Jed-- I agree looking for a scapegoat is not warranted. However looking for design requirement inadequacy is a necessary and desirable function to understand the DETAILS of the mistake in the design procedure and the corrective action necessary. Many times the expediency of the construction and trumps good design decision making. The seat of the pants decision making by high company officials are not consistent with good management practice. Risk calculations are many times vague because basic assumptions or not valid for the risk assessment. This is particularly true for uncertain events like earthquakes and related tidal waves.
The Fukushima event was tragic and COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED in contrast to your conclusion IMHO. It required good design control and objective management which was outside the objectives of the Nuclear Village in Japan and the rest of the nuclear industrial complex that avoided speaking up at the risky location of the reactors. The same issue of risky design applies to the above ground storage of spent fuel in wet storage in many GE design plants in this country. The options are dry storage containers in an underground facility not subject to damaging natural or man instigated events. The industry has found such a option too costly. I suspect that the optional location of secure generators and supplies of fuel were found to be too costly by the Nuclear Village decision makers in Japan. Building the Fukushima reactors out of Harms way, away from the ocean, although safer by any estimate, would have been more costly. That's the same rationale used to justify some of the beach front reactors in California, including their continued operation--a tragedy waiting to happen. Bob ----- Original Message ----- From: Jed Rothwell To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2014 7:04 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:NY Times: "Sun and Wind Alter Global Landscape, Leaving Utilities Behind" a.ashfield <[email protected]> wrote: I'd love to know if the decision to place the stand-by generators in the basement was a result of budget restraints or a conscious engineering decision. I wouldn't know how that came about. But these reactors are lavishly funded and they usually go way over budget so I doubt there were many budget restraints. I have heard that the fatal flaw was to put the fuel tanks on the seaward side of the buildings. The fuel tanks were enormous, but they were swept away by the tsunami. They had enough generators and equipment to keep the catastrophe under control until the second or third night as I recall, when the main generator ran out of fuel. They did not notice for some time, and by the time they realized it had stopped, the damage was done and things were spiraling out of control. It sounds unbelievably inept to run out of diesel fuel in the middle of the night, but you have to realize these people were working under terrible conditions, with life-threatening radiation, explosions and fires. I have seen actual videos and also dramatizations of the accident on Japanese TV. I have the highest respect for the people who responded to the accident and for the ones who are now trying to contain it. These are brave, competent people, doing their best. After the accident, a memo surfaced saying, "we should worry about the possibility of a large tsunami." In other words, someone foresaw the problem. An expert interviewed on NHK talked about this. He said: "You will always find a memo. We looked into everything; we thought about every possible scenario. If you were to try to eliminate every threat in a project like this, the plant would never be built." I sympathize with that point of view. Technology always carries some risk. We cannot be paralyzed into inaction by fear. In this case, it turned out the risk was much larger than anyone anticipated. (Anyone including me -- not that I'm an expert.) That is tragic but it cannot be helped, and I do not think we should go around looking for a scapegoat to blame it on. - Jed
