Utility Engineer Warned of Tsunami Threat at Japanese Nuclear Plant

[Octafish]

So, as upgrades require cash, it made perfect business sense to ignore him.

Utility Engineer Warned of Tsunami Threat at Japanese Nuclear Plant

By Patrick Corcoran on March 30, 2011
FairWarning.org

An engineer with Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, warned in 2007 that there was a 10 percent chance of a tsunami causing catastrophic damage, but his concerns went unheeded by superiors.

As Reuters reports, Toshiaki Sakai, a senior safety engineer with Tepco, as the utility is known, calculated that there was a one-in-ten chance that a tsunami would breach the plant’s defenses within a 50-year period.

“We still have the possibilities that the tsunami height exceeds the determined design height due to the uncertainties regarding the tsunami phenomenon,” said the report compiled by Sakai’s team.

This contradicts previous statements from Tepco officials that the tsunami was an extraordinary event that could not be anticipated. “It’s a bit strange for me that we have officials saying this was outside expectations,” Hideaki Shiroyama, a professor at the University of Tokyo and an expert in nuclear safety, told Reuters. “Unexpected things can happen. That’s the world we live in.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.fairwarning.org/2011/03/utility-engineer-warned-of-tsunami-threat-at-japanese-nuclear-plant/

Toshiaki Sakai, a name to remember in the decades ahead.

[Overseas]

1. Sad K&R.

A ten percent chance is very large. Very poor cost-benefit analysis on TEPCO's part.

Sad that their approach is so widespread. BP's "safety plans" and blowout preventers that don't prevent blowouts come to mind.

[Octafish]

4. BP and TEPCO have a LOT in common.

From Mother Jones (w links):

TEPCO: Japan's BP?

EXCERPT...

(S)cientists used data from the magnitude 6.8 earthquake to conclude that the builders of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, the world's largest by electrical output, may have unknowingly constructed it directly on top of an active seismic fault. "Not finding the fault was a miss on our part," said Toshiaki Sakai, who heads the engineering group in charge of Tokyo Electric's nuclear plants. "But it was not a fatal miss by any means."

BP and TEPCO also seem to think the "small people" exist to pay taxes and to clean up their messes.

[Overseas]

7. I can't help thinking of "The Junk Shot" and "Top Hat" and other outdated

clean up technologies BP used after the Transocean Deep Water Horizon explosion.

After we taxpayers had given billions in R&D tax cuts to Big Oil, it was horrifying to see them employing techniques from the 80's and using poison to disperse the oil and "improve the optics."

Our legislators don't seem to have the power to enact plans for action to protect the people and planet when companies Too Big To Fail actually do. Again and again.

The BP Transocean Deep Water Horizon explosion presented another great opportunity for a massive green energy rollout which would have also involved thousands of new jobs.

Yet we continued to pretend that our need for oil outweighed the need to amp up the development of alternative power sources, even though our national and global security is at stake, and we have millions of people eager to work.

We all know we will need oil for decades to come. It is painful to see alternatives and better safety technologies held back when they could help us preserve the precious resource to be available longer.

[Wilms]

2. Picture of TEPCO official testifying that no one could have imagined this happening.

[Octafish]

5. That's the type.

Thanks to her friend, Zelikow, Condescenda managed to talk out the clock.

History, though, won't be so kind.

[Old and In the Way]

3. What have I heard that before?

"We never anticipated that......"

A 1 in 10 chance in 50 years? Criminal negligence. If a Japanese nuclear energy company would take chances like this, I wonder what kind of safety risks vs. profit trade-offs are built into our plants here, that we don't know about..yet?

[Octafish]

6. ''Where there is money, there will always be corruption.''

Did you write this, Never-Old and In the Way?

Profits, not power, is nuclear's problem

It's not nuclear power that scares me, but the people who run them to make money.

Welcome to capitalism 101 and never has there been a worse match.

SNIP...

But never has there been a business less suited for doing things on the cheap.

Yet, it is all there in the record.

At the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, where there was a partial meltdown in 1979, The Associated Press reported this week that the plant operator, which was a subsidiary of General Public Utilities Corp., pled guilty in federal court in 1984 to using inaccurate test methods, manipulating the test results, destroying records and not filing proper notice that the plant's cooling system had excessive leaks.

CONTINUED...

http://poststar.com/news/opinion/columns/ktingley/article_76580d4e-5247-11e0-801f-001cc4c03286.html

A good case can be made for nationalizing a lot of industries these days -- nuclear power, defense, petroleum, banks for starters.

[AndyTiedye]

9. Government Ownership is No Guarantee that Nukes Will be Safe

Too Dangerous to Fail

[Old and In the Way]

10. True, and it might even cost more.

But the motivation for profit, at least on the operational side, is missing. The tendency to err on the side of caution vs. the side of ROI is what matters here. The USG has a better record in nuclear plant operations (think USN) then the private sector, as far as I can tell. I've heard plenty of horror stories about power plant shortcuts (my brother is a licensing engineer for mechanical systems in power plant construction) through the years. It's one thing when a conventional plant suffers a catastrophic failure due to shoddy workmanship or cut corners...it's entirely a different situation and consequences when that same philosophy is applied to a nuclear power plant.

[AndyTiedye]

11. Government Bureaucrats Trying to Stay Within a Slashed Budget

…are likely to make the same bad, short-sighted decisions for which corporations are so famous.

The purported economic system under which an oligarchy operates makes less difference than some people think.

[Old and In the Way]

14. On nuclear energy, I'd rather roll the dice with government designed/built/operated

nuke plants than comparable private industry plants (which, in the case of catastrophic failure, is ultimately the taxpayer's risk anyway). The benefit would be lower rate charges because we're not paying for exorbitant salaries and operating profits built into the private model. YMMV.

[AndyTiedye]

16. I'd Rather Not Roll Those Dice At All

Nuclear power is too dangerous to fail, and we have learned the hard way that neither public nor private ownership can prevent it from failing.

Don't build more nukes.

Don't continue to renew the licenses on outdated old nukes.

[AndyTiedye]

8. We Were Always Told that the Japanese Took the Long View

Were we misinformed or is TEPCO an exception?

[Hydra]

12. It's a symptom of "We adults know better than you"

The "Adults," both here on DU and in the real work have had some rather shocking setbacks lately. Just a few of note:

Financial Crisis and resultant bailouts/jobless recovery
Gulf oil disaster
Japan nuclear disaster
Never-ending war in the Mid-East

All of these things we said were too dangerous, and needed to be stopped. We were told again and again that "The Adults are in charge" and "We have nothing to worry about...trust them!"

Silly us. It appears there wasn't any oversight after all.

[Octafish]

13. 'The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true.' - Niels Bohr

...after Lao Tse.

Regarding TEPCO and misinformation: It's the way of the corporate world, where humanity amounts to little more than beasts of burden and cannon fodder.

Top Lies from TEPCO. Sound like BP?

When industry lying is the norm, concern about nuclear energy is not hysteria. It’s a fight for our lives.

Like British Petroleum, the Tokyo Electric Power Company has a history of playing fast and loose with the truth and endangering lives. So let’s drop the “What, Me Worry?” routine about nuclear energy. When cover-ups and preparing falsified records are part of the corporate culture, we’re not just getting hysterical, as some blindly pro-nuclear power folks would have it.

SNIP...

The horrible disaster we saw in the Gulf showed us plenty about what happens when industry and regulatory entities get too cozy and companies like BP are left to self-report on safety and are then actually trusted — by people as high up as the president of the United States — when they do. People die. Our natural world is polluted.

Admittedly there are no means of producing energy that are entirely without risk. Birds do get caught in windmills. But when something goes wrong at a nuclear facility, ENTIRE CITIES CAN BE WIPED OUT. So while nuclear hawks blithely tell us that smart companies and their engineers will take care of making nuclear energy safe and sound, let’s remind them of the actual record.

For example, here’s a little line-up of TEPCO lies:

* In 2002, Michael Zilenzieger reported that top officals TEPCO were forced to resign “after admitting that the company had covered up safety violations and falsified records at three of its largest nuclear power plants”.
* In 2006, the government demanded that TEPCO “check past data after it reported that it had found falsification of coolant water temperatures at its Fukushima Daiichi plant in 1985 and 1988, and that the tweaked data was used in mandatory inspections at the plant, which were completed in October 2005.”
* And in 2007, TEPCO reported that it “had found more past data falsifications, though this time it did not have to close any of its plants."

CONTINUED...

http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/top-lies-tepco-sound-bp

In short, these are plain lies by the corporate state -- the kind that injure and kill innocent people.

[malaise]

15. Some rational person always

warns the greedy reckless folks. He/she is always ignored by them.

Rec