tsunami at the reactor site.

Maybe the reactors "should" have been engineered to handle this situation anyway, but keep in mind that this event is an extreme outlier.

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 8:10 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #75

PaulHoule wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you consider that a nuclear plant costs billions of USD and that billions of USD of damage has been done, the $500,000 upgrade to the generators is a slam dunk. Also based on recent projections, the probability of a tsunami event of that severity was 80% for the next few decades, so it is a no brainer -- particularly when you consider that the nuclear industry worldwide has been set back 20 or 40 years at least…

You are still falling into the same trap. cost of preventing low probability events in the future >> cost of preventing events in hindsight The problem is that you do not know which events will occur, so you will inevitably spend not only on implementing that $300000 upgrade on one plant which will need it, but on many $500000 upgrades on many plants (most of which will never be necessary or related to tsunamis). The…

I can just say with that attitude there is going to be no public acceptance of nuclear power.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable