Fukushima nuclear plant owner falsified inspection records | Hacker News Reader

Fukushima nuclear plant owner falsified inspection records

theaustralian.com.au

41 pointsajhai25 comments

Mismanagement and the poor training of operators seems to be a consistent theme with incidents at nuclear plants. For example, from the investigation of the TMI incident,

"The investigation strongly criticized Babcock and Wilcox, Met Ed, GPU, and the NRC for lapses in quality assurance and maintenance, inadequate operator training"^.

So here's a relevant question: Do accidents happen at mismanaged plants, or do accidents reveal the level of mismanagement which is common across the industry?

^https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Three_Mile_Is...

A third possibility is that blame is assigned to the operators for political reasons.

Absolutely. I'm trusting these reports to evaluate something (nuclear facilities) I know nothing about. It's the best information I have.

On a related note, people seemed to be really focused on blame. The question of who (government, corporations, individuals) is to blame comes up all the time. Personally I don't see this as a very important question. I mean let's say we study the situation and decide to blame the operators. Then what? What have we gained? A scapegoat? That does nothing to help us make future decisions.

I think the focus on blame is a distraction from our understanding of the situation as a whole. The chain of causation never really ends. Even if you could single out a individual operator as the cause of an accident, who hired them? trained them? Why does one person have so much power without oversight? Why were their actions not noticed? What aspects of the culture of nuclear power allowed this to happen?

I agree that fine-grained assignment of blame may not be that useful, but that doesn't mean that finding out where things went wrong is useless.

Maybe companies always focus on profits over safety; in that case, maybe nuclear reactors should be state-owned or not exist at all. Maybe the governmental oversight failed; maybe anyone should be allowed to inspect the reactor, or the IAEA should be funded to do regular inspections. Maybe one operator did something wrong; maybe hiring practices should be revised, or maybe any important decision should be signed-off by two senior engineers.

I am very interested in finding out where things went wrong. Maybe it's the word "blame" that I have issues with. I see the word blame used like the ultimate goal of an investigation is to find a person to punish. It might be emotionally satisfying but I don't think it's useful.

You can start with a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami...

I think we are in violent agreement.

I can only hope that the longer this goes on, the more ridiculous and offensive it will seem, in light of the situation they've been dealing with.

Seems to crop up whenever process is substituted for accountability. I'm not sure more training is the answer so much as accountability.

Don't forget the time that another Japanese nuclear company (JCO) allowed workers with "no proper qualification and training requirements" to prepare batches of fuel. What could possibly go wrong ...? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tokaimura_nuc...

Another relevant question is whether those that assess the risks of nuclear power include the risks of mismanagement, or if they carry some assumption, kind of like the "efficient market" hypothesis, that people will maintain the numerous redundancies and not feel like it's not that important because after all, there are numerous redundancies.

The first rule of the nuclear power industry is that you always protect the nuclear power industry.

It stems from a culture ultimately rooted in nuclear weapons and the cold war. From the very beginning, civilian atomic power has always had a dual role - in addition to producing electricity, it has always been about either producing weapons-grade material directly or (as in the case of Japan) providing a break-out capacity to go nuclear. Government and the military have a far deeper commitment to nuclear than any comparable power generation technology.

On the other hand, you have the public fear of contamination. Any accidents further undermine support for nuclear, so far better simply to shoot-and-shovel rather than owning up to problems and potentially improving safety in the future.

I have supported nuclear myself in the past, but the polyannish and deeply irresponsible response of nuclear supporters during this crisis has me reconsidering. I'm becoming skeptical that real, fallible human beings are capable of safely managing a technology with so much political baggage and black-swan potential.

TEPCO has a long history of cover-ups and falsifications, including the Fukushima plant (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2321793 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2316951 from 2002-2003).

What's disturbing is that these facts were known to both Japanese and American officials and yet they were completely outside the realm of public discourse [1]:

An unnamed official from the International Atomic Energy Agency is quoted in a 2008 cable from the American embassy in Tokyo as saying that a strong earthquake would pose a "serious problem" for Japan's nuclear power stations. The official added that the country's nuclear safety guidelines were dangerously out of date, as they had only been "revised three times in the last 35 years."

Another cable sent from Tokyo to Washington in October 2008 alleged that the government had hidden past nuclear accidents. In 2008, Taro Kono -- a senior member of Japan's lower house of parliament -- told U.S. diplomats that the ministry of economy, trade and industry was "covering up nuclear accidents, and obscuring the true costs and problems associated with the nuclear industry."

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2333580

What's also disturbing is that people have been falling all over themselves in attempts to praise the Japanese for their superior awesomeness in everything, yet these records have been easily accessible to anyone who wanted to any serious research.

P.S. I love Japan, I think the Japanese are amazing people, and I am enormously sympathetic to them in their hour of need. However, the recent trend of what amounts to cultural fellatio has been disgusting and disturbing.

A lot of this information is only readily available on websites with a strong environmentalist or anti-nuclear agenda and thus is usually dismissed with comments such as this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317006

That's the problem with most arguments and information in these topics. It seems to me that both sides can come up with information that would require almost a full-time job to reasonably verify. In the end it usually boils down to finding some arguments that fit your subjective point of view…

I think this is a good comment. If the goal of your organization is to share information, then make that your goal. When the goal is "eliminating all nuclear power from the Universe", then it's hard to take your data seriously, because the reader knows that it's cherry-picked specifically to support their agenda. Bias, even when declared, is bad.

An analogy: imagine that there is a really good prosecutor who wins a lot of cases. Great! But what do you think when he says, "my goal is to rid the world of poor people by prosecuting them for capital offenses and ensuring that they are executed". Not as good.

You could entertain the possibility that the reason they are dedicated to eliminating all nuclear power is because they have seen information like that. You can't know a posteriori, of course, but there are actually people who try to make a judgement upon facts. That doesn't mean there aren't arbitrary judgement calls made as part of that decision, of course. Ultimately you have to judge whether you think more expensive power is a worse outcome than the small risk of making a large area somewhere around a nuclear plant uninhabitable, for example. Those are based on values and can't really be decided by facts.

So, another analogy would be: Imagine a journalist who is known for speaking out against nuclear power. Asking him for his reasons, he responds: "I've covered the nuclear industry for my entire life, and I've seen the coverups. Those that calculate the risks of nuclear power don't really know how close we've been to disaster many times, and I've come to the conclusion that we can't trust for-profit companies with managing the small risk of real disaster." Would your opinion of him be strengthened, or would you assume that he made up his mind beforehand and only went looking for facts that supported his belief?

Maybe plant operators and owners should be required to live within 30 km of plants with their families to promote more transparency and honesty...

Yes, although I guess if you include shareholders in "owners" then that could prove difficult to implement.

I think that the point is that the CEO/President of the company would be less likely to attempt to please the share-holders at the cost of safety measures if his/her own family was in the line of fire.

Make HQ of the company to be at a power plant.

Split between all the power plants or with the HQ workers moving around in rotation?

Well Japan still has the death penalty, so there should be ample opportunity to punish him for that.

yeah, well, we always knew they were dodgy, but hey: they were willing to pay spot prices for our uranium, even when it peaked at over $A150/pound in 2007.

Have fun sucking up the mess: thank f-ck it's not in our hemisphere.

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