World Is Ignoring Most Important Lesson From Fukushima 328
mdsolar writes "Kenichi Ohmae, an MIT-trained nuclear engineer also widely regarded as Japan's top management guru, is dean of Business Breakthrough University. In the CSM he writes: 'Fukushima's most important lesson is this: Probability theory (that disaster is unlikely) failed us. If you have made assumptions, you are not prepared. Nuclear power plants should have multiple, reliable ways to cool reactors. Any nuclear plant that doesn't heed this lesson is inviting disaster.'"
Too many protective measures (Score:4, Interesting)
Fukushima taught me that Japanese Nuclear reactors may be too protected.
19,300 people died as a result of the tsunami. Fukushima has had minimal impact by comparison (573 related deaths thus far).
Diverting all of the safety protections away from the reactors (guaranteeing full meltdown of all 4) to add to safety protections around shoreline towns, oil refineries, chemical factories, could have saved thousands of lives reducing the 19,300 total.
Re:Error in translation? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would argue that the Fukushima disaster actually did meet this criterion: far more people were killed by the earthquake/tsunami than will ever be killed by the radiation (in fact, the disaster probably killed more people than all the nuclear reactor accidents ever put together) released,
I don't see what relevance comparing the two disasters has. Just because lots of people died in the tsunami doesn't make the situation any better for those affected by Fukushima. Forcing people out of their homes and making large areas uninhabitable is unacceptable, and far from the only result of the accident.
and the cleanup will be a fairly small fraction of the total cost of the disaster.
The cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. I don't actually have figures to compare with the tsunami clean-up and rebuilding, but that kind of money is not inconsiderable even for the world's third largest economy. Much of the cost is being met by the government too, because like all countries Japan subsidises the cost of nuclear insurance and clean-up (not to mention subsidising the building of the plant in the first place). Of course most of the cost to local government in terms of evacuating and re-housing people, then paying them benefits because they are unemployed is met by the tax payer too.
Re:Correct (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Error in translation? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not true for Japan, or the US, or even TEPCO itself. They alone run (or ran, and are expected to run most again) 17 reactors [asiaone.com]. So even TEPCO alone is in a position to amortize quite a bit.
Your point is a good one about risk management in general, but there isn't just one nuclear reactor to amortize risk over.
In some ways, this has played out pretty well for Fukashima, which is expected to have zero deaths from radiation [thenewamerican.com]. TEPCO isn't even bankrupt. On the other hand, there are a lot of lessons learned about avoiding unnecessary trouble relatively cheaply, and we already knew we needed to replace a lot of these ancient reactors but didn't. Likewise in the US.
Re:Correct (Score:4, Interesting)
Suppose the reactor area is flooded, such that the plug is underwater (hence actively cooled by boiling water) but all other cooling systems are off-line. Reactor still safe? I think that violates one of the assumptions of the design, which is that the plug is only cooled if the cooling systems are (generally) working.
Re:Error in translation? (Score:4, Interesting)
It may be that "probability theory" tends to lead to assumptions that traditionally make the math more tractable -- independent events, not linked events, and assumptions about probability distributions (e.g., normal distributions). Those assumptions might not hold.
There was an article some years back in SIAM Review [kenyon.edu] proposing that traditional structural analysis too often made the assumption of linearity -- literally, that you CAN push a rope. Suspension cables do not obey Hookes' law in compression, concrete does not in tension, and ships heaving all the way out of the water experience forces that are not linear with displacement. Modeling non-linear systems used to be impractical, so people would just assume linearity to make the math tractable.