Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old.
You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.
A great article about another plant, closer to the epicenter, owned by another company that did things right.
It breaks my heart that these guys also have to be in a shutdown state. TEPCO should be forced to hand over all undamaged nuclear plants and responsibility (minus financial) to this company.
If any, I'd guess this correlation to be negative vs. the general population
[/excuses]
Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure.
In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.
The key question is: Who would have paid for it?
Once running, much of the structure is considered to be radioactive. Work in active radioactive areas is expensive and time consuming. Without shutting down the reactor entirely followed by an expensive cleanup, doing major structure upgrades to the reactor chambers is virtually impossible.
They also couldn't just decommission it once they realized their errors and rebuilt another one somewhere else - again the costs would have been astronomical.
People are terrible at managing (what was then) theoretical risks. If you can't convince people and companies to move out of proven high-risk earthquake areas, imagine trying to convince tax payers to pay billions to upgrade or move a functional-but-theoretically-vulnerable power station.
The disaster could have been prevented by the simple expedient of elevating the backup generators, or putting them in flood-resistant bunkers. Cheap.
The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.
Unfortunately, given I have only second-hand knowledge of these reports' existence, and given they are probably not in my native tongue, I'm not really in a position to validate what the situation was vis a vis the generators. However, generators positioned on the coast, behind a low seawall, in a country that is regularly inundated by tsunamis, appears to be an entirely predictable failure mode. Not quite to the degree of not bringing a parachute on a skydive, but in that direction.
It's like in New Orleans, where the emergency generators were located in the basements below sea level. There's nothing subtle about that. Sorry, but how daft can one get?
I disagree. Failure analysis does not start with "assume the seawall will never fail." It starts with "assume the seawall fails. What are the consequences?"
Given the location of those generators, it was obvious that a breach would take out CRITICAL generators, and it would have been cheap to remove that vulnerability.
Another cheap remedy would have moved the hydrogen vent pipe to vent outside, rather than INSIDE AN ENCLOSED SPACE FILLED WITH SPARKING ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT.
Every industry makes severe mistakes early on and eventually irons them out with time. Are you arguing that's not the case?
> However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure.
Economically retrofitting an old reactor with safety mechanisms is a much more challenging task than designing new reactors correctly. The industry quickly learned how to build reactors that could handle neglect and abuse, but by then the reactors under the ground were out of their control, and were essentially ticking time-bombs. Everyone in the industry knew it. The IAEA had been complaining about ancient, unsafe reactor designs in the ring of fire for decades when Fukushima happened. So it goes.
Given that they already knew this could happen when they built it, what could you plausibly claim has been learned?
There’s nothing very complicated about the EDG buses that supply safety-system components.
Upgrades to such systems, including flex interfaces, has occurred across the US fleet in the years following Fukushima, while exactly zero new reactors have been designed and built.
Sure, there are better designs for EDG siting and support system integration. This is completely besides the point. The point is, even moving the whole safety support system kilometers away is cheaper than designing a new reactor, which I think should be a pretty uncontroversial statement to engineers familiar with the complexity of license approval for power reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
Not only scientists but the whole humanity is acting like "naive teenagers" here.
I'm sure they can prevent the concrete from cracking in an earthquake.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Simplified_Boiling_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three
But not sure this really points to lack of caution?
Personally, I think we need low carbon power sources, but emotionally (irrationally?) nuclear fission always feels like "apes toying with God's fire"
Regarding the radiation, I think you've fallen victim to ignorance of basic facts about the nature of radiation and the oceans. Pretty much anywhere in the Pacific, radiation from Fukushima quickly dropped far below environmental background levels [1].
1 - http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=127297
Here's a good quote from the source above: "The highest levels of cesium (10 Bq/m3) attributable to Fukushima that we have measured were found 1,500 miles north of Hawaii. Swimming every day in the ocean there would still result in a dose 1,000 time smaller than the radiation we receive with a single dental x-ray."
On a related note, I live in Chiba, which is a fair distance south of Fukushima. The rain and wind drove the radiation into my area after the accident. I still have interesting radiation readings in my rain gutters and spouts.