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Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

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Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#91

Post by drtgh »

roenxi wrote: post #89
drtgh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Japan they have the "Tsunami Stones" [0] across the coast, memorials to remind future generations of the highest point the water reached. It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, and for such case they had ten years to design protections after being requested to reinforce measures (along with the other Japanese plants), but I can imagine the ones that s…

> It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, So why did they build it there? It isn't a gentleman in a clown hat hitting himself on the head with a rubber mallet, they had a reason. These things are always trade-offs. Maybe if they'd built it up on the hill there'd have been an earthquake, a landslide then the plant slides into the sea and gets waterlogged.…

Did you read the report I put? the pdf,

    >

    >
Even leaving aside they ignored the original placement in order to reduce costs by using biased seismological reports of their convenience, TEPCO knew the plant was at risk, they was warned successively it was at risk. And the supposed regulator NISA [0] closed the eyes conveniently (conveniently for someones).

    >
From the other url I put (I updated it with a cached url, I didn't noticed the article was deleted),

    >
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_Industrial_Safety_...

> the gentlest engineering disaster

EU raised the maximum permitted levels of radioactive contamination for imported food following Fukushima, this is not a gentlest gesture to the Europeans. Japanese citizens also received their dose, at time the more vulnerable ones was recruited by the Yakuza to clean up the zone.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#92

Post by cpgxiii »

roenxi wrote: post #89
drtgh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Japan they have the "Tsunami Stones" [0] across the coast, memorials to remind future generations of the highest point the water reached. It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, and for such case they had ten years to design protections after being requested to reinforce measures (along with the other Japanese plants), but I can imagine the ones that s…

> It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, So why did they build it there? It isn't a gentleman in a clown hat hitting himself on the head with a rubber mallet, they had a reason. These things are always trade-offs. Maybe if they'd built it up on the hill there'd have been an earthquake, a landslide then the plant slides into the sea and gets waterlogged.…

> "well we were hit with a wild tsunami and doubled the nominal price tag of the cleanup with no obvious loss of life or limb"

This is a bit of a wild understatement. (1) the tsunami was by no means wild, as multiple posts here have referenced, and (2) the incident resulted in a number of significant injuries, not including for deaths involved in the evacuation. And those deaths very much count - you can't hand-wave away the consequences of the evacuation on the basis of hindsight that the evacuation was larger than the final outcome necessitated.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#94

Post by roenxi »

drtgh wrote: post #91
roenxi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, So why did they build it there? It isn't a gentleman in a clown hat hitting himself on the head with a rubber mallet, they had a reason. These things are always trade-offs. Maybe if they'd built it up on the hill there'd have been an earthquake, a landslide then the plant slides into the sea and gets waterlogged.…

Did you read the report I put? the pdf, > > Even leaving aside they ignored the original placement in order to reduce costs by using biased seismological reports of their convenience, TEPCO knew the plant was at risk, they was warned successively it was at risk. And the supposed regulator NISA [0] closed the eyes conveniently (conveniently for someones). > From the other url I put (I updated it with a cached url, I d…

> Did you read the report I put?

No, I'm just trusting that you'll be honest about what it is saying. I don't need to read a report to persuade myself that a 40 year old plant was designed based on the best available knowledge of 40 years ago. That seems like something of a given. I'm just not sure where you are going with that, it doesn't obviously suggest negligence to me.

You're not saying what tolerances you want them to design to. We both agree that there are scenarios that can and might happen. Obviously is is possible for a tsunami to take out buildings built near the shore in Japan so it doesn't surprise me that people raised it as a risk. A lot of buildings got taken out that day. That doesn't obviously suggest negligence to me; obviously a lot of people were happy living with the risk.

> EU raised the maximum permitted levels of radioactive contamination for imported food following Fukushima

Oh well then. I had no idea. I thought the consequences were minor and now I have learned ... there you go, I suppose. I'm not really sure what to do with this new information.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#95

Post by roenxi »

cpgxiii wrote: post #92
roenxi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, So why did they build it there? It isn't a gentleman in a clown hat hitting himself on the head with a rubber mallet, they had a reason. These things are always trade-offs. Maybe if they'd built it up on the hill there'd have been an earthquake, a landslide then the plant slides into the sea and gets waterlogged.…

> "well we were hit with a wild tsunami and doubled the nominal price tag of the cleanup with no obvious loss of life or limb" This is a bit of a wild understatement. (1) the tsunami was by no means wild, as multiple posts here have referenced, and (2) the incident resulted in a number of significant injuries, not including for deaths involved in the evacuation. And those deaths very much count - you can't hand-wave…

> And those deaths very much count - you can't hand-wave away the consequences

I don't. If it is what it looks like, the government officials that ordered/organised the evacuations should be harshly censured and the next time evacuation orders should be more risk-based and executed in a safer way. What little I've gleaned suggests an appalling situation where a bunch of presumably old people were forced from their homes to their deaths. The main thing keeping me quiet on the topic is I don't speak Japanese and I don't really know what happened in detail there.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#96

Post by roenxi »

cpgxiii wrote: post #90
roenxi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, ok. So say they build the plant 35m higher up, then get hit by a tsunami that is 36 meters higher [0] than the one that caused the Fukushima disaster? If we're going to start worrying about events outside the design spec we may as well talk about that one. If they're designing to tolerate an event, we can pretty reliably imagine a much worse event that will happen sooner or later and take the plant out. That…

> Caveating that I'm not really sure it was even an out-of-design event but if it was then it is case closed and the swiss cheese model is an inappropriate choice of model to understand the failure. This is not how safe systems are designed and operated. Safety is not a one-time item, it is a process. All safety-critical systems receive attention throughout their operating lives to identify and mitigate potential saf…

> The choice of DBA tsunami height was clearly an underestimate, and underestimates were identified for Fukushima and other plants prior to the accident but not acted upon.

Not much of a swiss cheese failure then though. The failure is just that they committed hard to an assumption that was wrong.

My point is that unless it is actually an example of multiple failures lining up then this is a bad example of a swiss-cheese model. Seems to be an example of a tsunami hitting a plant that wasn't designed to cope with it. And a plant with owners who were committed to not designing against that tsunami despite being told that it could happen. It is a one-hole cheese if the plant was performing as it was designed to. The stance was that if a certain scenario eventuated then the plant was expected to fail and that is what happened.

Swiss cheese failures are there are supposed to be a number of independent or semi-independent controls in different systems that all fail leading to an outcome. This is just that they explicitly chose not to prepare for a certain outcome. Not a lot of systems failing; it even seems like a pretty reasonable place to draw the line for failure if we look at the outcomes. Expensive, unlikely, not much actual harm done to people and likely to be forgotten in a few decades.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#97

Post by drtgh »

roenxi wrote: post #94
drtgh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the report I put? the pdf, > > Even leaving aside they ignored the original placement in order to reduce costs by using biased seismological reports of their convenience, TEPCO knew the plant was at risk, they was warned successively it was at risk. And the supposed regulator NISA [0] closed the eyes conveniently (conveniently for someones). > From the other url I put (I updated it with a cached url, I d…

> Did you read the report I put? No, I'm just trusting that you'll be honest about what it is saying. I don't need to read a report to persuade myself that a 40 year old plant was designed based on the best available knowledge of 40 years ago. That seems like something of a given. I'm just not sure where you are going with that, it doesn't obviously suggest negligence to me. You're not saying what tolerances you want…

> I'm just not sure where you are going with that, it doesn't obviously suggest negligence to me.

You didn't read the report or search for information about the matter, but I have not problem to repeat it for you,

The General Electric's design was originally designed to be placed 30-35 meters above the ocean, instead of this TEPCO modified such design and constructed at sea level (almost) recurring to studies convenient to their purpose, cheaper, this in one of the more tsunami-prone countries, with an history of ones reaching 20-30 meters. When those -for them- convenient studies was not longer justifiable, as deeper studies did finally refute them, they decided to just keep ignoring all the warnings and requests to reinforce the safety. They knew the nuclear plant was in danger, they always knew it, General Electric didn't designed at 30-35 meters above the ocean by coincidence, and this happened with a supposed regulator always closing the eyes to this, conveniently, across those years, ignoring even pipes with fissures.

Well, this obviously suggest negligence to me. Decades of bad decisions with a strong smell to corruption.

> You're not saying what tolerances you want them to design to.

What about tolerance to avoid a meltdown of the core, specially under two events, an earthquake and a tsunami, exactly what happened after ignoring the warnings and requests to reinforce the safety.

> Oh well then. I had no idea. I thought the consequences were minor and now I have learned ... there you go, I suppose. I'm not really sure what to do with this new information.

Keep the sarcasm for other places, if you don't mind. It is not a mere gentlest engineering disaster as it reached the whole planet, with ate TEPCO's cesium-137, specially the Japanese. And it is not a mere gentlest engineering disaster when you have to force vulnerable people to go to ground zero to move contaminated land and water.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#98

Post by WJW »

singhrac wrote: post #16

I think people underestimate how valuable these reports are, so I’m very glad that detailed investigation is done here. Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid. In a lot of ways it’s like investigations into airplane crashes.

The root cause tree on page 452 gives a good overview of how complex the behavior can be.

The good news is that the grid operators have a good idea of what the problem was/is and it's well understood how to fix it. The downside is that it will require quite a bit of both time and money to reinforce the grid infrastructure.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#99

Post by hrmtst93837 »

drob518 wrote: post #7
darkwater wrote: post #3

The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.

Frequently, when you see these massive failures, the root cause is an alignment of small weaknesses that all come together on a specific day. See, for instance, the space shuttle O-ring incident, Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, etc. These are complex systems with lots of moving parts and lots of (sometimes independent) people managing them. In a sense, the complexity it the common root cause.

[flagged]

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#100

Post by pseudohadamard »

singhrac wrote: post #16

I think people underestimate how valuable these reports are, so I’m very glad that detailed investigation is done here. Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid. In a lot of ways it’s like investigations into airplane crashes.

  Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid.
You mistyped "Every major grid operator is going to get their lawyers to reword their contracts to make sure they can't get sued when this happens".
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