On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 7:49 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Whenever you see some idiot standing on a bully pulpit in media, >> government and/or academia and saying "Who could have foreseen?" You can >> bet someone did foresee it and not just because a broken clock is right >> twice a day. > > > Yes, indeed. > > The Three Mile Island disaster was foretold, as I wrote earlier. The > engineer who did field inspections reported that the same events had > happened in other plants of this design, and that if it happened under full > load the results might be disastrous. > > That is one example. There is a similar one that makes me feel sorry for > regulators and field engineers. After Fukushima, someone found a report > buried in the files saying: "There is historical evidence of high tsunamis > in this area, so we should build up the sea wall in this reactor complex, > and take other steps to avoid a catastrophe from a tsunami." > > In other words, Fukushima was a disaster foretold, just as Three Mile Island > was. A reporter asked a Japanese official about this. The official responded > with a bout of honesty that I suppose was induced by months of overwork and > worry. He said something like: "You can always find a report predicting a > disaster. Any disaster. We look at every scenario. We have experts in every > field look into anything imaginable. The thing is, if you were to turn off a > reactor until every possible scenario is covered, you would never turn it > on." That was prophetic. Soon after that, they turned off nearly every > Japanese nuke, and most are still off. > > > Risk can never be fully eliminated. Ordinary members of the public have > difficulty understanding this, but engineers know it. People get upset when > airplanes crash or factories burn down. Sometimes they are justified in > getting upset, such when a factory has a terrible safety record. Other > times, people should simply accept that risk is inevitable despite our best > efforts.
How do you view the decision to not build a higher sea wall? Was it an acceptable cost vs risk tradeoff or a criminal mistake? Harry
