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Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

> Looking back more than a year after the event, it is clear that the Fukushima reactor complex, though nowhere close to state-of-the-art, was adequately designed to contain radiation. New reactors can be made even safer, of course, but the bottom line is that Fukushima passed the test.

He made a good argument that new cancer cases are statistically few, but I can't see what test Fukushima passed. As far as I know there were multiple meltdowns and dumping radioactive water into the ocean. From an engineering point of view, it was a clear-cut failure. If not of implementation, then at least of specifications and margins.

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I think the idea was that even if it was an engineering failure, it turned out not to be so dangerous. In a sense, it passed the tests of "What if things go wrong? What if the engineering wasn't so good? What if there's human error? What if events happen that weren't initially predicted?"

They were not designed to be able to resist an earthquake of that magnitude so I fail to see how it can be an failure from an engineering perspective (the fact that most plants handled it fine should if anything suggest that, from an engineering perspective, it was a success).

Could you forward your comment to the author of Dilbert, please?

Not designing for an appropriately sized earthquake is itself an engineering failure.

> I can't see what test Fukushima passed

They had a disaster much bigger than was planned for, multiple failures, both human and machine and even so nobody died from it. At worst, some might eventually succumb to cancer someday.

But it's radiation, so people are still more scared of it than the tsunami that killed everyone. I mean, nobody is talking about how to make sure that we're better prepared for the tsuanmis that kill thousands of people and utterly devastate so much land.

That's a good point. I wonder how many more lives they could save by taking the money they're planning to use to phase out nuclear power and using it to build stronger tsunami walls.

The damage that actually occurred is not that serious. The oceans are large, and eventually the authorities will pick out what's left of the fuel rods and store it safely. This is what was done at Three Mile Island.

But the reality is they only very narrowly avoided a catastrophe that would have been orders of magnitude worse, since they were only able to regain control of the site by putting people there to add water. That was mostly luck.

But it could have been much worse, say like Chernobyl, and it wasn't due to good engineering.

How could it have been like Chernobyl? The Fukushima reactors didn't have graphite moderators.

Totally different reactor technologies, equivocating them is spurious at best.

Using a totally different reactor technology strikes me as an example of good engineering.

The Chernobyl reactor also had no containment vessel, so the initial core failure blew a cloud of radioactive fire into the air. The Fukushima containment vessel kept most of the crap in one place until it could melt into a cohesive mass.

You wouldn't get the graphite fly ash that turned Chernobyl from a localized problem into an international headache, so no, it wouldn't have been as bad as Chernobyl. But it could have been much worse than it was.

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