William Pentland

William Pentland, Contributor

I write about energy and environmental issues.

9/15/2013 @ 3:00PM |12,429 views

Nuclear Power's People Problem: How We Contributed To The Fukushima Crisis


So why has the “nuclear dream” fallen short of what we expected?






To expand on Carrington’s analysis, investor-owned utilities like the Tokyo Electric Power Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which operates the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, are legally obliged to shareholders to maximize profits and limit costs.




Facing pressures from investors, TEPCO’ cut costs aggressively across the board to improve the company’s returns.




These forces encouraged management to cut costs at Fukushima to support the capital investments in retrofitting the “much larger nuclear” plant, which is the world’s largest nuclear facility, for earthquakes.

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  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 7 months ago

    “For that is what a nuclear reactor is, a slow motion detonation. ” False. A car runs on slow detonation. A gun runs on fast detonation. A nuclear plant runs on a slow BURN. It’s no different than the gas burner in your hot water heater.

    “ In 2007, TEPCO narrowly avoided a meltdown a nuclear facility twice the size of the Fukushima reactors after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake inflicted major structural damages.” I have studied the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa damage, with first hand accounts from professors that actually study it for a living. The only damage was to the power production side, and limited to a single turbine. The cooling systems and structure was undamaged despite experiencing shaking four times that at the Fukushima site. There was never risk of meltdown, and in fact the total radiation leak was equal to a dozen bananas.

    “That is why they idled the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant. ” The plant was idled due to the earthquake, and restart authorization was denied as punishment for falsified records at TEPCO. It had nothing to do with safety, as the upgrades were finished and analysis completed long before the plant was allowed to start.

    “ In hindsight, it seems clear that they should have idled the Fukushima plant too. ” Fukushima 1-1 was originally scheduled to be replaced by newer, safer designs, but environmentalists with 100% hindsight refused to allow new reactors to be made to replace the old ones. As a result, units 5-6 weren’t ready in time and units 1-3 couldn’t be upgraded properly (as that requires the reactors to be idled).

  • fredlinn fredlinn 7 months ago

    ——-” It’s no different than the gas burner in your hot water heater.”—-

    Yes, it is different. A gas water heater does not have years worth of fuel already loaded into it.

    And if a water heater did explode, it could potentially be a hazard—-but not a hazard that would require the evacuation of large areas for many years because of nuclear radiation.

  • Sigh Westberry Sigh Westberry 6 months ago

    “fake fake fake”you are amazingly misinformed.
    Please explain how ” A car runs on slow detonation”. Then u go on to say that” A nuclear plant runs on a slow BURN”….please explain how this burn takes place! Then you make the third unbelievable claim that a nuclear plant is “ no different than the gas burner in your hot water heater ” Thank god you were not head of the Manhattan project! Honestly this is the internet, its suppose to be the information highway.

  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 6 months ago

    Sigh Westberry, a car engine runs on deflagrations, which are subsonic versions of detonations.

    In nuclear engineering, fuel burnup is the conversion of fertile U235 fuel into smaller particles, heat, and neutrons. It has nothing to do with exothermic oxidization, but is still called burning by anyone in that and related fields.

    As for a hot water heater, most reactors other than gas-cooled variants are just high powered boilers with a nuclear heat source rather than fossil fuel exhaust heat.

    fredlinn, other things explode too and do cause widespread and long lived environmental disasters. The Bhopal disaster cost at least 4k lives (some estimates in the 16k range), with a half million injuries. Add to that oil spills, flyash containment breaches, and coal mine fires, all which have even more to do with nuclear, and you have plenty of reasons to see why this isn’t nearly as horrible an accident as others out there.

  • Anon Anon 7 months ago

    This is overly simplistic. Earthquake and tsunamis do happen often together. But not the size of tsunami that Fukushima experienced. That has only happened once in all of recorded history.

    If you’re going to build a plant to last 40-100 years, do you build it to withstand something that hasn’t historically happened?

    No business can afford to protect itself from everything possible, it has to make financial decisions based on what is reasonably likely to occur and not occur.

  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 7 months ago

    You actually do. All civil engineering, especially nuclear reactor design includes a margin of safety above the most disastrous event that makes sense for the lifetime of the building (for a house that lasts 20 years a 10000 year event isn’t worth considering, but a nuclear plant lasting the same 20 years would consider that and even 25kyr or even 100kyr events). What happened at Fukushima is that evidence of a more powerful event was not clear until just a few years ago, and since that time the plants rolled out upgrade plans to be completed within a decade (and planned upgrades to sea wall and backup power were submitted to the government regulators just two weeks before the earthquake struck)

  • Anon Anon 7 months ago

    Yes, that what I mean by “reasonably likely to occur and not occur”.

    If such a tsunami had been reasonably plausible, TEPCO would have built the sea wall higher. It wasn’t reasonable based on the evidence they had.

    Highly unlikely things will happen, but businesses can’t consider every highly unlikely thing and spend lots of money on them.

  • Jack Dingler Jack Dingler 7 months ago

    These events have happened before. There are markers all over Japan that say “Tsunami Warning, do not build below this point.” From those markers, you can view a gorgeous panorama of towns, cities and fishing fleets below.

  • Jack Dingler Jack Dingler 7 months ago

    In this case though. The earthquake alone took out the cooling pumps (near the ocean), that keep the diesels going. After the went offline, and the diesels shutdown, then the tsunami came.

    We came close to having three plants explode and not just Daichi. We were lucky that it was a workday and the plants were fully staffed. Because of this, the worker were able to prevent the other plants from going critical.

  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 7 months ago

    Actually the quake only triggered a SCRAM, and because the reactor cooled too quickly, operators overrode valves to the closed position just before the tsunami struck. After that the backup power was destroyed and valves stuck off when they wanted to turn them back on. The generators only died after the tsunami, and because of short circuits in the controllers. The rest is history. (read spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/24-hours-at-fukushima )

    All other plants worked properly and backup power was fully operational. The only reason people mistake the high temperatures for “going critical” is because they forget that there’s a difference between SCRAMing a reactor and calling it off (latter depends on delayed reactions and has a very specific cutoff for temperature). Fukushima just happened to be a set of human failures on a company and government level that prevented onsite engineers from receiving the supplies and support they needed.

  • Roberto Ruiz Roberto Ruiz 7 months ago

    If you you search for a 40 meter high tsunami, it’s true, there has been no one in recorded history. But there was a 38m high one in 1896 and a 29 meters high one in 1933. Both were high enough to cause the same damage in Fukushima plant, and both were in the same part of japanese coast. Despite that, and many reports advicing from danger, the plant was built and no measures where taken.

  • fredlinn fredlinn 7 months ago

    ———” No business can afford to protect itself from everything possible, it has to make financial decisions based on what is reasonably likely to occur and not occur.”————-

    Considering the hazard potential inherent in nuclear power—this is the best reason of all not to use nuclear power.

  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 6 months ago

    fredlinn, you can say that about any energy source. Rooftop solar and wind turbine installers risk death or serious injury every day. Oil pipes, rigs and refineries can and do go up in flames, killing people and destroying the environment both in the short term (fires and oil sheets) and long term (heavy metals deposition in the areas affected). Coal, which nuclear directly replaces, creates all sorts of issues, from poisonous flyash to toxic exhaust to mine disasters.

    There have been several studies on the deaths per TWH produced for various energy types, and even including all civil nuclear disasters and mining deaths nuclear is tied with hydro as the safest energy source with just 0.04 excess deaths per TWH. Solar and wind more than ten times higher, and fossil fuels start at over 30 deaths per TWH.

  • fredlinn fredlinn 6 months ago

    I suppose one look at your screen name should explain anything that someone who cares to look needs to know.

  • Russ Finley Russ Finley 6 months ago

    As a foil, Fred is worth his weight in gold. Put his comments to good use.

  • Jack Dingler Jack Dingler 7 months ago

    If we made them safe, they’d be too expensive to use.

    We have to accept that there will be a Fukushima once in a while, if we’re going to keep using the technology.

    And even if we had a Fukushima style event near NYC or LA, the fact that folks are making a lot of money on them, will keep the momentum behind the construction of more nuclear power plants.

  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 7 months ago

    False, as Fukushima type plants were rated for 100x less safety (about 1000 years mean time between breach) than modern reactors. Gen 3+ reactors have MTBF of close to or even over a million years, which given the number of reactors in use would translate to one failure every 2000 years rather than the one per 20 years of the first commercial generation designs (and chernobyl to fukushima was a bit over 20 years).

    Modern designs like the ABWR, ESBWR, and AP1000 are far cheaper over their lifetime due to simplified designs, and far safer for the same reasons. There has yet to be anything above a lvl 2 event (minimal impact even inside the plant) at a Gen 3+ plant, and no accidents.

    Sure that’s not 100% safe, but in engineering there’s no such thing. And lets not forget that even with a Fukushima level event each year, nuclear would still be safer (in terms of both cancer risk and death) than the same amount of production from the coal/gas mixture that replaced it in Japan. Until we harness “magical unicorn farts” for power, nuclear is the best option.

  • They already are safe. The measure of safety isn’t that there is no way harm can happen but that the harm caused by the next safest option is greater.

    If you don’t build nuclear, then you would have to build coal which kills millions every year

    Or you can do without- which is an even worse killer

    Gas and oil will kill more than nuclear as well.

    Nuclear is the safest option

  • fredlinn fredlinn 6 months ago

    Is this the type of logic that you use when you shop for groceries?

  • EngSci ETC EngSci ETC 6 months ago

    fredlinn, you should and probably are doing just that, unless you haven’t bought food in your life. What is healthier? A twinkie or a GM carrot? What about a piece of deer meat from outside a copper mine or one from Hokkaido Japan? What about distilled water or mountain water with a pH of 6.7? You need to eat food to live, so your options are based on relative danger rather than absolute danger.

    (and answers are: carrot, Hokkaido, and nobody will know since both aren’t that good for you)

  • fredlinn fredlinn 6 months ago

    There are six twinkies in front of you——–one of them contains a large amount of Cesium 137.

    You may use any and all of your senses.

    Which twinkie should you not eat?

  • EngSci ETC EngSci ETC 6 months ago

    I would personally not eat a single one because twinkies have too much sugar. How that analogy comes into play is beyond me, as we were talking about relative safety factors of clearly different objects, in our case nuclear plants vs other power sources.

    To throw a wrench in your meaningless comment, if the nuclear twinkie has Cs137, then the coal twinkie has mercury and lead, the oil/gas twinkie has dioxins and nitrides, and the solar twinkie has cadmium telluride. Doesn’t really matter which you pick, you’re going to get something you don’t like, but if you’re choosing between them, might as well grab the one that is least likely to kill you, the nuclear option.

  • Anon Anon 7 months ago

    Interesting fact about the GE Mk1 boiling water atomic reactors (as per Fukushima) is that, if they lose power for cooling – they blow up – really simple, baked in the design. This is what happened at Fukushima, and that’s why there are all sorts of backup power sources provided – like diesel generators. If you lose the generators along with the off-site power – well, that’s what happened. There are a dozen or so of these GE Mk1 reactors still running in the States.

    A larger issue though, in losing power to a nuclear plant, is that the spent fuel pools will dry up and start to burn. And that’s the real killer (literally).
    It’s a larger problem because there are lots and lots of stuffed full, over-full, spent fuel pools all over the USA that need constant cooling.

    If a solar storm occurs which zaps the grid we have a major knock-on problem. Sure, the diesels can cope for awhile, but if the power to the diesel fuel pumps is gone, if the power to the refineries is gone, and you just can’t get more diesel fuel, after awhile all the nuclear junk just starts to burn – and then it’s goodbye USA. Sure, not too likely, but solar storms are real, the fragility of the grid is real and the nuclear pools are real – it’s a massive risk just sitting there, waiting.

  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 7 months ago

    The mark i containment is not set in features, and the custom design used for Fukushima 1-1 (units two and three were even more modified to be very close to the mkii) had passive pumping that would have continued to cool the system if it wasn’t manually shut off by the operators. The explosion had more to do with a lack of a pre-ignitor or converter and lack of water, and less to do with the containment vessel itself.

    As for diesel fuel… you don’t need that much. After a few weeks, an intact reactor will cool to the level that passive cooling is more than enough, and given the US’s massive fuel reserves, that’s not an issue. Spent fuel pools are even easier to cool, and most fuel can be solid casked so it requires only a few solar panels to cool.

  • Scott Portzline Scott Portzline 7 months ago

    Fake: Same as a gas burner? LOL burning requires oxygen. Nuclear plants don’t require O2 for fissioning. Totally different than burning.

  • Fake Fakefake Fake Fakefake 7 months ago

    Ask any nuclear engineer and they will tell you the preferred term for using fuel is to “burn” it. Hell, just look up nuclear fuel burnup. If you want to be a smartass, then you should have also noted that detonation by definition requires a supersonic exothermic front. The only “nuclear” reactors powered by that sort of energy source are fusion reactors, which have yet to accomplish useful energy conversion.

  • Silly as silly can be. The Fukushima crises was caused by a larger than anticipated Tsunami and some bad practices but it caused only minor damage to both the environment and to human safety. After all, over 15,000 died in the tsunami and fewer than five died at the plant.

    The hysteria regarding the harmless release of radiation should not dissuade us from the obvious: Far more people die every year from the alternatives than have ever been killed by nuclear power.

    Spread the cost of the cleanup over the four hundred operating nuclear power plants and we see how, even with the wildly excessive spending there, the total cost is but a minor expense

    Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused by reckless disregard for basic safety procedures and new methods have been in place for decades which would make repeats impossible

    Nuclear is the only clean, cheap and environmentally friendly power source that can provide a modern economy with the power it needs. And nuclear power can be very cheap, just ask India and China that can build their power plants for a fraction of the cost of ours and are getting the costs down even further. they can also operate their plants for a third less than ours

  • EngSci ETC EngSci ETC 6 months ago

    “Far more people die every year from the alternatives than have ever been killed by nuclear power.”

    Assuming 75% gas and 25% coal has replaced nuclear in Japan, we are expecting an extra 16000 people to die each year from pollution caused by those plants. According to Stanford University, around 500 people are expected to die due to Fukushima over the next half century, so the actual villain of this story is quite easy to see.

  • fredlinn fredlinn 6 months ago

    ———” While these efforts did not “cause” the crisis at Fukushima, they are symptomatic of the underlying factors that did.


    Well, they certainly saved themselves a lot of money. Instead of shutting down 4 reactors—-they’ve had to shut down the entire fleet of reactors(54) for over two years…………………………even today, only two are operating, and there is enormous pressure to shut them down as well. 4 have been destroyed at a cost of probably around $20 billion and a completely unknown response and recovery cost so far, all that is known for sure is that the $600 million TEPCO had liability for is LONG since gone and anything else that comes along is out of the taxpayers pockets.

    An large area remains evacuated and uninhabitable and each day’s news makes changing this situation seem less and less likely. Radioactive leaks are continuing and appear to be getting worse rapidly.

    So, what do the Japanese in Fukushima prefecture think about this situation? They are replacing nuclear power with what will be the largest off shore wind farm in the world—and what will be the largest solar installation in Japan.

    The people of Japan are in no mood to listen to the armchair experts pontificate to them about how safe nuclear power is. They have made up their minds. As have the people of Germany, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and many other places.

  • Thom Davis Thom Davis 6 months ago

    It’s OK to bash the nuclear industry. But PLEASE don’t quote folks who don’t know the difference between a nuclear power plant and an atomic bomb. One works on thermal neutron capture, the other works on prompt neutron capture. Thermal neutron capture isn’t fast enough to cause an explosion. It is THAT simple. Granted you can’t probably follow the math and you probably wouldn’t want to understand the physics (might take you years to learn), but take it from someone who has no vested interest (I’m retired), those are the facts. No debate, god’s honest truth, it is the way He made the universe.

  • fredlinn fredlinn 6 months ago

    —-” Granted you can’t probably follow the math and you probably wouldn’t want to understand the physics (might take you years to learn),……….”————


    It’s right there for you to see……………….and always has been.

  • Thom Davis Thom Davis 6 months ago

    Exactly my point. You could not possibly follow the math nor understand the physics based on your bio. Health care technician. When you can follow Bessel functions and explain the 7 factor formula, post again.

  • fredlinn fredlinn 6 months ago

    When you can’t breathe and need someone who can get air in and out for you, you’ll get off of that high horse pretty quick.

    Be careful, it’s a long way to the ground.

  • F. R. Ulrech F. R. Ulrech 6 months ago

    Being an engineer (retired for 19 years) I have some knowledge of the problems in the nuclear reactor business. One can not design for every eventuality mother can bring fourth. All that you can do is to mitigate against the outcome of an accident. (I worker for GE for almost 20 years in the development of fuels for nuclear reactors.) No matter how hard one designs for the worst possible accident there is always mother nature out there ready to trump your assumptions. One can not design for a meteor crashing into an instillation. Don’t design for an above ground instillation? What about earth quakes? More people will die for the lack of energy than for the accidents of energy producing plants. Three Mile was operator error. Russia’s accident was also operator error. The plant was designed to produce plutonium and not energy. Much more to say than time will allow. I’m for nuclear power!!! thanks

  • EngSci ETC EngSci ETC 6 months ago

    Great insight. Fukushima was also made worse by operator (and a great deal of government) errors. No-one can say for certain it was only operator error, but there were plenty of questionable choices made, from disabling the IC to not “violating” laws to get batteries on site. And now thanks to that we won’t be seeing another even exactly like it, since the errors made are now known. Glad to see rational thought laid out by someone with that much experience!

  • Russ Finley Russ Finley 6 months ago

    Articles like this have little value …innuendo, speculation and hypothesis presented as fact. A fairy tale to attract and entertain readers.

    A quake that was literally 1000 times more powerful than the one that flattened Haiti damaged a single nuclear power plant resulting in not a single death …sound of crickets chirping.

  • Toby Hoffman Toby Hoffman 6 months ago

    So all is fine ? No need to analyze or improve? Really think crickets can live near the leaking reactors? How about the radiated fish now showing up throughout the Pacific?

  • EngSci ETC EngSci ETC 6 months ago

    I don’t think anyone said lessons haven’t been learned and improvements aren’t needed, most in fact say the opposite. What is said is that there’s overreaction due to inaccurate information nobody cares to look up, including your own.

    Can crickets live near the reactors? Yes, quite easily, and with little side effect in the short lifespans of the insects.

    Irradiated fish outside the plant bounds have been either decreasing in radiation or simply being irradiated by something else. The radiation levels just 3km from the plant are already below 0.1Bq/L, which is 100x smaller than the natural radiation of sea water (about 15Bq/L, from naturally occurring K-40, uranium, etc). The huge claims of “2500x the legal limit” and such are actually from fish caught inside the plant itself, trapped there by concrete walls and fish nets. Beyond 20km there is little evidence of irradiation, and even within that area the numbers are constantly decreasing (tepco.co.jp/en/nu/fukushima-np/handouts/2013/images/handouts_130128_05-e.pdf)

  • Russ Finley Russ Finley 6 months ago

    There are no irradiated fish. Always room for improvement. This article is a gossip column.

  • Scribblerlarry Scribblerlarry 3 months ago

    It sure wouldn’t hurt to make the public aware of such safe nuclear power as LSTRs (Liquid Sodium (salt) Thorium Reactors) and how research on them is coming along. It might let people feel a bit safer to know that LSTRs do NOT produce weapons grade plutonium and can use up all the depleted fuel rods from our present uranium reactors with only a tiny fraction of the radioactive waste that present uranium reactors produce. Neither can they ever explode.

    Too many people only know about the dangerous uranium reactors presently in use. It would be wise to set their minds at ease by informing them of how soon LSTRs will be available.