The Japanese plants did have back-ups for cooling... large diesel gensets, which the tsunami took out.
The plant had battery back-up for eight hours or so of control and cooling operation without the diesels. Those ran down.
What ultimately failed here were engineering assumptions of how much water could wash in on top of the facility. The reactors shut down properly after the quake, the buildings and containment held through the quake with no problem. All of these problems at Fukushima ultimately are rooted in an under-estimation of the worst case tsunami event, and the subsequent inability to deal with the residual heat in the reactors after they were shut down.
The reason why there are so many “chicken littles” surrounding nuclear power is that a) the press has hyped the dangers far, far beyond what the data actually indicate is the danger (and there are dangers, to be certain, but there has been a deliberate disinformation campaign on nuclear weapons and power for the last 30 years), and this is received b) by people who are just plain stump-stupid about numbers, science, statistics, mathematics, medical statistical studies, etc.
Basically, while the liberal arts majors who get elected and spend inordinate amounts of time bloviating on the Boobie-Tube about “illiteracy,” they spend almost no time worrying about innumeracy.
And it is the innumeracy that has led to abundant chicken-littlism in the western press, and not just surrounding nuclear power. A great many people are quite simply fantastically stupid around numbers. You can see it in the discussions of radiation exposure and dosages - the cartoon from xkcd put the orders of magnitude into perspective for some people, but others simply gloss over it. And level of technology that is beyond people’s understanding becomes magic. Cell phone spread spectrum modulation? Well, that’s good magic. Nuclear radiation? Bad magic. But they both might as well be magic vapors in a bottle as far as most people are concerned. Rub the lamp the right or wrong way, the Genie appears and grants you your wishes... or kills you dead.
Want to prove this rampant innumeracy to yourself?
Go forth into the street and casually ask people how many millions are in a trillion. Go ahead, try it. You’ll be *amazed* at how astoundingly stupid your fellow citizens are. Heck, I see this out of supposed “conservative Republican” professional op-ed blowhards all the time, and it is the reason why I cannot watch TV talking head shows any more: people conflate “billions” with “trillions” all the time when talking about the budget, the outstanding debt, market capitalizations, etc.
When an engineer hears “billions” where he was supposed to hear “trillions” (or vice versa), his brain goes “Wait - WTF?@!” whereas the typical blowhard on TV with a liberal arts degree and JD blithely carry on, as tho billions and trillions were interchangeable.
What’s three orders of magnitude among supposedly educated people, anyway, right?
Go ahead, I encourage you to do the “how many millions in a trillion?” experiment. It will open your eyes.
When I’ve done it, and people get it wrong (as the majority of people do - I’m deadly serious, only about one in three people get it right - that there are a million millions in one trillion), I try to explain it thusly: “If you had a trillion dollars, you could spend a million dollars *every* day of your life and die with plenty of money left over. Let’s say your nanny or mother spent your million for you while you were too young to read or write or handle that much cash...”
They refuse to believe this. Go ahead, try it.
Then watch what happens when you go through the reckoning. You’ll see people’s true level of stupidity come to light. Once, when I multiplied mantissas and added exponents, I had one woman start shouting at me that “you can’t do that! That’s illegal!”
Riiiight.
It's the Black Swan Event problem, inherent in human nature.
The answer is to always be a little bit more conservative than you think necessary.
Depends on if you are asking Americans, or, say British..
It is obvious that there are a million millions in a trillion but I was educated in a different era.
Today’s kids do know all about diversity being strength - which I cannot follow - and how homosexuality is not a negative genetic trait, not to mention all kinds of junk science for which they have zero understanding.
But Jesus, they do know how to follow orders!
The Japanese intentionally ignored known tsunami data before 1896. That was the ultimate failure and the Japanese way of things. Ignore the problem and then play damage control when the problem finally rears its ugly head.
For just a little extra money they could have built that seawall a little higher at the plant and saved them from this disaster.
SPOT ON!!!
My husband didn’t believe people were so hopeless with numbers so he asked some check out clerks a couple years ago how many feet in a yard.
None of them got the right answer. One begged off that she ‘wasn’t good at math.’
Tragically, MOST Americans — probably more than 99% &mash; would expect to find a mantissa in a garden.
I don’t believe one in three knows that there are a million millions in a trillion. I would be surprised if one in ten do and suspect it is closer to one in twenty or more.
Try to have an in depth conversation with people very few know anything about any serious subject that will sustain more than a couple of minutes of intelligent exchange. Shakespeare, science, Plato, Locke, Beethoven, you name it you are talking Klingonese as far as the average American knows. It is beyond pitiful.