8 ms·

Fukushima Engineer Says He Helped Cover Up Flaw at Dai-Ichi Reactor No. 4

59 points by georgecmu 16y ago

allanchao 16y ago
"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 16y ago
  > 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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      Yes, this. An accidental defect may not have an incidence, but you can bet the corruption that led to it being covered up does.
- yread 16y ago
  >who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/869_Sanriku_earthquake_and_tsunami It wasn't that unexpected. It was just stronger than expected. I guess that's a consequence of there being a longer pause between major earthquake than expected
  - patio11 16y ago
    Keep in mind, log scaling makes 9.0 not just a wee bit bigger than 8.3 (and the plants were virtually unaffected by the quake, it was the tsunami that got them, because quakes were the events they spent most resources planning for).
    - anigbrowl 16y ago
      Tsunami is a Japanese word, no? If the language has a particular word for giant seismic waves, and you have a nuclear nuclear plant sitting right on the Pacific coastline, a large tsunami seems like exactly the sort of thing you might expect to occur in combination with an earthquake. Do you remember that 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, the on followed by a huge tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people? It swamped a coastal reactor in India, ~1000 miles away. Statistical evidence suggests that Japan gets hit with tsunamis every 8 years on average; this is the 3rd in the last 30 years with waves >10m. Fukishima Daiichi is 6m above sea level. I know they're not psychic, but it was rather predictable. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-known-to-nuclear-engineers-regulators-who-failed-to-act.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-k...
      - patio11 16y ago
        It is a much more sensible objection to say that the incident happened because the tsunami was 10 meters instead of nine meters, and the possibility of it being 10 meters was suggested by a previous tsunami mentioned once half a decade ago by a single engineer on the basis of an estimation gleaned from historical records that predate England, by not pursued further. But when you phrase it like that, it sounds like the awesomely accurate 20/20 hindsight that it is, and the narrative needs a villain.
        anigbrowl 16y ago
        That interpretation requires a lack of intellectual curiosity that borders upon the obtuse. From the link above, which it appears you didn't bother to read: Japan has suffered 195 tsunamis since 400, according to Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, which produced a report on tsunami threats to nuclear plants on the opposite coast to Dai-Ichi in July 2008. Three in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters. A 7.6-magnitude quake in 1896 off the east coast of Japan created waves as high as 38 meters, while an 8.6- magnitude temblor in 1933 led to a surge as high as 29 meters, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Yes, it was a very big earthquake and they were very unlucky, but the country is famously earthquake prone. I mean, nobody expected that Indonesian earthquake to be as big as it was either. they had an earthquake 15 years ago that wiped $100m off their GDP and killed thousands, and which surprised everyone considerably. If they are being astonished by natural phenomena on a regular basis then maybe their intellectual confidence is somewhat misplaced. The concept of >10 meter waves off the coast of Japan is hardly beyond imagination: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8Ok7XT4IAwo/TRQYSauk1gI/AAAAAAAAAHI/zg4QdSzj5gI/s1600/Hokusai.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8Ok7XT4IAwo/TRQYSauk1gI/AAAAAAAAAH...
jshen 16y ago
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.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  the nuclear industry seems to be caught in the multiple "9"s trap : it costs enormous amounts of money (and thus provide motive for taking shortcuts) to build a device with 0.999999999... reliability. That sucks in all the money what could otherwise have been spent on multiple, yet built to less "9"s and thus cheaper, additional levels of protection, say several more metal containment/enclosing vessels instead of the current 2 - the reactor's vessel itself and the containment structure. There are a lot of examples when the same or less amount of money spent on cheaper components allowed to organize them into more reliable or performant system.
- gamble 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Experimental or not, it has among the least accidents per KWh. 500 is a big enough number for some reasonable statistics.
    - 16y ago
semerda 16y ago
And then there's this.. maybe related? Breach possible at troubled Japanese power plant: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake 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.
maxxxxx 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
T_S_ 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
patio11 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Because the containment vessel in that reactor hasn't failed.
    - pinko 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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.

59 points by georgecmu 16y ago

"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 16y ago
> 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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Yes, this. An accidental defect may not have an incidence, but you can bet the corruption that led to it being covered up does.
yread 16y ago
>who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/869_Sanriku_earthquake_and_tsunami It wasn't that unexpected. It was just stronger than expected. I guess that's a consequence of there being a longer pause between major earthquake than expected
- patio11 16y ago
  Keep in mind, log scaling makes 9.0 not just a wee bit bigger than 8.3 (and the plants were virtually unaffected by the quake, it was the tsunami that got them, because quakes were the events they spent most resources planning for).
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
    Tsunami is a Japanese word, no? If the language has a particular word for giant seismic waves, and you have a nuclear nuclear plant sitting right on the Pacific coastline, a large tsunami seems like exactly the sort of thing you might expect to occur in combination with an earthquake. Do you remember that 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, the on followed by a huge tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people? It swamped a coastal reactor in India, ~1000 miles away. Statistical evidence suggests that Japan gets hit with tsunamis every 8 years on average; this is the 3rd in the last 30 years with waves >10m. Fukishima Daiichi is 6m above sea level. I know they're not psychic, but it was rather predictable. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-known-to-nuclear-engineers-regulators-who-failed-to-act.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-k...
    - patio11 16y ago
      It is a much more sensible objection to say that the incident happened because the tsunami was 10 meters instead of nine meters, and the possibility of it being 10 meters was suggested by a previous tsunami mentioned once half a decade ago by a single engineer on the basis of an estimation gleaned from historical records that predate England, by not pursued further. But when you phrase it like that, it sounds like the awesomely accurate 20/20 hindsight that it is, and the narrative needs a villain.
      - anigbrowl 16y ago
        That interpretation requires a lack of intellectual curiosity that borders upon the obtuse. From the link above, which it appears you didn't bother to read: Japan has suffered 195 tsunamis since 400, according to Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, which produced a report on tsunami threats to nuclear plants on the opposite coast to Dai-Ichi in July 2008. Three in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters. A 7.6-magnitude quake in 1896 off the east coast of Japan created waves as high as 38 meters, while an 8.6- magnitude temblor in 1933 led to a surge as high as 29 meters, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Yes, it was a very big earthquake and they were very unlucky, but the country is famously earthquake prone. I mean, nobody expected that Indonesian earthquake to be as big as it was either. they had an earthquake 15 years ago that wiped $100m off their GDP and killed thousands, and which surprised everyone considerably. If they are being astonished by natural phenomena on a regular basis then maybe their intellectual confidence is somewhat misplaced. The concept of >10 meter waves off the coast of Japan is hardly beyond imagination: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8Ok7XT4IAwo/TRQYSauk1gI/AAAAAAAAAHI/zg4QdSzj5gI/s1600/Hokusai.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8Ok7XT4IAwo/TRQYSauk1gI/AAAAAAAAAH...

jshen 16y ago

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.

VladRussian 16y ago
the nuclear industry seems to be caught in the multiple "9"s trap : it costs enormous amounts of money (and thus provide motive for taking shortcuts) to build a device with 0.999999999... reliability. That sucks in all the money what could otherwise have been spent on multiple, yet built to less "9"s and thus cheaper, additional levels of protection, say several more metal containment/enclosing vessels instead of the current 2 - the reactor's vessel itself and the containment structure. There are a lot of examples when the same or less amount of money spent on cheaper components allowed to organize them into more reliable or performant system.
gamble 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Experimental or not, it has among the least accidents per KWh. 500 is a big enough number for some reasonable statistics.
  - 16y ago

semerda 16y ago

And then there's this.. maybe related? Breach possible at troubled Japanese power plant: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake 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.

maxxxxx 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

T_S_ 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.

patio11 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Because the containment vessel in that reactor hasn't failed.
  - pinko 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.