Who Would Have Guessed?
In comments about the Fukushima problems, Badtux and I have a running dark joke about the plant being run by Moe-san, Curley-san, and Larry-san [look up the Three Stooges is you don’t understand]. I’m guilty of starting this [see Number 7] in reference to an earlier nuclear problem caused by three Japanese workers enriching uranium using “milk pails” [stainless steel buckets {pronounced BUK-ET}] that resulted in a chain reaction. It is a dark and un-PC bit of humor that turns out to be closer to the truth than we expected.
Ms Ex-Pat at Corrente reports on a rather disturbing New York Times article that indicates that almost 9 out of 10 people working at Japanese nuclear facilities are day-laborers. The guys who accidentally set off the chain reaction at the nuclear fuel facility may have been using the same type of pail to actually milk cows the week before they began enriching uranium.
Apparently trained nuclear workers are expensive and want benefits, so the nuclear industry fills a lot of their jobs by hiring temporary workers. Imagine a TEPCO van pulling into a Home Depot parking lot at 5AM and loading up.
Nuclear energy is too dangerous to be left in the hands of people who are only interested in profits. People keep referring to these problems as Black Swans, but they are all quite predicable. We keep finding out that events that “No one could have imagined …”, were not only imagined, but rather stridently warned against.
5 comments
Well, that’s the whole thing in a nutshell, isn’t it? In theory, I’m in favor of using nuclear power of some sort. Unfortunately, I also think that only a fool would trust a typical modern corporation to run such.
PJ, there are a lot of reactor in use in the military, and they have back-ups of back-ups. I don’t doubt that military reactors can be cooled manually if necessary, just like aircraft landing gear and a lot of other gear designed with combat in mind. The A-10 can land safely with only 1 engine, 1 of 2 tails, 1½ wings, and both hydraulic systems out.
The things is, in the nuclear area, you can’t near anything nuclear in the military without a clearance and specific training. TEPCO is hiring farm workers and other day laborers. That is an invitation to a disaster.
Modern corporate executives don’t have any idea what their corporation actually does, although they usually look up some key words to sound intelligent.
One of my oldest friends is a nuclear Physicist (who studied at Oxford in the 50’s & worked until mid 60’s at what was then AWRE, then UKAEA at Aldermaston (AWE Aldermaston). In a curious Coincidence, I became friends about a decade after meeting my first friend with another ex-pat Brit who (when comparing notes on our relative early *hush* careers) that he also worked at Aldermaston. 🙂
I remember a conversation some years ago with them both, and my first friend with the PhD said that it was a tragedy that Nuclear Energy couldn’t be trusted to private companies or most Governments, and that the World would learn to regret it. He got out of the entire area of science & industry long ago (he has a conscience, one of the things I admire about him) and moved into a completely different field. I think he has always been disappointed that he couldn’t pursue his chosen field. He said that if properly maintained, a well designed plant could last safely for a very long time. He said that a small plant would cost roughly AU$10-20 mill/year just in preventative maintenance (and this was over a decade ago), and when profit is the primary motivator, maintenance is always the first casualty. One of the projects he was involved in before leaving the field, was in dealing with nuclear waste. He said until that is fully solved, it’s non-viable. He used to joke that the US had found the simplest way to deal the whole issue of disposing of spent fuel rods… turn them into ammunition, start a war, and make it all someone else ‘s problem. 🙂 Except that of course… it’s not a joke.
Profit. The greatest invention of Man that will destroy Man. 🙂 Poetic justice really, and I do so love irony! 😈
BTW, my Physicist friend came to Aus as part of the Blue Streak IRBM project that was being tested here. After spending some rather dissatisfying years in the UK, he decided to return here (and married a woman he’d met). 🙂
The whole Blue Streak debacle was one of the two final nails in the coffin of Aus being a staunch supporter of being part of the Monarchy. (We were royally screwed out of some rather large cancellation payments when the UK cancelled Blue Streak). 😉 And then there was the whole debacle of massive amounts of radiation at the Maralinga (Woomera, SA) nuclear weapon test sites (about 3,500 sq KM of land was contaminated and the winds carried it much farther), that harmed and killed many Aussies, and especially the Indigenous population of the area). The cost of cleaning up the majority of the area was well in excess of AU$100 million (in 1999 dollars) including millions in compensation payouts over the years. So, we know what it’s like.
The cost of disposal has to be part of the overall costs, and business doesn’t want to do that. They never want to include, or even calculate, the cost of what they are doing to the world at large or the local community, because that would be an expense that would reduce profits.
The same rules apply to governments that are “run like businesses” – they don’t feel any responsibility for the messes they create. Privatize the profits and socialize the losses – it’s what they always do.
You can run a nuclear plant safely under less than ideal conditions, as demonstrated by the reactors on US subs and aircraft carriers, but it requires trained and dedicated people, plus what industry would consider “over-engineering’. When something is subject to battle damage, it really needs to be tough, and “good enough” doesn’t cut it. If these things were constructed and maintained like those on an aircraft carrier, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because they wouldn’t have failed under the stresses they would have been subjected to by the earthquake and tsunami. [The military would have built the plant inland to avoid the whole tsunami problem of building on the coast. It would have involved pumping stations to get the water to the plant, but that wouldn’t matter.]
That whole coast is littered with markers put up after previous tsunamis, so the risk was well enough known to be carved on ancient stones, which makes putting back-up generators in basements a total engineering failure. Living along a coast line I can tell you that the only thing you find by digging down is the water table. Even without the tsunami, they had to have had water problems in those underground areas since the place was first built; and building it would have required constant pumping for the concrete to set.