Fukushima Nuclear Worker Accidentally Toggles Off Cooling Pumps

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.'"

Just another sign of TEPCO's incompetence...

[Elledan]

This isn't another example of how precarious the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant is, but one of how massive the incompetence of TEPCO is that they keep having 'incident' after 'incident'. Even long before Fukushima Daiichi TEPCO's safety record was beyond frightening.

That the Japanese government a) allows TEPCO to 'clean up' Fukushima and b) refuses any foreign help shows that the problem with Fukushima is and always has been a political one.

Sadly, we're all human.

[Dzimas]

We've instilled a belief in the general public that scientists and engineers can pull of miracles, and that we know more than them. Science in movies is often almost magical, and people expect our encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric technical systems to translate into quick and easy solutions to difficult problems. About a decade ago, I found myself giving a presentation to a group of nuclear scientists. It was a nerve-wracking experience for a young computer geek, and I presented the team with two alternatives for warehousing environmental data at their facility. There was a brief debate before the most senior member of the group spoke up and said, "You're the expert. What do you recommend?" It didn't matter that there were ten people in the room with PhDs and decades of experience; everyone naturally wants someone else to provide them with an easy path to the best answer. At that point, they were all primed to accept a recommendation from the young whippersnapper who could think quickly on his feet (and was armed with a laser pointer, I might add) I gave them the best recommendations I could, and many were eventually accepted. But deep down I realized that I could quite easily have led them astray at that point. I'm acutely aware that there must be dozens of people like me who have been working at Fukushima for over a year now; the so-called "experts" on the ground who are trying to make the best choices possible. Their job is unenviable because they're facing contamination on a huge scale and many decisions were made in haste in an attempt to limit the scope of the catastrophe. That will make everything harder for those involved in the containment and remediation in the coming decades.

Re:Evidently not that vulnerable

[ottothecow]

One thing worth noting though is that often these systems use ancient control schemes.

Can't speak directly about the japanese systems since they have some more modern stuff, but in the US they are *old*. We haven't started building a new plant since 1974 or a new reactor since 1977 (though they did start some new reactors at existing plants earlier this year).

The control rooms at these places are filled with tons of manual buttons and switches. Many of them look like this [cryptome.org]. I have no doubt that they are reliable and have failsafes, but a physical switch doesn't have a "are you sure" dialog or stop to ask for an admin password. Sure, switches might have those little covers you have to lift up to press a button, and the most important switches could be controlled with a key, but if somebody wants to push a button, it is getting pushed.

We hear a lot about how much reactor design has come along in the 35 years it has been since we last built one (just think about how long ago that was)...but don't forget that along with efficiency and physical safety, there have been a LOT of improvements in monitoring and control (only a fraction of which have been able to be integrated into the old plants).

Re:Evidently not that vulnerable

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong. If they fuck up while removing the rods from the spent fuel pool they run the risk of having a criticality incident that could release more Caesium into the environment than all of the above ground nuclear tests ever put together. If that happens, all bets are off.

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-fuel-cleanup-operation-522/

Folks with decades of real world experience are concerned. Perhaps you should re-evaluate your opinion.

Re:Evidently not that vulnerable

[girlintraining]

One thing worth noting though is that often these systems use ancient control schemes.

The control systems were state of the art when it was built: In the early 80s. These reactors have a life expectancy of 50 years. They generally don't get a refit until halfway through that service life, when many of its non-structural components like pipes, tubing, turbines, and pumps, have degraded to the point that the ongoing maintenance cost exceeds the replacement cost.

I have no doubt that they are reliable and have failsafes, but a physical switch doesn't have a "are you sure" dialog or stop to ask for an admin password.

No, it has about a year's worth of training, and time in a simulator ensuring that every plant operator has a full and complete understanding of the machine they'll be working with. It also has multiple people checking each others' work. It also has ongoing training and random inspections by an independent government body, as well as regular inspections by management, to ensure operational safety and compliance with the protocols they were trained in.

You're right that a switch doesn't have a dialog box that pops up when you push it... but these buttons aren't being pushed by Joe Average just following a three ring binder. There has been only a handful of cases in which this training failed, and it took numerous failures at all levels to allow it to happen; And the systems these events happened at were immediately pulled from active service or retrofitted so that it couldn't happen again.

The nuclear industry's safety record is unmatched in the larger industry of energy production. Every year we tolerate a major oil spill. Every year we hear about gas stations experiencing catastrophic failure of safety systems leading to massive neighborhood-sized fireballs. We only hear about nuclear accidents about once every decade or so, and the majority of them result in a big mess and lots of costs for the plant operators, but do not endanger public safety or harm the environment.

All that said... Fukishima has been mismanaged from day one, and a lot of the failure is down to Japanese culture; An inability to be transparent and admit when there's a problem. This retiscence to work the problem is what led to the disaster, and what has since amplified the failure enormously.

The international community in the hours and days following the disaster repeatedly offered assistance, including the US Army Corp of Engineers, who were dispatched to an aircraft carrier who was sitting about 200 miles off the coast in international waters with a full team prepped and on standby, ready to assist in evacuation and containment efforts. These were some of the most highly trained people on the planet; They had each spent years training for it. They were a phone call and 30 minutes away by helicopter from being on the scene and ready to assist.

The phone never rang.

To this very day, the plant managers continue to underfund the cleanup and containment efforts. They continue to keep insufficient equipment and personnel onsite. They have no published plan on how they plan on cleaning up the affected area. Even the Russians, after Chernobyl, put their entire military into containment and isolation of the area... and while many people died, and they were not adequately trained, or equipped, they sent people in by the busload to try and stop it from getting worse. Now I'm not saying Japan should have done that... thrown away thousands of lives to a radiological inferno, like the Russians did... especially not when state of the art equipment and well-trained personnel were ready to assist and knew how to minimize the risk to life.

But I am saying this disaster has been made needlessly worse, much worse, because the Japanese government, their culture, and the corporate culture within TEPCO, are functionally incompetent. And there's no equipment on the planet that can fix what is essentially a problem between the ears of TEPCO management and Japanese government leaders.