It isn’t 20/20 hindsight to tell the Japanese that every few centuries they get a quake on this scale. Also it isn’t hindsight to tell them that the bigger the quake is out at sea the bigger the resulting tsunami will be.
It is poor planning to just hope your plant is built, run, decommissioned, and replaced with a newer plant all before a big quake hits. Ok fine, I understand that they did the numbers and figured that they should build it for a certain level of quake. I’m very happy to see the plant did far better than anticipated. I understand you can’t plan against every possible disaster even if you have the right kind of challenge in mind (wtc towers could have survived smaller jet planes for example).
Sometimes you don’t even know you have a hole in your defenses, but when you do there is no excuse for not having a plan ready to go. In New Orelans people were told that should a storm much bigger than the ones they had been getting hit the city disaster will result. They did nothing and didn’t even plan for that event and we all know how that turned out.
Someone at some point somewhere in the Japanese governemnt, IAEA, TEPCO, or somewhere else even must have asked “What would happen if Fukushima got hit with a quake much bigger than anticipated and the ensuing tsunami?”. Someone else must have said either “We don’t think that is possible”, when scientifically it is inevitable, or that “we just hope such a quake never hits while Fukushima is running”.
It is very inspiring to see the Japanese respond and improvise to this situation but you can’t tell me that they didn’t know this would happen one day. This phenomena isn’t specific to the Japanese by any means. Look globally about the a future asteroid impact Earth will have. Right now the thinking is basically “we hope it doesn’t happen anytime soon” and as long as it doesn’t we are good to go. Should it be discoverd that there will be an impact of significance in a few months time what could be done?
‘Look globally about the a future asteroid impact Earth will have.’
You seem to be saying that all construction on Earth should be able to withstand a meteor impact. People simply do not prepare for events of extremely low probability.
They DID plan for an earthquake and Tsunami.
They built a 20 foot seawall in an area where around it there were no seawalls. They had it rated for an 8.2 earthquake, they had backup systems.
Everything worked as well as can be expected.
Only thing is, it was 8.9 instead of 8.2, and a 23 foot surge instead of 20 ft. Why not build higher or more? Well, where do you stop? how much extra do you spend for a 1 in a billion event? An extra billion dollars to cover events that wont occur in 999 out of 1000 plants?
You CANNOT plan for a 6-sigma or 7-sigma extraordinary event like this. Any planner forecasting a 23 ft surge would look at the area and say “huh, so this nuclear plant is to survive a Tsunami that is so severe it will kill 50,000 people. What about spending that money saving those 50,000 instead of putting more safety in an already pretty safe nuke plant, or using the money a different way?”
And what’s the answer to that?
The nuke in the end is the MOST SAFE building of them all, compared with the thousands and thousands of others that were swept away.