Fukushima Nuclear Worker Accidentally Toggles Off Cooling Pumps 190
An anonymous reader writes "A Tepco employee carelessly pressed a button shutting off cooling pumps that serve the spent fuel pool in reactor #4 — thankfully a backup kicked in before any critical consequences resulted. The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools, filled nearly to capacity as they are with over 12,000 spent fuel rods? From the article: 'The latest incident is another reminder of the precarious state of the Fukushima plant, which has suffered a series of mishaps and accidents this year. Earlier this year, Tepco lost power to cool spent uranium fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi plant after a rat tripped an electrical wire.'"
Homer! (Score:4, Funny)
It was homer simpson who did it.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools,
Did you also notice that this is pretty much how the Linux command line and programming is? One single button push can ruin your whole week. Yet, everyone here calls that a feature and blanches at Windows when it says "Are you sure you want to do this?"
I bet the engineer who pushed the button was a slashdotter... "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CAUSE A MAJOR NUCLEAR EVENT? y/N? _" ... oh fuck you, NukeOS, I know what I'm doing!
Re: The Boss (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Weird (Score:5, Funny)
That seems like the sort of function that should be designed with a multi-step process to execute, to eliminate precisely that kind of error. How in the world did that get implemented?
I suggest one more step in the process might be effective.
They need a slight reconfiguration of the Cooling Pump Switch [environmentteam.com]. It would be relatively cheap, and pretty much idiot proof.
Re:Weird (Score:2, Funny)
Clippy: Hello! It looks like you are trying to shutdown the cooling pumps. Would you like me to:
- Shutdown the cooling pumps
- Turn out all the lights
- Turn off everything (default)