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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

by 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.
- pinko 16y ago
  Hopefully we agree here that the most important goal is to understand the entire chain of events (from plant design to construction to operation to earthquake to tsunami to power failure to meltdown to vessel breach), in order to better avoid something like this happening again in the future. Insofar as a containment vessel appears to have failed--regardless of the reasons--gross negligence by the firm that constructed it, which is known to have led to a structural flaw that could hasten a breach in another vessel at the same plant, is not "unrelated" news. I'm probably being unfair, but your snarky dismissal of this article seems to amount to, "act of god; nothing to learn here; move right along". Your implicit premise seems to be that no reasonable containment vessel standards could have been envisioned or successfully engineered to survive a total, prolonged power failure--in this case the result of a 30' wave hitting the plant's diesel generators. Therefore, because that unlikely event occurred, everyone is off the hook for structural flaws that could have hastened any subsequent meltdown and breach. I don't buy the premise, or the conclusion given the premise. I think the point of the containment vessel is to be a last line of defense in case everything else goes wrong. So when everything else goes wrong you don't get to say "everything else went wrong, so it's not really relevant whether some of the vessels were poorly made". In any case, I suspect we're arguing "at" rather than with each other now, so I'm happy to give you the last word and then drop it, unless you'd really like a response...

by 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.

pinko 16y ago
Hopefully we agree here that the most important goal is to understand the entire chain of events (from plant design to construction to operation to earthquake to tsunami to power failure to meltdown to vessel breach), in order to better avoid something like this happening again in the future. Insofar as a containment vessel appears to have failed--regardless of the reasons--gross negligence by the firm that constructed it, which is known to have led to a structural flaw that could hasten a breach in another vessel at the same plant, is not "unrelated" news. I'm probably being unfair, but your snarky dismissal of this article seems to amount to, "act of god; nothing to learn here; move right along". Your implicit premise seems to be that no reasonable containment vessel standards could have been envisioned or successfully engineered to survive a total, prolonged power failure--in this case the result of a 30' wave hitting the plant's diesel generators. Therefore, because that unlikely event occurred, everyone is off the hook for structural flaws that could have hastened any subsequent meltdown and breach. I don't buy the premise, or the conclusion given the premise. I think the point of the containment vessel is to be a last line of defense in case everything else goes wrong. So when everything else goes wrong you don't get to say "everything else went wrong, so it's not really relevant whether some of the vessels were poorly made". In any case, I suspect we're arguing "at" rather than with each other now, so I'm happy to give you the last word and then drop it, unless you'd really like a response...