

Fukushima nuclear plant owner falsified inspection records - ajhai
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/fukushima-nuclear-plant-owner-falsified-inspection-records/story-fn84naht-1226023073141

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dmm
Mismanagement and the poor training of operators seems to be a consistent
theme with incidents at nuclear plants. For example, from the investigation of
the TMI incident,

"The investigation strongly criticized Babcock and Wilcox, Met Ed, GPU, and
the NRC for lapses in quality assurance and maintenance, inadequate operator
training"^.

So here's a relevant question: Do accidents happen at mismanaged plants, or do
accidents reveal the level of mismanagement which is common across the
industry?

^[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Three_Mile_Is...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Investigations)

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mixmax
A third possibility is that blame is assigned to the operators for political
reasons.

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dmm
Absolutely. I'm trusting these reports to evaluate something (nuclear
facilities) I know nothing about. It's the best information I have.

On a related note, people seemed to be really focused on blame. The question
of who (government, corporations, individuals) is to blame comes up all the
time. Personally I don't see this as a very important question. I mean let's
say we study the situation and decide to blame the operators. Then what? What
have we gained? A scapegoat? That does nothing to help us make future
decisions.

I think the focus on blame is a distraction from our understanding of the
situation as a whole. The chain of causation never really ends. Even if you
could single out a individual operator as the cause of an accident, who hired
them? trained them? Why does one person have so much power without oversight?
Why were their actions not noticed? What aspects of the culture of nuclear
power allowed this to happen?

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JoachimSchipper
I agree that fine-grained assignment of blame may not be that useful, but that
doesn't mean that finding out where things went wrong is useless.

Maybe companies always focus on profits over safety; in that case, maybe
nuclear reactors should be state-owned or not exist at all. Maybe the
governmental oversight failed; maybe anyone should be allowed to inspect the
reactor, or the IAEA should be funded to do regular inspections. Maybe one
operator did something wrong; maybe hiring practices should be revised, or
maybe any important decision should be signed-off by two senior engineers.

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dmm
I am very interested in finding out where things went wrong. Maybe it's the
word "blame" that I have issues with. I see the word blame used like the
ultimate goal of an investigation is to find a person to punish. It might be
emotionally satisfying but I don't think it's useful.

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richieb
You can start with a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami...

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georgecmu
TEPCO has a long history of cover-ups and falsifications, including the
Fukushima plant (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2321793> and
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2316951> from 2002-2003).

What's disturbing is that these facts were known to both Japanese and American
officials and yet they were completely outside the realm of public discourse
[1]:

 _An unnamed official from the International Atomic Energy Agency is quoted in
a 2008 cable from the American embassy in Tokyo as saying that a strong
earthquake would pose a "serious problem" for Japan's nuclear power stations.
The official added that the country's nuclear safety guidelines were
dangerously out of date, as they had only been "revised three times in the
last 35 years."_

 _Another cable sent from Tokyo to Washington in October 2008 alleged that the
government had hidden past nuclear accidents. In 2008, Taro Kono -- a senior
member of Japan's lower house of parliament -- told U.S. diplomats that the
ministry of economy, trade and industry was "covering up nuclear accidents,
and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear
industry."_

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2333580>

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InclinedPlane
What's also disturbing is that people have been falling all over themselves in
attempts to praise the Japanese for their superior awesomeness in everything,
yet these records have been easily accessible to anyone who wanted to any
serious research.

P.S. I love Japan, I think the Japanese are amazing people, and I am
enormously sympathetic to them in their hour of need. However, the recent
trend of what amounts to cultural fellatio has been disgusting and disturbing.

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georgecmu
A lot of this information is only readily available on websites with a strong
environmentalist or anti-nuclear agenda and thus is usually dismissed with
comments such as this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317006>

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jrockway
I think this is a good comment. If the goal of your organization is to share
information, then make that your goal. When the goal is "eliminating all
nuclear power from the Universe", then it's hard to take your data seriously,
because the reader knows that it's cherry-picked specifically to support their
agenda. Bias, even when declared, is bad.

An analogy: imagine that there is a really good prosecutor who wins a lot of
cases. Great! But what do you think when he says, "my goal is to rid the world
of poor people by prosecuting them for capital offenses and ensuring that they
are executed". Not as good.

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lutorm
You could entertain the possibility that the _reason_ they are dedicated to
eliminating all nuclear power is _because_ they have seen information like
that. You can't know _a posteriori_ , of course, but there are actually people
who try to make a judgement upon facts. That doesn't mean there aren't
arbitrary judgement calls made as part of that decision, of course. Ultimately
you have to judge whether you think more expensive power is a worse outcome
than the small risk of making a large area somewhere around a nuclear plant
uninhabitable, for example. Those are based on values and can't really be
decided by facts.

So, another analogy would be: Imagine a journalist who is known for speaking
out against nuclear power. Asking him for his reasons, he responds: "I've
covered the nuclear industry for my entire life, and I've seen the coverups.
Those that calculate the risks of nuclear power don't really know how close
we've been to disaster many times, and I've come to the conclusion that we
can't trust for-profit companies with managing the small risk of real
disaster." Would your opinion of him be strengthened, or would you assume that
he made up his mind beforehand and only went looking for facts that supported
his belief?

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shareme
Maybe plant operators and owners should be required to live within 30 km of
plants with their families to promote more transparency and honesty...

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rwmj
Yes, although I guess if you include shareholders in "owners" then that could
prove difficult to implement.

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pyre
I think that the point is that the CEO/President of the company would be less
likely to attempt to please the share-holders at the cost of safety measures
if his/her own family was in the line of fire.

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kiba
Make HQ of the company to be at a power plant.

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rwmj
Split between all the power plants or with the HQ workers moving around in
rotation?

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tomjen3
Well Japan still has the death penalty, so there should be ample opportunity
to punish him for that.

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ntnedotws
yeah, well, we always knew they were dodgy, but hey: they were willing to pay
spot prices for our uranium, even when it peaked at over $A150/pound in 2007.

Have fun sucking up the mess: thank f-ck it's not in our hemisphere.

