The "more political thread" besides "Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants" scientific one

Danuta

I posted the same vid a couple of posts back. It's rather interesting viewing!

Danuta

Em, #5 is a BWR? Yeah, yeah, no problemo with the injection of a little seawater. So the real reason they shut Hamaoka
down is due to earthquake damage necessitating almost trashing(if not trashing) reactor #5 with seawater, and not the sudden
concern over underestimated risk and peoples' welfare. God but these guys positively stink at spin doctoring too.

etudiant

Your opinion is clearly shared.
The Japanese National Policy Minister Koichiro Genba just said publicly that TEPCO 'may not survive as is'.
Link here: http://jen.jiji.com/jc/eng?g=eco&k=2011051600073

Danuta

So it seems.

Somewhere in the middle of this are some very angry Japanese banksters threatening
to refuse any future loans to TEPCO after Edano's hint, hint, ah, bold suggestion, that
said banksters waive all of TEPCO's present loans.

But, well, nationalization after the bankruptcy would solve that "future loans" obstacle
too. (And quite frankly, who really gives a hoot about banksters losing any money.)

We shall see how it all plays out.


Bank chiefs unsettled by Edano's remarks over TEPCO
http://www.istockanalyst.com/busines...rks-over-tepco

"The heads of major banking groups did not hide their discomfort on Friday at
remarks by the government's top spokesman suggesting banks lending to the
embattled Tokyo Electric Power Co. (OOTC:TKECY) should forgive their debt and
help the utility pay compensation over the crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant.

Loans extended to Tokyo Electric, known as TEPCO, by SMFG, Mizuho and other
big banks amount to around 4 trillion yen, including 1.9 trillion yen in emergency
loans offered after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

''We have lent to TEPCO, considering the significant role it plays for the interest
of Japanese society,'' a senior official at a major bank said, complaining about
Edano's comments.

In the event of debt forgiveness, the official added, any loans to TEPCO must
be categorized as nonperforming and this could make it rather difficult for banks
to extend additional loans to the company."

jlduh

It seems that more governors start to be pretty angry about the principle retained by government of the basic circular evacuation zones and want more "fine tuning" forecast through SPEEDI system:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/16_11.html

All things some of us already mentionned and criticized in the last weeks here, by the way...

The problem is: time and deposits going on, data will soon reveal to either evacuate or... just absorb more and more doses as "no short term improvement" is foreseen at the plant (to say it in a politically correct manner...)

jlduh

I wanted to mention here this documentary that was made by a famous documentarist, Adam Curtis, whose films have been widely shown and awarded especially at the BBC (more on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis )

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurti..._for_atom.html

very interesting because it goes back to old times and history of BWR reactors and GE...

pdObq

Wow, thanks for that link, that documentary is kind of disturbing (although it's not really surprising that much blame goes to business and sales people).

One thought during watching: It would not seem terribly unfair if GE (or GE-Hitachi) had to pay its share in the whole mess. After all, they designed those reactors and sold them to TEPCO, almost certainly without letting them know about the known risks.

Just for comparison (although possibly not quite comparable):

Toyota had to pay and its image got damaged just because some "operators" mixed up the accelerator with the break pedal.

"BP" Oil Spill: So far BP is getting all the blame, but how about Transocean who owned the platform and did the work, how about Haliburton who (likely) did a poor cementing job, how about the company that built the blowout preventer? IMHO they all should pay their share depending on how much they are able to contribute without going bankrupt.

gmax137

Source, please?

Oh, almost certainly there is no source.

pdObq

Source?? I guess that would be me, as I wrote that was a thought I had while watching that documentary...

Did you watch it? One could probably make a list of the actual sources shown in the documentary (studies and interviews). It's pre Fukushima-crisis, though, so there is no information about the history of TEPCO or the plant in there. However there is about GE and its BWR design.

jlduh

Don't preclude to quickly that there are none

Sorry if it isn't a pure source (peer review article etc.) but at least this is an article that summarizes the history of mark I containment and some old studies (not sure they are available on the net anyway) which made this design very controversial:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/wo...16contain.html

See also this document hyperlinked in the article, which criticizes the technology used by GE in order to reduce size of containment and ultimately cost:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...nc/hanauer.pdf

And you have also an interesting page, PAGE 63, in this document, where are compared the abilities of different containments to absorb a sudden Hydrogen production from Zr oxydation, and Mark I is far behind the other ones (high percents of H2 inside the containment are reached much quicker, increasing risks of explosion...)

http://www.galcit.caltech.edu/~jeshe...0April2011.pdf

I don't have access to all the documents behind this article of the NY times but in the mega trial that will follow this desaster, no doubt that there will be a cascade of responsabilities that will be debated (long and hard anyway!) and that Tepco will mayb be tempted to sue GE and maybe other subcontractors to share the burden of responsabilities, as anyway this history exist and that some documents may be available...

Meanwhile, the article precise that "G.E.’s liability would seem limited in Japan — largely because the regulatory system in that country places most liability on the plant operator".

Also, these reactors have been through some retrofit to improve the flaws but it is unclear right now which ones are implemented at Daichi (the hardened venting seems part of this, also some deflectors in the torus, but still retrofit has its limits of course...)

Anyway, this will be a VERY COMPLEX trial (a bunch of different trials in fact), as an expert for courts, with some experience in this kind of technical debate, i can assure you that!

By the way it seems the first ones (of a long list...) to claim compensation from Tepco will be the farmers:

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/17_33.html

Danuta

Couldn't seem like a better time for a certain law revision.

Laws revised to make it easier to sue foreign firms in Japan
Thursday 28th April 2011
http://www.japantoday.com/category/p...firms-in-japan


"Legal revisions to enable consumers to file lawsuits against foreign companies more easily in Japan were approved Thursday by a majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives.

With the approval, consumers and workers will be able to file suits against foreign firms with Japanese courts, in principle, if their residence addresses are in Japan.

The enactment of the revised Code of Civil Procedure and the revised Civil Preservation Law will also allow Japanese courts to deal with legal cases if defendant foreign firms have their main offices in Japan or if their representatives live in Japan.

Until now, there was no domestic law governing the jurisdiction of civil litigation involving parties belonging to Japan and other countries, thus Japanese courts had to handle those suits on a case-by-case basis, based on precedents.

The legal revisions were made to stipulate under what kind of circumstances Japanese courts can have jurisdiction amid an increasing number of problems involving transactions through the Internet and employment contracts between people in Japan and foreign firms."

gmax137

Thanks for those links, jlduh, the hanauer memo especially is interesting (as is typical of his work). But I don't see how AEC debating the merits of the pressure suppression containment designs shows that the weaknesses of the design were some secret closely guarded by GE. Further, the issues discussed by hanauer don't really address what seems to have happened at fukusima -- namely h2 explosions in the secondary containment.

pdObq

jlduh, thanks for the backup !

gmax137, I suppose you were offended a bit by the "almost certainly without letting them know about the known risks". I mean, you probably don't want to debate about that GE designed the reactors, nor about that GE (and later GE-Hitachi AFAIK) sold them to TEPCO?

I was looking for a transcript of that documentary, but I couldn't find anything so far. However, Adam Curtis (who made it for BBC back in 1992) puts it into the context of the Fukushima accidents in his blog entry that jlduh found in his post above. So, let me quote Mr Curtis (with some highlighting by me):
There are more interviews and references to studies in the film itself, in which IIRC is stated that a) they knew their plants were not as safe as possible quite early on, b) they were trying to make it a profitable business (since they had spent already so much money on the technology that they could not go back any more), so they had to sell plants at the lowest possible prices to be competitive with fossile fuel plants, which lead to safety compromises.

So, common sense tells me, that in order to do b), you don't tell your potential customers about a), at least not in any honest way (Just think about used car dealers...). Because if you did they just would not buy it. Probably the TEPCO people really were convinced that it was a safe technology (maybe even the GE sales people were!), but of course there is no easily available source for that either .

In terms of responsibility, maybe those law suits agaist the tobacco industry in the US are more related to this case, in the sense of "But you told us it was safe..."

Well, we'll see what's going to happen regarding possible law suits against GE.

jlduh

I was ready to answer to GMAX137 but I think you summarized pretty well pdObq what would have been my answer.

There are a lot of information in this documentary and I'm sure that there are documents behind to support what the guys interviewed in the documentary are saying. Most were "insiders" at this time with responsabilities in various organisations, and that's the force of the film. They are talking freely because they are much older, or even very old, and no more implied in the business! Also the film is not one based on sensationalism after the Fukushima accident, this documentary is from 1992, so its interest is just being rediscovered in light with the Fukushima disaster.

The dates mentioned in the video seem to pretty well correlate with the possibility that at the date of building Fukushima plant was started to be built in 1967, so at this date, based on some of the dates mentionned in Adam CURTIS site (1966), the discussions between american regulators and GE about redesign demands and flaws of the primary design, already occurred, but as you said it is very probable that the japanese weren't informed of that (the Hanauer document is from a later date, September 1972, so one year after the start of reactor N°1 at Fukushima).

So yes, it can be said with some reason that it has "probably" been kept secret at this date to Japanese buyers.

Something else to mention to explain what the documentary is showing very well -the fact that in this era, some countries were rushing in a race to be the first, and that safety was NOT AT ALL the primary concern- is that, in addition to the "make money" reason, there was as second reason why these leading countries wanted to build a profitable civil nuclear industry: the race they were involved in was also a military one, and as i mentionned already in some previous posts, they needed PLUTONIUM in larger quantities for the bombs and missiles... And one way to get it was through civil reactors, where PU is a byproduct of the nuclear fission in used cores. This is a know fact that civil nuclear birth happened as a close brother of military nuclear.

All of this old history is resurging with the Fukushima disaster, which scares a little bit the nuclear industry IMO...

It very premature to know IF there will be a juridic battle on this, it depends closely of the behind the screen relations that are currently taking place between governments and various interests. Personally i would be very surprised if this would happen, but we'll see. Don't forget that Tepco is or will be in a short future almost nationalized (and at least very dependent of state funding...) so the game will be decided at high level with strategical things on the table.

zapperzero

Here's a nice example of regulator capture
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-co.../sec3/108.html

Executive summary:

The NRC is telling the industry "There was this safety rule that was supposed to prevent the pressure suppression pool from cracking, but we're going to go ahead and waive it because, umm, if we do you'll save some money on unplanned outages. So yeah."

Before you ask, yes, I know the NRC is regulating American plants, but the industry is global and "lessons learned/ best practices" have an amazing tendency to spread.

tsutsuji

Asahi is asking :


Yomiuri is proposing :

Tsuneo Futami, former superintendent of the plant, from 1997 to 2000 told IEEE Spectrum :
, which leaves open the question of discharging "low contaminated" water into the Ocean.

The Japanese government's envoy to South Korea, Oriza Hirata, said to his South Korean audience that the seawater discharge was a request of the US government : http://jp.ibtimes.com/articles/18754...1305641051.htm. That statement was then rebutted by Yukio Edano and Goshi Hosono, and Oriza Hirata finally retracted and apologized : http://www.j-cast.com/2011/05/18095925.html?p=all

gmax137

Well I finally had time to view the show, and it was pretty interesting. One thing that continues unabated is the repeated juxtaposition of (admittedly dramatic) weapons test films with discussion of nuclear power. Just because Weinberg and Seaborg et al worked on the Manhattan project doesn't mean that a power plant is a bomb factory. This 'journalistic' fantasy has been a staple of the anti-nuclear-power movement ever since the US and USSR began negotiating down the weapons stockpiles. Many well-meaning people have fallen for this story. See, for example:

Nobody has ever used a BWR to produce weapons grade plutonium. Why? Because a BWR is operated for 12 to 18 months between refuelings, and this ensures that the spent fuel contains large amounts of Pu-240 in addition to the Pu-239. If you wanted to make a bomb out of the fuel, you'd need to separate out the 240, a profligate source of neutrons that would ruin any attempt to make a weapon with the material. And, if you have the technology to separate the Pu-240 from the Pu-239, then you can just as well make a uranium bomb and skip the BWR step.

Reactors run to create Pu-239 for bombs are run for short times between refueling, or have the ability to add and remove fuel while operating. To refuel a BWR, you need to remove the vessel closure head, and then remove all of the steam separator/dryer components before you can even see the fuel. There is no connection between a BWR and the weapons.