Fukushima documentary

[Homer J Simpson]

[Red Squirrel]

Username checks out. 

That was a good watch.  To this day I still say they did everything they could with what they had.  There may be things they could have done differently but at the heat of the moment you don't think of those or know what will happen next.    I'm sure the nuclear industry has learned a lot from this such as how to design better backup systems and how to locate key equipment in safer places etc.

[VK3DRB]

A good doco, but some of it is .

It is not the worlds most powerful earthquake ever as the Youtube publisher states. And it is not Japan's most powerful earthquake ever as the documentary states. They are just sensationalist claims.

As far as being the most devastating, in recent history there was an 8.2 on the Richter scale around the year 750 BC that destroyed much of the middle east and Europe. The number of deaths is unknown but it was very significant, possibly the most significant ever. More recently in 1556, the massive Shaanxi earthquake killed 830,000. And lest not forget the Indian Ocean tsunami for 2004 that was 9.1 to 9.3, killing 200,000. In 1960, the Valdivia earthquake was recorded as around 9.4 to 9.6, and most powerful ever recorded empirically.

The Japanese government is foolish for allowing a nuclear power plant to be built on a fault line. They only planned for tsunamis they knew about from recent history. And even then the system design failed by flawed system design. Like Chernobyl, the people of Japan, and indeed much of the world will have to pay for the work of fools. An IBM Japan colleague once said to me about 10 years before the Fukushima disaster happened, he fear the nuclear power plants because "When something bad happens, we Japanese have nowhere to run."

In Australia, we don't have nuclear power plants, we just export our uranium to make money.

[Rick Law]

A good doco, but some of it is .

It is not the worlds most powerful earthquake ever as the Youtube publisher states.
...
...
The Japanese government is foolish for allowing a nuclear power plant to be built on a fault line. They only planned for tsunamis they knew about from recent history. And even then the system design failed by flawed system design.
...
...

[Bold added to quote]

Can't agree more...I don't know exactly which problem you (VK3DB) mean by flaw system design, but I like to point out this one:  One idiot thing they did was to put the backup generators in low-lying areas.  In fact, one generator was placed in the basement.

The word tsunami came from Japanese - a nation with a history of tsunami, and yet they put backup power generators at places most susceptible to flood!

Too bad Seppuku is out of style.  Whoever did that design, or approved that design, should be charged with at least 2nd degree man-slaughter.  (As defined by New York State: Second Degree when that person recklessly causes the death of another person.)


Reference:
University of Southern California News (Science and Technology section):
"Fukushima disaster was preventable, new study finds: Critical backup generators were built in low-lying areas at risk for tsunami damage — despite warnings from scientists..."

"...They found that “arrogance and ignorance,” design flaws, regulatory failures and improper hazard analyses doomed the coastal nuclear power plant even before the tsunami hit..."

"...The authors describe the disaster as a “cascade of industrial, regulatory and engineering failures” leading to a situation where critical infrastructure — in this case, backup generators to keep cooling the plant in the event of main power loss — was built in harm’s way..."

"...At the four damaged nuclear power plants (Onagawa, Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushimi Daini and Toka Daini), 22 of the 33 total backup diesel generators were washed away, including 12 of 13 at Fukushima Daiichi. Of the 33 total backup power lines to off-site generators, all but two were obliterated by the tsunami..."

Full article: https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable-new-study-finds/

[coppice]

The Japanese government is foolish for allowing a nuclear power plant to be built on a fault line. They only planned for tsunamis they knew about from recent history. And even then the system design failed by flawed system design. Like Chernobyl, the people of Japan, and indeed much of the world will have to pay for the work of fools. An IBM Japan colleague once said to me about 10 years before the Fukushima disaster happened, he fear the nuclear power plants because "When something bad happens, we Japanese have nowhere to run."

Look at any reactor design in the world and you'll see insane design decisions. If a power company is going to buy a design from the market, they really have no choices that are robustly designed to mitigate failure. When the TEPCO reactors were built this issue was even worse.

The location issue looks insane at first sight, but take a look around Japan. Where do they have suitable land that isn't subject to quakes or tsunamis, and isn't too close to heavily populated places? They needed energy. They lacked local supplies of fossil fuels. What else were they to do?

[ez24]

This topic made me look into documentaries on youtube, and under "documentary playlist"  1,000s come up.  So using 4k Downloader, I will be downloading them for the next several months
thanks 

[Cerebus]

They lacked local supplies of fossil fuels. What else were they to do?

I believe the traditional thing to do under those circumstances is to invade someone who does.

[dmills]

I believe the traditional thing to do under those circumstances is to invade someone who does.

They tried that with the USA, didn't work out so well.

To be fair to the reactor design, it was at least as much a problem caused by inept risk management as it was anything else including reactor design (Not that I am a big fan of boiling water plants), see also the regulators being way too far in bed with the industry.

Keeping the fuel in the cooling ponds because that was cheaper then shipping it to be processed was one of those poor decisions, as was not venting steam to control reactor pressure given the rather inadequate feedwater pumps they had available after the wave hit (The steam would have been radioactive, mostly 16N (Half life 7 seconds decays to oxygen 16 which is stable by beta emission) which is really not a big deal.

Dumping steam contaminated with nitrogen 16 to atmosphere would have lowered pressures and made pumping in sufficient sea water to keep the fuel cladding intact rather easier, and the half life is so short that it would all have decayed completely within 10 minutes.

That piece of ineptness was down to a boardroom decision (The chief engineer on site apparently wanted to vent, the board wanted time for PR to spin it), by the time the go ahead was given the fuel cladding had melted making it a non starter (Lots of nasties in the water by that point), and even venting to the containment was problematic due to H2 from the watergas reaction with the cladding (This caused several hydrogen explosions).

Nuclear accidents will probably always be one of those low probability things, still rather have a nuke in my back garden then a coal fired plant....

Interestingly, there was another nuclear accident which came so close to making most of the northern UK uninhabitable that does not much get discussed, the fire at Calder Hall.
It was a purely plutonium producing reactor (Not even a nod towards power production), graphite moderated, AIR COOLED!, well of course you have red hot graphite with air being blown over it by big fans, what could possibly go wrong? Yep the thing caught fire....
The only thing that saved us was that the filters in the exhaust stack were at the TOP of the chimney.
Scarily they extinguished the fire with WATER, that could have gone **REALLY** pearshaped.

You can see the chimney and core containment building on google earth at 54:25'27.86N, 3:30'02.09W, but the whole site is fascinating (You can see what I suspect is a uranium enrichment cascade at 54:25'09.29N 3:29'31.88W, together with the huge power supply towers (The site actually has several very large overhead feeders).

Regards, Dan.

[raptor1956]

Username checks out. 

That was a good watch.  To this day I still say they did everything they could with what they had.  There may be things they could have done differently but at the heat of the moment you don't think of those or know what will happen next.    I'm sure the nuclear industry has learned a lot from this such as how to design better backup systems and how to locate key equipment in safer places etc.

I would hope they'd have learned something but almost all companies are run by MBA's and spending money to go from a 100 year event to a 500 year event isn't in there lexicon.  There were nuke plants along the New Jersey shore than came within 1.5 feet of being inundated by Hurricane Sandy and Sandy, bad as she was, isn't the biggest threat -- imagine a decent sized meteor landing in the Atlantic and creating a wave even a few feet higher than Sandy.

The great failing of Nuke power is that no matter how clean they are 99.9999% of the time when they do have issues that 0.0001% could kill millions.  A typical reactor has 250,000 pounds of nuclear material and some plants have 6 of them.  Sooner of later ISIS or the next bad guy will find a way to detonate a reactor and the impact of that could bring down a nation, even one the size and power of the USA.  Imagine such an event taking place at Indian Point along the Hudson River and only about 35 miles from downtown Manhattan.  An event that destroys one of the reactors could despoil NYC resulting in tens of trillions in loses before you count people.


Brian

[magetoo]

imagine a decent sized meteor landing in the Atlantic and creating a wave even a few feet higher than Sandy.

The great failing of Nuke power is that no matter how clean they are 99.9999% of the time when they do have issues that 0.0001% could kill millions.

Lots of things "could" happen, but at some point they are so unlikely that they don't matter in reality.  Nuclear power is still way safer, per kilowatt hour, than almost anything else.  (Wind is safest, if I recall correctly.)  People seem to be very aware of unlikely disaster movie scenarios that could happen, but completely ignore everyday risks like traffic, or the statistics that say other sources of power regularly harms or kills people in normal operation.

Everyone involved in designing and building reactors is trying to move the decimal point even further out; on the other side anyone can still say "0.000001% of the time it could kill millions" and it'll seem just as real of a threat.

Sooner of later ISIS or the next bad guy will find a way to detonate a reactor and the impact of that could bring down a nation, even one the size and power of the USA.

Turning a commercial power reactor into a weapon is about as likely as blowing up a plane with your Arduino project with wires sticking out of it.

What would ISIS do, just walk in, shut down the reactor, wait for a few weeks while it cools down, move the used fuel rods to storage pools, let it sit there for months until the decay reactions have slowed down, build a plutonium refinement facility on site, take the fuel out, reprocess it, then start manufacture of a weapon that requires strict tolerances and simulations of neutron behaviour, and then use that to blow up the rest?

[helius]

Sooner of later ISIS or the next bad guy will find a way to detonate a reactor

This is the dumbest thing I've read all week, congratulations!
There isn't any way to "detonate" a reactor. The fuel is not enriched to anywhere near the necessary degree and the geometry is wrong.

[nctnico]

I would hope they'd have learned something but almost all companies are run by MBA's and spending money to go from a 100 year event to a 500 year event isn't in there lexicon.  There were nuke plants along the New Jersey shore than came within 1.5 feet of being inundated by Hurricane Sandy and Sandy, bad as she was, isn't the biggest threat -- imagine a decent sized meteor landing in the Atlantic and creating a wave even a few feet higher than Sandy.

Another major problem I see with nuclear power plants is that all of them are old. Thanks to Greenpeace et al nobody invested in designing and building safer (and probably cheaper to operate) nuclear power plants. The Fukushima power plant for example was commissioned in 1971. If Greenpeace et al would not have spread so much FUD about nuclear power Fukushima and many old nuclear power plants probably would have been shutdown and replaced by much safer ones already.

[nctnico]

Sooner of later ISIS or the next bad guy will find a way to detonate a reactor

This is the dumbest thing I've read all week, congratulations!
There isn't any way to "detonate" a reactor. The fuel is not enriched to anywhere near the necessary degree and the geometry is wrong.

Sure you can detonate a reactor. Fukushima and Chernobyl are prime examples of how well a nuclear power plant can explode.

[magetoo]

Sure you can detonate a reactor. Fukushima and Chernobyl are prime examples of how well a nuclear power plant can explode.

No, what happened at Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion in the containment building, not the reactor blowing up.

[dmills]

And Chernobyl was at heart a steam explosion (Aided by the water gas reaction, a positive void coefficient and a totally stupid control rod design).

You cannot even meaningfully produce weapons grade Pu from a civil plant unless you replace the fuel elements every 6 months as the Pu ends up contaminated with isotopes that spoil it for a prompt fission device (And not needing a centrifuge cascade is the whole reason to go Pu rather then the much simpler U235 route).

You can (given a sufficiently pathological case) cause a meltdown, and possibly a hydrogen gas explosion in the containment building, maybe a week after dropping the rods, but all civil reactors only manage delayed criticality , and then usually, only just, no way to take them prompt critical. 

Regards, Dan.

[coppice]

Sure you can detonate a reactor. Fukushima and Chernobyl are prime examples of how well a nuclear power plant can explode.

No, what happened at Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion in the containment building, not the reactor blowing up.

You can't get a reactor to undergo a nuclear explosion. However, a conventional explosion in amongst the uranium fuel can make a horrible mess of the surrounding area.

[SeanB]

Sure you can detonate a reactor. Fukushima and Chernobyl are prime examples of how well a nuclear power plant can explode.

No, what happened at Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion in the containment building, not the reactor blowing up.

You can't get a reactor to undergo a nuclear explosion. However, a conventional explosion in amongst the uranium fuel can make a horrible mess of the surrounding area.

To get that explosive there will require quite a few hours, first to shut down the reactor and undo the top, then you need a volunteer to put the ton of HE in there, in a radiation environment so dangerous that he likely will be dead from the radiation levels before he even gets into a place to drop the first load of explosives. Let alone the very likely prospect of a premature detonation of the explosive just from the neutron bombardment triggering the primer.

Pleny of time ofr a police or military reaction force to storm the building complex and do a "if it moves drop it and make it still" sweep of the area. You will have a few hours to patch holes before it is very dangerous.

[nctnico]

Pleny of time ofr a police or military reaction force to storm the building complex and do a "if it moves drop it and make it still" sweep of the area. You will have a few hours to patch holes before it is very dangerous.

IMHO you are not suitable to become a terrorist. You see way too many problem and too little solutions 

[SeanB]

Pleny of time ofr a police or military reaction force to storm the building complex and do a "if it moves drop it and make it still" sweep of the area. You will have a few hours to patch holes before it is very dangerous.

IMHO you are not suitable to become a terrorist. You see way too many problem and too little solutions 

I live in South Africa, where we, along with the Irish, have a rather unique take on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu

[raptor1956]

Sooner of later ISIS or the next bad guy will find a way to detonate a reactor

This is the dumbest thing I've read all week, congratulations!
There isn't any way to "detonate" a reactor. The fuel is not enriched to anywhere near the necessary degree and the geometry is wrong.

No, the fuel isn't going to detonate, the fuel is not nearly enriched enough for that to happen ( typically about 4-7% as my memory serves me).  No, if they were to get a hold of two planes, and you know they've done that before, and pack them with explosives the first would breach the containment and the second would detonate in the reactor.  No. I'm not suggesting they would hijack commercial planes but getting a few truck loads of explosives then commandeering cargo planes on the ground.

Another scenario that might happen is for a commando team to assault a nuke plant then rig small explosives from the inside.  Hey, if they're willing to die what's to stop them.

Is this likely to happen -- no, I hope not, but if it did the effect would take down a nation and that's a fact.

The point is, as clean as nuke power is, and it is very clean, when they do have problems, and they have had problems then the consequence can be terrible.  The Fukushima incident was due to flood waters killing the back up generators so that cooling water could not flow -- a similar event was narrowly avoided in New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy when the surge came within 1.5 feet of the backup generators.  This isn't a maybe, it's a fact...


Brian

[dannyf]

Fukushima disaster was preventable, new study finds

You are really talking about tail risks here, and n this case long tail risks.

They are very difficult to manage and incredibly expensive to counter.

[dmills]

Aircraft impact is actually something that is considered in the design of nuclear plants (over here anyway, most of ours were designed while the IRA were playing silly buggers), and there is a LOT of concrete surrounding the core, the things are just not that easy to kill.

Also, even if you include the two major incidents that have scattered radionuclides directly from a reactor (TMI contained the material inside the plant, as did Windscale), the amount of contaminated land per GW/H is way smaller then the coal plants manage.

Now could you cause a problem given military weapons? Sure, Feedwater pumps (And their power supplies), Condensers, Condenser feed pumps, plenty of softish targets, and in a BWR there are some fairly obvious places where a shaped charge would cause trouble, but one thing to bear in mind is that for the most part reactor decay heat accidents occur in slow motion, providing that someone (or the automation) has dropped the control rods (Or Boron powder or whatever) into the core, you have probably got time to kill the attackers and get some engineers and plant in to get the water levels back up over the fuel (Another reason to prefer gas cooled, graphite moderated plants, more thermal mass that is not going to boil off quickly, and the primary loop can handle the decay heat by convection).

As much as anything else what killed Fukushima was that the transport infrastructure was destroyed and there was no good way to deliver required equipment, IIRC they didn't actually have a core meltdown until several days after the wave hit.

The UK plants at least have the reactor safety systems completely isolated from the operators and while an operator can manually trip the plant, they cannot keep the plant from tripping on low water/feedwater flow rate (Actual relay logic cutting the feeds to electomagnets that hold the control rods up out of the core). Most of our fleet are too old to suffer from the PLC on the internet with no firewall disease, in fact some are I believe still running old VAX and LSI 11 class gear simply because nobody wants to write the safety cases for something more modern.

Regards, Dan.

[Kilrah]

You are really talking about tail risks here, and n this case long tail risks.
They are very difficult to manage and incredibly expensive to counter.

Sure, but when considering things that have the potential to cause extremely widespread damage over inconcievable periods of time there should be no excuse for not doing the needed efforts and factoring the costs to do it right right down to the very detail. Nuclear as it is is a gigantic gamble.

[magetoo]

The point is, as clean as nuke power is, and it is very clean, when they do have problems, and they have had problems then the consequence can be terrible.

It's still safer per watt-hour than hydro, which has similar or worse problems.  Rare accidents but with terrible consequences, with attacks even harder to guard against.

Both are, so far, still significantly better in terms of deaths per Wh than coal/oil/gas.  So assuming that the risks associated with nuclear power are unacceptable, what should we use to power civilization?

I honestly don't see any great options.  The only place I can think of that has been successful without nuclear, hydro and fossil fuels is Iceland, using geothermal energy - and their geology is pretty special.  (It could be at least part of a solution in Japan too, but as far as I know, it's not possible for political reasons.)

[dannyf]

"Rare accidents but with terrible consequences, with attacks even harder to guard against."

Tail risks are by definition not hedgeable. You just have to decide 1. To what extent you can contain it? And 2. If you are willing to live with it.

Ex post assessment of risk has no value: because by its very nature you wouldn't have taken it.

[dannyf]

"significantly better in terms of deaths per Wh than coal/oil/gas. "

That's just one of many measurements, however. And it is flawed in the sense that when measuring risk, you want to know it's dispersement: how many lives I could lose in an accident. Not how many lives I lost on average.

[XynxNet]

The irony is, that they razed the pretty high cliffs at the power plant site to embed fukushima daichi into bedrock to harden it against earthquake, which made it suszeptible to tsunami damage.

[Rick Law]

"significantly better in terms of deaths per Wh than coal/oil/gas. "

That's just one of many measurements, however. And it is flawed in the sense that when measuring risk, you want to know it's dispersement: how many lives I could lose in an accident. Not how many lives I lost on average.

Beside what DannyF mentioned, one should also include mining to obtain the raw material.  Death tolls for coal mining accidents is high.

According to Wiki, the 21st century mining accident killed 8382 so far.  Of the 4 listed, Baia Mare cyanide spill  is without human death.  The rest of the mining accidents listed are all coal mines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_accident

For uranium mining deaths, I can't find the word Uranium on the mining accident list above.  The list above contains mining accidents since the 19th century.  Google "uranium mining deaths" yield no results of actual deaths.  Wiki's list of "civilian nuclear accidents" listed no mining accidents.  So, I can reasonably conclude that "documented Uranium mining deaths" is zero.  Even if it is non-zero, it would be much lower than coal mine accidents.  Anyone with better info please correct me. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents

[XynxNet]

The point is, as clean as nuke power is, and it is very clean, when they do have problems, and they have had problems then the consequence can be terrible.

It's still safer per watt-hour than hydro, which has similar or worse problems.

Problem with nuclear is long term contamination. On a non personal level, all other risks pale in comparison because you can deal with them. Contamination is not solveable on a grand scale in the forseeable future. If one of your major population and economic centers are hit by nuclear contamination, that's basically it for your average country.

That's why my part of germany is so "enamoured" with those decrepit belgian nuclear plants upwind.

[Cerebus]

Problem with nuclear is long term contamination. On a non personal level, all other risks pale in comparison because you can deal with them. Contamination is not solveable on a grand scale in the forseeable future. If one of your major population and economic centers are hit by nuclear contamination, that's basically it for your average country.

You can equally say, in almost literally the same words, the same thing about fossil fuels:

Problem with fossil fuels is long term contamination. On a non personal level, all other risks pale in comparison because you can deal with them. Contamination is not solveable on a grand scale in the forseeable future. If one of your major planets is hit by greenhouse gas contamination, that's basically it for your planet.

Contamination from fossil fuels is a very real and present danger in the form of global warming. I presume that those here assembled are not insane enough to deny or dispute this. That's a global, in the worst case possibly existential, threat. Nuclear power presents comparatively local threats. Neither are comfortably acceptable.

The sooner humanity pulls its collective head out of its derrière and gets serious about renewable energy the better. I fear that it may come too late.

[dannyf]

Anything can have long term consequences, especially if done on massive scales and over a long period of time. Geothermal for example can impact the core temperature, thus earth rotation and it's climate....

The key, to me, is to diversify our energy sources when we don't know the long term concequences with high degrees of confidence.

Thus, a little bit of coal, nuclear and solar, ..., is the safetest approach.

IE, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

[Someone]

In Australia, we don't have nuclear power plants, we just export our uranium to make money.

But we do have one operational reactor and it is on a fault line!

[XynxNet]

Problem with nuclear is long term contamination. On a non personal level, all other risks pale in comparison because you can deal with them. Contamination is not solveable on a grand scale in the forseeable future. If one of your major population and economic centers are hit by nuclear contamination, that's basically it for your average country.

You can equally say, in almost literally the same words, the same thing about fossil fuels:

Yes with one difference.
We could do carbon sequestration today, if we wanted to and we have several biological and chemical options to get carbon out of our atmosphere, although at the moment we are not willing to implement them.

We don't have any viable solution to decontaminated the fukushima/tschernobyl exclusion zones.
I think we don't have to really talk about japans decontamination pr stunt (toothbrushing walls and dozing a few cm of ground which gets recontaminated the next rainfall).

[coppice]

We could do carbon sequestration today, if we wanted to.

Can we? There seem to have been numerous attempts to do sequestration, but when I tried looking through them a few months ago they all seem to have been abandoned. Some after apparently massive expenditure.

[Seekonk]

It should have been a non event at that plant.  I worked at the nuclear site just below it.  NHK showed photos just after the tsunami.  The first thing destroyed was the backup generator's fuel tank.  Generator sucked in water and died.  Had the generator and tank been placed in a better location, the plant would have survived without issue.  TEPCO was all about cost.

[dannyf]

There are likely other factors made it seem wise to put the backup where it is.

To me they didn't seem to think about the possibility that the backup could fail. Additional redundance, in terms of flooding or outright failure of the backup, should have been considered.

For such a system with huge failure consequences, a back up to the back up system is warrantted.

[Cerebus]

We could do carbon sequestration today, if we wanted to.

Can we? There seem to have been numerous attempts to do sequestration, but when I tried looking through them a few months ago they all seem to have been abandoned. Some after apparently massive expenditure.

I've always thought carbon sequestration was a non-starter. Even back of the fag packet calculations quickly show it's going to use more energy to store the stuff (if you can do it safely and reliably) and that's going to create more CO2, that's going to need more sequestration, that's going to need more energy,... Maybe the PDE for that converges but why not spend the energy capital that sequestration requires on renewable energy instead?

[Rick Law]

There are likely other factors made it seem wise to put the backup where it is.

To me they didn't seem to think about the possibility that the backup could fail. Additional redundance, in terms of flooding or outright failure of the backup, should have been considered.

For such a system with huge failure consequences, a back up to the back up system is warrantted.

That is what made the Univ. Southern California article so pertinent.  With such “arrogance and ignorance,” design flaws it was a disaster waiting to happen.

[dannyf]

 "it was a disaster waiting to happen"

I don't know.

Risk is by definition probalistic, and a compromise between costs and benefits, not completely but often in monetary terms.

For any design or compromise we come up, no matter how well they perform against the goals of that design, you will find at least one scenario under which that great design will fail, and sometimes spectacularly.

The fact that a design failed spectacularly in an adverse outcome is a joint test of that design and the objectives or scenarios that initiated that design.

So a bad outcome by itself doesn't invalidate the risk taking.