[rtkwe]

Kind of surprising at this point that there’s not an area directly below the bottom of the reactor with a giant ceramic catch basin (or something similarly heat resistant) to catch these failures and cleared of pipes etc so when this happens cleanup workers know the location of the materials.

[jjoonathan]

> Kind of surprising at this point

Fukushima was built when the nuclear power industry was 13 years old. Now it's 63 years old.

You are seeing the folly of youth, with consequences delayed 60 years, not a design that would be typical of new construction.

[beached_whale]

Also, from what I understand, they ignored the reports that recommended to put the backup generators on higher ground and to make the sea wall higher. Fukashima is the worst case for that design I think.

[rurounijones]

https://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant...

A great article about another plant, closer to the epicenter, owned by another company that did things right.

It breaks my heart that these guys also have to be in a shutdown state. TEPCO should be forced to hand over all undamaged nuclear plants and responsibility (minus financial) to this company.

[beached_whale]

It seems like the regulators really failed. Short sighted actions and failure to fix past mistakes shouldn’t be allowed. The other sad thing is that, this is the worst case scenario for that plant and it pales in magnitude, but it is overshadowing the sorrow and lost due to the flooding and earthquake.

[Rapzid]

Sounds like life :| Those cigarettes you smoked in your early twenties? Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..

[collectively]

You know if you stopped smoking in your early twenties they’re not likely to affect you when 63. So this is more like smoking crack in your twenties.

[distances]

> Those beers you smashed working in IT? 63 will be interesting..

If any, I'd guess this correlation to be negative vs. the general population

[Cthulhu_]

But but but beer is healthy! It's what people drank all the time in the middle ages etc, it was better than the water.

[/excuses]

[jacquesm]

The trick is not to give in to peer pressure.

[jdubs]

elaborate plz

[bamboozled]

Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though.

Sure the design could've been better; However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure.

In-fact, it still absolutely amazes me it was even running at the time of the disaster and built on a coast in a country notorious for Tsunamis.

[falcolas]

> improve the structure

The key question is: Who would have paid for it?

Once running, much of the structure is considered to be radioactive. Work in active radioactive areas is expensive and time consuming. Without shutting down the reactor entirely followed by an expensive cleanup, doing major structure upgrades to the reactor chambers is virtually impossible.

They also couldn't just decommission it once they realized their errors and rebuilt another one somewhere else - again the costs would have been astronomical.

People are terrible at managing (what was then) theoretical risks. If you can't convince people and companies to move out of proven high-risk earthquake areas, imagine trying to convince tax payers to pay billions to upgrade or move a functional-but-theoretically-vulnerable power station.

[WalterBright]

> Who would have paid for it?

The disaster could have been prevented by the simple expedient of elevating the backup generators, or putting them in flood-resistant bunkers. Cheap.

[inimino]

Hindsight.

The actual tradeoff would have been not just this one mitigation, but all the mitigations for all the equally probable risks. Including all the assessments to find out what those risks would have been.

[discoursism]

I don't think you can say, "hindsight," when the mitigation was actually recommended in reports that were made before the event. It's only hindsight when mitigations become obvious after a disaster.

[WalterBright]

> Hindsight

I disagree. Failure analysis does not start with "assume the seawall will never fail." It starts with "assume the seawall fails. What are the consequences?"

Given the location of those generators, it was obvious that a breach would take out CRITICAL generators, and it would have been cheap to remove that vulnerability.

Another cheap remedy would have moved the hydrogen vent pipe to vent outside, rather than INSIDE AN ENCLOSED SPACE FILLED WITH SPARKING ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT.

[jjoonathan]

> Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though.

Every industry makes severe mistakes early on and eventually irons them out with time. Are you arguing that's not the case?

> However by your logic they had 50 years to take extra safety pre-cautions and improve the structure.

Economically retrofitting an old reactor with safety mechanisms is a much more challenging task than designing new reactors correctly. The industry quickly learned how to build reactors that could handle neglect and abuse, but by then the reactors under the ground were out of their control, and were essentially ticking time-bombs. Everyone in the industry knew it. The IAEA had been complaining about ancient, unsafe reactor designs in the ring of fire for decades when Fukushima happened. So it goes.

[Alex3917]

> Every industry makes severe mistakes early on and eventually irons them out with time. Are you arguing that's not the case?

Given that they already knew this could happen when they built it, what could you plausibly claim has been learned?

[cocoablazing]

Moving several EDGs and support system a couple kilometers is a small task in comparison to the design, qualification, construction, and training associated with a new power reactor design.

There’s nothing very complicated about the EDG buses that supply safety-system components.

[petre]

The cables from the diesel generators a couple of kilometers away could have been destroyed by the tsunami or another earthquake.

[cocoablazing]

This isn’t relevant to the fact that upgrading safety and safety support systems is less costly and a smaller engineering task than designing a new reactor.

Upgrades to such systems, including flex interfaces, has occurred across the US fleet in the years following Fukushima, while exactly zero new reactors have been designed and built.

Sure, there are better designs for EDG siting and support system integration. This is completely besides the point. The point is, even moving the whole safety support system kilometers away is cheaper than designing a new reactor, which I think should be a pretty uncontroversial statement to engineers familiar with the complexity of license approval for power reactors.

[andrewcchen]

Nuclear reactors need to be built next to a large body of water for cooling. So Japan didn't have a choice when they wanted to have nuclear power.

[eeZah7Ux]

> Nuclear scientist's weren't like "naive" teenagers though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

Not only scientists but the whole humanity is acting like "naive teenagers" here.

[jjoonathan]

I'd go even further: the bigger the aggregation of people, the younger they act. The UN is basically kindergarten with fancy clothes and longer words.

[wbl]

Every year the chemical industry kills and contaminates far more.

[rtkwe]

True I’d forgotten how old Fukushima was.

[philipkglass]

That's part of some newer reactor designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_catcher

[petre]

Expensive. The concrete can also crack in the event of an earthquake.

[Cthulhu_]

Not as expensive as having to clean up three reactors worth of nuclear meltdown and a few exploded reactors.

I'm sure they can prevent the concrete from cracking in an earthquake.

[petre]

Cheaper solutions exist, such as the one with borosilicate sand on the bottom of the reactor. Building passive cooling pools with those resources is orders of magnitude more useful because it prevents a meltdown rather than attempting to catch the molten core. The ESBWR uses such a passive cooling design.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Simplified_Boiling_...

[ChuckMcM]

I have seen reactor designs with a borosilicate sand pile under the reactor. Presumably the molten core will turn the sand into borosilicate glass which not only freezes at a high temperature but is also a radiation shield.

[eberkund]

I think that is easier said than done, the temperatures are in the several thousands of degrees here.

[askvictor]

And radioactive. Which changes the atoms if which your containment material is made of. Which makes things much, much more difficult.

[IshKebab]

Clay would hold that wouldn't it?

[Neil44]

Depends, most types of ceramic are molten by 1300-1400 centigrade

[faceplanted]

These catchers exist, they use a ceramic-concrete mixture with a massive melting temperature.

[nielsbot]

I remember reading articles right after the disaster saying some engineers/scientists tried to warn people that the design had some critical safety flaws..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three

But not sure this really points to lack of caution?

Personally, I think we need low carbon power sources, but emotionally (irrationally?) nuclear fission always feels like "apes toying with God's fire"

[phkahler]

I still think they should fight fire with for. A small tactical nuclear bomb just inland of the plant could blow it all into the ocean where the material would sink. ;-)

[narrator]

That would just end up like the Marshall Islands where they did the H-Bomb tests. They are still too contaminated to live on.

[sschueller]

Wasn't something like that poured under Chernobyl after the accident which prevented the radioactive slurry from entering deep into the ground?

[frik]

The Russians handled the catastrophe better and faster. International help sender them low tech robots, Russians poured tunnels below within days/weeks with lot of human contractors. But Japan is doing little. Contaminated fluids leak into the sea that swaps to Hawaii and west coast ever since 2011. It's the local culture of loosing face that seems to be at odds with handling it and a major corruption problem. After 6 years Japan has done so little, compared to the Chernobyl Sarcophagus and all the handling inside and ever since. Why is there not more international pressure to Japan to do more and do it faster? They have to do it no matter what the costs are or if the have the resources, it doesn't matter - the rest of the world population will thank you for less pollution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...

[nate_meurer]

Perhaps it's a language barrier, but this comment makes no sense. The low-tech robots you speak of were uniformly useless, and the people working on the initial cleanup and containment were sent on what were essentially suicide missions. Information is easy to find; just google for stories about the Chernobyl liquidators.

Regarding the radiation, I think you've fallen victim to ignorance of basic facts about the nature of radiation and the oceans. Pretty much anywhere in the Pacific, radiation from Fukushima quickly dropped far below environmental background levels [1].

1 - http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=127297

Here's a good quote from the source above: "The highest levels of cesium (10 Bq/m3) attributable to Fukushima that we have measured were found 1,500 miles north of Hawaii. Swimming every day in the ocean there would still result in a dose 1,000 time smaller than the radiation we receive with a single dental x-ray."

[franklin_cobb]

I think they tried, but the radiation was too hot and melted through the steel and concrete below. This was an old facility, so it was probably built with that idea in mind. It just failed.

On a related note, I live in Chiba, which is a fair distance south of Fukushima. The rain and wind drove the radiation into my area after the accident. I still have interesting radiation readings in my rain gutters and spouts.