OK, I read both of those reports. I wouldn’t categorize either of them as a “vent debacle”. IN fact, I don’t see there, nor have I seen information elsewhere, that indicates that waiting to vent #1 caused any trouble.
The delay in venting didn’t cause the hydrogen explosion — it was the venting that did that, along with inadequate ventilation because of lack of power. That was one of the dangers of venting.
The danger of NOT venting would have been a reactor explostion, and we didn’t have one of those. #2 may have cracked open, but that may have been due to aftershock, and it never got to the overpressure that #1 did.
Further, I don’t see the discussion of how it took so long to do things as a sign of gross incompetence. I’ve been through enough fire drills to see this kind of thing. You hope people can be heroic in those situations, and sometimes they are, but often they are just human. People act with limited knowledge — later you look back and see that pieces of information were available, but not all together. It’s much easier after looking at all the pieces to understand.
How would they know for sure they needed to fly in a diesel generator, when all their generators were working? How could they know for sure that their auxillary power trucks couldn’t make it to the site? That the wires were not long enough?
They should have known ALL of that. They COULD have known all of that. But it doesn’t take gross negligence to “NOT” know that. It’s just how things happen during emergencies.
And how do we know they had an emergency generator that could be flown in? How do we know they could have hooked it up in time to get the pumps going again? It would be nice if they had asked for that right away, and it would have stopped the problems. But I don’t see that as gross negligence.
Again, watch the Apollo 13 movie; you see the institutional difficulties, and that was a resounding success story for how to manage a crisis. We have a lot more examples that are not. They actually hesitated to take one step they thought might help, because it would mean they couldn’t land on the moon. Looking back, that was an absurd worry, but at that moment, they hadn’t institutionalized the realization that the mission was dead.
Likewise, you’d like them to have known that the reactors were doomed, and inject water earlier. But remember, the reactors were NOT doomed. They survived the earthquake. They even survived the tsunami, they simply needed enough power to run their backup systems. They thought their plan was going to succeed — they had the power trucks coming, and that was the plan. the Batteries were keeping the situation under control, they would have a replacement for the batteries before the batteries ran dead, and then they could get their generators running again and everything would be fine.
You are asking them to go from THAT thought, to “let’s destroy 15 billion dollars worth of power plant” in a matter of hours. And yes, that is what they had to do, but is it really unconscionable that they couldn’t make that kind of decision in that circumstance? SOME people were making that decision, but because of the devastation, those leaders couldn’t get into a position to communicate that effectively.
As the one article noted — you can’t order the destruction of 15 billion of assets owned by stockholders by an unsecure cell phone with no verification.
I guess a lot of our disagreement is a matter of interpretation of the severity of the incompetence. I see multiple mistakes made, but understand those mistakes, and see how normal humans, trying their best, could make those mistakes, while you at least to me suggest that only corrupt people who don’t care about anything but their own money could have made these mistakes.
It is a lot easier to assume that bad things happen because people are bad. Then you don’t have to deal with the possibility that bad things can happen even when everybody is really trying to do the right thing.
I really am not sure how you can claim this vent debacle..and it was one...had no bearing.
But whatever...
There was a known venting issue with that design. Did they do the retrofit. Wouldn’t surprise if they really didn’t do it.
http://www.tipnews.info/breaking_news/NDcwNjY=/2011/03/18/us_japan_quake_company_aig
I believe this guy
http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3225300&postcount=2535
It really shouldn’t have been that hard for the CEO and the Chairman to understand that the earthquake and tsunami had devastated the landscape and DUH...the generators might have a problem getting there.
But go ahead and give them a pass
I don’t. Too much scandal at the hands of Katsumata. I personally believe there is a good possibility that his resignation was a token resignation because of the huge scandal and that the CEO went missing in action so Katsumata could take control over the disaster.