No, it’s really silly to believe they’re prepared when they are relying on systems they’re throwing together now, for the first time, to deal with a problem they assured the public they had already considered and adequately prepared for.
Not the issue in the article you quoted, once again, the problem is that the alarmism you push is really silly because it implies that no recommendations or changes were made already.
Also: the accusation that they did not look at advice from others is not supported.
And once again: having a backup system is evidence that they were prepared, it is really silly to double down on the denial of this.
Sort of like that tsunami thingy that hit them, right? I mean, if they were on the ball then all those people who died and all that damage that was done, villages swept away and huge swaths of devastation wouldn’t have happened. Unfortunately, reality sucks and sometimes disasters out scale the planning of those who’s job it is to try and plan for them. They DID have plans for emergencies, but the scale of this disaster was larger than what they planned on. This was an older power plant that used older standards for safety and redundancy. The sea wall (contrary to what FX spewed earlier, there was one) was inadequate. The secondary and tertiary backup power was poorly situated for the actual disaster that happened, as opposed to the one the planners had planned for. The scale of the disaster meant that logically, it was impossible to get the assets into the area in a timely manner when this was all originally unfolding. The measures taken, as part of the plan, actually caused more issues (i.e. when they manually vented the reactors to relieve some of the pressure they caused a build up in hydrogen gas that caused the explosions) when they blew the shit out of the outer reactor housing buildings.
It was a near perfect storm of issues and disaster. And it continues to be a serious problem, with the original storage containers now seemingly leaking and issues with containing and processing the contaminated water coolant. There is no doubt that this is still a very serious problem, and probably will be for years to come. But let’s get real here…bad as this was, it demonstrates that it takes something fairly epic to take one of these things down, and what we are really talking here is a purely local ecological disaster on par with something like, say, the Love Canal.
I think my point is clear and I’m not implying anything. I’m stating flat out that they are cobbling together solutions for problems and it’s silly to claim preparedness when you have to run around in a panic asking experts the world over what to do.
Nope. That’s a fiction. Certainly there are forces against all things nuclear, including waste storage and spent fuel security. But these social and political forces do not prevent other countries from solving the problem. Like China, the French, England and India, Russia and Korea. Lots of countries with the problem. Some could care less about the people’s will. They don’t have the problem solved.
If anyone has a secure storage facility, considering how valuable spent fuel is, they would be happy to take the worlds’ supply of spent fuel rods. And charge you for the trouble. You talk like the US is the only place on earth that needs to safely store a LOT of spent fuel. It’s a world wide problem. Hell, it’s a problem for Japan. Even if they could move the rods on site at Fukushima, it will only be to another plant, where they will be kept in a pool or eventually dry casks. But where is it going to stay? For the thousands of years it remains dangerous? How do you keep it secure?
There are a host of real problems, and all your rhetoric and lies won’t solve them.
Besides feeding himself, he also can not help but to fight with himself. 
Nope, what you have to realize is that nowhere in your cite there is a report of panic. Nor there is a report of the backup not being part of the preparations for an eventuality like that one. The backup of the pumping system added was not an afterthought, there is no evidence of that.
Remember: doubling down on unsupported say so’s only leads others to conclude that you can not identify even clear contradictions on what you report, the backup system was not added by God or by luck.
The nuclear lover doesn’t care, it’s all good to them.
Now you’re just being silly. TEPCO and the government have been in panic reaction mode ever since this began. You are implying because the populace of Japan isn’t panicking right now nuclear good.
I still see no cites about the panic reported by the people involved in that incident, so I take what you say with a boulder size grain of salt. And you are moving the goalposts, you need a cite regarding the panic involving the operators in that incident.
There was one village that didn’t suffer any damage, since the Mayor had a tsunami defense wall built. If the Fukushima plant had a tsunami defense wall, it probably would have only suffered a slight crisis from the earthquake.
Would have been a lot cheaper as well.
It’s that fact that they didn’t protect it from a known danger, and had no plan on what to do when the tsunami damaged the pant, that has led to this. You can live in a dream world, or the real world. In the real world, people are quite aware now of how dangerous a nuclear accident can be.
The people that think there will never be another one, they are in denial.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
Nope. That’s a fiction. Certainly there are forces against all things nuclear, including waste storage and spent fuel security. But these social and political forces do not prevent other countries from solving the problem. Like China, the French, England and India, Russia and Korea. Lots of countries with the problem. Some could care less about the people’s will. They don’t have the problem solved.
[/QUOTE]
So, what you are saying is that, in fact, there ARE ‘forces against all things nuclear’, but that these can’t be characterized as anti-nuclear groups blocking all things nuclear…or something. Do I have that correct? 
As for how other countries solve the problem, they do it in a variety of ways, but in many cases what they do is reprocess the nuclear waste. We don’t do this in the US because, well, reprocessing means you create weapons grade materials that ‘we’ decided we didn’t want to deal with…which is why we attempt to store everything. In some countries they plan for the reactor cores themselves to act as entombment facilities in the future, and that is actually the defacto position of the US right now, thanks to your ‘forces against all things nuclear’, though in our case it’s an ad hoc and jury rigged system, since we were going to go with the central storage system…blocked, again, by your ‘forces against all things nuclear’. So, it’s sort of painted us into a corner, since we can’t reprocess, we can’t centrally store, and our facilities weren’t designed with eventual entombment as an option, and, of course, this makes our facilities less safe having all that spent fuel in cooling and storage pools.
The Japanese have painted themselves into a similar corner…and for similar reasons, mainly that there is a very large and organized anti-nuclear movement in Japan even before Fukushima that has mousetrapped their government and industry. From memory, Japan was one of the countries that were planning to do reprocessing, but that brings up those weapons grade materials issues, so instead they waffled, procrastinated and in the end changed direction and were looking at central storage and in the mean time doing what we did…sequestered the waste on site in holding pools until they could figure out what the fuck they COULD do in the face of your ‘forces against all things nuclear’. And there it stood until a tsunami larger and more destructive than they have seen in hundreds of years smacked them right where they had an older plant with all it’s storage pools vulnerable to such an epic disaster.
There ARE a host of real problems and issues. They are solvable, however, and the risks could be mitigated to a much greater extent, except your ‘forces against all things nuclear’ stand in the way of doing really anything, except complain and drive up the costs while also driving up the risks for everyone.
At least in India, when there were recent protests against the commissioning of a new nuclear plant, there were a LOT of allegations that these protests were funded by unnamed foreign organisations. Reeked a little bit of conspiracy theory, but it’s not as implausible as most.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
There was one village that didn’t suffer any damage, since the Mayor had a tsunami defense wall built. If the Fukushima plant had a tsunami defense wall, it probably would have only suffered a slight crisis from the earthquake.
[/QUOTE]
And hundreds of villages, especially near where the Fukushima plant was, that were totally wiped out, with thousands killed. Yes, if the folks who originally planned Fukushima had known that such a tsunami was coming they could have built defenses that would have made this a much more modest disaster (for the plant…10’s of thousands would still have died and had their homes destroyed along the coast). Hell, if they had situated the secondary and tertiary backup power systems a little better (i.e. not in freaking basements) that probably would have averted at least some of what happened (they wouldn’t have needed to vent as quickly, and that would have meant no hydrogen build up and no blowing up of the reactor housing buildings or release of radiation). But this was an older design that was already beyond it’s projected end of life (which had been extended because no new plants were being built and Japan needs electricity…their demand, as ours, continues to grow so something has to meet those needs), and it had some serious flaws, obviously, especially in hindsight.
Certainly. If we knew that some maniacs with box cutters would hijack air planes and fly them into the World Trade Center buildings we could have saved a ton of money by putting armored doors to the pilots cabin, or perhaps creating buildings that could withstand a modern jet air craft flown into them at high speed and with full loads of fuel. If the folks who planned the plant back in the (IIRC) '70s had known such a tsunami was probable I’m sure it would have changed many of their design choices. If they had simply decommissioned the plant on schedule (assuming they had alternatives to the plant to take up the load as was supposed to happen) then it wouldn’t have been an issue either, especially if they were allowed to reprocess the fuel as they originally intended…or, alternatively, if they were allowed to look into and build a central storage facility, again, as they were supposed too. Hindsight is always 20/20.
No, that’s not a fact…that’s your own erroneous assertion. The ‘known’ dangers at the time the plant was designed and built weren’t for a tsunami hitting it at that magnitude after a large earthquake. Later data revealed that such tsunamis were possible, but this was after the plant was built. They had a plan for the tsunami they THOUGHT they were planning for on the window of this plants operations (that’s why they had a sea wall at all), it was simply insufficient to what actually happened.
You make the plans based on the best data you have. Sometimes events simply out scale your plans, and then you have a disaster. At that point you have to do your best. Folks like you never seem to get that, nor to get that you simply can’t plan for every eventuality, otherwise you’ll never build or do anything. You have to do the best cost to benefits analysis you can, plan for what you can realistically expect coupled to what it costs to put in more and more elaborate defenses (and in the case of nuclear, plan for all the delays, protests, and additional costs that will be incurred because idiots like you are knee jerk blocking every…single…thing anyone tries to do with respect to putting in nuclear power, storage or anything with ‘nuclear’ in it) and hope that the disaster you MIGHT get doesn’t supersede the assumptions you based your plan on.
Actually that is a demonstration to all that you do not know much about many things, there was a tsunami wall, the failure was that it was not as tall as it was needed in this case.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Fukushima_Nuclear_Disaster.php?printing=yes
Nice selective quoting. Here are some other quotes from the rest of the page:
Disingenuous would be a nice way of describing what you did. I put up a citation in good faith, and you deliberately pulled the most negative point out of context to make it look much worse than if it were read along with the other information.
There is no reason to believe that the situation will get any worse, and there is NOT A SINGLE PERSON to date who has died as a direct result of exposure to radiation at Fukushima. Even in Japan, radiation levels are at or around background levels except very close to the disaster site. Keep in mind, Honshu is smaller than California. For perspective, if San Onofre were still running and had a meltdown like Fukushima, the exclusion zone would barely reach San Clemente.
Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab.
Looks like it might now only be about twenty years away or so.
Its a genius level techno jump, it requires a genius to fire the needful spark. The lightbulb goes off over someone’s head and he sees the whole pattern differently. Then he tells everybody he knows and they all tell him he’s nuts. Then somebody tries it just to shut him up already, and shortly thereafter they all claim they were working on a very similar idea, quite recently…
It could be twenty years, it could be twenty minutes. But IIRC, for many a year now some folks have been adamant that fusion would never return more energy than it required. Maybe all this means is that theoretical limit isn’t really there, but that’s something. Or it isn’t, anyway, we won’t know until the cat’s dead. Pretty sure about that.
Could you display a little more ignorance, please? The Fukushima complex did have a tsunami defense wall. The only hitch was that the designers hadn’t anticipated a 50 foot wave, only one that was “just” about 30 feet.
Sure they had a plan - starting with the mechanisms that automatically shut down the reactors at the first sign of an earthquake, which functioned perfectly, to back-up generators and the previously mentioned tsunami wall The problem is that the tsunami was much greater than anticipated by engineers.
This wasn’t a matter of lack of planning, it was lack of being able to see the future exactly. The universe dropped multiple whammies on Japan near simultaneously.