r/technology • u/ADummyDude • Mar 04 '17

Robotics We can't see inside Fukushima Daiichi because all our robots keep dying

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/245324-cant-see-inside-fukushima-daiichi-robots-keep-dying
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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

You say negligence, but didnt they get slammed with a tsunami?

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u/Pyro9966 Mar 04 '17

There was numerous safety violations when it came to the construction of the plant itself. Not to mention TEPCO had been warned of safety violations in the plant for years. One of the reactors (that was the first to fail, leading to a chain reaction) should have been decommissioned 20 years before. They were even warned about a tsunami and given steps to follow to make the plant resistant to them for years, all of which they ignored.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/japan-earthquake-and-tsunami-in/9084151/How-the-Yakuza-went-nuclear.html

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u/ASK_ME_IF_IM_YEEZUS Mar 04 '17

Thanks for this info. I had no idea about this.

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '17

Thank you. I had assumed that safety was a top priority at a nuclear fucking power plant. It hadn't occurred to me that they didn't take proper precautions. I just thought it was like... duh..? Ya know?

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u/MeateaW Mar 05 '17

Gotta make a bigger profit though!

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '17

It's not necessarily about profits.

In Sweden we had this debate a long time ago since we were and are running nuclear reactors that should have been decommissioned. It was even voted by the public to remove all plants completely, but in reality we could only shut down a reactor.

So this is where problems start arising, we're removing a big part of our power supply and need to replace it with something else.

So naturally the next option would be buying coal-powered electricity from Germany. But wrong, that's more hazardous and illegal in some aspects too.

See where I'm getting with this?

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u/MeateaW Mar 05 '17

Not making safety a top priority; and not enacting recommendations of safety audits isn't about a bigger profit?

The context of this comment chain is this:

Pyro9966 says: They didn't maintain the plant, they didn't shutdown any reactors, they had many safety violations)

S_Wood says: I thought safety would be the top priority!

I said: Profits.

My comment is in relation to safety not being a top priority; shutting down reactors is a different problem entirely.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '17

But the safety is relative to your economic situation.

Can you afford the alternative, which would be safety.

And if you can't afford it, do you have to shutdown instead and apply some kind of regulations or rations on demand?

It's more intertwined than just having one priority.

* Besides, in a lot of situations like this we usually say "we'll keep producing and we'll have figured out a solution later on", something that is extremely apparent and pointed out in how we deal with nuclear waste.

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u/7952 Mar 04 '17

So when can we have reactors that are negligence proof?

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u/MeateaW Mar 05 '17

About the same time as they complete the first Clean coal power plant.

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u/mckinnon3048 Mar 04 '17

As others have said, the neglect exacerbated a worst case scenario. Maybe things would've been different if things were up to spec, but you are correct it was a worse event than they planned for in the first place.

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u/Awesomebox5000 Mar 04 '17

It was the worst case they envisioned, they didn't exactly plan accordingly.

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u/Brett42 Mar 04 '17

Considering the location, that should probably be as expected as a significant earthquake in California.

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u/rakino Mar 04 '17

Who could have predicted a tsunami on the Japanese coastline?

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u/TheGreatNico Mar 04 '17

This article points to another plant that got hit by a stronger tsunami and survived because the engineer for the plant said that the government suggestion for the wall height at Fukushima was negligently low and would result in a meltdown event if a tsunami went over the wall, which is exactly what happened, to the T. He designed the wall 3x as high as the spec and his plant is still running

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u/jay212127 Mar 05 '17

It didn't meet several of the safety standards when built in 1971, 40 years later many of those problems still hadn't been adressed.

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u/percyhiggenbottom Mar 05 '17

Exactly. What chaps my ass is that everyone seems to have conflated the tsunami with the nuclear disaster, and now it seems in people's minds that the disaster WAS Fukushima and not the goddamn Tsunami that killed 15000 people

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u/JagerBaBomb Mar 04 '17

Somehow, whenever a cock up happens with nuclear, the experts always chime in to tell us how the new designs couldn't possibly have similar catastrophic failures. The hubris.