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The Fukushima accident was preventable

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Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#81

Post by FussyZeus »

dalke wrote: post #74
thaumasiotes wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. A traditional disaster kills people.

Eh? I don't think "a traditional disaster" means what you think it means. The Cerro Grande Fire destroyed about 420 homes and caused ~$1 billion in damages but no one died. The Bel Air Fire destroyed 484 homes but again left no fatalities. Tropical Storm Fay hit Texas and nine counties in Texas were declared disaster areas, but again, no fatalities.

But that's just stuff, the majority of which was probably insured and even if it wasn't, all of it can (theoretically) be replaced. People can't.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#82

Post by Animats »

With that Mk 1 reactor design, lose cooling water for 4-6 hours and you get a meltdown. The containment vessel is too small for the pressures in a worst-case accident. It's just not a good design.

Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania has the same Mk 1 design, and that's been a worry for years. They now have extra backup power systems of different types and multiple cooling water sources for that reason.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#83

Post by vlehto »

Karunamon wrote: post #49
Avshalom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Radiation doesn't increase cancer linearly. Otherwise eating bananas would be very bad idea. If you stay under certain threshold, it's unlikely that small dose can do anything that your immune system could not handle.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#84

Post by kobayashi »

bsder wrote: post #54
Someone1234 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think you should make the appropriate edit to your above comment.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#85

Post by dalke »

FussyZeus wrote: post #81
dalke wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? I don't think "a traditional disaster" means what you think it means. The Cerro Grande Fire destroyed about 420 homes and caused ~$1 billion in damages but no one died. The Bel Air Fire destroyed 484 homes but again left no fatalities. Tropical Storm Fay hit Texas and nine counties in Texas were declared disaster areas, but again, no fatalities.

But that's just stuff, the majority of which was probably insured and even if it wasn't, all of it can (theoretically) be replaced. People can't.

I don't understand your response.

When was there ever a tradition where something had to have deaths in order for it to be called a "disaster"? I gave three counter-examples of events which were labeled disasters but which had no fatalities.

While what you said is (theoretically) true, all evidence is that it's appropriate to use the term "disaster" for something which 'displaces tens of thousands of people and costs several hundred billion dollars', and there's no need to distinguish between 'traditional' and 'modern' definitions.

How does your comment fit into that context?

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#86

Post by alricb »

nickff wrote: post #21
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…

I have read that many times, and it makes some sense. The issue with this line of reasoning is that the move would be a design change which is not required by the specification (as I have read and understood it), which would have been seen as unnecessary waste at the time. A study which I would find more important and useful than the one here would be a cost/benefit analysis of increasing all specifications relating…

It's very hard to estimate the probability of very rare events like tsunamis and earthquakes, so you kind of have to use heuristics to get a reasonable "design basis" event. Then you design your system to survive said event. The argument the authors make is that the event was improperly chosen (too low). A proper choice of event would have led TEPCo to conclude that they had to mitigate the danger posed by a higher flood line, by, for instance, moving the generators.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#87

Post by RockyMcNuts »

nickff wrote: post #41
monochromatic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 res…

> if anyone was at fault, it was the government regulators.

that seems to imply that the power plant's owners responsibility was not to ensure safe operation, but merely to follow the government regulations.

to my ear, the tone of the argument is that there is a 'rush to judge' private actors who cannot be judged or blamed.

surely, it's possible that oversight was inadequate on the part of both management and regulators?

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#88

Post by msandford »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #19
maxerickson wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

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…

> 2) The tsunami disabled primary and backup power to the cooling systems which was the proximate cause of the failure.

What I find really disgusting is that they had backup BACKUP generators trucked in and they couldn't use them because the plugs didn't match up. IT'S A FREAKING NUCLEAR POWER PLANT! DO YOUR JOB, CUT THE CONNECTORS OFF AND MAKE A CONNECTION! Literally EVERY ONE of the people who worked there are directly involved in the power generation business and they couldn't make a wonky connection work? If that's not in the top 10 completely preventable disasters of the century I don't know what is.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#89

Post by InclinedPlane »

PaulHoule wrote: post #15
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…

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…

Molten salt reactors have the ability to avoid such disasters, as a built-in design criterion. In such a reactor there's no issue if the fuel melts down, it's normally molten anyway. If there's a loss of coolant then the core melts through a frozen salt plug and then sits in a catch area. Because the core isn't under high pressures there's vastly less risk of any radioactive bits escaping the confines of the reactor.

Re: The Fukushima accident was preventable

#90

Post by jessaustin »

hamiltonkibbe wrote: post #55
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?

?

It costs us nothing when people sell cigarettes. Actually, private investors are happy to finance cigarette production without any help from the public. No such investors can be found for nuclear power, so it costs us billions when our leaders are convinced that we need another nuclear plant.

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