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Clive et al, My comments are embedded below. Clive's post was shortened; hopefully I didn't remove so much as to weaken his own arguments. On 17 March 2011 08:23, Clive Dilnot <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > [...] > My original post asked two questions. The first was open—what does the > word “design” mean when it is used in connection with the design of (or > what I would call the configuration) of the Japanese nuclear plants? > What is “design” here? What is that in the nuclear plant or as a quality > of the plant, that causes commentators to talk of its ‘design”? There's 2 questions here. 1. What did "design" mean to those who designed & built the reactor (commissioned in '71, I believe, the design probably dates to the mid-1960's). Things were different then. Answering this question will help understand the context in which the reactor was originally developed. We cannot expect modern thinking and sensibilities to apply to a time that long ago. 2. What does the "design" of the reactor facility mean to us today and how does that modern viewpoint help bring out shortcomings of the thinking 50 years ago? I cannot answer either of these questions in any general sense, for lack of information. But I'd be very interested to read well-documented accounts that do (try to) answer them. In my *personal* view, "to design a nuclear power reactor" means to develop the plan for a facility that uses nuclear fission to generate a constant supply of electricity safely and within economic contraints. I guess the devil is in the details. > > The second question, which asked "to what extent does the failure of the > Fukushima plant throw up the generic failure of purely technological > models of design with respect to the construction, operation and > implication(s) of complex systems?" was both a provocation and a deeply > serious question. This was not aimed at individual engineers, for whom I > have enormous sympathy, but at certain view of “how to design.” So the > intent of the second question was not to skewer some poor bastard for > not anticipating a 10-metre Tsunami (though let us say this is a nuclear > plant in a zone prone to earthquakes, one that has experienced no less > than 308 separate quakes within 200 miles in the last 11 days alone). > Above all, it was not to suggest that the ‘design profession could have > done it better.’ They would not. My understanding was that they designed those particular reactors in light of the best earthquake information they had at the time - which is as much as one could ever possibly expect. They accounted for the modes of vibration they'd recorded in previous earthquakes, and as far as that went, the reactors could have withstood them. I need to wax technological here for a moment, because it is the foundation of the argument. The reactors survived the earthquake, and were properly SCRAMed (shut down in a hurry). They were not undergoing the kind of nuclear reactions that occur during operation. The natural decay of the fuel, however, continued. That's what required them to keep cooling the core. But tsunami knocked out multiple redundant systems to ensure that they could keep the cooling systems running. What's more, the tsunami effectively isolated the plant, so they couldn't run new power lines into the facility. I think this was the straw that broke the camel's back. If the tsunami had *only* knocked out all the electrical systems, I believe they could have easily run new power before the 6-hr battery supply expired. It was the isolation caused by the tsunami that caused the real problems. All this is to indicate that what happened was a "perfect storm" the odds of which are quite astronomical. The practicalities of developing any product are such that at some point one must say: we can't design for *every* eventuality, so we'll design for those of some suitable combination of most-probably and most-severe. I don't think *anyone* could have done it better. Not against the earthquake/tsunami/isolation combo. Whether such a 3-pack of phenomena could have reasonably been predicted and designed for, only time will tell. I'm sure there'll be plenty of investigation and analysis in months to come. Hopefully we'll all get to see it. > > But we are, in all likelihood, facing a nuclear crisis. I disagree. Could you please indicate the evidence you have for this? > [...] The real crisis > then is the political one. It usually is. > > But in relation to Fukushima we also have a technical crisis—a failure > of technical back-up systems and of management and organization that has > put on the table the prospect of a nuclear meltdown. Here, we disagree. Every system - natural or artificial - will fail eventually, given sufficient stress. I really can't see how *any* system could have withstood the power of the events, and I don't even see how they could have been predicted to any degree. Again, I don't discount the possibility that there was a human failure of some sort. But I think, under the circumstances, the failure of the technical systems was totally normal given the severity of the events. > > It is irrelevant that, even in worse case scenarios, “only” the local > population may be affected. Such scientific common-sense is useful to > put the situation in context; it allays the apocalyptic—at least for the > moment. But it also misses the point: the “meaning” of Fukushima is not > in the number of eventual casualties but in the sense that here is a > crisis that should not be occurring; and it should not be occurring (the > public in this case intelligently perceives) because if you are dealing > with technologies which have potential for disaster on the scale of the > nuclear then you had damn well better make sure that you think through > the consequences and implications of deploying this technology. I'm not sure I get the use of "should" in this paragraph. There are lots of things that shouldn't - in the sense of wishing/hoping that they don't - happen. I get the sense, at the end of the paragraph, that Clive is suggesting particular care should be paid to nuclear energy due to its inherent dangers. Surely, nuclear power is not anything to take lightly. But there's plenty of other things currently doing very real damage to people and the environment - WAY more damage that nuclear power has caused so far, or can reasonably be expected to cause, based on the performance of facilities around the world so far. > > In the case of Fukushima, disaster is the making not because of an > “unexpected event” (earthquakes and thus Tsunami in this part of > Japan are no more “unexpected” than icebergs were in the North Atlantic > in April 1912) but because of a lack of resilience in the total system > of which Fukushima is only one small part. You'll get no argument from me that the "system" that includes Fukushima was insufficiently resilient to take the combo of the earthquake, the tsunami, and the resulting isolation of the plant. The problem is that I don't accept that a sufficiently resilient system is at all possible. > > The objective engineering response to this situation is not to lament > the impossibility of the individual engineer thinking through every > possibility—nor to advocate bigger walls. For what it's worth, there are very few engineers in my acquaintance who lament thus. > It is to ask a question about > the system that, in effect, short-changed (doubtless on economic > grounds) the conceptual procedure of thinking through the resilience of > the system. (And which on another level short-changed also the capacity > of local management to respond well to theshort-changing that lead them to concoct ad-hoc solutions (hoses of > seawater as coolant) rather than, from the first moment, focusing also > on re-connecting power, the loss of which is the real or at least the > immediate “culprit” in this scenario. It is this failure that has seen > today pathetic (and failing attempts) to drop water by helicopter over > the plant, 90% of which cannot possibly reach its intended target, and > which (as I write) is about to see attempts by water cannon to spray > water on the reactors! Such ad-hoc responses are perhaps courageous, in > a Heath-Robinson kind of way, but they are also evidence of severe > systemic failure. Again, I do not believe it is possible to "think through the resilience" of the system sufficiently to have predicted and avoided this failure. This particular chain of events was astronomically unlikely. There are I'm sure thousands of other equally astronomical yet devastating chains of events. It's intractable to solve for them all. One way to deal with such problems is to re-conceptualize it. One re-conceptualization of this matter is to stop using nuclear power. I would argue strenuously against that position for all kinds of reasons that don't pertain here & now. Another re-conceptualization is based on recognizing that the usual uranium-based reactor is NOT the only way to go; indeed, it's probably not even the best way to go. I personally really like thorium-based reactors because they produce far less nuclear waste, thorium is something like 1000x more plentiful than uranium, the waste of thorium reactors cannot be weaponized, and in fact many of the waste products of thorium fission are extremely valuable "medical isotopes" that are already in very short supply. And don't underestimate the fire-hose approach. See, for instance, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-21/latest-reactor-status-at-japan-s-stricken-fukushima-nuclear-plant-table.html. > [...] > One issues here is political. Should private companies be allowed to run > such plants—when as we’ve seen spectacularly this year with the BP > case—the companies instinct is both to cut costs to the bone and to > abandon as rapidly as possible the site of its disasters? The point here > is that such questions today demand to be brought into the total “design” > process. Yet part of what we are talking about here is that while we are > certainly talking in some ways here about “design” (this word referring > to a configurational choice amongst alternatives) “design” is itself a > completely inadequate term (with all the wrong associations) for the > kind of process which needs to be undertaken. So we come back again to > the question: what does it mean to “design” such plants? And what does > the answer to that question tell us about the responsibilities and work > of “design” as a whole? Refer to my personal sense of what it means to design a nuclear facility. It works for me just fine. Having said that, I do agree that designerly thinking would be beneficial to the development of the larger systems of which nuclear facilities are components. I think of the ultimate goal of designing as the achievement of balance. A nuclear facility plays a role in the larger system that contains it by shifting the "way things are" in that system in many different ways. Understanding the "forces" that exist within a system, and that are altered by the introduction of something like a nuclear facility, seems like a pretty important first step. > > Clive > > > Clive Dilnot > Professor of Design Studies > School of Art Design History and Theory > Parsons School of Design, > New School University. > Room #731 > 2 E 16th St > New York NY 10011 > e [log in to unmask] > Cheers. Fil -- Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng. Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Ryerson University 350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749 Fax: 416/979-5265 Email: [log in to unmask] http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/