FWIW Christiane Amanpour interviews American workers who renovated Fukushima nuclear reactor

[somone]

http://abcnews.go.com/International/christiane-amanpour-reports-nuclear-power-plant-workers-plants/story?id=13131588

Christiane Amanpour Reports: Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Worker Describes Quake's Impact
After Working in Japanese Plants for Years, U.S. Worker Says Nuclear Plants are Safe
by CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR

I spoke exclusively with American workers who have been in Japan for the last two months working on the Fukushima nuclear plant, renovating one of its reactors. They had just completed work on it the day before the earthquake struck.

This disaster, the worst earthquake and tsunami ever recorded in Japan, dealt a knock-out blow to the cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear reactor. Barely 24 hours later, an explosion at the first reactor destroyed the outer wall.

American worker Greg Henderson told me he had worked in at least 15 plants in Japan, and had just left the Fukushima plant when the earthquake struck.

Although there have been concerns over deadly radiation exposure and a possible meltdown since the quake happened, Henderson said working in a nuclear power plant was just as safe as working in a grocery store...

[hedgehog]

1. "working in a nuclear power plant was just as safe as working in a grocery store..."

True, but how often do they evacuate an area 20 miles around a grocery store when someone drops a jar of pickles in Aisle 5?

[Old and In the Way]

2. I don't want to think this is funny....

But, isn't this always the point? It's was absolutely safe until it isn't. Then it's too late.

What I don't get is...they spend 100's of millions of dollars on redundant safety systems, yet something obvious like the location of system critical back-up generators in a tsunami/earthquake zone seems to be done without regard for this most probable scenario. Why not mount these generators on top of the building where the tsunami couldn't have destroyed them? What am I missing here? Is there a reason why that couldn't be done? No doubt that the roof would have required some reinforcement to support...but in the overall scheme of things, that would have been peanuts compared to the situation they face now.

[hedgehog]

4. Engineers have a saying - "It's impossible to make something

fool proof, because fools are so ingenious!"

For example - as an engineer, you figure that there are contingencies that you haven't thought of, so you make a pressure vessel say 10% stronger than the highest expected pressure. Three years down the road, someone loads the vessel to 120% of design pressure because of course "engineers always over-design things...."

That's one type of problem. Another type of problem occurs when something is too hard and/too expensive and/or too inconvenient to do, so everyone pretends that it doesn't have to be done. For example, there may be a 1% chance of a Richter 9 quake, but it's very expensive to design for a Richter 9 quake, so Richter 8 is chosen as the design criterion, and everyone pretends the Richter 9 quake will never happen. Or, it's expensive to put emergency generators on a roof, so hospitals in New Orleans install them in the basement. Or, there's pressure from the White House to launch the space shuttle, so everyone pretends that an O-ring won't fail.

[Old and In the Way]

5. I go with "too expensive".

That's always a root cause when profits are the bottom line.

"Or, there's pressure from the White House to launch the space shuttle, so everyone pretends that an O-ring won't fail. " I wonder how many people remember that Reagan's handlers wanted that shuttle up in space so they'd have a nice backdrop for the SOTU speech that was imminent? No one in our corporate media ever made that connection...

[hedgehog]

6. People remember seeing Richard Feynman dipping an o-ring in ice water,

but the actual cause of the disaster was group-think; the managers were looking at the costs of delaying the launch, and discounted the engineers' warnings of possible disaster.

[Zoeisright]

3. LOL! Thanks for the first laugh I've had in days.

Nice, crisp, to the point.