Earthquake/Nuclear Accident Warnings Ignored by Japan
“In the 40 years that Japan had been building nuclear plants, seismic activity was, fortunately or unfortunately, relatively quiet. Not a single nuclear facility was struck by a big quake. The government, along with the power industry and the academic community, all developed the habit of underestimating the potential risks posed by major quakes.
“Since around the time of the Great Hanshin Earthquake that devastated Kobe in 1995, however, almost the entire Japanese archipelago has entered a period of brisk seismic activity.”
-Katsuhiko Ishibashi, 2007
>
Why does it turn out that every single time we have a major “unforeseeable event,” it turns out to have been not only foreseen, but warned against — and those warnings were widely ignored by the people in charge?
In 2006, Japanese Katsuhiko Ishibashi, professor at the Research Center for Urban Safety and Security at Kobe University’s Graduate School of Science, resigned from a nuclear power advisory panel. The reason? The Japanese commitment to building nuke plants in earthquake zones. Ishibashi believed that design standards were too lax to stand up to a major earthquake. Further, he believed that overconfidence in plant engineering could lead to a nuclear catastrophe.
Ishibashi even created the word “GENPATSU-SHINSAI,” which is a combination of earthquake and a nuclear meltdown. He has been repeatedly, explicitly warning the Japanese government about the danger of building Nuclear plants on active fault lines.
The quote above comes from a 2007 article published in both International Herald Tribune and Asahi Shinbun: Why Worry? Japan’s Nuclear Plants at Grave Risk From Quake Damage.
Ishibashi believed that a long period of relatively mild earthquake activity may have lulled Japanese authorities into a false sense of security. Following the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995 (the Kobe quake), fault lines seemed to have entered into a new period of activity. Over the next years following the Kobe quake, several major quakes took place in close proximity of three nuclear power plants: the Onagawa plant in Miyagi Prefecture (August 2005), the Shika plant in Ishikawa Prefecture (March 2007) and the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant. In each case, the maximum ground motion caused by the quake was stronger than the seismic design criteria for the nuclear power plants.
>
click for larger graphic
>
Previously:
Governments Have Been Covering Up Nuclear Meltdowns for Fifty Years to Protect the Nuclear Power Industry.
Sources:
Why Worry? Japan’s Nuclear Plants at Grave Risk From Quake Damage
Ishibashi Katsuhiko
International Herald Tribune August 11, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Ishibashi-Katsuhiko/2495
Quiet voices must be heeded to avert a future Fukushima
Alister Scott and Jim Watson
The Guardian, Friday 18 March 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/17/fukushima-japan-nuclear-disaster
Nuclear test
Nature 26 July 2007
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7152/full/448387a.html
PDF (93K)
Insight: Where not to build nuclear power stations
Michael Reilly
New Scientist 28 July 2007
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526144.500
Tweet
Facebook
Reddit
Digg this!
March 21st, 2011 at 8:34 am
Just thinking out loud, but how has GE escaped the finger pointing in this disaster? Did they not build a majority of the power plants, and are they not responsible, at least in part, for the engineering in and around the facilities? Thoughts?
March 21st, 2011 at 8:42 am
BR wondered:
Why does it turn out that every single time we have a major “unforeseeable event,” it turns out to have been not only foreseen, but warned against — and those warnings were widely ignored by the people in charge?
reply:
————
Because there’s not enough money, time, and effort available in the world now, and there never will be enough resources, to plan for and fix all the problems that might happen so they never happen. I’m probably the only person I know who has a home maintenance program. I replace sump pumps, garage door springs, and other items before they break so I don’t have to worry about problems after they break. Nobody I know does this besides me. It goes against human nature to spend on things that aren’t broken yet. People aren’t stupid but they are lazy. The thinking is, You Can’t Plan For Everything So Let’s Not Plan At All. Besides, if we stall long enough, we might be able to stick someone else with the bill. Occasional voluntary donations and deficit financed US aid are less costly than infinite preparation for unforeseeable events.”
March 21st, 2011 at 8:48 am
“Why does it turn out that every single time we have a major “unforeseeable event,” it turns out to have been not only foreseen, but warned against ”
You can always dig out a ‘warning;’ and a ‘foreseen’ for everything. In fact, you can dig them out for both sides of every event so, obviously, most of these warnings are bogus. The problem is not to heed the warnings, it is to decide which wrnings might have validity.
I’m sure you see that every single day in the investment world: the market will rise, the market will fall… whichever it happens to be, somebody ‘foretold’ correctly. However, you have no way to know the future. If you guess and it turns out to happen that way then you were ‘correct’. In reality, there is no such thing as a ‘correct’ guess or decision… there are only guesses that are made correct by later events.
March 21st, 2011 at 8:59 am
On the other hand, I’m a little surprised more catastrophes don’t happen.
I’ve become a huge fan of low class reality TV. Shows like Campus PD, World’s Dumbest, Las Vegas Jail, Southern Fried Stings, Bait Car, and several others present a good view of real human nature. You can put a suit on someone, give them a high paying job, opportunities to build and most will do the bare minimum necessary to get the biggest payout while sticking others with the bill when it comes due. While these shows focus mostly on trailer trash and other forms of human waste, you will clearly see it’s only the personal presentation that differentiates these people from many others who do similar things, but at a higher level.
March 21st, 2011 at 9:12 am
In this instance I think it’s straw-manning to equate preparedness for this event with preparedness for ALL “unforeseeable”/highly improbable events. A magnitude 8 event would have exceeded plant specs. The relevant calculus always includes extent of downside risk which, in the case of nuclear power, is extreme. The classic test of negligence is simply whether preparedness was reasonably proportional to risk.
A good question to ask is whether the window of risk is limited to the lifetimes and job tenures of those currently making decisions, meaning the can is being kicked down the road.
March 21st, 2011 at 9:25 am
“and those warnings were widely ignored by the people in charge?”
Because people making obscene amounts of $ don’t give a shit about the people who are not. Our Financial crisis and subsequent “bailout” could have been prevented. We had people who saw it. Money is the ultimate motivator and some could care less about the nation they rape to get it.
March 21st, 2011 at 9:27 am
Why does it turn out that every single time we have a major “unforeseeable event,” it turns out to have been not only foreseen, but warned against — and those warnings were widely ignored by the people in charge?
because people ‘in charge’ are the owners of the plants who’s first loyalty is to their owner’s money.
which is exactly why government and regulations are necessary
and that people need to recognize that the owner’s are perpetually trying to buy government that
will favor them over the interests of public safety.
so the next time you hear some asshole talking about ‘too much regulation’ remember that government
oversight intended to prevent these kind of events are a major part of what they’re complaining about.
March 21st, 2011 at 9:30 am
The plant was 41 years old, and survived a history making 9.0 quake, followed shortly by a massive tsunami with its containment vessel intact. It only became endangered because they didn’t think to place the backup generator in an elevated position. Otherwise this would have been a minor issue. Thats quite remarkable when you think about it. What other powersource capble of generating 5gw of electricity within that footrpint would have faired better?
What other economically plausible power generating sources does Japan have at its disposal? I seem to recall the pickle they found themselves in circa 1941 over an oil embargo. They didn’t think their options through too clearly then, and I’m sure history played a part in their strategic plannning 40-50 years ago.
20/20 armchair quarterbacking is always easy in the Internet age. Ther are 10s of thousands of future “I told you so’s” premonition warnings out there for all manner of ‘could have/should have’ scenarios waiting for just the right cataclysm to occur so the pundits can wheel them out as evidence of past negligence. If only we had unlimited resources and money, I’m sure I could engineer utopia as well. Reality says “Hi, come visit soon”.
March 21st, 2011 at 9:36 am
this may be part of the Answer..
http://search.yippy.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&v%3Aproject=clusty&query=Normalcy+bias
this may be worthwhile..
http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/situational-awareness-vs-normalcy-bias
and, here, is (part of) a descriptor..
“…People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation…”
http://howtosplitanatom.com/university/normalcy-bias/
March 21st, 2011 at 9:37 am
Actually since the plants were built in the 1970s further studies have found that there have been at least 3 tsunamis in the Sendai region in the last 2500 years, the last one in 869 ad, (because there are records of it). Scientists have dug in the area and found sand and mud deposits that come from tsunamis in 3 layers, the last one just below a volcanic ash deposit from 915 ad. This work was done in the 1990s. It does beg the question of beyond the seismic strengthening that has gone in all japanese reactors over time, should they have worked on tsunami hardening of the sites as well. Apparently the reactors were designed with a 5 m tsunami in mind, but the tsunami of 2011 was 10 m high.
March 21st, 2011 at 9:57 am
We are a disaster-driven species, a species of grasshoppers who will succumb to the exceedingly-well-understood models of population dynamics, to global warming, to pervasive corruption in our financial and political systems (and any other systems with a high degree of power and influence).
It’s in our genes.
Don’t fight it — embrace your inner idiot, and rush out to load up on derivatives NOW. Tomorrow the Dow is going to 100,000.
March 21st, 2011 at 10:03 am
japanese PM Kan clearly not familiar with the second meaning of
light at the end of the tunnel.
it might be getting better.. but who can tell as long as they only tell us the reactor temperatures of the ones said under control 5 and 6 less than 100C
im short Canon
said to be toast anyway on plant damage and no supply, the optical related companies all produce in the region and do not generally offshore, a reactor release would only add…
but hard to short anything when the nikkei up on mother of all QE and all cos could be govt rescued
March 21st, 2011 at 10:20 am
I’m with lugnut here. Honestly, you can find a report someone for any “disaster” you can think of…nuclear, financial, sewage, pipe bursting…..anything. This is the uninteresting part of what this is about.
The truly interesting part is that, somehow, we think we can predict and even avert disaster, even when human and earth history shows you can’t. This isn’t a case of people ignoring warnings, it was a clear outlier combination of events here. Furthermore we have this silly expectation of science that it can solve all our problems (a religious view?) when it clearly can’t. I blame scientists themselves for this sense of hubris they cast off. I constantly watch these “How the universe works” programs and how they state theory as fact. People who don’t know any better watch this and think we’ve got it figured out. We don’t. Not even close. Mostly everything is theory, NOT fact. The same with building nuclear plants. As soon as they correct for a magnitude 9 with a severe tsunami, a magnitude 9.1 and tsunami will happen at the same time as a typhoon or asteroid strike. Then someone boring will trot out some scientific paper stating they knew this could happen all along.
So instead of looking for blame, how about we help the survivors cope, pick up the pieces, and correct for what we can without trying to believe we have it all covered. All life is risk. That’s me paraphrasing the Buddha. ;)
March 21st, 2011 at 10:47 am
Wow you found a dozen articles over 40 years- Wow, yes, they really ignored the warnings.
I find it interesting that we consider playing with different elements of nature, wind, solar and thermal much safer. Yes no risks there except for the ones we havent seen. Because altering winds, and playing with thermal currents is much safer.
March 21st, 2011 at 10:55 am
The only relevant questions are (1) whether Prof. Katsuhiko was correct in his concerns about seismic risks, and (2) whether his concerns were rooted in a sound scientific analysis of the risk issues using data and accepted scientific methods generally available to experts responsible for nuclear policy.
An opinion can be correct purely by coincidence or because it represents rigorously applied scientific principles.
Of course, another class of opinion is the Nostradamus variety, i.e., vague and astrological: “When Mars is in the ascendant a great leader will come holding the standards of the eagle and the flaming sword.” Now, quite obviously, this particular made-up snippet of Nostradamus would point to Obama, because the eagle is on the Great Presidential Seal and a “flaming sword” quite obviously meant a cruise missile fired at Qadaffi’s house 500 years ago when that fictional phrase was written. Of course, it could also have been code for the doge of an Italian city state of the time but, you know, decoding that would require intimate knowledge of Italian history and stuff.
So, to address the thrust of some comments above, the question is whether the professor’s opinion was scientifically sound or not at the time he made it. If it was sound, then the question becomes why it was not acted upon. If it was challenged as lacking in scientific rigor, then that’s a valid critique.
March 21st, 2011 at 11:04 am
“I told you that cat was dead”
—- Mrs. Schrödinger
March 21st, 2011 at 11:05 am
I don’t know a thing about nuclear plants, but the problem (I thought) was with the tsunami – not a fault line. I’m aware of at least two plants that are built on active fault lines, but I didn’t know that the Fukushima plants were.
I lived in Houston at a time when we figured out that subterranean basements are a bad place for backup generators. Very bad. All it takes is a flood. Inundation is a problem that apparently they did not consider at Fukushima either.
I try not to comment on the risks of nuclear accident, because I’m not a particularly objective person on that. Got caught in the plume trail from Chernobyl in Europe, and don’t have a particularly good opinion of nukes in general.
March 21st, 2011 at 11:05 am
Barry,
Know your bias.
Your map alone should have set off some alarm bells. 52 active plants and others being built on one of the most seismicly active islands in the world. In the past 50 years they’ve had 1 incident of merit, and that was due to a extraoridinarily massive earthquake followed by a tidal wave.
It seems they’ve very successfully engineered around earthquakes.
March 21st, 2011 at 11:06 am
Wally; I agree, you can always find a warning about everything after the fact. The trick is to make a realistic judgment of cost and probability as you decide what should or should not be done to prevent an unlikely catastrophe. Unfortunately organizations are inclined to assign very low probabilities to events that will cost them to prevent. That is why you have to have effective independent outside regulators to oversee any risk taking that is big enough to influence the world outside of the organization itself. Putting some serious personal “skin in the game” for those in charge of the organization is also helpful but not always enough because some people have a gambler personality.
The main problem in Japan was that nobody even thought of a backup to the backup generator. The cost of an earthquake + tsunami safe backup to the backup generators would have been fairly small. They and their regulators developed the group think idea that there would NEVER be a need for it (i.e., risk so small that even a small investment would be a waste of money).
March 21st, 2011 at 11:07 am
Also, there are other reactors next to Fukoshima which apparently managed just fine.
March 21st, 2011 at 11:38 am
When dealing technologies that result in broadly toxic byproducts that can cause irreversible, long term damage, the worst case scenario — regardless of probability — should be the basis for both risk mitigation and public policy.
Warning: To shit in one’s own well or community water supply is a bad decision.
Same can be said for our financial/political environment. There are warnings that are being ignored, and we have already shit in the public well.
It’s all good, until it ain’t.
Who could have known?
March 21st, 2011 at 11:55 am
Why are people surprised when humans act like humans?
Now that we have internet and twitter and science – you think we will act differently than behavior documented in Greek tragedies?
March 21st, 2011 at 11:59 am
Should we believe what the US gov is saying or what they’re doing? Handing out iodine tabs and sending ships out of port while they say things are stabilizing.
Meanwhile TEPCO has 2 new plumes and they claim they don’t know the cause and a shift in winds will be blowing towards Tokyo. The US has a low threshhold for “stablize”.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/japan-nuclear-crisis-close-stabilizing-us-official/story?id=13184684&page=2
March 21st, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Back when we were talking about Black Swans I took exception with those who said that literally, no one, must have predicted “it.” I said then, with 6 billion people on the planet, you can always find someone who said something.
If Katsuhiko Ishibashi is high enough profile that he should have been listened to, it’s a tragedy. If he’s just some guy, it’s the way of the world. Sad maybe, but that’s the way it is.
(How much better can we really be at filtering-up good ideas from “some guy?” This comment is your test ;-)
March 21st, 2011 at 1:03 pm
“When dealing technologies that result in broadly toxic byproducts that can cause irreversible, long term damage, the worst case scenario — regardless of probability — should be the basis for both risk mitigation and public policy.” (Petey Wheatstraw)
And yet, we ignore those things every single day for the coal and petroleum industries because it is somehow ingrained that it is OK to excuse them.
I think 40,000 automobile deaths per year fits that description, as well.
March 21st, 2011 at 1:32 pm
@John Personna: Valid point, but I don’t think he’s just “some guy”:
http://www.annalsofgeophysics.eu/index.php/annals/article/view/3305/3351
http://www.planet.sci.kobe-u.ac.jp/study/list/seis/ishibashi_e.html
March 21st, 2011 at 10:55 pm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/21/us-japan-nuclear-idUSTRE72K47A20110321
until there’s a solution for used fuel storage there is no such think as safe nuclear
and any suggestions that it’s a low cost source of energy are BS
March 22nd, 2011 at 12:59 am
Thanks Transor Z for the links, the first one is perfect to understand the historical seismology of Japan, and in the second link he lists his research interests :
1. Seismicity and seismotectonics in and around the Japanese Islands
2. Especially, modeling of convergence process and earthquake generation along the northern margin of the PhilippineSea plate
3. Mechanism and predictability of large and great slab earthquakes
4. Long-term earthquake forecasting
5. Renovation of historical seismology in Japan
6. Critical science for citizens with special interest in earthquake disaster mitigation
indeed Ishibashi Katsuhiko is not ”some guy”, he’s THE GUY, a Nouriel Roubini of Japanese seismology, working for the Research Center for Urban Safety and Security of Kobe University (RCUSS),
and I quote the purpose of RCUSS from their site:
” The Research Center for Urban Safety and Security (RCUSS) is established on May 11, 1996, about one year following the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.
The mission of RCUSS is to make contributions in building safe and secure urban society by developing the visions towards such society and by conducting researches and educations on suitable methodologies and frameworks in realizing such society.
The urban society needs to be above of all a safe and secure place to live, while it serves various and extensive functions for lively industrial, economic and cultural activities, as well as comfortable and pleasant living environments.
The urban society is however composed of huge and complex societal and infrastructure systems, accompanied by problems such as urbanization and overcrowding.
Thus such society is highly vulnerable to the natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, as well as to the environmental destruction and pollution due to human and industrial activities.
The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake has taught us, through painful sacrifices of people and society, that urban cities are highly vulnerable to disasters and that integrated and holistic researches are required on building a safe and secure urban society. Kobe University that was the only multidisciplinary national university in the quake-stricken area has thus proposed to establish the RCUSS to orchestrate interdisciplinary and integrated researches, both in hardware and software aspects of society, with the aim of creating genuinely safe and secure urban society. ”
http://www.rcuss.kobe-u.ac.jp/English/index-e.html
I’ve been trying to know what Mr. Katsuhiko is doing right now, maybe he’s on field research in in the affected areas…
March 23rd, 2011 at 1:22 pm
[...] Recent news articles on Japan show a pattern of falsified safety records, warnings to Japan about building nuclear plants on active fault lines, as well as ones susceptible to [...]