
Fukushima Engineer Says He Helped Cover Up Flaw at Dai-Ichi Reactor No. 4 - georgecmu
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/fukushima-engineer-says-he-covered-up-flaw-at-shut-reactor.html
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patio11
Plato had this theory that in drama, you had to show the bad guys being bad,
so that they would be morally worthy of the hero killing them. Of course, they
actually get killed by the unexpected combination of sword and internal
organs.

A lot of the reporting about TEPCO seems to be "Aldight alright, we get it,
your plant got physically hit by a thirty foot tall wave... but _you were
asking for it_ what with your shiftiness on that totally unrelated inspection
years ago."

~~~
pinko
Wait, how is a coverup and botched inspection leading to an unsafe containment
vessel _unrelated_ to a situation decades later in which a sister vessel is
compromised?

EDIT: clarified that the vessel from this story was not the exact one that
just failed; it's simply another of the same design made by the same company
during the same era, overseen by the same agency.

~~~
tptacek
Because the containment vessel in that reactor hasn't failed.

~~~
pinko
But the one next to it has! Do you really think the corrupt construction of
one of these structures has no bearing on the failure of the others? That
they're independent events in history?

~~~
patio11
Occam's Razor: was in the corrupt construction or the power interruption
caused by the ten meter high wave hitting their diesel generators? Here, let's
try an experiment: take a reactor not maintained by TEPCO. Turn it off.
Interrupt power to cooling systems. Wait.

Result: bad shit happens, in a fairly predictable sequence. The French nuclear
agency actually did this with a containment pool to study disaster effects.
Water heats? Check. Water boils? Check. Zirconium slags off? Check. Spent fuel
rods begin to melt as heat rises? Check. (The video of the control room during
this experiment was broadcast on Japanese TV.)

They then, of course, turned the power back on and restored cooling. TEPCO
didn't have a button they could push to do that. Not because they're evil
bastards who left that button out to save a buck, no, it's because they got
hit with a ten meter tsunami.

Forgive me if I keep coming back to that detail, but it is fairly important to
understanding the failure.

~~~
pinko
Hopefully we agree here that the most important goal is to understand the
entire chain of events (from plant design to construction to operation to
earthquake to tsunami to power failure to meltdown to vessel breach), in order
to better avoid something like this happening again in the future.

Insofar as a containment vessel appears to have failed--regardless of the
reasons--gross negligence by the firm that constructed it, which is known to
have led to a structural flaw that could hasten a breach in another vessel at
the same plant, is not "unrelated" news.

I'm probably being unfair, but your snarky dismissal of this article seems to
amount to, "act of god; nothing to learn here; move right along".

Your implicit premise seems to be that no reasonable containment vessel
standards could have been envisioned or successfully engineered to survive a
total, prolonged power failure--in this case the result of a 30' wave hitting
the plant's diesel generators. Therefore, because that unlikely event
occurred, everyone is off the hook for structural flaws that could have
hastened any subsequent meltdown and breach. I don't buy the premise, or the
conclusion given the premise.

I think the point of the containment vessel is to be a last line of defense in
case everything else goes wrong. So when everything else goes wrong you don't
get to say "everything else went wrong, so it's not really relevant whether
some of the vessels were poorly made".

In any case, I suspect we're arguing "at" rather than with each other now, so
I'm happy to give you the last word and then drop it, unless you'd really like
a response...

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jshen
This highlights the biggest problem I have with the rabidly pro nuclear people
who insist that we now know how to build safe reactors. They always assume
everyone involved has the best intentions, but we know that that is not the
case.

~~~
gamble
Nuclear industry PR reminds me of NASA's attitude to space travel prior to the
Challenger explosion.

The fact is that there are fewer than 500 reactors in operation worldwide,
representing a significant fraction of the total number ever built. Even if
you don't consider Chernobyl a civilian reactor, a substantial fraction of the
reactors ever built have now suffered severe accidents. Like the shuttles,
nuclear failures are essentially black swan events. The shuttle program's
probabilities of failure looked great prior to Challenger and Columbia. Now
they look like dangerously experimental technology.

Likewise, nuclear power is still essentially experimental. No one can credibly
quantify the risk involved, or the chances that containment features will
work, when there is so little data to draw conclusions from.

~~~
Wientje
Experimental or not, it has among the least accidents per KWh. 500 is a big
enough number for some reasonable statistics.

~~~
jshen
This argument is popular, but I don't find it compelling. The dangers of most
other energy sources are front loaded (let's ignore global warming for a
moment), while the risks from nuclear power are spread over many many many
years.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage
immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other
diseases many years later?

Surface coal mining doesn't leave many square miles of more or less
uninhabitable wasteland that remains uninhabitable for many years in the
future? Underground coal mines don't catch fire and render entire towns
completely uninhabitable?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania>

Many other energy sources have risks which are spread over many years. They
just don't have that "omfg, scary scientific stuff I don't understand" factor.

~~~
tptacek
... to say nothing of the stats for coal miners themselves; coal has killed
tens of thousands of miners since 1950.

~~~
pohl
Does anybody know if coal and uranium/plutonium miners are included in those
death-per-Kwh stats?

~~~
ximeng
Sorry accidental downvote due to fiddly touch screen

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allanchao
"If the mistake had been discovered, the company might have been bankrupted,
he said." ... "At the time, I felt like a hero," he said.

Tough choice. On the one hand, you have your friends, family, and your
company; on the other hand, who could have expected there'd be a 9.0
earthquake.

~~~
ramchip
> who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake

Your comment makes it sound like the defect had an incidence, but it's
specific to reactor 4 alone, and reactor 4 was empty when the earthquake
happened. For all we know putting the pressure vessel back in shape may have
had little effect on its resiliency.

Still, of course, a very tough choice.

~~~
wtn
For me, the real story is the cover-up that occurred when he reported his
story years ago. He did the right thing in terms of public safety and got
called a liar.

~~~
pinko
Yes, this. An accidental defect may not have an incidence, but you can bet the
corruption that led to it being covered up does.

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maxxxxx
That's what worries me about nuclear power. A well maintained plant is
probably very safe but there is an incentive for operators to cover up flaws
in order to save money. Let's wait until more power plants get old. They
probably should be shut down but that's the time when they are the most
profitable and fixing problems is the most expensive.

~~~
tptacek
A missing or damaged filter on a coal plant is sufficient to contaminate the
surrounding environment with uranium-235, uranium-238, and thorium-232 (not to
mention arsenic). Your long term exposure to radionuclides is actually
probably worse from coal plants allowed to continue operating negligently than
your exposure would be if you lived 30km from Fukushima.

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semerda
And then there's this.. maybe related?

Breach possible at troubled Japanese power plant:
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake>

Makes you wonder what other nuclear reactors have had cover ups and what can
possibly can go wrong when the unexpected hits.

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T_S_
We have a real dilemma...

If we spread enough plutonium dust around, it will make original sin look like
a walk in the park. (Which it was I believe :-)

On the other hand, if we spew enough CO2 there might not be any sinners left
in 50 generations.

People are standing around waiting for a techno fix. That won't happen without
incentives. We need to tax the heck out of carbon. Fine to cut other taxes and
pay Grandma's heating bill. But we must change relative prices to get the
right focus. Economic forces are much more powerful than a few government
research projects.

Is anyone driving less at $100 oil? We need about $50-$100 of tax per barrel
to get the ball rolling. And a carbon equivalent tax on coal and gas.

~~~
tptacek
And so, if you live in an area of Subsaharan Africa with poor to nonexistent
infrastructure, your answer is basically "die of dysentary"? You cannot look
at this problem solely from the surroundings of your couch. I promise you, the
dysentary entamoeba pathogen is many tens of thousands of times scarier than
100msv of radiation.

The prohibitively high cost of energy in the world is actually _a bad thing_.

