An anonymous reader writes
"A day after TEPCO workers mistakenly turned off cooling pumps serving the spent pool at reactor #4 at the crippled nuclear plant comes a new accident — 6 workers apparently removed the wrong pipe from a primary filtration system and were doused with highly radioactive water. They were wearing protection yet such continuing mishaps and 'small mistakes' are becoming a pattern at the facility."
Tohoku Earthquake Casualty Report
By gargleblast
•
2013-Oct-9 20:23
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
News from Fukushima? Excellent! Let me update my Tohoku Earthquake Casualty Report. Here it was yesterday:
Deaths..Injuries/Illness..Location/Cause
.....0.................2..Fukushima Daiichi NPP (Radiation exposure)
.....2................37..Fukushima Daiichi NPP (Earthquake / tsunami)
.15000..............6000..Rest of Japan
Here it is today:
Deaths..Injuries/Illness..Location/Cause
.....0.................2..Fukushima Daiichi NPP (Radiation exposure)
.....2................37..Fukushima Daiichi NPP (Earthquake / tsunami)
.15000..............6000..Rest of Japan
Re:fried fish
By AK Marc
•
2013-Oct-9 20:29
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
But it isn't a pattern of small mistakes. A design that guaranteed that a generator failure during a power outage would result in a meltdown was (and still is) considered safe. That's not a mistake, that's a fundamental design/regulatory issue. That they put the generators in line with a tsunami path, rather than mounting them on the roof of a reinforced shed (which would have prevented the meltdown, so long as the fuel wasn't contaminated before the backup fuel was brought in), wasn't error. It was intentional. There's a difference. An unfortunate event that was intentional is negligence. Opening the wrong pipe mistakenly believing it to be a different one is a 'small mistake'/mishap.
Re:How does this happen?
By gstoddart
•
2013-Oct-9 20:32
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
please tell me which pipe is the correct on in this tiny fraction of a plumbing schematic for a power plant
See, if I was actually qualified for, and responsible to do that, I might try.
That I don't know how to do it is irrelevant. That they don't know is appalling.
Because every place I've worked in that had extensive piping that carried dangerous stuff ... the piped were clearly labelled, and people had good schematics of them.
My dad makes hockey ice, and you can bet your ass that the pipes that carry ammonia for the cooling are all brightly labelled as such. And if the sensors detect anything, he and several other people are all getting paged to look at it right away, because an ammonia leak could wipe out a few city blocks.
Are you telling me the Japanese nuclear industry can't label pipes and keep good schematics, but people who make hockey ice are onto something new?
Sorry, not buying it.
Re:Tohoku Earthquake Casualty Report
By n3r0.m4dski11z
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2013-Oct-9 22:59
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
and here is your little chart if we keep trusting mere mortals with the power to create a country sized wasteland:
Deaths..Injuries/Illness..Location/Cause
999999999999999999999999..Fukushima Daiichi NPP (Radiation exposure)
999999999999999999999999.Fukushima Daiichi NPP (Earthquake / tsunami)
999999999999999999999999..Rest of Japan
That is one hell of a 10,000year - 100,000 year long mistake. Which could very well happen at those timescales, even if its rare, even if its got 8 safeties. We are all fallible human beings running this shit after all. No amount of clean, "safe", cheap power should be worth the risk of generating pollution lasting tens of thousands of years.
Re:How does this happen?
By Neo-Rio-101
•
2013-Oct-10 00:18
• Score: 4
• Thread
That was my experience in the Japanese IT industry as well. Fastidious and near anal retentive attention to detail.
Unfortuantely it's also got it's fair share of it's bumbling halfwits that the company can't/won't fire due to the lifetime employment custom.
The head honcho representative of the large Japanese-IT-company-that-many-people-will-have-heard-of at the place I was working once had to apologise for accidently unplugging the wrong production server (Nope he didn't even shut it down or turn it off)
The Japanese actually need the anal retentive planning, because they recognise that they are actually pretty hopeless. The REAL problems begin when something happens OUTSIDE of their plans. They lack a complete inability to think on their feet and respond in a timely manner... preferring to sit on their hands and wait for a roundtable discussion and confirmation from their higher ups. Contrast that with the situation at Fukushima. In fact it was the initial Fukushima engineers at the beginning of the disaster that made some critical calls in defiance of Tepco (who were only interested in saving the plant), that may have prevented a greater catastrophe.
In fact, when the Tepco engineers were starting to explain and reassure people about what had happened at Fukushima on TV on the 12th of March, they sounded just like the voice of the bumbling server engineer, trying to apologize for unplugging the server, that i remembered from years earlier.
It was at that time I knew that they had no control over the plant....