The lessons of Fukushima

[FourScore]

This absolutely fantastic piece was first posted a couple of weeks ago at the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" by an Anthropologist. I had not seen it anywhere until tonight. Sorry if it has already been posted. This entire article is so good, I wish I could post more than 4 paragraphs. Follow the link to read the rest; it's worth it.


The lessons of Fukushima
By Hugh Gusterson | 16 March 2011

...We have now had four grave nuclear reactor accidents: Windscale in Britain in 1957 (the one that is never mentioned), Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979, Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986, and now Fukushima. Each accident was unique, and each was supposed to be impossible. Nuclear engineers have learned from each accident how to improve reactor design so as to diminish the likelihood of that particular accident repeating itself but, as Donald Rumsfeld famously reminded us, there are always "unknown unknowns," and so each accident has been succeeded by another, unwinding in a way that was not foreseen. The designers of the reactors at Fukushima did not anticipate that the tsunami generated by an earthquake would disable the backup systems that were supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake...

SNIP

...Thus it is hard to resist the conclusion reached by sociologist Charles Perrow in his book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies: Nuclear reactors are such inherently complex, tightly coupled systems that, in rare, emergency situations, cascading interactions will unfold very rapidly in such a way that human operators will be unable to predict and master them. To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise...

SNIP

...And what of the United States? Will it be like Germany and Switzerland, or like Turkey and China? A good way to think through this question is to look at how the United States responded to its last meltdown -- the meltdown of its banking system in 2008. To prevent a future recurrence of this disaster, the US government should have broken up banks that were "too big to fail," restored the Glass-Steagall Act's prohibitions on the commingling of investment and depository banks, and moved aggressively to regulate credit default swaps and financial derivatives. It did none of these things because the banks did not want it to, and the banks now run the show...

SNIP

...But we now have a government captured by special interests, paralyzed by partisanship, and confused by astroturfing political groups and phony scientific experts for sale to the highest bidder. Our democracy and our regulatory agencies are husks of what they once were. It is unclear that such a system is capable of learning any lessons or indeed of doing anything much beyond generating speeches and passing the responsibility for failure back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball between our two yapping political parties. While we are distracted by the theater of Congress and the White House, our fate lies in other hands...

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/hugh-gusterson/the-lessons-of-fukushima

[bananas]

1. k&r nt

[TheMadMonk]

2. Re the tsunami.

My take, is that the operators "ignored" the warning about the large tsunami in 800 or so, because they truly did not expect the reactors to survive any quake capable of generating a tsunami that would overwhealm the defenses already in place. Though of course no one would be so crass as to say it so bluntly.

Something we keep forgetting in our bringing up of old disasters and even this one. The bloody kit is ancient. It's patched and overlayed with safety system after safety system, materials technology now make commonplace materials which weren't even pipedreams when many of today's working reactors were designed and built.

And virtually every effort is devoted to copletely WITHSTANDING any conceivable event, rather than accepting the posibility that defences can be overwhelmed and design in deliberate weaknesses which allow failures to happen in a containable fashion. By forcing one known cascading failure mode, we can with reasonable surety stand ready with lead lined buckets to catch the fallout. And at the same time eliminate a huge chunk of the saftey systems designed to cater for no longer possible scenarios.

[marions ghost]

3. EXCELLENT!

Read the whole article...and forwarded it.

thanks

[FourScore]

4. kick