Japan Earthquake: nuclear plants

triumph61

1. Picture: look at the right side. The upper Part is visible.
2. Picture : The upper Part is no longer visible.
3. Picture: Left side, maybe there is the upper part of the FHM.

Rive

Oooops. Yes, you are right. That thing on the third picture is the trolley of the FHM.

tsutsuji

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-...0920yoken.html At a symposium in Washington about the Fukushima Daichi accident, Commissioner Apostolakis said "the consequences of a tsunami could have been predicted". The symposium organiser, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, is also releasing a report on "Why Fukushima was preventable", saying that the analysis of historical tsunamis was not sufficient and that in contrast with the measures taken in Europe after the French NPP flooding and blackout of 1999 or in the US after the 11 September 2001 attacks, Japan was negligent to take countermeasures against blackout.

http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03...-s-impact/9iid Symposium

http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf report: James M. Acton and Mark Hibbs, "Why Fukushima was preventable"

etudiant

Seems nuclear management in Japan after thirty plus years of operations free from disaster suffered from the same 'Victory Disease' as that which afflicted Japanese leadership in the early days of WW2.
It is very hard to stay careful when things work well for a long time.

jmelson

Ok, that seems a lot safer, but the problem is that repairing the FHM and being sure it is completely reliable will be a huge effort, due to the structural damage to the entire building. The FHM itself could be pulled out by crane and moved elsewhere for repairs, but the tracks it runs on have to be guaranteed to handle the load and be transited in so the FHM can travel in the proper plane.

Jon

jmelson

See also Challenger accident and Columbia accident. "It hasn't killed anybody yet, so it can't be a big risk."

Jon

mheslep

That's a half-appropriate comparison. Yes organizations can and have misjudged the risk of accidents, but clearly the consequences of the one (Challenger) means 100% fatalities, while the other with containment equipped reactors means large capital losses and economic damage, but zero fatalities, so far.

jmelson

Wow, what an understatement! Anybody who was analyzing safety should have put this together pretty easily. It seems the Japanese government allowed TEPCO WAY too much
leeway to set their own rules and safety management.

But, of course, anybody who was let in to give Fushima Dai-ichi #1 a complete review
would have demanded it be shut down immediately. And, the rest of the plants there would have only gotten a slightly better review. There were so MANY features of the plant that compromised survivability, it would have made it almost impossible to bring these plants up to reasonable standards. Once you put practically the entire electrical safety system in the basement of a building only meters from the ocean, both horizontally and verticaly, you have a HUGE problem. Then, there was so much ELSE vulnerable to the tsunami, like EDG fuel tanks. Just a mess. Fixable, but it would cost a couple billion $ to retrofit just the plants
at this one location.

Jon

jmelson

There indeed WERE fatalities at the plant, although not related to safety systems, but just
people being at the lower levels of the buildings when the tsunami came in. it is kind of a miracle
nobody was killed by falling debris, etc. when the explosions happened.

This accident has caused major radioactive contamination of a large area of Japan, deaths are really hard to associate with such an event, but this is a HUGE, widespread consequence that is not over yet. Radioactive soil will be dug up and cause further contamination for years to
come. There are still areas where farming is not permitted, produce will need to be tested
for radioactivity for years, it is a HUGE mess. The entire nation of Japan will have a big power shortage this summer, it will be interesting to see how they cope with it. It is definitely affecting their whole national economy.

But, I was mostly trying to draw a comparison between assessing risk in very complicated systems, and the cultures that manage such systems.

Jon

mheslep

Though not related to anything having to do with nuclear power.

clancy688

So you're saying that seven dead people are worse than 100.000 displaced people, hundreds of square kilometres literally lost and economic losses in the range of dozens or hundreds of billions of dollars?

Oh, of course, from a purely naive and moralistic view, of course, the seven dead are way worse. Since, they are dead and all those displaced still have their lives and human lifes can't be compared to money anyway...

But that's wrong. Life is no pony farm. Those seven astronauts died and with them billions of tax money disintegrated, but then there's no major future impact to the lifes of other people. They may be dead, but it doesn't affect anyone except their families and NASA managers.
As for Fukushima, nobody died, that's right. But hundreds of thousands of lifes are HEAVILY affected, you could even say derailed - for DECADES. Millions, if you count the economic ramifications in.

al2207

at least 1 worker was killed when tsunamis, hit he was investigating if there were some damage from earthquake

etudiant

There is clearly a problem in maintaining alertness, whether individually or in large organizations, in a long term situation.
Afaik, the SSBN program in the US Navy has done so pretty well, certainly better than the USAF's SAC counterpart, now melded into a generic 'Strike Command['. This latter group was in the news a few years back because a B52 with a half dozen live nukes on board hopscotched across the US, oblivious to the detailed rules on nuclear weapons transport. The head of the USAF was relieved as a result.
My guess is that a periodic human sacrifice of that type is essential to maintain focus.
If so, the problem of the Japanese nuclear program is that they allowed too few flaming public failures. If someone had been pilloried after the leaks at the Monju breeder project for instance, instead of a general whitewash, I am sure the managers at Fukushima would have been more vigorous in demanding better tsunami defenses.
I might add that imho the current Japanese government's insistence that 'no one was responsible' for this disaster guarantees a bigger one next time.

Cire

Why don't you ask if any of the 100,000 displaced people would rather be dead instead of displaced. I think we know the answer.

jmelson

The Fukushima plant was not "defendable", in my opinion. Defenses might have helped, but the whole plan of the system was so fatally flawed that it would have taken insane
effort to protect the plant as it was sited. And, fixing one of the major flaws would have required getting practically all the electrical equipment out of the basement. This plant could have been damaged by a major leak in a similar manner, it doesn't have to be a tsunami.

Well, as for the future, at least so far, many of the older coastal plants are now shut down, and it may be politically impossible to restart those, even if they wanted to.

Jon

jmelson

There WILL be fatalities from this accident, but it will be essentially impossible to know which persons died from it. In five, ten or maybe twenty years there will be a clear increase of cancers and related diseases. It certainly won't be a HUGE increase, like those laughably insane reports that there were already tens of thousands of deaths in the US that were circulating on some wacko blogs last fall. But, there is quite likely to be a measurable and statistically significant effect on the Japanese population, given the sizable radiation dose that was released.

Jon

tsutsuji

I answer in the other thread at http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...&postcount=512