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Fukushima was caused by shoddy planning. From a Carnegie Endowment report[1]: "The original design-basis tsunami for Fukushima Daiichi of 3.1 meters was c

Fukushima was caused by shoddy planning. From a Carnegie Endowment report[1]: "The original design-basis tsunami for Fukushima Daiichi of 3.1 meters was chosen because a 1960 earthquake off the coast of Chile created a tsunami of that height on the Fukushima coast." Assuming that future tsunamis would be no higher than a recent historical tsunami is already silly. But it's worse: "one compilation of historical tsunamis in and around Japan lists twelve events since 1498 having a maximum amplitude of more than 10 meters, six of which had a maximum amplitude of over 20 meters." In 2002 they already knew the seawater pumps were located too low, but took no action: "Fukushima Daiichi’s design basis tsunami was estimated to have a maximum height of 3.1 meters above mean sea level. Given this, TEPCO decided to locate the seawater intake buildings at 4 meters above sea level and the main plant buildings at the top of a slope 10 meters about sea level" "In 2002, on the basis of a new methodology for assessing tsunami safety developed by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, TEPCO voluntarily reevaluated the tsunami hazard and adopted a revised design-basis tsunami height of 5.7 meters. Yet, NISA neither updated the licensing documents to reflect this change nor reviewed TEPCO’s analysis. Given that the revised design-basis tsunami was now 1.4 meters above the seawater pumps, such a review should have been conducted." [1] http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf

tunesmith 11y ago
This is one of those "Therefore, what?" points... (although you may not have intended anything more than sharing some very interesting and relevant information). But I can see a "therefore, we should not dismiss nuclear power due to some shoddy planning". And, I can see a "therefore, we can expect some degree of shoddy planning in any engineering project, given that it happened even with a nuclear plant, where the risks were well-known ahead of time."
- paulsutter 11y ago
  To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning. Nuclear safety is a multifacted issue and only the news media would take one fact (Fukushima was avoidable) and reach a conclusion (proving that nuclear is completely safe / completely risky). I'm personally an advocate for fission, because power storage has a long way to go before wind/solar can handle baseload. I especially like the newer designs such a Moltex (http://www.moltexenergy.com/ http://www.moltexenergy.com/). But that one fact about Fukushima isn't enough to support that position so I didn't bring that into the discussion.
  - joelthelion 11y ago
    > To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning. Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact. Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.
    - jahewson 11y ago
      There's no excuse for obvious mistakes. This wasn't something tricky. There are hundreds of years old stone markers in that area documenting the level which previous Tsunmis have reached - well above the level of the power plant. The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously enforced. Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusion.
      - abakker 11y ago
        I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have radiation and waste to deal with. Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen. Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.
- lisper 11y ago
  Therefore, just about any technology can result in catastrophic failure if you adopt stupid designs. The answer is not to eschew nuclear power, but rather to avoid stupid designs. Also, avoiding nuclear power will result in a much worse outcome in the long run, even in the face of stupid designs. A runaway greenhouse effect will be worse than dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Fukushimas.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    How many other technologies that are in use today have such devastating and long lasting side effects as nuclear energy? If a whole farm of wind turbines falls over, its a huge fuck up, and its quite possible people will die. It's pretty unlikely people will get sick and/or die if they visit the site the next day in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt.
    - rhino369 11y ago
      Fossil fuels are wreaking havoc on the environment that is probably several orders of magnitude higher than nuclear. Solar and wind will be a key component of the grid power source but they aren't afeasible replacement for baseload coal plants yet. One Fukashkma every 20-30 years is worth avoiding global warming.
      - stephenr 11y ago
        > that is probably several orders of magnitude higher than nuclear Well I'm glad we got all sciencey and shit. Fuck it, sounds legit. > One Fukushima every 20-30 years is worth possibly avoiding global warming. Fixed that for you.
        Retra 11y ago
        If you want numbers, provide funding.
        stephenr 11y ago
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Well. Here's the real question. When a natural disaster coupled with a human engineering disaster causes massive loss of life, destruction of property, and land rendered dangerous and uninhabitable, why is it that blame concentrates exclusively on nuclear power compared to other alternatives? Coal power causes millions of deaths a year. It causes hazardous living conditions in some of the most populous cities in the world. The coal power industry depends on mining which endangers the lives of miners, with many deaths every year, and wrecks the environment. There are huge swaths of land that are barren and uninhabitable. There are giant piles of mine tailings and giant lakes of sludge scattered around the world. Nobody lives on that land, nobody can because it's contaminated and dangerous. There are places in the US where the risk of dying due to the effects of coal power are 4x higher than the national average murder rate. And there are places around the world where it's much, much worse. The difference between nuclear power and other sources of power or other engineer works is mostly that the hazards of nuclear power are still seen as unusual and frightening, whereas we've simply grown comfortable with those of other forms of power.
  - dwd 11y ago
    Can't agree more... A bushfire in an open cut coal mine is an environmental and human health disaster and it's not a one off. Here's the partial list of burning coal seams/mines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire#List_of_mine_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire#List_of_mine_fi... A good summary of the health problems: http://dea.org.au/news/article/coal-mine-fires-remind-us-of-coals-threat-to-our-environment-climate-and-he http://dea.org.au/news/article/coal-mine-fires-remind-us-of-...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
delish 11y ago
> Fukushima was caused by shoddy planning. > In 2002 they already knew the seawater pumps were located too low, but took no action A relatively-unasked question is, "How many nuclear power plants have analogous failings?"[0] Fukushima could be an outlier because it is more shoddy. This is an argument for nuclear power. Or every nuclear powerplant could have a different subset of shoddinesses. I'd be interested in having the same attention paid to all nuclear powerplants that was paid to Fukushima. Then we'd be able to tell whether Fukushima was an outlier.[1] [0] This may be publicly available information, say published by America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I as a layman haven't found it and doubt I could read it. [1] You might say, "Why are we overanalyzing nuclear power relative to $SOMETHING_ELSE?" I agree with that criticism. My point as regards the parents is that the parent is implicitly making a statistical conclusion (other plants are safer than Fukushima) when we don't know as much about other plants as we do Fukushima.
xigency 11y ago
The Fukushima disaster was caused by TEPCO, which suffered from shoddy planning, and resulted from an extremely rare natural disaster. Recognizing that these mistakes were made and have happened does not instantly restore confidence in nuclear energy to opponents. Even with properly located pumps and larger sea-walls, it's easy to imagine destruction from the greater Tohouku earthquake and tsunami still presenting huge operational hazards to the Fukushima TEPCO nuclear power plant. In order to dispel myths around nuclear power, it's going to require everyone to have a lot more knowledge, including those arguing for and against and those who are designing these systems. There aren't many people who understand all of the climate risks, engineering concerns, issues to social welfare, and risk of disaster (natural or man-made) at stake in this position, so it will require much better communication overall before we can solve this problem.
pasbesoin 11y ago
Human error. Which human history demonstrates thoroughly is the norm rather than the exception. With nuclear and similar technologies, human error has unprecedented scope of impact. Until we "fix" the human error (and short-sightedness, and durability of institutions and civilizations), I remain convinced that large-scale deployment is a recipe for disaster -- sooner or later. At a minimum, designs should be default power-down and containment until quite dead. If humans fail to keep the system running properly, its default behavior is shut-down and isolation until radiologically cold. Necessary designs that can't accomplish this should be government level projects limited in scope and with very clear mandates including hard shut-down horizons and over-generously endowed orthogonal cost trust funds. We can afford this. It's a question of whether we want to. Put the true costs up front -- not passed on to future generations. Decide then what parts are "worth it." P.S. Additionally, the uranium mining aspect seldom gets addressed. Hardly "clean", itself. Just ask the Navajos, for just one example.
- AstralStorm 11y ago
  You say "with nuclear", I say "any technology with high enough energy density". Want to see a huge flash lithium fire from all the solar-charged batteries? Or maybe a dam failure for pump energy storage?

tunesmith 11y ago

This is one of those "Therefore, what?" points... (although you may not have intended anything more than sharing some very interesting and relevant information). But I can see a "therefore, we should not dismiss nuclear power due to some shoddy planning". And, I can see a "therefore, we can expect some degree of shoddy planning in any engineering project, given that it happened even with a nuclear plant, where the risks were well-known ahead of time."

paulsutter 11y ago
To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning. Nuclear safety is a multifacted issue and only the news media would take one fact (Fukushima was avoidable) and reach a conclusion (proving that nuclear is completely safe / completely risky). I'm personally an advocate for fission, because power storage has a long way to go before wind/solar can handle baseload. I especially like the newer designs such a Moltex (http://www.moltexenergy.com/ http://www.moltexenergy.com/). But that one fact about Fukushima isn't enough to support that position so I didn't bring that into the discussion.
- joelthelion 11y ago
  > To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning. Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact. Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.
  - jahewson 11y ago
    There's no excuse for obvious mistakes. This wasn't something tricky. There are hundreds of years old stone markers in that area documenting the level which previous Tsunmis have reached - well above the level of the power plant. The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously enforced. Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusion.
    - abakker 11y ago
      I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have radiation and waste to deal with. Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen. Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.
lisper 11y ago
Therefore, just about any technology can result in catastrophic failure if you adopt stupid designs. The answer is not to eschew nuclear power, but rather to avoid stupid designs. Also, avoiding nuclear power will result in a much worse outcome in the long run, even in the face of stupid designs. A runaway greenhouse effect will be worse than dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Fukushimas.
- stephenr 11y ago
  How many other technologies that are in use today have such devastating and long lasting side effects as nuclear energy? If a whole farm of wind turbines falls over, its a huge fuck up, and its quite possible people will die. It's pretty unlikely people will get sick and/or die if they visit the site the next day in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    Fossil fuels are wreaking havoc on the environment that is probably several orders of magnitude higher than nuclear. Solar and wind will be a key component of the grid power source but they aren't afeasible replacement for baseload coal plants yet. One Fukashkma every 20-30 years is worth avoiding global warming.
    - stephenr 11y ago
      > that is probably several orders of magnitude higher than nuclear Well I'm glad we got all sciencey and shit. Fuck it, sounds legit. > One Fukushima every 20-30 years is worth possibly avoiding global warming. Fixed that for you.
      - Retra 11y ago
        If you want numbers, provide funding.
        stephenr 11y ago
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Well. Here's the real question. When a natural disaster coupled with a human engineering disaster causes massive loss of life, destruction of property, and land rendered dangerous and uninhabitable, why is it that blame concentrates exclusively on nuclear power compared to other alternatives? Coal power causes millions of deaths a year. It causes hazardous living conditions in some of the most populous cities in the world. The coal power industry depends on mining which endangers the lives of miners, with many deaths every year, and wrecks the environment. There are huge swaths of land that are barren and uninhabitable. There are giant piles of mine tailings and giant lakes of sludge scattered around the world. Nobody lives on that land, nobody can because it's contaminated and dangerous. There are places in the US where the risk of dying due to the effects of coal power are 4x higher than the national average murder rate. And there are places around the world where it's much, much worse. The difference between nuclear power and other sources of power or other engineer works is mostly that the hazards of nuclear power are still seen as unusual and frightening, whereas we've simply grown comfortable with those of other forms of power.
- dwd 11y ago
  Can't agree more... A bushfire in an open cut coal mine is an environmental and human health disaster and it's not a one off. Here's the partial list of burning coal seams/mines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire#List_of_mine_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire#List_of_mine_fi... A good summary of the health problems: http://dea.org.au/news/article/coal-mine-fires-remind-us-of-coals-threat-to-our-environment-climate-and-he http://dea.org.au/news/article/coal-mine-fires-remind-us-of-...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

delish 11y ago

> Fukushima was caused by shoddy planning. > In 2002 they already knew the seawater pumps were located too low, but took no action A relatively-unasked question is, "How many nuclear power plants have analogous failings?"[0] Fukushima could be an outlier because it is more shoddy. This is an argument for nuclear power. Or every nuclear powerplant could have a different subset of shoddinesses. I'd be interested in having the same attention paid to all nuclear powerplants that was paid to Fukushima. Then we'd be able to tell whether Fukushima was an outlier.[1] [0] This may be publicly available information, say published by America's Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I as a layman haven't found it and doubt I could read it. [1] You might say, "Why are we overanalyzing nuclear power relative to $SOMETHING_ELSE?" I agree with that criticism. My point as regards the parents is that the parent is implicitly making a statistical conclusion (other plants are safer than Fukushima) when we don't know as much about other plants as we do Fukushima.

xigency 11y ago

The Fukushima disaster was caused by TEPCO, which suffered from shoddy planning, and resulted from an extremely rare natural disaster. Recognizing that these mistakes were made and have happened does not instantly restore confidence in nuclear energy to opponents. Even with properly located pumps and larger sea-walls, it's easy to imagine destruction from the greater Tohouku earthquake and tsunami still presenting huge operational hazards to the Fukushima TEPCO nuclear power plant. In order to dispel myths around nuclear power, it's going to require everyone to have a lot more knowledge, including those arguing for and against and those who are designing these systems. There aren't many people who understand all of the climate risks, engineering concerns, issues to social welfare, and risk of disaster (natural or man-made) at stake in this position, so it will require much better communication overall before we can solve this problem.

pasbesoin 11y ago

Human error. Which human history demonstrates thoroughly is the norm rather than the exception. With nuclear and similar technologies, human error has unprecedented scope of impact. Until we "fix" the human error (and short-sightedness, and durability of institutions and civilizations), I remain convinced that large-scale deployment is a recipe for disaster -- sooner or later. At a minimum, designs should be default power-down and containment until quite dead. If humans fail to keep the system running properly, its default behavior is shut-down and isolation until radiologically cold. Necessary designs that can't accomplish this should be government level projects limited in scope and with very clear mandates including hard shut-down horizons and over-generously endowed orthogonal cost trust funds. We can afford this. It's a question of whether we want to. Put the true costs up front -- not passed on to future generations. Decide then what parts are "worth it." P.S. Additionally, the uranium mining aspect seldom gets addressed. Hardly "clean", itself. Just ask the Navajos, for just one example.

AstralStorm 11y ago
You say "with nuclear", I say "any technology with high enough energy density". Want to see a huge flash lithium fire from all the solar-charged batteries? Or maybe a dam failure for pump energy storage?