Making Mountains Out of Basements

Monday, March 21, 2011

I’m being generous in assuming that The Toronto Star merely copied-and-pasted the text that appears in its story “ Nuclear plant operator missed inspections before disasters ”.

I’m being generous too in assuming that no editor proof-read the story for logic.

“Japan’s nuclear safety agency criticized the operator of the country’s troubled nuclear complex for repeatedly failing to make inspections of critical equipment in the weeks before it was crippled in this month’s massive quake and tsunami.”

Leaving aside the grammar, most stories about Japan’s second nuclear tragedy (the first occurred before I was born) make it clear that equipment performed as it should during the earthquake. Reactors shut down automatically, on cue, as the tremors were detected.

It was the Tsunami that messed things up and washed away the fuel tanks that powered the backup-electricity generators.

Strictly speaking it wasn’t “this month’s massive quake and tsunami” that caused the problem at all, it was “this month’s massive tsunami”.

Japan’s Nuclear industry should be credited with its successful nuclear plant strategy that coped very well, thank you, with a massive earthquake.

My second quibble in logic is the idea that “the safety agency has pointed to one mistake — backup generators were stored in the basement and so were easily swamped”.

I fail to see how this is linked to a schedule of regular inspections.

Storing the diesel generators in the basement is a design flaw, not an operational flaw, and as such ought not to have been committed to blueprint, let alone steel-and-concrete.

But regular inspections, once the plant is operational, are meant to identify operational problems.

As an aside, I was listening to a podcast from TVO’s Steve Pakin, specifically the Duncan Hawthorne episode, and it seems to me that a really good design for nuclear plants would be to site them on the shore of any large body of water, but below the water level, and permit instant flooding in the event of an emergency.

True it would kill off seaweed and fish in the vicinity, but it ought to permit near-instant cooling without the ridiculous images of helicopters trying to drop buckets of water from 300 feet in the air.

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