There were inspection issues, not safety issues:
On March 2, 2011, just days before the start of the current earthquake catastrophe, Japan's nuclear regulators lobbed accusations of mass negligence against Tepco. It alleged that Tepco had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant, one of the sites of the current catastrophe, including central cooling system elements in the six reactors, and spent fuel pools that hadn't been inspected according to regulations.They become safety issues if, when the aftermath is studied, it turns out that a piece of equipment for which an inspection was skipped broke because of a defect that would have been detected by the inspections.
Note that they had 19 inspections missing at their #2 plant, and it had no difficulties. And at this time, there is no evidence presented that the problems at #1 are directly related to equipment that would have been found defective had it been inspected.
My state requires car safety inspections. Sometimes people wait too long, and they will get tickets for failure to have safety inspections. However, most of their cars are perfectly safe, they just don't have the papers to prove it. Of more importance, most of the items inspected are things that fail "hard", like lights; you can get a car safety inspection, and two days later your headlight is burned out. The inspection does little to make you "safer", unless you completely ignore all maintenance on your car and drive around with red warning lights.
or perhaps you missed how all of this could have been dealt with in the first few hours and they refused to do it.
Even the negative article you linked doesn't make that assertion. It alleges that they could have reacted quicker, quotes some outsiders suggesting the slow reaction was because they wanted to save the plant, and says they "considered" pumping water in earlier.
But it doesn't offer any proof as to why they didn't pump water in earlier; it says the engineers claim they waited until it was "right" to do so for plantwide security, and doesn't say that any engineers RECOMMENDED starting earlier. Saying they "considered" is to say it was on a list of things they could do; we consider and reject ideas all the time, for many reasons, often because they simply are NOT the best ideas.
Of course, it is easy to look back at the consequences, and see how certain rejected ideas might have worked better than what was done. But in this case, we have no evidence presented that it would have even been POSSIBLE to start injecting water earlier than they did. It could well be that the best course of action was to put all their resources toward getting the pumps running again, only to fail because of things they hadn't realised about failures they hadn't anticipated.
It is remarkable that people like you pretend that years and years and years of a corrupt climate and engineers that did not have enough knowledge as admitted by TEPCO had no bearing on this incident.
I don't "pretend" anything. I don't even mean to "assert" anything, or "protest", or "conclude". I will go so far as to say that the posted article does not provide evidence that the current problems at the reactor are related to any of the previous scandals, or that the engineers at the plant had inadequate knowledge to handle the disaster. If evidence is provided, it won't "shock" me, nor will it require me to change my opinion, since my OPINION is that we don't know yet, not that it isn't true.
Often an argument that a conclusion is jumping the gun is confused with an argument against a conclusion. I have a history of "not jumping the gun" on many different topics here at FR. That means I'm sometimes behind the curve because sometimes people guess right, and sometimes it turns out that things are proven eventually.
Anyway, the biggest problem at the site SEEMS to be the spent fuel in the reactor 4 pool; (and yes, I'm using non-conclusive terms here, this is best-guess-work) the major radiation leaks seems to come from exposed rods due to a lowered water level in that pool. But that pool was completely UNRELATED to the issue of the three working reactors and whether they waited too long to inject water. #4 wasn't even running, and had no reactor fuel. They weren't expecting a hydrogen explosion there because they didn't release hydrogen from the reactor because the reactor was not fueled.
So, from where I sit, it appears that the biggest source of radioactivity, and the largest problem from the site, had nothing to do with their decision on when to inject seawater into reactor 1, 2, or 3.
Where is the diesel generator located for Reactor 2???
Give me the exact location.
Btw, did you miss the post I made from the physics forum about protocol in this situation??? Or do you just think he doesn’t know what he is talking about and is lying about his experience?
Btw, there is an article about the debacle over opening the vents.
Perhaps you missed it.