Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant
Image: Wikipedia Commons
Trust us, they say. Things are different than they used to be in the nuclear industry. Reactor vessels are no longer installed
backwards. Lessons have been learned from mistakes. It can't happen here.
Uh-huh. At The New York Times, Hiroko Tabuchi, Norimitsu Onishi and Ken Belson report that Japan Extended Reactor’s Life, Despite Warning:
Just a month before a powerful earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the center of Japan’s nuclear crisis, government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest of the six reactors at the power station despite warnings about its safety.
Several weeks after a 10-year extension was granted for the Fukushima Daiichi plant, its operator admitted that it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment related to the plant's cooling systems.
Eisaku Sato, a former governor, called the system flawed.
The regulatory committee reviewing extensions pointed to stress cracks in the backup diesel-powered generators at Reactor No. 1 at the Daiichi plant, according to a summary of its deliberations that was posted on the Web site of Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency after each meeting. The cracks made the engines vulnerable to corrosion from seawater and rainwater. The generators are thought to have been knocked out by the tsunami, shutting down the reactor’s vital cooling system. ...
Several weeks after the extension was granted, the company admitted that it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment related to the cooling systems, including water pumps and diesel generators, at the power station’s six reactors, according to findings published on the agency’s Web site shortly before the earthquake.
Nobody could have foreseen. Right?
Then there's this guy, whose accusations are not new. But they apparently haven't been investigated thoroughly either:
One of the reactors in the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant may have been relying on flawed steel to hold the radiation in its core, according to an engineer who helped build its containment vessel four decades ago.
Mitsuhiko Tanaka says he helped conceal a manufacturing defect in the $250 million steel vessel installed at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 4 reactor while working for a unit of Hitachi Ltd. (6501) in 1974. The reactor, which Tanaka has called a “time bomb,” was shut for maintenance when the March 11 earthquake triggered a 7-meter (23-foot) tsunami that disabled cooling systems at the plant, leading to explosions and radiation leaks. ...
[During heating to remove welding stress the reactor] vessel had sagged so that its height and width differed by more than 34 millimeters, meaning it should have been scrapped, according to nuclear regulations. Rather than sacrifice years of work and risk the company’s survival, Tanaka’s boss asked him to reshape the vessel so that no-one would know it had ever been damaged. Tanaka had been working as an engineer for the company’s nuclear reactor division and was known for his programming skills.
The warped vessel was not a safety problem, said a spokesperson for Hitachi Ltd., the reactor maker. Uh-huh.
Mycle Schneider says:
As far back as 2005, I warned Eisaku Sato, governor of Fukushima at the time, about the dangers of letting spent fuel accumulate in cooling ponds at the prefecture’s nuclear plants and the need to put it into much safer dry stores as soon as possible. He seemed to be the only one who listened. But clearly there were people who always knew better and whose arrogance characterizes the nuclear industry. ...
The nuclear industry has always lacked foresight. On 3/11, Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. was still recovering after a massive tremor that shut down its seven Kashiwazaki units on the west coast in July 2007 and three reactors are still off-line. Tepco and the authorities didn’t hear that wake- up call, brushing off the warnings of many experts.
Not just brushing off, but brushing off with sneers.
As my colleague Laurence Lewis wrote here on Sunday:
This is an industry with a long record of cover-ups of dangerously damaged facilities, and cover-ups of safety violations, and unreported radioactive leaks, and inadequate waste storage protections, and napping guards, and more radioactive leaks, and more radioactive leaks, and on and on. WikiLeaks even comes into play, with the revelation that in December 2008 an official of the International Atomic Energy Agency specifically warned that seismic safeguards at nuclear plants were outdated and inadequate. Which was dutifully ignored by the typically dutiful media, the industry, and governments. Which may be the real but unintended meaning of the president's words about nuclear power, that we can "do that in a much more effective way."
It's been argued that this is the way all corporations operate. That such is the natural order. That the nuclear industry's behavior is no different and it shouldn't be held to a higher standard than other corporations that cut corners, conceal potentially lethal problems and laugh about it all the way to bank. You would think their PR departments would rework that argument just a bit. Come up with something a little more soothing. But, then, why should they as long as captive regulators don't do their jobs?