

Why Fukushima Was Preventable - _delirium
http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable

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dctoedt
My jaundiced view of civilian nuclear power is still colored by one of my most
vivid experiences in the Navy nuclear reactor program. It came in the course
of prepping for the [chief] engineer's exam, after two years of sea duty
running reactor plants aboard an aircraft carrier. That in turn had followed a
year of intensive academic and practical nuclear propulsion training.

Our "coaches," all senior nuke officers, had us work through the details of
some what-if scenarios. Funny thing, we didn't seem to have covered those
particular scenarios in our initial training.

It was pretty scary; to this day I'm not convinced that conventional-design
civilian nuclear reactors belong anywhere near population centers.

What worried me wasn't the technology itself, but the human fallibility. In
the Navy nuclear program, we had the occasional [foul]-up even though we were
ferocious about doing things right. We used checklists for _everything_ , even
though we were required to have memorized practically every procedure,
especially emergency procedures. (In an emergency, the first thing you did was
to take the "immediate actions" to put the plant in a safe condition. The
second thing you did was to get out the appropriate checklist and start
working through it with your watch team.) We second-checked each other's work,
and both the worker and the second-checker had to sign off on the work.
Noncompliance with the prescribed safety procedures (and with the prescribed
serious attitude) was guaranteed to get you in _big_ trouble. The Navy
systematically collected and disseminated lessons learned from throughout the
nuclear fleet, and every nuclear ship's nuke operators routinely trained on
those lessons. All this derived from the tone at the top, set early on by
Admiral Rickover.

Both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were caused (so far as is publicly known)
by cascading human errors; apparently the same was true at Fukushima. I have
no experience whatsoever in the civilian nuclear industry, but these accidents
have reinforced my doubts about whether a civilian work force, even one
heavily populated by ex-Navy types, can achieve the kind of zero-defect
culture we strove for in the Navy.

~~~
mjvandenbergh
The American nuclear navy is one of the classic examples of what process
safety experts call a High Reliability Organisation. HROs are organisations
that run dangerous systems susceptible to so-called "Normal Accidents" while
having fewer such accidents than their competitors.

The main things that have been found to contribute to HROs are: A chronic
sense of unease even in the face of normal operations - always be thinking of
ways to improve safety. A separate engineering standards organisation that is
not responsible for operations - i.e. they can order shutdowns without
affecting their own job objectives in a way that a plant manager cannot. They
do not tolerate the so-called "normalisation of deviance" (which is when out-
of-range behaviour becomes accepted as people get used to it.).

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_delirium
Long article, but the best one I've run across explaining the inputs used to
choose design tolerances, the advances in those methods over the years, and
where the Fukushima design and later maintenance was and wasn't in accordance
with best practices.

The overall conclusion is that it was known by the early 2000s that the
plant's worst-case tsunami estimate, used as its design basis, was no longer
sufficient, given improved understanding of tsunamis. At that time, a
significant upgrade should have been initiated, since the original design-
basis tsunami of 3.1 meters was no longer believed to be a good estimate of
the worst case. But those reports basically got buried and nothing was acted
on.

Side note: I was wary of submitting, because we've just had a big round of
Fukushima and nuclear discussion/debate, and rehashing the same debate in
another thread doesn't seem productive. But imo this article is quite
informative and worth a read.

~~~
alberich
I don't know Japan's geography, so, maybe it is possible for it to have
tsunamis everywere. However, if there is some part of Japan's territory that
is safe from tsunamis, wouldn't it be easier to just build those reactors
there, and not in a place that is known to have tsunamis since, at least, the
year 684 AD?

~~~
pasbesoin
I haven't read the OP article, yet, but as I vaguely recall from past media
reporting on the topic, I believe one of the reasons such sites were chosen is
that the were economically fairly poor. The jobs were welcome and outweighed
residents' safety concerns. (Perhaps safety concerns were also somewhat
diminished by said residents having on average a lower degree of independent
information and/or education.)

This is from memory; feel free to correct me if and as I'm wrong.

Such approaches can also be spun positively as "economic development
packages/projects". Whenever such is said, the observer should look critically
at who is really benefiting -- as often as not, I think, the project owners'
interests come ahead of, and sometimes at the cost of, those of local
residents.

Ideally, all parties gain. But to do so, amongst other things someone has to
keep those in power from cutting too many corners.

~~~
ams6110
Politics will trump public safety almost every time. Why do we keep rebuilding
communities in flood areas, for example?

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gregd
Isn't everything preventable with the benefit of hindsight?

~~~
DougWebb
I think the key is that they already had the hindsight years before the
accident occurred. They knew, from incidents at other plants and from tsunamis
in other areas that the assumtions made when the plant was designed were wrong
and the plant was vulnerable. They chose not to act on that knowledge.

------
pella
"Black Swan Lessons on the Japanese Disaster .."

 _"We don't understand the world as well as we think we do and tend to be
fooled by false patterns. We mistake luck for skills (the fooled by randomness
effect), overestimate knowledge about rare events (Black Swans), as well as
human understanding, something that has been getting worse with the increase
in complexity."_ Nassim Taleb

[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-40143642/black-
swan-l...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-40143642/black-swan-lessons-
on-the-japanese-disaster/)

------
esbwhat
I don't think it's really relevant. The point is not that there is a way to
have safe nuclear energy, the point is that the worst case scenario is
catastrophic, and that I don't trust any company or government to do what's
necessary, especially if they're strapped for cash.

~~~
jimktrains2
That's not entirely true. There are a lot of new designs (i.e.: not BWR) that
passively cool and shutdown without the input of any external energy.

Also, molten salt reactors and fusion reactors won't be able to have
catastrophic failure modes either.

~~~
Retric
You can dramatically slow reactors down, but you can't actually 'shut down'
because simply decay produces significant amounts of heat. So the real problem
at Fukushima was the need to be able to passively cool a reactor indefinitely
in that 'slow' state without human interaction and that's where they failed.
Sure, if they had power and none of the connectors had failed it would have
also been ok, but without long term passive safety nuclear power is not safe.

~~~
jimktrains2
Yes, I understand that you can't just turn them "off." It's easiest just to
say that it's shut off if it's unable to do anything really.

I think you missed everything in my previous post. All new designs passively
cool. You can have safe (comparative to coal and gas) nuclear power.

~~~
Retric
I should have been more clear, a lot of designs passively cool the reactor /
primary loop, but they don't have long term 100% passive cooling on the
secondary loop. Though a counter example would be welcome.

~~~
mjvandenbergh
No, you're right. They have a water pool that cools the secondary loop. That
will need refilling after a few days, 72 hours for the ESBWR iirc.

