Quote:

of course it wasnt predicted but we are talking about 20year old technology that is outdated (was almost outdated when installed).

its no supprise that they may have gne with lowest cost- thats what business does. and by saying why go with best case not worse case is not any new argument or highlighting anything anybody knows about global economies of scale... its all down to $$$.

No body can predict an earthquake to its magnitude, just a rough geographical location highlighted by fault lines.

at the end of the day, when the earthquake causes the ground to liquidfy, no human engenieering will withstand it when it built to contain this type of material that is very tempremental and requires specific handleing and cooling conditions.

Its not the earthquake as such that cuased the damage to the cores, it was the loss of power and the time its taken to bring back the cooling funstions, which after said 12 to 24 hours , is too late.

so why banter on about it, we know nuclear is not the future it was once promsised to be. but when a company builds a pant for power that is based around return of investment for profit over a 50 year time frame, and 20years in when its just starting to make its long term returns, its not great.

we just have to forget about all this conspiracy and envrionemtal crap and focus on the people affected and how to stop it happening again in the future.

who knows, hydrogen power of the future may see similar issues, so may gas turbine who knows.

end of my supposed mainstream rants .

This itself is a big problem when playing with U-235 and plutonium

"Decisions have been made based on the opinion of the more optimistic seismologist and the opinions of the pessimistic ones are ignored."

The optimistic ones are on the Nuclear Energy payroll.

is nothing new. plants are designed and operated to manage risk. That's another way of saying the aren't designed or operated to handle the known dangers, only to meet a certain bar and hopefully the bar is high enough. In this case, they lost the bet that a 9.0 earthquake wouldn't cause the problems that were predicted

The san diego plant (right on the ocean and near the big fault line) is being reevaluated. Their cooling batteries are only 8 hour while fukushima were 12 hour, but the plant spokesman says not to worry they have backup generators they can move in should the need arise...

Four corners Tonight will be a good one after reading this article

11.40pm - Four Corners

Quote:

Whistleblower slams Japan nuclear regulation

By Quentin McDermott for Four Corners

Updated Mon Mar 21, 2011 11:08am AEDT

The Fukushima plant was stricken by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11. (TEPCO)
Related Story: Japan signals nuclear plant to be scrapped
Related Story: Weary firefighters battle Japan crisis
Related Story: Two survivors found after Japan quake
Related Link: Four Corners website

A nuclear industry whistleblower who helped design protective containment vessels for reactors has attacked the Japanese government, its nuclear industry and regulators over their safety record.

Dr Masashi Goto, a nuclear engineer, resigned from his job at the Toshiba Corporation over safety concerns.

Toshiba supplied two of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that was stricken by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

Dr Goto criticised his country's record on nuclear safety.

"We have the government commission overseeing nuclear safety standards and in my opinion they are not doing their job," he told ABC correspondent Eric Campbell last Thursday in Tokyo in an exclusive interview for Four Corners.

Around 300 engineers are working round-the-clock at Fukushima to contain the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

They have been spraying the reactors with sea water so fuel rods will not overheat and emit radiation. Hopes for a more permanent solution depend on connecting electricity cables to reactivate on-site water pumps at each of the reactors.

Working in suits sealed by duct tape, engineers have managed to re-establish power cables to the No. 1, 2, 5 and 6 reactors and plan to start testing systems soon.

But Dr Goto says the Fukushima crisis shows Japan has not yet learned the lessons of history.

"At Three Mile Island the nuclear fuel melted. Fuel is melting here now," he said.

"We have to design reactors to withstand melting fuel rods. Right now the reactor will break down due to the heat generated by the melting rods."

Dr Goto alleges that in Japan's nuclear industry profits take precedence over safety standards.

"No-one says it officially or openly. When setting standards for future earthquakes, the thought is of money - how much is it going to cost?" he said.

"This underlies the government's decision making. They are thinking the costs could have a bad repercussion on the economy."

Dr Goto says one of his special research interests at Toshiba was how to make containment vessels stronger.

He says Japan's nuclear safety standards have been based on an insufficient acknowledgment of the potential severity of natural disasters.

"What's wrong with the standards is that the anticipated level of the worst-case-scenario earthquake is not correct," he said.

"Seismologists have different opinions and predictions. Some say bigger quakes are coming. Others say a big one is unlikely.

"Decisions have been made based on the opinion of the more optimistic seismologist and the opinions of the pessimistic ones are ignored."

The earthquake that shook Japan on March 11 was magnitude 9.0 - the strongest recorded earthquake in Japan, and far stronger than the country's nuclear industry had anticipated.

Despite this, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the Fukushima plant, boasted in its corporate publicity that its nuclear power stations were "designed for the largest conceivable earthquake" and that "all designs provide margins of safety capable of withstanding even natural disasters".

Grim warnings


Further grim warnings are given in tonight's Four Corners by nuclear experts and activists who have been interviewed over the past week.

American Damon Moglen, director of Friends Of The Earth's climate and energy project, points to the presence of as much as a quarter of a tonne of plutonium in Fukushima's No. 3 reactor, which suffered an explosion last Monday.

"The problem there is, if that plutonium fuel is melting inside the core, if it's being vented out or if an explosion were to break the containment open, we could have - and we have as much as a quarter of a tonne of additional plutonium in that reactor - we could have radioactive releases containing plutonium, which would be just yet another horror to have to deal with," he said.

Dr Ziggy Switkowski, former chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), warns the crisis at Fukushima has done a "great deal of damage" to the industry.

"The nuclear industry has, over time, worked as well as it has because of people's confidence in the integrity of reactors and acceptance that many of the issues associated with the management of spent fuel and waste were properly handled," he said.

"But we've always understood, and we saw this happen in Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, that if the community trust is breached by whatever development, it will take a long, long time to recover it.

"I think this is a turning point for the industry."

Bloody hell!

holy shiznit

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011 ... ed-reports-accidents.html

____________________________________________________

Japan Nuclear Disaster Caps Decades of Faked Reports, Accidents
By Jason Clenfield

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.

The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.

With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors -- more than any other country except the U.S. and France -- to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.

Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.

Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”

Nuclear Earthquake

In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi said fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could suffer a catastrophic disaster.

“We didn’t learn anything,” Ishibashi said in a phone interview this week. “Nuclear power is national policy and there’s a real reluctance to scrutinize it.”

To be sure, Japan’s record isn’t the worst. The International Atomic Energy Agency rates nuclear accidents on a scale of zero to seven, with Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union rated seven, the most dangerous. Fukushima, where the steel vessels at the heart of the reactors have so far not ruptured, is currently a class five, the same category as the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in the U.S.

‘No Chernobyl’

“The key thing here is that this is not another Chernobyl,” said Ken Brockman, a former director of nuclear installation safety at the IAEA in Vienna. “Containment engineering has been vindicated. What has not been vindicated is the site engineering that put us on a path to accident.”

The 40-year-old Fukushima plant, built in the 1970s when Japan’s first wave of nuclear construction began, stood up to the country’s worst earthquake on record March 11 only to have its power and back-up generators knocked out by the 7-meter tsunami that followed.

Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.

Radiation readings spiked around Fukushima as the disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people and causing radiation levels to rise on the outskirts of Tokyo, 135 miles (210 kilometers) to the south, with a population of 30 million.

Basement Generator

Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves.

“This in the country that invented the word Tsunami,” said Brockman, who also worked at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Japan is going to have a look again at its regulatory process and whether it’s intrusive enough.”

The cascade of events at Fukushima had been foretold in a report published in the U.S. two decades ago. The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.

While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, it seems adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.

Accident Foretold

“It’s questionable whether Tokyo Electric really studied the risks,” Tateno said in an interview. “That they weren’t prepared for a once in a thousand year occurrence will not go over as an acceptable excuse.”

Hajime Motojuku, a utility spokesman, said he couldn’t immediately confirm whether the company was aware of the report.

All six boiling water reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant were designed by General Electric Co. and the company built the No. 1, 2 and 6 reactors, spokeswoman Emily Caruso said in an e-mail response to questions. The No. 1 reactor went into commercial operation in 1971.

Toshiba Corp. built 3 and 5. Hitachi Ltd., which folded its nuclear operations into a venture with GE known as Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy Ltd. in 2007, built No. 4.

All the reactors meet the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for safe operation during and after an earthquake for the areas where they are licensed and sited, GE said on its website.

Botched Container?

Mitsuhiko Tanaka, 67, working as an engineer at Babcock Hitachi K.K., helped design and supervise the manufacture of a $250 million steel pressure vessel for Tokyo Electric in 1975. Today, that vessel holds the fuel rods in the core of the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima’s Dai-Ichi plant, hit by explosion and fire after the tsunami.

Tanaka says the vessel was damaged in the production process. He says he knows because he orchestrated the cover-up. When he brought his accusations to the government more than a decade later, he was ignored, he says.

The accident occurred when Tanaka and his team were strengthening the steel in the pressure vessel, heating it in a furnace to more than 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), a temperature that melts metal. Braces that should have been inside the vessel during the blasting were either forgotten or fell over. After it cooled, Tanaka found that its walls had warped.

‘Felt Like a Hero’

The law required the flawed vessel be scrapped, a loss that Tanaka said might have bankrupted the company. Rather than sacrifice years of work and risk the company’s survival, Tanaka used computer modeling to devise a way to reshape the vessel so that no one would know it had been damaged. He did that with Hitachi’s blessings, he said.

“I saved the company billions of yen,” Tanaka said in an interview March 12, the day after the earthquake. Tanaka says he got a 3 million yen bonus ($38,000) from Hitachi and a plaque acknowledging his “extraordinary” effort in 1974. “At the time, I felt like a hero.”

That changed with Chernobyl. Two years after the world’s worst nuclear accident, Tanaka went to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to report the cover-up he’d engineered more than a decade earlier. Hitachi denied his accusation and the government refused to investigate.

Kenta Takahashi, an official at the NISA’s Power Generation Inspection Division, said he couldn’t confirm whether the agency’s predecessor, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, conducted an investigation into Tanaka’s claim.

‘No Safety Problem’

In 1988, Hitachi met with Tanaka to discuss the work he had done to fix the dent in the vessel. They concluded that there was no safety problem, said Hitachi spokesman Yuichi Izumisawa. “We have not revised our view since then,” Izumisawa said.

In 1990, Tanaka wrote a book called “Why Nuclear Power Is Dangerous” that detailed his experiences.

Tokyo Electric in 2002 admitted it had falsified repair reports at nuclear plants for more than two decades. Chairman Hiroshi Araki and President Nobuyama Minami resigned to take responsibility for hundred of occasions on which the company had submitted false data to the regulator.

Then in 2007, the utility said it hadn’t come entirely clean five years earlier. It had concealed at least six emergency stoppages at its Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station and a “critical” reaction at the plant’s No. 3 unit that lasted for seven hours.

Coming Clean

Kansai Electric Power Co., the utility that provides Osaka with electricity, said it also faked nuclear safety records. Chubu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. said the same.

Only months after that second round of revelations, an earthquake struck a cluster of seven reactors run by Tokyo Electric on Japan’s north coast. The Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant, the world’s biggest, was hit by a 6.8 magnitude temblor that buckled walls and caused a fire at a transformer. About 1.5 liters (half gallon) of radioactive water sloshed out of a container and ran into the sea through drains because sealing plugs hadn’t been installed.

While there were no deaths from the accident and the IAEA said radiation released was within authorized limits for public health and environmental safety, the damage was such that three of the plant’s reactors are still offline.

After the quake, Trade Minister Akira Amari said regulators hadn’t properly reviewed Tokyo Electric’s geological survey when they approved the site in 1974.

Fault Line

The world’s biggest nuclear power plant had been built on an earthquake fault line that generated three times as much as seismic acceleration, or 606 gals, as it was designed to withstand, the utility said. One gal, a measure of shock effect, represents acceleration of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per square second.

After Hokuriku Electric’s Shika nuclear power plant in Ishikawa prefecture was rocked by a 6.9 magnitude quake in March 2007, government scientists found it had been built near an earthquake fault that was more than twice as long as regulators deemed threatening.

“Regulators just rubber-stamp the utilities’ reports,” Takashi Nakata, a former Hiroshima Institute of Technology seismologist and an anti-nuclear activist, said at the time.

While Japan had never suffered a failure comparable to Chernobyl, the Fukushima disaster caps a decade of fatal accidents.

Two workers at a fuel processing plant were killed by radiation exposure in 1999, when they used buckets, instead of the prescribed containers, to eye-ball a uranium mixture, triggering a chain-reaction that went unchecked for 20 hours.

‘No Possibility’

Regulators failed to ensure that safety alarms were installed at the plant run by Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. because they believed there was “no possibility” of a major accident at the facility, according to an analysis by the NRC in the U.S. The report said there were ‘indications’ the company instructed workers to take shortcuts, without regulatory approval.

In 2004, an eruption of super-heated steam from a burst pipe at a reactor run by Kansai Electric killed five workers and scalded six others. A government investigation showed the burst pipe section had been omitted from safety checklists and had not been inspected for the 28 years the plant had been in operation.

Unlike France and the U.S., which have independent regulators, responsibility for keeping Japan’s reactors safe rests with the same body that oversees the effort to increase nuclear power generation: the Trade Ministry. Critics say that creates a conflict of interest that may hamper safety.

‘Scandals and Lies’

“What is necessary is a qualified, well-funded, independent regulator,” said Seth Grae, chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corp., a nuclear consultant in the U.S. “What happens when you have an independent regulatory agency, you can have a utility that has scandals and lies, but the regulator will yank its licensing approvals,” he said.

Tanaka says his book on the experiences he had with the nuclear power industry went out of print in 2000. His publisher called on March 13, two days after the Fukushima earthquake, and said they were starting another print run.

“Maybe this time people will listen,” he said.

--With assistance from Yuriy Humber, Tsuyoshi Inajima, Maki Shiraki and Shigeru Sato in Tokyo, Makiko Kitamura in Osaka and Rachel Layne in Boston. Editors: Peter Langan, Philip Revzin

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Clenfield in Tokyo at jclenfield@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Langan at plangan@bloomberg.net

____________________________________________________

situation worsened overnight after an error blocked the flow of water into one of the stricken reactors at the Fukushima plant.

An air flow guage was accidentally switched off, resulting in a rapid rise in pressure and the exposure of the fuel rods in one of the plant's six reactors.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/15/3163913.htm

Quote:

its pretty much explosion time

2nd and 3rd explosions, Nuclear rods sitting 3metre in the air with no cooling
More than one meltdown is looking imminent. The ocean has received a battering
since Sushi is on the worlds plate. David Attenboroughs latest "Death of the
Oceans" predicting end of commercial fishing by 2015. Now this disaster is the
icing on the yellow cake.