Fukushima Engineer Says He Helped Cover Up Flaw at Dai-Ichi Reactor No. 4
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
A lot of the reporting about TEPCO seems to be "Aldight alright, we get it, your plant got physically hit by a thirty foot tall wave... but you were asking for it what with your shiftiness on that totally unrelated inspection years ago."
EDIT: clarified that the vessel from this story was not the exact one that just failed; it's simply another of the same design made by the same company during the same era, overseen by the same agency.
Result: bad shit happens, in a fairly predictable sequence. The French nuclear agency actually did this with a containment pool to study disaster effects. Water heats? Check. Water boils? Check. Zirconium slags off? Check. Spent fuel rods begin to melt as heat rises? Check. (The video of the control room during this experiment was broadcast on Japanese TV.)
They then, of course, turned the power back on and restored cooling. TEPCO didn't have a button they could push to do that. Not because they're evil bastards who left that button out to save a buck, no, it's because they got hit with a ten meter tsunami.
Forgive me if I keep coming back to that detail, but it is fairly important to understanding the failure.
Insofar as a containment vessel appears to have failed--regardless of the reasons--gross negligence by the firm that constructed it, which is known to have led to a structural flaw that could hasten a breach in another vessel at the same plant, is not "unrelated" news.
I'm probably being unfair, but your snarky dismissal of this article seems to amount to, "act of god; nothing to learn here; move right along".
Your implicit premise seems to be that no reasonable containment vessel standards could have been envisioned or successfully engineered to survive a total, prolonged power failure--in this case the result of a 30' wave hitting the plant's diesel generators. Therefore, because that unlikely event occurred, everyone is off the hook for structural flaws that could have hastened any subsequent meltdown and breach. I don't buy the premise, or the conclusion given the premise.
I think the point of the containment vessel is to be a last line of defense in case everything else goes wrong. So when everything else goes wrong you don't get to say "everything else went wrong, so it's not really relevant whether some of the vessels were poorly made".
In any case, I suspect we're arguing "at" rather than with each other now, so I'm happy to give you the last word and then drop it, unless you'd really like a response...
The chain of reasonings seems fairly clear ... something done by someone you know does shoddy work breaks. What do you imagine might have happened?
The fact is that there are fewer than 500 reactors in operation worldwide, representing a significant fraction of the total number ever built. Even if you don't consider Chernobyl a civilian reactor, a substantial fraction of the reactors ever built have now suffered severe accidents. Like the shuttles, nuclear failures are essentially black swan events. The shuttle program's probabilities of failure looked great prior to Challenger and Columbia. Now they look like dangerously experimental technology.
Likewise, nuclear power is still essentially experimental. No one can credibly quantify the risk involved, or the chances that containment features will work, when there is so little data to draw conclusions from.
Surface coal mining doesn't leave many square miles of more or less uninhabitable wasteland that remains uninhabitable for many years in the future? Underground coal mines don't catch fire and render entire towns completely uninhabitable?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
Many other energy sources have risks which are spread over many years. They just don't have that "omfg, scary scientific stuff I don't understand" factor.
There are orders of magnitude differences between this time span and radioactive material, right? The same is true of all your points, right?
I'm not anti nuclear, it may be preferable to coal, but it doesn't make the logic of those stats any better.
Coal will do more damage than nuclear on this metric, too.
The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers.
When you score risk, you multiply probability by impact. The power output and operational history of nuclear power indicates that the probability of failure is very low, but the impact is very high. (both in terms of severity and duration)
Should I say "citation needed" or just call it as FUD? I'd say that even with such a disaster at Fukushima, the impact has been very low. Even less so compared to the alternatives:
1) What are the levels of radiation that the workers were exposed to? Is that fatal or problematic for their health? How many people suffer from respiratory diseases related to fossil fuel burning?
2) What is more damaging to the environment: a nuclear plant or a coal mine? The amount of "poisoning" that happened will make the land inhabitable ever again? How much farm land would have to stop producing crops to give way to wind turbines?
Since the NY Times reported this morning that unprotected workers were burned by contaminated water suspected to be leaking from the #3 reactor, after ignoring warnings from personal radiation warning devices. I don't think its unreasonable to think that workers will suffer adverse health effects.
A safely operating nuclear power plant with an uninterrupted supply of fresh water and electricity has less impact to the surrounding area than your average coal mine. The problem is, as Fukushima aptly demonstrates, is that many of these facilities do not fail safe.
Again, think risk management. Probability vs. impact. You're letting your fondness for nuclear energy blind you from the obvious.
It's not like we don't have any idea what radiation does, is it? It's among the better studied of the human industrial health hazards, right? A lot better understood than, say, endocrine disruptors?
Because coal kills 30-60 industry workers every year. (Down from ~1200/yr in the late '40s).
† (Which, while more carcinogenic than the air in Chicago, is far less carcinogenic than failing to eat enough leafy green vegetables or a 4-times-a-week habit of eating red meat)
In the whole world, roughly a million people die every year due to the direct effects of coal power production. Most of that is because of the very dirty plants in use outside of the western world -- but even here, more than 50,000 people die every year because of coal.
If nothing new and catastrophic happens in the near future (it looks like the worst is being contained, but if another earthquake and/or tsunami hits the plant right now, the damage will be massive), the most casualties caused by the Daichi nuclear plant will be in Germany.
This is because Angela Merkel caved to political pressure and ordered the seven oldest nuclear reactors in Germany shut down for at least 3 months. During those 3 months, the plants would have generated 17 TWh, which will now need to be supplied from other sources. The most likely candidate for most of it is coal, because there is currently plenty of underutilized capacity. Coal power releases lots of SO2 and NO2 to the atmosphere, which directly kills people. By current data, 1 TWh of coal power produced in the western world kills roughly 15 people -- so when Merkel signed that moratorium, she signed death warrants for 250 people. (This estimate is probably seriously low -- notably, the coal plants currently running are the newer and cleaner ones, and the capacity that will be brought up to replace them will be dirtier. Also, I have not counted CO2 emissions in any way.)
If every nuclear reactor in the world operated constantly at the level of leakage and operator casualties that are happening at Daichi, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. If there was a Chernobyl every year, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. The normal operation of a coal plant over it's lifetime is more costly in human lives than the worst case nuclear accident of a modern nuclear plant.
The problem is that people are not afraid of dying -- they are afraid of dying in disasters. Nuclear accidents are concentrated. The casualties and the environmental damage caused by coal are diffuse.
Longer-term, you'd also have to factor in the benefit of being able to use electric tractors. (I don't think anybody actually does yet, mind you, but there's a clear advantage.)
A "severe" accident results in loss of life, or in square kilometers of land unexpectedly rendered unusable for habitation or agriculture.
I have yet to read any worst case scenarios for nuclear energy accidents which are anywhere comparable to this.
Lots of people die in mining accidents and mining byproducts cause water pollution.
NO2 emissions are horrid for human health—I don't have death count numbers at hand.
This is not to say nuclear failure isn't bad news, just that many large scale electricty generating schemes have a big downside and it's going to be a big ask to find 100% benign alternatives.
By "a substantial fraction", you mean...?
By "severe accidents", you mean...?
Cite, please?
442 active reactors
125 shutdown reactors
---
567 total
Unit 2 TMI
Units 1-4 Fukushima
Unit 4 Chernobyl
1.04% including Chernobyl
0.87% excluding Chernobyl
This seems like a disingenuous way to dodge the simpler and more relevant statistic: how many fatalities are attributable to nuclear vs. coal.
I disagree with you. Strongly. I think you're on the wrong side of an argument that simple math demonstrates the right side of. But I don't think you're a jerk for making your argument, and certainly don't mean to be "dickish".
How about a nice simple metric of dollars/kWh, including an accurate accounting for externalities?
(I'd also like a pony.)
Jaslovske bohunice A-1: plant contaminated and decomissioned http://www.omegainfo.sk/kuruc_30th_anniversary_of_reactor_ac...
Chalk River: reactor destroyed http://www.ccnr.org/paulson_legacy.html
But from this (a bad list but I couldn't find better) http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/14/nuclear-... it seems that the reprocessing plants are much more dangerous than the actual nuclear plants.
The evidence isn't yet in whether this has any impact on Fukushima's current troubles
These are ideological thoughts, not reasoned thoughts. That's what I mean by 'rabid'
Documented casualties directly linked to the production of energy with fossil fuels simply dwarfs that of nuclear power, and probably will for as long as fossil fuel remains in common use.
And that is to say nothing of the indirect but fairly obvious casualties to the developing world of lack of electrical infrastructure. Simple diseases such as dysentary, which can be mitigated in part by electrical infrastructure, take HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES A YEAR.
When those people then claim that science is on their side, and I'm a luddite or something ... it's annoying.
You can't treat this like a football game where you're on the pro nuclear side and everyone else that is pro nuclear is on your team.
If someone like me is trying to make sense of this stuff by participating in a discussion and asking questions, someone like you comes along and decides that I'm on the opposite side of some fight from you. Despite the fact that I'm not. I'm on neither side, and am trying to reason about these issues, and I found one argument unconvincing. Now I'm your enemy apparently, and you're "knocking down" my points, which I don't even have.
Tough choice. On the one hand, you have your friends, family, and your company; on the other hand, who could have expected there'd be a 9.0 earthquake.
Your comment makes it sound like the defect had an incidence, but it's specific to reactor 4 alone, and reactor 4 was empty when the earthquake happened. For all we know putting the pressure vessel back in shape may have had little effect on its resiliency.
Still, of course, a very tough choice.
In 2007 the probability of an earthquake with a magnitude of Mw8.1–8.3 was estimated as 99% within the following 30 years.[1] The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was larger than the predicted event, but occurred in the same area and caused major flooding in the Sendai area.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/869_Sanriku_earthquake_and_tsunami
It wasn't that unexpected. It was just stronger than expected. I guess that's a consequence of there being a longer pause between major earthquake than expected
Do you remember that 2004 earthquake in Indonesia, the on followed by a huge tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people? It swamped a coastal reactor in India, ~1000 miles away. Statistical evidence suggests that Japan gets hit with tsunamis every 8 years on average; this is the 3rd in the last 30 years with waves >10m. Fukishima Daiichi is 6m above sea level. I know they're not psychic, but it was rather predictable.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/tsunami-risk-well-k...
Japan has suffered 195 tsunamis since 400, according to Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, which produced a report on tsunami threats to nuclear plants on the opposite coast to Dai-Ichi in July 2008. Three in the past three decades had waves of more than 10 meters.
A 7.6-magnitude quake in 1896 off the east coast of Japan created waves as high as 38 meters, while an 8.6- magnitude temblor in 1933 led to a surge as high as 29 meters, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Yes, it was a very big earthquake and they were very unlucky, but the country is famously earthquake prone. I mean, nobody expected that Indonesian earthquake to be as big as it was either. they had an earthquake 15 years ago that wiped $100m off their GDP and killed thousands, and which surprised everyone considerably. If they are being astonished by natural phenomena on a regular basis then maybe their intellectual confidence is somewhat misplaced. The concept of >10 meter waves off the coast of Japan is hardly beyond imagination: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8Ok7XT4IAwo/TRQYSauk1gI/AAAAAAAAAH...
A seawall was supposed to handle any large waves, but among other problems, some fuel tanks for the diesel generators were immediately behind it - not really the ideal place to put any component of your backup system. There's a before & after photo here: http://everist.org/pics/Fukushima/Fukushima_fuel_tanks.jpg
The reactors themselves would have been hard to move, but would likely have been OK had the backup systems been more robust - and being external and modular, they could have been made more robust, and ought to have been.
Even if it were an all-or-nothing proposition, the additional data gathered in the years since the plants' construction was sufficient to justify a re-evaluation of risk; if the risk were sufficiently probable but impossible to mitigate, then decommissioning would be the appropriate response. Sure, that would be very expensive, but much less so than a post-disaster situation like this. Going ahead with a plan that's known to be flawed because you've already put a lot of money into it is known as a 'sunk costs fallacy'; the amount you've already spent has zero bearing on the future probability of failure, so if the latter is unacceptably high then the size of the former is no excuse for inaction.
Besides the Sanriku earthquake was estimated 8.6
Breach possible at troubled Japanese power plant: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake
Makes you wonder what other nuclear reactors have had cover ups and what can possibly can go wrong when the unexpected hits.
If we spread enough plutonium dust around, it will make original sin look like a walk in the park. (Which it was I believe :-)
On the other hand, if we spew enough CO2 there might not be any sinners left in 50 generations.
People are standing around waiting for a techno fix. That won't happen without incentives. We need to tax the heck out of carbon. Fine to cut other taxes and pay Grandma's heating bill. But we must change relative prices to get the right focus. Economic forces are much more powerful than a few government research projects.
Is anyone driving less at $100 oil? We need about $50-$100 of tax per barrel to get the ball rolling. And a carbon equivalent tax on coal and gas.
The prohibitively high cost of energy in the world is actually a bad thing.