5 ms·

> The decision process that produced that DBA was clearly faulty - the economic and social costs of the disaster so clearly have exceeded those of a building to

by roenxi 7mo ago

> The decision process that produced that DBA was clearly faulty - the economic and social costs of the disaster so clearly have exceeded those of a building to a more serious DBA. That isn't clear at all. We're effectively sampling from the entire globe and we've had 2-3x bad nuclear disasters since the 70s. Our safety standards appear to be overcautious given the relatively small amount of damage done vs ... pretty much every alternative. The designs seem to be fine. I'm still waiting to see the justification for the evacuations from Fukushima; they seemed excessive. People died. > For the cost of maybe maybe tens of millions at most... You haven't thought for long enough before you typed that. For this particular disaster, sure. But hardening against all the possible disasters is what needs to happen when you become less risk tolerant. It is the millions of dollars to prevent against this disaster multiplied by the number of potential disasters that you have to consider. Safety is expensive. The numbers aren't small, safety of that magnitude might not even be economically feasible. To say nothing of whether it is actually sensible. And once you get into one in 500 or thousand year events, some really catastrophic stuff starts happening that just can't be reasonably defended against. San Francisco and its fault springs to mind, I forget what sort of even that is but it is probably once a millennium or more often.

drtgh 7mo ago
Fukushima was designed to be constructed on a hill 30-35 meters above the ocean, but someones decided would be cheaper to construct it at sea level in order to reduce costs in water pumping, others decided to approve this, and much latter, one decade before the disaster when was requested to reinforce the security measures within all the reactors at Japan, those in charge of Fukushima decided to ignore it, again, pushing for extensions year after year until it all blew up. Decades of bad decisions with a strong smell to corruption. https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp/en/report/ https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp... https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/NAIIC_Eng_Chapter1_web.pdf https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp... https://web.archive.org/web/20210314022059/https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://web.archive.org/web/20210314022059/https://carnegiee...
- roenxi 7mo ago
  I mean, ok. So say they build the plant 35m higher up, then get hit by a tsunami that is 36 meters higher [0] than the one that caused the Fukushima disaster? If we're going to start worrying about events outside the design spec we may as well talk about that one. If they're designing to tolerate an event, we can pretty reliably imagine a much worse event that will happen sooner or later and take the plant out. That is the nature of engineering. Eventually everything fails; time is generally against a design engineer. Caveating that I'm not really sure it was even an out-of-design event, but if it was then it is case closed and the swiss cheese model is an inappropriate choice of model to understand the failure. If you hit a design with things it wasn't designed to handle then it may reasonably fail because of that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami homework for the interested, it is cool stuff. Japan has seen some quite large waves, 57 meters seems to be the record in recent history.
  - drtgh 7mo ago
    In Japan they have the "Tsunami Stones" [0] across the coast, memorials to remind future generations of the highest point the water reached. It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, and for such case they had ten years to design protections after being requested to reinforce measures (along with the other Japanese plants), but I can imagine the ones that should put the money was not very collaborative (I even doubt if such responsible learnt the lesson). [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnin... If it was a cheese model or not I do not enter (notice that parent of parent and me are different users), their negligence breaks all the possible logic we could apply without introducing the corruption's variable behind such decades of bad decisions.
    - roenxi 7mo ago
      > It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, So why did they build it there? It isn't a gentleman in a clown hat hitting himself on the head with a rubber mallet, they had a reason. These things are always trade-offs. Maybe if they'd built it up on the hill there'd have been an earthquake, a landslide then the plant slides into the sea and gets waterlogged. I dunno. If we're talking about things without a clearly defined bounds of risk tolerance that is the sort of scenario that can be bought up. You're talking about negligence, but you aren't saying what tolerances this plant was built with, what you want it to be built to or what the trade-offs you want made are going to be. Once you start getting in to those details it becomes a lot less obvious that Fukushima is even a bad thing (probably is, the tech is pretty old and we wouldn't build a plant that way any more is my understanding). It isn't possible to just demand that engineers prevent all bad outcomes, reality is too messy. It isn't negligent if there are reasonable design constraints, then something outside the design considerations happens and causes a failure, is the theoretical point I'm bringing up. It is just bad luck. The whole affair seems pretty responsible from where I sit a long way away. Fukushima is possibly the gentlest engineering disaster to ever enter the canon. It is much better than a major dam or bridge failure for example, and again assuming the event that caused the whole thing was unexpected not even evidence of bad management. Most engineering failures involve a chain of horrific choices the leave the reader with tears in their eyes, not just a fairly mild "well we were hit with a wild tsunami and doubled the nominal price tag of the cleanup with no obvious loss of life or limb". And bear in mind we're scouring the world for the worst nuclear disaster in the 21st century. And besides, they did build it above sea level.

by roenxi 7mo ago

drtgh 7mo ago

Fukushima was designed to be constructed on a hill 30-35 meters above the ocean, but someones decided would be cheaper to construct it at sea level in order to reduce costs in water pumping, others decided to approve this, and much latter, one decade before the disaster when was requested to reinforce the security measures within all the reactors at Japan, those in charge of Fukushima decided to ignore it, again, pushing for extensions year after year until it all blew up. Decades of bad decisions with a strong smell to corruption. https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp/en/report/ https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp... https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/NAIIC_Eng_Chapter1_web.pdf https://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp... https://web.archive.org/web/20210314022059/https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361 https://web.archive.org/web/20210314022059/https://carnegiee...

roenxi 7mo ago
I mean, ok. So say they build the plant 35m higher up, then get hit by a tsunami that is 36 meters higher [0] than the one that caused the Fukushima disaster? If we're going to start worrying about events outside the design spec we may as well talk about that one. If they're designing to tolerate an event, we can pretty reliably imagine a much worse event that will happen sooner or later and take the plant out. That is the nature of engineering. Eventually everything fails; time is generally against a design engineer. Caveating that I'm not really sure it was even an out-of-design event, but if it was then it is case closed and the swiss cheese model is an inappropriate choice of model to understand the failure. If you hit a design with things it wasn't designed to handle then it may reasonably fail because of that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatsunami homework for the interested, it is cool stuff. Japan has seen some quite large waves, 57 meters seems to be the record in recent history.
- drtgh 7mo ago
  In Japan they have the "Tsunami Stones" [0] across the coast, memorials to remind future generations of the highest point the water reached. It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, and for such case they had ten years to design protections after being requested to reinforce measures (along with the other Japanese plants), but I can imagine the ones that should put the money was not very collaborative (I even doubt if such responsible learnt the lesson). [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnin... If it was a cheese model or not I do not enter (notice that parent of parent and me are different users), their negligence breaks all the possible logic we could apply without introducing the corruption's variable behind such decades of bad decisions.
  - roenxi 7mo ago
    > It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, So why did they build it there? It isn't a gentleman in a clown hat hitting himself on the head with a rubber mallet, they had a reason. These things are always trade-offs. Maybe if they'd built it up on the hill there'd have been an earthquake, a landslide then the plant slides into the sea and gets waterlogged. I dunno. If we're talking about things without a clearly defined bounds of risk tolerance that is the sort of scenario that can be bought up. You're talking about negligence, but you aren't saying what tolerances this plant was built with, what you want it to be built to or what the trade-offs you want made are going to be. Once you start getting in to those details it becomes a lot less obvious that Fukushima is even a bad thing (probably is, the tech is pretty old and we wouldn't build a plant that way any more is my understanding). It isn't possible to just demand that engineers prevent all bad outcomes, reality is too messy. It isn't negligent if there are reasonable design constraints, then something outside the design considerations happens and causes a failure, is the theoretical point I'm bringing up. It is just bad luck. The whole affair seems pretty responsible from where I sit a long way away. Fukushima is possibly the gentlest engineering disaster to ever enter the canon. It is much better than a major dam or bridge failure for example, and again assuming the event that caused the whole thing was unexpected not even evidence of bad management. Most engineering failures involve a chain of horrific choices the leave the reader with tears in their eyes, not just a fairly mild "well we were hit with a wild tsunami and doubled the nominal price tag of the cleanup with no obvious loss of life or limb". And bear in mind we're scouring the world for the worst nuclear disaster in the 21st century. And besides, they did build it above sea level.