If we factored in every possible worst case scenario, nothing would get built. What engineers look for is consensus from the seismologists and we don’t get that.
Quote of the Day ( 51 )
Masanori Hamada, a Waseda University engineering professor. (Bloomberg)
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2
SquidBert
Well Mr Hamada,
If you can not factor the worst case scenario, then maybe you should consider not building stuff that can blow up and poison the nature and population of your beautiful country?
And you did not need geologists to tell you what could happen in terms of earth quakes, you could have just asked the historians and archeologists, they knew pretty well.
-4
ebisen
Squid - the professor is absolutely right, why do you kick at him?
Task: build nuclear plants.
Location: Fukushima.
ToDo: Find out the maximal probable earthquake that can occur during the plant's life. Ask seismologists for this. Build accordingly.
That's exactly what they did.
The 3/11 quake was a big statistical improbability, but it happened anyway.. Kind of like the opposite of winning the lottery.
1
SquidBert
This is were I believe you are wrong.
2
SquidBert
And to be fair, this is probably the part where I am wrong. Mr Hamada, is of course not personally responsible for building those plants. But I think the quote is indicative for a way of thinking that is way to wide spread in the engineering of nuclear plants.
3
zichi
If nuclear reactors can't be built to the state-of-the-art safety standards including withstanding a powerful quake, then they shouldn't be built.
On 3/11 the suppression chamber of No2 reactor was wrecked, ripped right open by the earthquake, releasing a huge amount of radiation. The thing is, all suppression chambers on all the 54 reactors in the country are built to the same standard. TEPCO still maintains the damage was from the tsunami rather than the quake.
In 2008, NISA requested that TEPCO update 600 pieces of essential equipment against a strong quake. TEPCO refused. In 2006, seismologists discussed the possible height of a tsunami following a strong quake. Based on that, the Tokai nuclear plant increased the height of its sea wall but TEPCO didn't do the same at Fukushima. The Tokai plant wasn't damaged by the 3/11 tsunami.
At the Fukushima plant the cooling pipes to the reactors were poorly installed including incomplete welds on the pipe joints. On 3/11, operators reported seeing these pipes ripped from the walls by the power of the quake.
If power companies had to build reactors to the state-of-the-art safety standards they wouldn't build them because there would be less profit.
Atomic power plants cost billions to build, billions to decommission, and trillions when they turn into a nuclear disaster.
Every year, the government spends ¥500 billion on nuclear energy R&D. The Monju Fast Breeder reactor has cost ¥1.7 trillion, and costs ¥50 million per day, and its a complete failure.
3
Johannes Weber
I guess it is okay to build a plant with the risk of an accident if You have sufficient funds for a fair compensation and agree about that in advance. That would mean that no one would built nuclear plants at all.
The value of a human life is far lower if it lost in a nuclear accident than in a car crash in all cost studies for nuclear plants. This is ridiculous and reveals how debased the nuclear industry actually is.
Including every possible worst case scenario (like an asteroid hitting the plant) is not required. Hamada's statement reveals that he is neither scientific nor objective at all. There are far too many unknowns in any complex system to ever reach consensus. They say that a room with N scientists contains at least N different opinions.
Every scenario whose direct consequences which are less severe than the accident in a certain kind of categoy (like release of radioisotopes) must be taken into account. Then those who construct the project can decide how much money they want to use for safety measures and how much for a decent compensation fund (or insurance).
-3
ebisen
I'm not a specialist, this is from what I remember reading in various sources Squid - the chances of this earthquake to happen were very low. Specialists do say this quake was a nasty unexpected surprise. Everybody was looking forward to the big Kanto (Tokyo) quake, which is still to come.
-2
ebisen
zichi:
I really doubt this - even 40 years ago people knew nuclear plants need to be safe. The standards of building for nuclear plants were the strictest among civilian standards.
I honestly doubt that the high pressure joints that were supposedly poorly welded worked properly, only to be ripped by the earthquake... Making such joints is an art in itself, and no experienced welder would allow such mistakes in there...
4
zichi
ebisen,
reported in an article from operators and engineers. If you believe atomic power plants are built to safe standards why did Fukushima suffer so much earthquake damage including destroying the No2 reactor suppression chamber?
according to the article he joints were welded in situ and the rear of the pipes were not welded.
4
zichi
“It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaking, the pipes buckling, and within minutes, I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall. Others snapped. I was pretty sure that some of the oxygen tanks stored on site had exploded but I didn’t see for myself. Someone yelled that we all needed to evacuate and I was good with that. But I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving I was told and I could see that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn’t get to the reactor core. If you can’t sufficiently get the coolant to the core, it melts down. You don’t have to have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out.”
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/07/meltdown-what-really-happened-fukushima/39541/
2
zichi
Basically, I could live 5-10 atomic power plants built with the state-of-the-art safety standards like they are building in Finland, but we have 54 reactors built to the same standards as Fukushima.
2
zichi
Some 8 percent of Japan's land area, or more than 30,000 square kilometers, has been contaminated with radioactive cesium from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
Spanning 13 prefectures, the affected area has accumulated more than 10,000 becquerels of cesium 134 and 137 per square meter, according to the science ministry.
The ministry has released the latest version of its cesium contamination map, covering 18 prefectures.
-1
Star-viking
No one in public was talking about a big Tohoku earthquake before 3/11, the opinion of the people around me was that Tohoku was one of the safer areas in Japan for earthquakes, save for the occasional temblor around Sendai.
0
ebisen
zichi - thanks for the link,,, Hmmm - it's clear that the quake might have done enough damage to make the plant un-salvageable... The earthquake did so much damage because at the time it was built the prediction for an earthquake during it's 50 years of life was at around M7.2, not M9.0 (many hundreds of times stronger). It is a general consensus that nowadays it is impossible to build nuclear plants designed to withstand such tremors and still be cost effective, Basically this is what the prof. is saying...
What I was saying was that I strongly doubt that a high pressure weld joint on a pipe survived for 40 years with a bad welding... No engineer in her/his right mind would agree to this... I still believe the building was done up to the best standards of the day... Japanese are not generally known for sloppy work...
4
zichi
Senior government officials withheld from reporting Russia's offer to store and reprocess spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants in Japan to other relevant government bodies in a bid to thwart any unfavorable move toward the operation of the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Aomori Prefecture.
On November 17, the architect of Fukushima Daiichi Reactor 3, Uehara Haruo, was interviewed in Japan. He warned that a “China Syndrome” situation is inevitable at the plant. Haruo said that considering eight months have passed since the tsunami and the crippling of the nuclear plant without any improvement in the condition of the reactors, it is likely melted fuel has escaped the container vessel and is now burning through the earth. On September 20, 2011, Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, estimated that material from the nuclear fuel rods may be twelve meters deep underground at reactors one and three.
3
zichi
ebisen
The pipes are replaced frequently has are other parts of the reactor plant and the pipes don't have a 40 year life.
3
oikawa
@ebisen
People still don't seem to understand the history and circumstance regarding this area and the nature of earthquakes. Very recently that very coast has been battered by massive tsunamis, from smaller earthquakes even, so they had no excuse not to build it to levels that could withstand massive tsunamis, form studying past history. An idiot with google could have told them that. The size of the actual earthquake at it's epicentre is completely irrelevant, otherwise you could say Hawaii was hit by a 9.0 earthquake as it too was a hit by some waves emanating from Tohoku. In Fukushima it was a high 6 I think, so if a 7.2 had hit closer to the plant it would have been even stronger than this one, which it didn't even withstand, so the plant couldn't even withstand what it was supposedly designed to do. If, as you say, the professor means these plants can't be built in a cost-effective way and simultaneously be able to withstand such tremors, fair enough, but that would be admitting liability right there. There is no excuse for not knowing what the size of those tremors and tsunamis could have been though, and it has been shown that they did know the potential risks but chose to ignore them. Now they are peddling the line that, some people fall for, that this event was unpredictable and/or unprecedented.
2
SquidBert
@okiwa
Well said. I did not have time to make those arguments in response to star-viking and ebisen earlier. I came back here now to do so, Only to find that you had already said all I wanted to say and then some. Actually the rulers of Japan, has kept quite precise records of Earthquakes and the destructive power during history and there are many archeological evidence of great floodings of the Sendai plains and other places. This is all well know to the Japanese, so saying that they didn't know it could happen is just bs.
@zichi
I stated early on that the corium melting trough the concrete and into the ground would be the natural progression of things. At that time the Idea was scorned in this forum, maybe now that Haruo is saying the same thing, people will give it some attention. Actually, I had much preferred to be proven wrong on this one.
I hope that you are correct in your findings that there is no major ground water table under the plant. But I have read accounts from workers testifying to seeing steam, miniature geysers and hearing localized rumbling sounds coming out of the ground in the plant surroundings. I think this might have been around July, but memory fails me on a precise time or source for that information.
4
zichi
Squidbert,
I don't know if there's a water table under the reactors or not? I just could find one on a map. Best to assume there is and then be wrong if necessary. I think TEPCO have reached the end of what they can do with the reactors 1-3. The radiation in those buildings is too high for workers to enter so even removing the spent fuel will be difficult and impossible in reactor building 3. The corium or melted fuel will be there for many decades because there will be no way to remove it. If it does burn into the rock then it's lost forever.
0
Star-viking
SquidBertNov. 25, 2011 - 01:42PM JST
And yet, having been a resident of Tohoku for 9 years, the first I or my friends heard of the potential for massive earthquakes and tsunamis was when one actually hit on the 11th of March.
Despite all these precise records, none of the municipalities or the people therin seemed to know of the potential - hence people dying in their thousands in evacuation centres in the path of the tsunami.
How do you account for that?
0
Star-viking
And another point - there has been opposition to Hamaoka for years, as the seismic risk was well-known. How come, if the risk to the Pacific Coast of Tohoku was so well known why was there no wide-spread opposition to Fukushima DaiIchi and Daini because of this supposedly well-known seismic risk?
0
SquidBert
@Star-Viking
Your friends learned in history class about the Sendai plains flooding I am sure. As for being told there were no possibility of large earthquakes in Tohoku, they have obviously been misinformed. By who I don't know. In fact I knew people, who said the same, and argued with them that they were wrong. But when you live close to some known danger, denial seems to be a common human reaction (maybe also for you Star-Viking?).
Please also read the story of Fudais dead mayor, to see that some who chose to remember their history could thereby save their town even after their death. And the people of Fudai now visits his grave to thank the person the once scorned.
http://wonderfulrife.blogspot.com/2011/10/dead-mayor-saves-town-from-tsunami.html
The reason that there has so much focus on Hamaoka, is that there are known fault lines just under or very nearby the plant. The fact is however that such fault lines exist under other plants as well, but it has been chosen to ignore it in the same way that some has chosen not to remember history.
-2
Star-viking
Sorry Squidbert - but that is nonsense.
How could my friends or family learn of the Sendai plains flooding when the first definitive mention of it is in the paper "Tsunami source of the unusual AD 869 earthquake off Miyagi, Japan, inferred from tsunami deposits and numerical simulation of inundation" in 2007?
Why didn't the seismologists make more of a stink about this? Maybe they didn't expect what happened?
I know about Fudai - but that was just luck.
-1
Star-viking
Modify that last comment: the paper was the first to give a definitive recurrence interval for the Sendai Plains event - 1000 years
-3
Star-viking
In fact, search the Japan Times website for any mention of a tsunami in 869 and you'll find nothing before March 27th 2011. That how much the threat was in the public consciousness.
3
zichi
Star-viking
I don't think that is correct. People were not not in evacuation centers when the tsunami struck, which in many locations came quickly after the earthquake?
3
zichi
SquidBert,
typo in my my comment to you. Should say I couldn't find a water table on a map but that don't mean there ain't one.
0
SquidBert
Just because there were no English papers on it does not mean that there were none in Japanese. I don't have time to do the digging for you.
How was that luck?
He witnessed tsunami events in 1933, he knew through history that the same had happened in 1896 and he pushed for the building of the sea wall. This is exactly what I was talking about, look at history to see what can happen in the future.
'But 10-term mayor Wamura never forgot how quickly the sea could turn. Massive earthquake-triggered tsunamis flattened Japan's northeast coast in 1933 and 1896. In Fudai, the two disasters destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 439 people.
'When I saw bodies being dug up from the piles of earth, I did not know what to say. I had no words,' Wamura wrote of the 1933 tsunami in his book about Fudai, 'A 40-Year Fight Against Poverty.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html#ixzz1ehML5AHm
Some did. For instance Tokai Mura NPP, did increase the height of its seawall to 14m because of it.
3
zichi
The ancestors placed warning stones in some Miyagi locations warning people of tsunami's and not to build below the level of the stones. I think that was mid 1700's or 1800's?
0
SquidBert
@zichi
Thanks, I understood you perfectly well anyway.
4
zichi
Basically, the plain fact is, that no nuclear reactors should have been built in Japan unless to the standard of the one being built in Finland.
In the mid 1950's the Americans pressurised the Japanese government into having a nuclear energy policy. The Japanese government of the day falsified documents and lied to its people about the safety of nuclear energy. There are Wikileak documents on this.
There are 44 out of 54 nuclear reactors closed down and the level of greenhouse CO2 only increased by 4%.
I have said it before and I will say it again.
Atomic power plants cost billions to build, billions to decommission, and trillions when they go wrong and become the worse nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
2
Blair Herron
According to "Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku" (sixth of the six classical Japanese history texts), the 869 Jogan Sanriku earthquake and tsunami struck the area around Sendai on 9 July 869. The estimated magnitude of the earthquake as 8.6 on the surface wave magnitude scale, has been taken from modelling of the tsunami.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/869_Sanriku_earthquake_and_tsunami
The 1896 Meiji-Sanriku earthquake(M7.2 in Tohoku & Hokkaido) was highly destructive, destroying about 9,000 homes and causing at least 22,000 deaths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_Meiji-Sanriku_earthquake
Other big earthquake/tsunami after 1896 (according to Japan Metrological Agency)
http://www.seisvol.kishou.go.jp/eq/higai/higai-1995.html
TEPCO knew all of the above earthquake/tsuami. TEPCO predicted in 2008 that a tsunami could reach a height of more than 15 meters at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. However, they ignored it.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110826005191.htm
1
oikawa
Star Viking
When you say friends and family do you mean Japanese or foreign friends? And do you live near enough to the coast that they should know about it? If you mean foreigners it's not to be expected that they know anyway if they haven't lived there long, if you mean Japanese then it just shows how atrocious the history education they receive is, and how well the powers that be kept the threat hidden. Either way it's not really relevant. What is relevant is that TEPCO and the govt. did know and decided to risk it.
2
zichi
Dismissed as a “nobody” by Japan’s nuclear industry, seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi spent two decades watching his predictions of disaster come true: First in the 1995 Kobe earthquake and then at Fukushima. He says the government still doesn’t get it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-21/nuclear-regulator-dismissed-seismologist-on-japan-quake-threat.html
0
Star-viking
zichi Nov. 25, 2011 - 04:31PM JST
Over 100 designated evacuation centers were hit by the tsunami. Ref: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20110414a4.html
0
Star-viking
Squidbert, most scientific papers are in English - it's the international scientific language. The authors of the paper mentioned above are Japanese. I did, however find an earlier paper, 2001, "The 869 Jogan tsunami deposit and recurrence interval of large-scale tsunami on the Pacific coast of northeast Japan".
He started the wall in the 80s - he could not have known of the 1000-year recurrence scale of the Sanriku earthquakes. Hence 'luck'.
Really Squidbert? That comes from this article at the Japan Times http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111024x1.html
The article does not say what earthquake the seawall was being increased over. We're talking about the Sanriku one here.
0
Star-viking
oikawaNov. 25, 2011 - 08:16PM JST
I mean Japanese. No, I do not live near the coast. I did ask my wife about whether the Sendai Plains Flooding of AD 869 was covered in her history classes at school - it was not. I asked about the "Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku", which Blair Herron mentions above - she said that everyone she knows thought of it as a fairytale until the disaster.
0
zichi
Star-viking
"Over 100 evacuation centers were hit"
That might well be correct but I doubt like you claimed that thousands were killed in them. Most people just didn't have time to even reach an evacuation center?
0
Star-viking
For those quoting the well-known 869 inundation, take a look at the japanese wikipedia page on it, which is created on March 11th 2011: http://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%B2%9E%E8%A6%B3%E5%9C%B0%E9%9C%87&limit=500&action=history
0
Star-viking
zichi Nov. 27, 2011 - 02:38PM JST
There were a lot of stories in the news of one or two people making it out of evacuation centers by holding on the the rafters as hundreds drowned below them. I'll admit that it could be hundreds, but it could easily be thousands too. If an official report shows up we might find out. The pertinent point was that the evacuation centers were placed in areas hit hard by the tsunami - which shows that the proposition that the risk was widely known by the public and those working in disaster preparedness is false.
2
zichi
Star-viking,
not all evacuation centers are the same or for the same purpose. There are different standards. Those near the coast tend to be "tsunami evacuation centers" and are fitted with sliding steel gates and surrounded by walls. But in the 3/11 they would have been totally useless.
Others can be "general evacuation centers" which could be a school, temple or some other public building. These are used if there's a landslide or possible landslide, or mountain fires. They are not purpose built evacuation centers.
The force of the earthquake was so powerful and lasted more than 20 minutes and I think most people would be unable to even move. In the areas with a high number of deaths, the tsunami came very quickly after the start of the earthquake.
Anyway, there will never be any official figures on this, just the total killed and the total missing.
I think the main point of this post is that atomic power plants should never have been built in Japan in the first place unless to the state-of-the-art safety standards or previous plants upgraded.
There are now only 10 reactors in operation, and counter to your previous claims about CO2, and only nuclear energy can save the world, there was only an increase of 4% of CO2 produced since 3/11, which is a figure very easy to deal with.
2
zichi
10% of the world's earthquakes happen in Japan. That fact alone is enough reason not to built atomic power plants here.
0
oikawa
I'm curious as to why this "once in a thousand years" phrase has entered the lexicon. Well I'm not really, it's becauae it hides the truth, but it is an absolute irrelevance. Since 1896, including 3/11, 4 massive tsunamis have hit this coast, and god know how many before that, and countless earthquakes. You don't need a once-in-a -thousand-year 9.0 earthquake to damage a plant, ones like the 2005 Sendai earthquakes could do it just as well.
2
zichi
The reactor building structures at Fukushima were built to be very weak. I'm not sure of the thinking behind that? They should have been built to withstand the strongest of explosions, like the hydrogen ones, without ripping the building apart then everything would have stayed inside them, including the radiation.
If an airliner had hit one of those reactor buildings we would have the same situation as we have now, maybe even worse, ripping the reactor wide open and filled with fuel rods. And the spent fuel storage pool going everywhere?
Could another Fukushima happen? Well heck! yes! at least another 50 times.
The Fukushima plant was suppose to withstand a 7 point something earthquake, but the local quake on 3/11 was 6 point something. The earthquake severely damaged the plant including destroying or badly damaging the No2 suppression chamber allowing high levels of radiation to be released and setting off a radiation alarm 1.5km away, just before the tsunami hit the plant.
0
Star-viking
zichi Nov. 27, 2011 - 03:33PM JST
Thanks for the breakdown of the types Zichi. Still, the uselessness of the tsunami evacuation centres does seem to bear out my point.
Power plants should be upgraded to state-of the art, preferably with supervision from outside experts.
Well, my point is that all non- or low-carbon technologies should be used. We have had a 4% increase since March 11th - but we have also had an energy-saving campaign on too, and lower economic activity. If Japan gets back to normal without nuclear power then we can look for much more CO2 emissions. We can also look to much higher energy bills - oil, coal and gas will not come cheap.
As for a 4% increase in CO2 emissions being easy to deal with - we have yet to see a developed system that can scrub CO2 from power plants and sequester it. Even if we do - estimates of the energy needed to do so range from 10 to 40% of the power plant's output.
0
Star-viking
oikawa Nov. 27, 2011 - 05:19PM JST
The once in a thousand years is what seismologists have defined as the recurrence interval for the Sanriku megaquake. If you do serious work on earthquakes you have to define these things. As for damaging a plant - sure the 2005 earthquake could have damaged one - but could it have caused problems on the scale of Fukushima Daiichi - I doubt it.
0
oikawa
Star-viking
Yes, I know what it refers to, I just don't think it's relevant and has been propagated to deflect blame because
I don' t agree with this. As zichi and I have already said, the actual effect of the quake (forget the misleading megaquake term) was a high 6 in Fukushima. The magnitude of an earthquake is important but location, groudn movement and distance from point X are also fundamental in determining damage at point X. Do you think if a 7.4 earthquake (which had been given a 99% percent of occurring in the next 30 years even by TEPCO officials) had hit much closer to the coast than the 3/11 one did, that it would not have caused so much damage simply because its magnitude was lower? And as has also been said already, the plant didn't even withstand this one, which it had supposedly been built to do! It couldn't even stand what they claimed it could, let alone what it should.
0
Star-viking
oikawa,
I have seen megaquake used to refer to a quake of 9.0 on the Richter scale, though it's use may be colloquial and not well-defined. As for the recurrence interval - of course it's relevant. It may, however be misused.
As for the effect of the quake, the Shindo scale, whilst being a good indicator of what we see - is hardly accurate enough to measure the effects of a quake on a building. The gal, a unit of acceleration, is used in the industry. This report (yup, from TEPCO) shows the ground accelerations being with the design ratings - though some are close to the limits http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11040103-e.html
As for the plant not being able to withstand the earthquake - there's also the tsunami to factor in.
0
Star-viking
Blair HerronNov. 25, 2011 - 06:47PM JST
And the worst thing about this was that TEPCO were the ones doing the investigation - not the regulator. I will point out they did report the full findings to the regulator three years later. Whilst that might seem slow - I saw a report on NHK News about a panel who had been instructed to investigate if Japan's Port Oil Storage Tanks could be reinforced to resist a Tsunami like the 2004 Aceh one. They took 5 years to report, and the finding weren't incorporated into the design of the tanks up on the Pacific Coast of Tohoku.
0
oikawa
Star-viking
Thanks for the link, very interesting.
I don't think the megaquake interval (or even fact of its occurrence) is relevant because of the point that I think a much smaller earthquake could have produced similar results, dependent on location and earthquake wave-type. As for the tsunami, the 1896 and 1933 earthquakes produced enormous tsunami, of maximum heights of 38 and 28 metres respectively, while the earthquakes were magnitude 7.4 and 8.2, and these were just in the last 100 years or so. I just don't believe TEPCO wasn't able to know they were playing with fire but opted to go for profits instead of safety. As the executive in zichi's article above states, "I understand the arguments, but we just can't turn the plants off, we need the electricity". Typical short-sighted thinking, everyone does it now again, and TEPCO should admit they did it too but of course they don't want to to avoid paying compensation, and hiding behind the "megaquake" rarity helps them do so.
0
Star-viking
oikawaNov. 28, 2011 - 03:06PM JST
No problem Oikawa, links are always good.
I think we have to be careful with the use of maximum heights - as these are influenced by the terrain of the coast.. Ōfunato is a case in point - it's terrain is steep and channels tsunami waves to great heights. There were even near-identical stretches of coast which either got pounded or escaped damage due to under-sea terrain.
TEPCO execs definitely have a lot to answer for - but we also have to make sure that they don't get blamed for all the failures which were the responsibility of the LDP, the Bureaucracy, and Japanese Society's 'Shoganai' attitude.
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