What Set Fukushima ApartNuclear reactors are designed to leave nothing to chance, but at Fukushima, a lot came down to luck.
By Andrew Leatherbarrow
February 25, 2022
Looking back on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, one of the most expensive and complex industrial accidents of all time, it’s striking how often simple luck influenced the course of events. Chance follows us everywhere. You miss the bus after bumping into a friend; a stranger pays it forward by buying your morning coffee; a burst water pipe floods your home. It’s no surprise that a certain amount of luck was involved in an accident as colossal as the Fukushima disaster, but the amount of it is perhaps a little overlooked. Reading through the various government and institutional reports into what happened, words like “coincidence” appear more often than you might expect.
In the nuclear power industry, a sector famed for its caution and strong redundant systems, we can see that luck rarely held much sway prior to the Fukushima disaster. At the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama in 1975, for example, two men tasked with inspecting an electrical-cable room for air leaks used a naked candle to check for air flow. The flammable foam insulation ignited, damaging the cables, which then crippled the control room instrumentation for two reactors. Not much bad luck there, just a lack of common sense. At Three Mile Island in 1979, luck started the accident when a trickle of water seeped its way into an electrical circuit, but from that point on it had little impact. The safety equipment all functioned as intended up to a critical point, after which it was overwhelmed people who couldn’t grasp the situation and made incorrect decisions because of a badly designed control room.
In August 2004, Japan suffered its worst-ever accident at a nuclear plant in terms of direct fatalities, and its first fatal accident during operation, when a steam pipe ruptured near a group of workers inside the Mihama plant’s turbine hall, boiling five men alive and hospitalizing six others. The victims were unlucky, to put it mildly, but what about the cause? The exact same accident had already occurred in two almost-identical Westinghouse nuclear plants in the United States, the Trojan plant in Oregon and Surry in Virginia in 1985 and 1986 respectively, the latter resulting in four deaths. An investigation quickly determined that flow-accelerated corrosion had eroded the pipe’s inner wall until it was as thin as a sheet of paper. Westinghouse informed its partner Mitsubishi, which maintained the fleet of American-designed plants in Japan, yet Mitsubishi still missed similar piping at several facilities across the country. At Mihama, an engineer spotted the absent pipe in April 2003 and added it to the inspection list, but the plant’s owner decided the issue was trivial. This meant, in a tragic twist, that technicians had planned to perform ultrasound tests on the pipe five days after it burst. Here again, chance did not exert a huge influence. It was more bad communication.
When it comes to the Fukushima disaster, there’s no denying that reckless negligence set the stage, a fact well established by a mountain of evidence against Japanese regulators and the power station’s owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). But once it all began, if we view what followed the initial accident with an eye on chance, we can see that good and bad luck played a surprisingly large role.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-set-fukushima-apart/
