pdObq said:
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.
gmax137 said:
Source, please?
Oh, almost certainly there is no source.
pdObq said:
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, 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
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/03/a_is_for_atom.html" that jlduh found in his post above. So, let me
quote Mr Curtis (with some highlighting by me):
The film shows that from very early on - as early as 1964 - US government officials knew that there were serious potential dangers with the design of the type of reactor that was used to build the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But that their warnings were repeatedly ignored.
[...]
Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric.
In 1966 the US government Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards tried to force the industry to redesign their containment structures to make them safer. But the chairman of the committee claims in the film that General Electric in effect refused.
And in 1971 the Atomic Energy Commission did a series of tests of Emergency Core Cooling systems. Accidents were simulated. In each case the emergency systems worked - but the water failed to fill the core. Often being forced out under pressure.
As one of the AEC scientists says in the film: "We discovered that our theoretical calculations didn't have a strong correlation with reality. But we just couldn't admit to the public that all these safety systems we told you about might not do any good"
And again the warnings were ignored by senior members of the Agency and the industry.
That was the same year that the first of the Fukushima Daiichi plant's reactors came online. Supplied by General Electric.
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.
. So the real reason they shut Hamaoka 
Source?? I guess that would be me, as I wrote that was a thought I had while watching that documentary...