5 ms·

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

• roenxi 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.
      • drtgh 6mo ago
        Did you read the report I put? the pdf, << The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant construction was based on the seismological knowledge of more than 40 years ago. As research continued over the years, researchers repeatedly pointed out the high possibility of tsunami levels reaching beyond the assumptions made at the time of construction, as well as the possibility of reactor core damage in the case of such a tsunami. However, TEPCO downplayed this danger. Their countermeasures were insufficient, with no safety margin.>> << By 2006, NISA and TEPCO shared information on the possibility of a station blackout occurring at the Fukushima Daiichi plant should tsunami levels reach the site. They also shared an awareness of the risk of potential reactor core damage from a breakdown of sea water pumps if the magnitude of a tsunami striking the plant turned out to be greater than the assessment made by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers.>> Even leaving aside they ignored the original placement in order to reduce costs by using biased seismological reports of their convenience, TEPCO knew the plant was at risk, they was warned successively it was at risk. And the supposed regulator NISA [0] closed the eyes conveniently (conveniently for someones). << TEPCO was clearly aware of the danger of an accident. It was pointed out to them many times since 2002 that there was a high possibility that a tsunami would be larger than had been postulated, and that such a tsunami would easily cause core damage.>> From the other url I put (I updated it with a cached url, I didn't noticed the article was deleted), << there appear to have been deficiencies in tsunami modeling procedures, resulting in an insufficient margin of safety at Fukushima Daiichi. A nuclear power plant built on a slope by the sea must be designed so that it is not damaged as a tsunami runs up the slope.>> [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_Industrial_Safety_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_Industrial_Safety_... > the gentlest engineering disaster EU raised the maximum permitted levels of radioactive contamination for imported food following Fukushima, this is not a gentlest gesture to the Europeans. Japanese citizens also received their dose, at time the more vulnerable ones was recruited by the Yakuza to clean up the zone.
  • cpgxiii 6mo ago
    > 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. This is not how safe systems are designed and operated. Safety is not a one-time item, it is a process. All safety-critical systems receive attention throughout their operating lives to identify and mitigate potential safety risks. Throughout history, many safety-critical systems have received significant changes during their operating lives as a result of newly-discovered threats or recognition that threats identified during the initial design were not adequately addressed. Many (if not most) commercial aircraft have required significant modifications to address problems that were not understood at the time they were initially built and certified. Likewise, nuclear power plants in many countries have received major modifications over the years to address potential safety issues that were not understood or properly modeled at the time of their design. Sometimes, this process determines that there is no safe way to continue operation - usually that there is no economically viable way to mitigate the potential failure mode - and the system is simply shut down. This has happened to a few aircraft over the years, as well as several nuclear power plants (in many cases justified, in others not so much). Fukushima existed in just such a system, and that the disaster occurred was the result of failures throughout the system, not a one-off failure at the design stage. > 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. I think you are missing the point. Obviously it is possible that a tsunami higher than any possible design threshold could occur (it is, after all, possible that an asteroid will strike in the pacific and kick up a wave of debris that wipes everything off the home islands). However, the tsunami that struct Fukushima Daiichi was no higher than a number of tsunamis that were recorded in Japan within the last century. The choice of DBA tsunami height was clearly an underestimate, and underestimates were identified for Fukushima and other plants prior to the accident but not acted upon. This was not a cases of "a bigger wave is always possible", it was a case where the design, operation, and supervision were wrong, and known (by some) to be so prior to the accident.
    • 6mo ago