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> Kind of surprising at this point Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old. You are seeing the folly of yo

> Kind of surprising at this point Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old. You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.

Rapzid 9y ago
Sounds like life :| Those cigarettes you smoked in your early twenties? Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..
- jdubs 9y ago
  elaborate plz
- jacquesm 9y ago
  The trick is not to give in to peer pressure.
- distances 9y ago
  > Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting.. If any, I'd guess this correlation to be negative vs. the general population
- collectively 9y ago
  You know if you stopped smoking in your early twenties they’re not likely to affect you when 63. So this is more like smoking crack in your twenties.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  But but but beer is healthy! It's what people drank all the time in the middle ages etc, it was better than the water. [/excuses]
bamboozled 9y ago
Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.
- andrewcchen 9y ago
  Nuclear reactors need to be built next to a large body of water for cooling. So Japan didn't have a choice when they wanted to have nuclear power.
- falcolas 9y ago
  > improve the structure The key question is: Who would have paid for it? Once running, much of the structure is considered to be radioactive. Work in active radioactive areas is expensive and time consuming. Without shutting down the reactor entirely followed by an expensive cleanup, doing major structure upgrades to the reactor chambers is virtually impossible. They also couldn't just decommission it once they realized their errors and rebuilt another one somewhere else - again the costs would have been astronomical. People are terrible at managing (what was then) theoretical risks. If you can't convince people and companies to move out of proven high-risk earthquake areas, imagine trying to convince tax payers to pay billions to upgrade or move a functional-but-theoretically-vulnerable power station.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    > Who would have paid for it? The disaster could have been prevented by the simple expedient of elevating the backup generators, or putting them in flood-resistant bunkers. Cheap.
    - inimino 9y ago
      Hindsight. The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.
beached_whale 9y ago
Also, from what I understand, they ignored the reports that recommended to put the backup generators on higher ground and to make the sea wall higher. Fukashima is the worst case for that design I think.
- rurounijones 9y ago
  https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-didn%e2%80%99t-melt-down-311 https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant... A great article about another plant, closer to the epicenter, owned by another company that did things right. It breaks my heart that these guys also have to be in a shutdown state. TEPCO should be forced to hand over all undamaged nuclear plants and responsibility (minus financial) to this company.
  - beached_whale 9y ago
    It seems like the regulators really failed. Short sighted actions and failure to fix past mistakes shouldn’t be allowed. The other sad thing is that, this is the worst case scenario for that plant and it pales in magnitude, but it is overshadowing the sorrow and lost due to the flooding and earthquake.
- draw_down 9y ago
  It seems bad that nuclear facilities can be built with disregard for good practices. I feel like a lot of the argument for why this won’t happen again is “oh well you just have to build it right”. But they don’t get built right.
rtkwe 9y ago
True I’d forgotten how old Fukushima was.

Rapzid 9y ago

Sounds like life :| Those cigarettes you smoked in your early twenties? Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..

jdubs 9y ago
elaborate plz
jacquesm 9y ago
The trick is not to give in to peer pressure.
distances 9y ago
> Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting.. If any, I'd guess this correlation to be negative vs. the general population
collectively 9y ago
You know if you stopped smoking in your early twenties they’re not likely to affect you when 63. So this is more like smoking crack in your twenties.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
But but but beer is healthy! It's what people drank all the time in the middle ages etc, it was better than the water. [/excuses]

bamboozled 9y ago

Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though. Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure. In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.

andrewcchen 9y ago
Nuclear reactors need to be built next to a large body of water for cooling. So Japan didn't have a choice when they wanted to have nuclear power.
falcolas 9y ago
> improve the structure The key question is: Who would have paid for it? Once running, much of the structure is considered to be radioactive. Work in active radioactive areas is expensive and time consuming. Without shutting down the reactor entirely followed by an expensive cleanup, doing major structure upgrades to the reactor chambers is virtually impossible. They also couldn't just decommission it once they realized their errors and rebuilt another one somewhere else - again the costs would have been astronomical. People are terrible at managing (what was then) theoretical risks. If you can't convince people and companies to move out of proven high-risk earthquake areas, imagine trying to convince tax payers to pay billions to upgrade or move a functional-but-theoretically-vulnerable power station.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > Who would have paid for it? The disaster could have been prevented by the simple expedient of elevating the backup generators, or putting them in flood-resistant bunkers. Cheap.
  - inimino 9y ago
    Hindsight. The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.

beached_whale 9y ago

Also, from what I understand, they ignored the reports that recommended to put the backup generators on higher ground and to make the sea wall higher. Fukashima is the worst case for that design I think.

rurounijones 9y ago
https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-didn%e2%80%99t-melt-down-311 https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant... A great article about another plant, closer to the epicenter, owned by another company that did things right. It breaks my heart that these guys also have to be in a shutdown state. TEPCO should be forced to hand over all undamaged nuclear plants and responsibility (minus financial) to this company.
- beached_whale 9y ago
  It seems like the regulators really failed. Short sighted actions and failure to fix past mistakes shouldn’t be allowed. The other sad thing is that, this is the worst case scenario for that plant and it pales in magnitude, but it is overshadowing the sorrow and lost due to the flooding and earthquake.
draw_down 9y ago
It seems bad that nuclear facilities can be built with disregard for good practices. I feel like a lot of the argument for why this won’t happen again is “oh well you just have to build it right”. But they don’t get built right.

rtkwe 9y ago

True I’d forgotten how old Fukushima was.