Posted on 03/31/2011 10:03:02 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Japanese Plant Had Barebones Risk Plan
By PHRED DVORAK And PETER LANDERS
TOKYO—Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s disaster plans greatly underestimated the scope of a potential accident at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, calling for only one stretcher, one satellite phone and 50 protective suits in case of emergencies.
Disaster-response documents for Fukushima Daiichi, examined by The Wall Street Journal, also contain few guidelines for obtaining outside help, providing insight into why Japan struggled to cope with a nuclear crisis after an earthquake and tsunami devastated the facility.
The disaster plans, approved by Japanese regulators, offer guidelines for responding to smaller emergencies and outline in detail how to back up key systems in case of failure. Yet the plans fail to envision the kind of worst-case scenario that befell Japan: damage so extensive that the plant couldn't respond on its own or call for help from nearby plants. There are no references to Tokyo firefighters, Japanese military forces or U.S. equipment, all of which the plant operators eventually relied upon to battle their overheating reactors.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Clearly they spent money for emergency conditions, but were unable to think out of the box as to how an emergency could play out.
Even more amazing was that in the 8 hours after the tsunami when the onsite batteries were keeping the pumps going, that they weren't able to drive other truck mounted generators in from other nuke plants.
The entire fiasco shows a complete lack of critical thinking at all levels and lack of oversight.
When a disaster containment plan is wanting, the Libs will blame the core technology...
When Socialist schemes fall apart, they blame the lack of the “right people”...
Same symptoms were also present in handling quake and tsunami damage.
A Japanese co. (I won't name) was visited and they said: ‘We don't have a plan. To prepare for disaster is to court disaster.’ Maybe it's a cultural thing.
Creative brainstorming is the driving force in American thought and was completely lacking here.
I have my doubts about the passability of the roads due to the earthquake and tsunami, but why did no one try to bring in another set of generators and fuel tanks from a warehouse elsewhere in Japan, by heavy lift helicopter? This would require some staging, but in an emergency should be able to be done in less than 24 hours.
I would have set up for the largest generator that could fit in a 40ft shipping container, and a second container with fuel to be set on top for gravity feed of fuel. Gen-set could then be trucked, heloed, or for some sites barged in from anywhere off site. One truck for each container, and either a crane or the helo to set them in place, then all that is needed is to hook them up.
Even now, that keeps them from some timely and very obvious responses to this mess.
They claimed the plug-ins were wrong. Nonsense, any competent line-side electrician could have jumpered the cables in a couple of hours.
Bottom line, TEPCO sat on the problem and tried to fix it onsite for over 16 hours before asking for help from anyone.
I touched on this a couple of weeks ago on another thread.
We have military installations on the island of Japan, and the US military doesn’t go anywhere without a bevy of engineers.
I have to believe that the US military could have transported and have had power restored to these pumps within 6-8 hours.
Did the Japanese not reach out to the Americans in those initial hours? Did no American in the power structure of the US government reach out to Japan?
If ever there was a disaster needing the capabilities of the US government, this was it.
Did Obama sleep through his 3AM call?
Splicing the cables would be the easy part, Many of the US military generators would have had problems in that they were set for North American standard 60 HZ AC, and the Japanese equipment was designed for 50 HZ. How severe these issues would have been depends on the equipments tolerance for differing HZ, Amperage and voltage. Thus I would have thought use the US heavy lift capacity to bring in Japanese emergency generators from elsewhere in Japan. The wrecked generators should have been a standard size available in most Japanese industrial areas. While custom Gen sets are possible, I would view them as a lot of excess work compared to using an off the shelf item.
Did Obama sleep through his 3AM call?
Sleep through it, no. IIRC he attempted to make the Japanese government agree to his terms on their use of future nuclear power before he would agree to aid them. In other words he tried to coerce a crippled ally, they rejected his “offer”.
It was my understanding that they did bring in transportable generators -- but the electrical connectors didn't match up.
They are an electric power company, for goodness' sake! Why is it they couldn't figure out how to strip the insulation off of wires and clamp them together -- like they do all the time on transmission lines?
Sounds like mental paralysis -- or union jurisdiction problems.
But, I think it is important to remember in discussing this the scope of the total disaster. Government, military and civilian chains of command were probably overwhelmed with the requests for help and resources in dealing with the quake, tsunami, and nuclear plant damage. And because of such widespread damage, just communicating the situations and problems to appropriate agencies was likely quite a challenge in itself.
Can't image how much time was lost in just trying to understand what they were dealing with and where their priorities should be directed. As many have pointed out, culture structure and protocols may have been a major impediment to fast response and creative solutions.
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