13 ms·

The Fukushima accident was preventable

79 points by Oatseller 11y ago

Oatseller 11y ago
It's a long read, here's a link to an article that summarizes some of the study's findings. http://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable-new-study-finds/ http://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable...
jonknee 11y ago
In hindsight all accidents are preventable.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kevan 11y ago
  > The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings. I think the main point is that the damage wasn't caused by a freak storm that no one could have predicted. It was caused by a series of mistakes that we shouldn't have made with the knowledge we had at the time.
  - PaulHoule 11y ago
    The report says that for less than $1M they could have raised the emergency generators up higher in which case they could have maintained reactor cooling and had reactor damage but no major harm. Also there was evidence of similar events in the inhabited past.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  Only under an overly broad definition of "preventable". In the context of this article, "preventable" means that the failure mode was foreseen and not accounted for in the design. If the failure mode had not been foreseen then the accident would not be preventable, because how can you protect against something you can't even imagine?
FussyZeus 11y ago
Here's something about the real world: Things break. Shit happens. We can sit on a chair now and look back and point out all the things that could've been done better, and I honestly don't see the value in it. When the World Trade Center was built, it was designed to withstand the impact of a common airplane at the time and remain structurally sound. The engineers didn't envision a 757 being flown into them, and so they fell. Does that mean they were engineered poorly too? 9/11 would've been prevented if we built additional structure around the WTC each year to accommodate newer, larger, heavier aircraft, but at what point do you rule safety cost as too high to be justified? On the same note, Fukushima survived a storm massively larger than it was ever meant to. It still failed, but it did so in a way that prevented any direct deaths. As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened. How about we just agree to say we got lucky this time and do better in the future?
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  > As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened. There are hundreds of square miles still in the exclusion zone and some 80,000 people haven't been able to return to their homes.. I'd say a nuclear meltdown that displaces tens of thousands of people and costs several hundred billion dollars to clean up qualifies as a 'disaster'.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Eh. A traditional disaster kills people.
    - dalke 11y ago
      Eh? I don't think "a traditional disaster" means what you think it means. The Cerro Grande Fire destroyed about 420 homes and caused ~$1 billion in damages but no one died. The Bel Air Fire destroyed 484 homes but again left no fatalities. Tropical Storm Fay hit Texas and nine counties in Texas were declared disaster areas, but again, no fatalities.
nickff 11y ago
As I understand it, the Fukushima plant was never designed or rated to sustain such a large earthquake or tsunami. If this understanding is correct, we should not have expected it to survive the damage, and the problems were not with the design, but perhaps with the specification (depending on whether you think this should have been foreseen). It seems to be a common thread with all tragedies and disasters that people suffer from hindsight bias, and believe that this specific case should have been foreseen. It is not clear what the cost of building everything to sustain all similar low-probability events would be, and whether doing so would be statistical murder.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Here's a key phrase from the abstract that suggests more than hindsight bias is involved in the report: The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings. Another one: Three, the hazard analysis to calculate the maximum probable tsunami at Dai-ichi appeared to have had methodological mistakes, which almost nobody experienced in tsunami engineering would have made. So there is sense in which they are pretty strongly pointing at regulatory failure.
  - Shivetya 11y ago
    When it was built or after? This plant was built in the early eighties. The article doesn't state if it violated the ideals of then or more recent knowledge.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      The comparison to Onagawa makes it clear enough that they are talking about when it was built. They wouldn't have had so much more experience in 1968 than when they did the early design work for Fukushima Dai-ichi.
    - samstave 11y ago
      Fukushima was built in 1967... and was based on an even slightly older GE plant design. Or were you talking about the other plant?
Johnny555 11y ago
Isn't every accident preventable in hindsight since you know exactly what the failure mode was? If they'd built the generators on a hillside that was washed away in a mudslide the article would read "Critical backup generators were built on unstable hillside despite warnings from scientists".
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  Indeed, and most accidents can shown to have been preventable "if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings." [the article] But claims would seem to be little more than a thin gloss on the unbreakable unobtainium[1] of your hindsight. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
- WalterBright 11y ago
  The idea with building safe systems is not to imagine what could cause subsystem X to fail, but to figure out how to cope when subsystem X fails. The most obvious design failure at Fukushima was not "how big a tsunami we should protect against" but not asking "how will we cope when the seawall fails". If the critical backup generators had been in a bunker designed to protect them from a seawall breach, the disaster would not have happened.
  - lucozade 11y ago
    Although it's been a very long time since I did engineering that could actually kill people, this idea that you focus on what can go wrong and how you mitigate it has stuck with me and has proved useful in lots of things. Having said that, the next questions are usually: what is the likelihood of it going wrong and what is the cost of mitigation? I don't envy the people making those decisions on something like a nuclear reactor, with or without hindsight.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      At some point, you do assign a probability of systemic failure threshold, as nothing is perfect. The idea behind orthogonal backups, however, is that since they are independent, very high reliability can be achieved with low reliable components. For example, if you've got a main with 90% reliability, and a backup with 90% reliability, the combined reliability is 99%. This can be a lot easier and less expensive to achieve than making one component 99%. The backup generators could have a cheap extra seawall built around them, or could have simply raised them up on a 10 foot platform, or built them with snorkels like a jeep designed to cross streams. Building a heftier main seawall would have been an order of magnitude or two more expensive.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jessaustin 11y ago
Of course they have to say that. If they admitted how dangerous nuclear power is, the bribes required to force the taxpayer to build new plants would be simply enormous.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  Literally no one died of radiation due to Fukushima.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    As much as the parent comment is content-free, direct deaths aren't the only thing to consider. There's also cancer and other diseases that can be caused because of the increased radiation in the area, including that which got into the food chain.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      Yeah... the number of those deaths is estimated at somewhere between 0 and 100. Which is to say such a tiny number that it won't be empirically distinguishable from normal fluctuations.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        I said diseases, not deaths. Cancer isn't always fatal, but they impact the quality of life for the sufferers as well as putting an economic burden on the healthcare system.
        pdkl95 11y ago
        Ok. That's still only a handful of people in the worst cases. Now what is the cost to the healthcare system of the coal power generation that replaced the nuclear power stations that were shutdown after the tsunami?
        vlehto 11y ago
bsder 11y ago
Of course it was, as were things like the explosions afterward. However, management always gets in the way--either up front, because there is profit pressure, or on the backend, because there is profit and/or political pressure. This paper covers the up front failures. However, backend failures, like spraying water on the core (NOT one of the established procedures because calm engineers knew that the reactor could dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen) rather than letting the core melt into the bottom of the containment area which was designed to deactivate and contain the core, were also rampant. This was just like Three Mile Island. If people had sat on their hands, done nothing, and let the engineered last-chance safety systems do their job, things would have turned out better. Reactors should not be for-profit. Rickover showed us all how to do it right, but we lack the stomach. Here is his quote about real reactors: "On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."
- jakeogh 11y ago
  "sat on their hands, done nothing" That's how it should be, but in this case not doing anything was not an option. The passive (gravity fed) cooling system on the first reactor to melt had it's valve's almost closed when they lost power. Seems like a bad design to even have valves on it but I'm not a Nuclear Engineer. And people at Daini were able to prevent meltdowns by hand-laying miles of high current cable. Reasonable documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9wDRHZHP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9wDRHZHP0
  - ori_b 11y ago
    > The passive (gravity fed) cooling system on the first reactor to melt had it's valve's almost closed when they lost power. Seems like a bad design to even have valves on it but I'm not a Nuclear Engineer. It wasn't a great design. But that's what happens when you take reactors that were built before Chernobyl, were optimized for producing material suitable for nuclear bombs instead of safety, and then run them long past their designed lifespan. More or less, these reactors should have been retired long ago, and replaced with more modern designs.
craigching 11y ago
> causing the third most severe accident in an NPP ever. I thought this was the second most severe nuclear power plant accident. Obviously Chernobyl is the first, so what is the second according to this article?
- keypusher 11y ago
  Hmm. According to the International Nuclear Event Scale, there have only been 2 events at the most severe level (7): Chernobyl and Fukushima. There was 1 event at a rating of 6, which was a Soviet explosion in 1957. There was also the Three Mile Island accident, which cost a lot of money to clean up (~$1 billion) but I don't think the severity was anywhere near Fukushima. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale#Details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...
worik 11y ago
Really this is silly. People who advocate nuclear power do not understand the difference between "risk" and "uncertainty". "Risk" is where the probabilities of occurrence can be estimated and the consequences predicted. "Uncertainty" is the set of other things going wrong. Nuclear risk can be managed: We can contain a nuclear pile, we can design piping to withstand wear and sopply redundancy. But with a nuclear power station if some thing unforeseen happens to the containment vessel the consequences are ruin and effectively unbounded catastrophe. A coal burning stations are dirty polluting monstrosities (at their best) but it is all risk. Not that I am advocating coal, I am not! But nuclear is no replacement. We are much better to do without energy than build nuclear power plants. But the main incentive for nuclear power is making materials for bombs, IMO
jrjr 11y ago
Could have all been avoided. Japan's power consists of Fiefdoms and no cooperation from adjacent working power sources at that time. They could have run an "extension cord" and saved themselves from the entire mess.
lurkinggrue 11y ago
Aren't all accidents preventable?
Animats 11y ago
With that Mk 1 reactor design, lose cooling water for 4-6 hours and you get a meltdown. The containment vessel is too small for the pressures in a worst-case accident. It's just not a good design. Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania has the same Mk 1 design, and that's been a worry for years. They now have extra backup power systems of different types and multiple cooling water sources for that reason.
scytalevsbijaz 11y ago
U guys are retards ... hacker news have just became a bastion of lies. https://truthnewsinternational.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/fukushima-and-the-japan-earthquake-loud-and-clear/ https://truthnewsinternational.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/fuku...
NumberCruncher 11y ago
>> The 11 March 2011 tsunami was probably the fourth largest in the past 100 years and killed over 15 000 people. For me it still sounds to be a moronic idea to buid a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Or even to live there.

79 points by Oatseller 11y ago

It's a long read, here's a link to an article that summarizes some of the study's findings. http://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable-new-study-finds/ http://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable...

jonknee 11y ago

In hindsight all accidents are preventable.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kevan 11y ago
> The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings. I think the main point is that the damage wasn't caused by a freak storm that no one could have predicted. It was caused by a series of mistakes that we shouldn't have made with the knowledge we had at the time.
- PaulHoule 11y ago
  The report says that for less than $1M they could have raised the emergency generators up higher in which case they could have maintained reactor cooling and had reactor damage but no major harm. Also there was evidence of similar events in the inhabited past.
thescriptkiddie 11y ago
Only under an overly broad definition of "preventable". In the context of this article, "preventable" means that the failure mode was foreseen and not accounted for in the design. If the failure mode had not been foreseen then the accident would not be preventable, because how can you protect against something you can't even imagine?

FussyZeus 11y ago

Here's something about the real world: Things break. Shit happens. We can sit on a chair now and look back and point out all the things that could've been done better, and I honestly don't see the value in it. When the World Trade Center was built, it was designed to withstand the impact of a common airplane at the time and remain structurally sound. The engineers didn't envision a 757 being flown into them, and so they fell. Does that mean they were engineered poorly too? 9/11 would've been prevented if we built additional structure around the WTC each year to accommodate newer, larger, heavier aircraft, but at what point do you rule safety cost as too high to be justified? On the same note, Fukushima survived a storm massively larger than it was ever meant to. It still failed, but it did so in a way that prevented any direct deaths. As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened. How about we just agree to say we got lucky this time and do better in the future?

mikeyouse 11y ago
> As nuclear "disasters" go, I honestly don't even think Fukushima should be among them. Considering what COULD have happened, very little actually happened. There are hundreds of square miles still in the exclusion zone and some 80,000 people haven't been able to return to their homes.. I'd say a nuclear meltdown that displaces tens of thousands of people and costs several hundred billion dollars to clean up qualifies as a 'disaster'.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  Eh. A traditional disaster kills people.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Eh? I don't think "a traditional disaster" means what you think it means. The Cerro Grande Fire destroyed about 420 homes and caused ~$1 billion in damages but no one died. The Bel Air Fire destroyed 484 homes but again left no fatalities. Tropical Storm Fay hit Texas and nine counties in Texas were declared disaster areas, but again, no fatalities.

nickff 11y ago

As I understand it, the Fukushima plant was never designed or rated to sustain such a large earthquake or tsunami. If this understanding is correct, we should not have expected it to survive the damage, and the problems were not with the design, but perhaps with the specification (depending on whether you think this should have been foreseen). It seems to be a common thread with all tragedies and disasters that people suffer from hindsight bias, and believe that this specific case should have been foreseen. It is not clear what the cost of building everything to sustain all similar low-probability events would be, and whether doing so would be statistical murder.

maxerickson 11y ago
Here's a key phrase from the abstract that suggests more than hindsight bias is involved in the report: The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings. Another one: Three, the hazard analysis to calculate the maximum probable tsunami at Dai-ichi appeared to have had methodological mistakes, which almost nobody experienced in tsunami engineering would have made. So there is sense in which they are pretty strongly pointing at regulatory failure.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  When it was built or after? This plant was built in the early eighties. The article doesn't state if it violated the ideals of then or more recent knowledge.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    The comparison to Onagawa makes it clear enough that they are talking about when it was built. They wouldn't have had so much more experience in 1968 than when they did the early design work for Fukushima Dai-ichi.
  - samstave 11y ago
    Fukushima was built in 1967... and was based on an even slightly older GE plant design. Or were you talking about the other plant?

Johnny555 11y ago

Isn't every accident preventable in hindsight since you know exactly what the failure mode was? If they'd built the generators on a hillside that was washed away in a mudslide the article would read "Critical backup generators were built on unstable hillside despite warnings from scientists".

joe_the_user 11y ago
Indeed, and most accidents can shown to have been preventable "if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings." [the article] But claims would seem to be little more than a thin gloss on the unbreakable unobtainium[1] of your hindsight. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
WalterBright 11y ago
The idea with building safe systems is not to imagine what could cause subsystem X to fail, but to figure out how to cope when subsystem X fails. The most obvious design failure at Fukushima was not "how big a tsunami we should protect against" but not asking "how will we cope when the seawall fails". If the critical backup generators had been in a bunker designed to protect them from a seawall breach, the disaster would not have happened.
- lucozade 11y ago
  Although it's been a very long time since I did engineering that could actually kill people, this idea that you focus on what can go wrong and how you mitigate it has stuck with me and has proved useful in lots of things. Having said that, the next questions are usually: what is the likelihood of it going wrong and what is the cost of mitigation? I don't envy the people making those decisions on something like a nuclear reactor, with or without hindsight.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    At some point, you do assign a probability of systemic failure threshold, as nothing is perfect. The idea behind orthogonal backups, however, is that since they are independent, very high reliability can be achieved with low reliable components. For example, if you've got a main with 90% reliability, and a backup with 90% reliability, the combined reliability is 99%. This can be a lot easier and less expensive to achieve than making one component 99%. The backup generators could have a cheap extra seawall built around them, or could have simply raised them up on a 10 foot platform, or built them with snorkels like a jeep designed to cross streams. Building a heftier main seawall would have been an order of magnitude or two more expensive.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jessaustin 11y ago

Of course they have to say that. If they admitted how dangerous nuclear power is, the bribes required to force the taxpayer to build new plants would be simply enormous.

Avshalom 11y ago
Literally no one died of radiation due to Fukushima.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  As much as the parent comment is content-free, direct deaths aren't the only thing to consider. There's also cancer and other diseases that can be caused because of the increased radiation in the area, including that which got into the food chain.
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    Yeah... the number of those deaths is estimated at somewhere between 0 and 100. Which is to say such a tiny number that it won't be empirically distinguishable from normal fluctuations.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      I said diseases, not deaths. Cancer isn't always fatal, but they impact the quality of life for the sufferers as well as putting an economic burden on the healthcare system.
      - pdkl95 11y ago
        Ok. That's still only a handful of people in the worst cases. Now what is the cost to the healthcare system of the coal power generation that replaced the nuclear power stations that were shutdown after the tsunami?
      - vlehto 11y ago

bsder 11y ago

Of course it was, as were things like the explosions afterward. However, management always gets in the way--either up front, because there is profit pressure, or on the backend, because there is profit and/or political pressure. This paper covers the up front failures. However, backend failures, like spraying water on the core (NOT one of the established procedures because calm engineers knew that the reactor could dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen) rather than letting the core melt into the bottom of the containment area which was designed to deactivate and contain the core, were also rampant. This was just like Three Mile Island. If people had sat on their hands, done nothing, and let the engineered last-chance safety systems do their job, things would have turned out better. Reactors should not be for-profit. Rickover showed us all how to do it right, but we lack the stomach. Here is his quote about real reactors: "On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It is requiring an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated."

jakeogh 11y ago
"sat on their hands, done nothing" That's how it should be, but in this case not doing anything was not an option. The passive (gravity fed) cooling system on the first reactor to melt had it's valve's almost closed when they lost power. Seems like a bad design to even have valves on it but I'm not a Nuclear Engineer. And people at Daini were able to prevent meltdowns by hand-laying miles of high current cable. Reasonable documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9wDRHZHP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H9wDRHZHP0
- ori_b 11y ago
  > The passive (gravity fed) cooling system on the first reactor to melt had it's valve's almost closed when they lost power. Seems like a bad design to even have valves on it but I'm not a Nuclear Engineer. It wasn't a great design. But that's what happens when you take reactors that were built before Chernobyl, were optimized for producing material suitable for nuclear bombs instead of safety, and then run them long past their designed lifespan. More or less, these reactors should have been retired long ago, and replaced with more modern designs.

craigching 11y ago

> causing the third most severe accident in an NPP ever. I thought this was the second most severe nuclear power plant accident. Obviously Chernobyl is the first, so what is the second according to this article?

keypusher 11y ago
Hmm. According to the International Nuclear Event Scale, there have only been 2 events at the most severe level (7): Chernobyl and Fukushima. There was 1 event at a rating of 6, which was a Soviet explosion in 1957. There was also the Three Mile Island accident, which cost a lot of money to clean up (~$1 billion) but I don't think the severity was anywhere near Fukushima. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale#Details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...

worik 11y ago

Really this is silly. People who advocate nuclear power do not understand the difference between "risk" and "uncertainty". "Risk" is where the probabilities of occurrence can be estimated and the consequences predicted. "Uncertainty" is the set of other things going wrong. Nuclear risk can be managed: We can contain a nuclear pile, we can design piping to withstand wear and sopply redundancy. But with a nuclear power station if some thing unforeseen happens to the containment vessel the consequences are ruin and effectively unbounded catastrophe. A coal burning stations are dirty polluting monstrosities (at their best) but it is all risk. Not that I am advocating coal, I am not! But nuclear is no replacement. We are much better to do without energy than build nuclear power plants. But the main incentive for nuclear power is making materials for bombs, IMO

jrjr 11y ago

Could have all been avoided. Japan's power consists of Fiefdoms and no cooperation from adjacent working power sources at that time. They could have run an "extension cord" and saved themselves from the entire mess.

lurkinggrue 11y ago

Aren't all accidents preventable?

Animats 11y ago

With that Mk 1 reactor design, lose cooling water for 4-6 hours and you get a meltdown. The containment vessel is too small for the pressures in a worst-case accident. It's just not a good design. Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania has the same Mk 1 design, and that's been a worry for years. They now have extra backup power systems of different types and multiple cooling water sources for that reason.

scytalevsbijaz 11y ago

U guys are retards ... hacker news have just became a bastion of lies. https://truthnewsinternational.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/fukushima-and-the-japan-earthquake-loud-and-clear/ https://truthnewsinternational.wordpress.com/2014/01/11/fuku...

NumberCruncher 11y ago

>> The 11 March 2011 tsunami was probably the fourth largest in the past 100 years and killed over 15 000 people. For me it still sounds to be a moronic idea to buid a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Or even to live there.