[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.

[krallja]

The hindsight is in which mitigation would have been effective. In a different disaster, perhaps the generators would not have been the missing piece.

[discoursism]

It's only really possible to make a determination about whether it was hindsight or not after seeing the prominence of the recommendation. Suppose I tell someone a thousand times, "you should wear seatbelts," and once to fix their taillight. Then they are killed in an accident after being flung from a vehicle while not wearing a seatbelt. It would not be hindsight for me to say, "they probably should have worn a seatbelt." Maybe it would be if they were killed in a freak accident involving an unfixed taillight.

Unfortunately, given I have only second-hand knowledge of these reports' existence, and given they are probably not in my native tongue, I'm not really in a position to validate what the situation was vis a vis the generators. However, generators positioned on the coast, behind a low seawall, in a country that is regularly inundated by tsunamis, appears to be an entirely predictable failure mode. Not quite to the degree of not bringing a parachute on a skydive, but in that direction.

[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.