It also seems to be an oxymoron.
It's difficult to manage a very small risk with very serious consequences.
If you start with adequate safety margins, you can screw up quite a lot
and you'll probably get away with it most of the time. Probably.
Though to be fair to the plant operators in this instance it was the
largest quake since the industrial era began and it scored an almost
direct hit on these reactors. Not too surprising the turbines shutdown
on vibration monitoring - shame there wasn't a small sacrificial turbine
to maintain critical circuits when under duress in the aftermath of a
SCRAM. Once they ran out of batteries they were stuck.
Modern designs are meant to have intrinsic safety systems based on
convection emergency cooling and not relying on pumps.
This results in pressure to tolerate corner-cutting.
I suspect that Japan is more susceptible to this issue than the west.
I don't know about that. Scientists and engineers status in Japan is
higher than in the West and penny pinching beancounters & MBAs lower.
Their emphasis on agreement and compromise may make for a orderly society,
but it doesn't necessarily make for sound nuclear safety policy. The
Confucianist notion that important people (e.g. CEOs) are owed deference
from the little people (which includes the bureaucrats who are supposed to
be regulating them) probably doesn't help.
The deference works both ways. The good CEOs know when they need expert
advice and rather disconcertingly come to your office (not too bad for a
Westerner but possibly quite disconcerting for a Japanese worker).
I would be far more worried about the naked maximise profit now and let
the future go hang attitude prevalent in US style energy companies of
which Enron was the prime exponent.
But those accidents aren't a danger to people who don't actually work in
those industries (i.e. most of the population). And people seem to think
that radiation from coal is just something the tree-huggers made up to try
to scare people away from coal.
The radiation from impurities in coal are real enough. Uranium is a lot
more common than most people imagine there is 2ppm in almost everything
and slightly more in most igneous rocks. Mineable uranium ore is rare.
I don't know about the height issue. But putting 4 reactors next to each
other seems to have been an issue. A hydrogen explosion at #2 damaged the
pumps used to cool #3, operation of #3 was temporarily abandoned due to
radiation from the spent fuel pool at #4.
OTOH, I suppose that one exclusion zone is better than four.
They are a bit too close together for comfort, with the benefit of
hindsight.
But I'd have thought that once a site is researched and has obtained
planning permission putting more than one in place makes best use of
infrastructure and expertise. In the UK getting planning permission for
a new nuclear site runs into tremendous NIMBY opposition. As a result
all new build will be on existing nuclear sites (if they go ahead).
And the high level waste repository will by built under an existing
remote site with entirely unsuitable geology because the correct site is
under land in the prosperous south where the rich and powerful live.
Regards,
Martin Brown
. There are no clues that there might be any channels or
