With all of the disarray in the nuclear village of Japan, there had to be a story of someone doing something right. I finally found one: Tōhoku Electric Power Company, called Tōho Den, which is located in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, which runs the Onagawa nuclear power plant.
Why did the Onagawa NPP survive the disaster of March 11? It experienced the highest ground shaking of all of the NPP in Japan and also survived a 13m tsunami.
The story begins in 1968 when Hirai Yanosuke joined the costal planning committee for the construction of the Onagawa NPP. Hirai-san was a former VP at Tōho Den and a former head of technology research at the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry. He died in 1986.
Hirai-san was apparently the only person on the entire project to push for the 14.8-meter breakwater. Many of his colleagues said that 12 meters would be sufficient, and they derided Hirai-san’s proposal as excessive. Hirai-san’s authority and drive, however, eventually prevailed, and Tōhoku Electric spent the extra money to build the 14.8m tsunami wall. Some 40 years later, on March 11, 2011, the 13m tsunami struck the coast at Onagawa. Continue reading →
On March 19th, 2012, I gave a presentation at the Pacific Basin Nuclear Power Conference in Pusan, Korea.
In that presentation I used a slide from the ANS Summer meeting in 2011. This slide indicated that a study by TEPCO in 2006 showed that the recurrence frequency of a tsunami greater than 5.7m was higher than 1/10,000 years.
The slide depicts a recurrence frequency of about 1/400 years.
I was absolutely wrong to use this slide. The information I was given that the slide was about Fukushima Daiichi was incorrect. I did not verify the source of the slide.
The prediction of 1/400 in the slide was based on the location of Yamada in Iwate-ken on the Sanriku coast. Please understand that the coastline in Sanriku is completely different than the coast on the Sendai Plain, where Fukushima Daiichi is located. The coast on Sanriku has a completely different topography and the tsunami effects historically are amplified by the hundreds of small inlets, coves, and bays which proliferate Sanriku and focus the tsunami. For example, even if one believes that the height of the tsunami was 14m, as reported by TEPCO, the height of the tsunami on the Sanriku coast exceeded 26m.
One must be very careful to make probabilistic inferences only from data which comes from comparable sources. The Sanriku Coast is another world in comparison to the Sendai Plain.
On March 19th, at the Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference in Busan, Korea, Woody was a guest speaker on a special panel session, ” Special Panel Discussion I: Fukushima Accident, Issues and Lessons”.
From left to right: Kondo-sensei; Dr. Richard Clegg, Director of Nuclear Lloyd's Register; Jerzy Grynblat, Nuclear Business Manager Lloyd's Register; Popeye
In January, 2012, Woody met with Professor Kondo, the Chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, a long time friend and colleague. He took his colleagues from Lloyd’s Register to meet Kondo-sensei as they made a tour of Japan.
Kondo-sensei is a great man; he is truly concerned with nuclear risk and safety, and more importantly, he is concerned for the health and happiness of Japanese people.
Dr. Kondo became a Lecturer, in 1970, then an Associate Professor in 1971 at the Department of Nuclear Engineering, The University of Tokyo. After that, he became a Professor at Nuclear Engineering Research Laboratory, The University of Tokyo in 1984.
He moved to the Department of Nuclear Engineering, The University of Tokyo in 1988 and remained there until his retirement in 2004. In addition, he was appointed to the Director, Research Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo from 1999-2003. After he retired from the University of Tokyo, he became the Chairman, Japan Atomic Energy Commission in 2004.
Kondo-sensei is not a bureaucrat. He is a sharp scientist with a heart of gold. Given his difficult position, his presentation at the ICONE conference in October 2011 was indeed candid. Click here to read it.
Woody Epstein and Philip Watts have released a new presentation on the Tohoku Tsunami on Tsunami Hazard and Risk Assessment
The presentation includes a probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Simulation of Fukushima Daiichi, an explanation of the new PerfectWave® software, the revelation of how many Japanese nuclear power plants are exposed similarly, and the probability of when this should happen again. They also address the difference between a Seismic PRA and a Tsunami PRA.
PerfectWave® is proprietary software of Applied Fluids Engineering, Inc.
Applied Fluids Engineering and its partner LR Scandpower are pleased to announce Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA) consulting and software services. PerfectWave® is the leading state of the art PTHA software modeling tool, producing probability distribution functions for earthquake tsunami, landslide tsunami, and volcanic tsunami to occurrence frequencies as low as 1/1,000,000 per year.
PerfectWave® resolves and focuses the tremendous uncertainty surrounding the largest, rarest, and most hazardous tsunamis, realistically converging on reasonable results for extreme events.
PerfectWave® provides probability distribution functions of tsunami amplitudes and tsunami wavelengths at the source regions, producing exceedance curves for chosen tsunami hazard levels, and setting up deterministic simulations of known frequency.
PerfectWave® employs an established mathematical model, having been called upon since 2004 to produce reliable tsunami projections for the insurance, oil & gas, and nuclear industries.
It’s not widely known, but Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), built an eight storey tribute to itself, Denryokukan, The Hall of Electric Power, The Shibuya area of Tokyo in 1984. There, TEPCO has a two “image characters”: Pluto-kun (as in plutonium) and TEPCO’s generic mascot Denko-chan…both explaining why nuclear power “is good for you.”
Denko-chan, whose name comes from the “den” of electric power (denryoku), the “ko” (child) in which female names so often end, trapping their bearers in a state of eternal childhood, and the generally female diminutive suffix “chan”, can be found everywhere in TEPCO propaganda. Here she is, with finger characteristically a-wagging, admonishing us to “Take care of electricity!”
And here, exhorting us to “Make friends with electricity!”
She features on a bewildering variety of character goods, as they are called in Japan, from pen tops to mobile phone straps, bento lunchboxes to T-shirts. Here she graces a pair of oven mitts:
She has, inevitably, attracted her own fan art, some of it, inevitably, made to sooth salarymen on trains with a look of soft-core porn.
But the undisputed star of the galaxy of TEPCO image characters must be Plutonium-kun. Once upon a time there was Yu-chan, the cartoon mascot of the battered former coal town of Yubari. Japan of course has a massive talent for making anything cute: if you can make coal mining cute, then perhaps you can make anything cute. But never in the darkest visions of creating acceptance for nuclear power could one imagine the odious image of Plutonium-kun. Here, below, we show him and his message. The text is aimed at the very young since their mothers are the largest single group of nuclear power opponents:
Plutonium kun also appeared in a 10-minute anime made about a decade ago by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC) (now the Japan Atomic Energy Agency), an industry body specializing in the development of fast-breeder and advanced thermal reactors, an anime that was swiftly withdrawn in part because of a scene in which Pluto-kun gets his boy pal to drink a glass of liquid plutonium while he sweetly intones that “I’m hardly absorbed by your stomach or intestines and I’m expelled by your body, so in fact I can’t kill people at all”, or when terrorists steal plutonium, “If bad guys dropped plutonium into the ocean, it actually won’t dissolve into the water well and will just fall to the bottom.”
You can view the anime available in its entirety:
And for those who don’t speak Japanese, here is a 30-second clip of Pluto-kun asking his little friend to have a glass of good, cool plutonium and a hot day:
As a side note, the above mentioned PNC changed its name to the Japan Atomic Power Company after its inept management casued the MOX fuel accident at the Monju Fast Breeder Reactor in Tsuruga in 1995. The PNC covered up the extent of the sodium fire by editing videos of the fire from 15 minutes to 5 minutes and excluding the serious damage and footage of the thermometer on the leaking sodium pipes. The incident was obfuscated in reporting to the local government. Of course, they had their little cute promotional character, also: Natriumko.
What the Japanese regulators need now is a new mascot to win back public trust.
Were the earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi “unforeseeable events”? Listen to some technical opinions, including those of Woody and his mentor, Professor Ninokata. Then you make your own judgement.
Woody wrote this white paper for his sponsor at the Tokyo Inst. of Tech., Professor Ninokata, at the end of April, 2011. His analysis preceded those of the NRC, MIT, HSE, and the IAEA.
I gave a presentation at the second Resilience Engineering Symposium on November 6th, 2006. The accompanying article was included in the book, Resilience Engineering: Remaining Sensitive to the Possibilities of Failure, E. Hollnagel, et. al, editors (Ashgate Press), 2007, under the title “Unexampled Events, Resilience, and PRA”.
The words of the presentation have remained the same, but for the changing of “unexampled” to “unforeseen”, and “PRA” to “risk assessment”; the example given in slide #32 has been changed from the Storm King Mountain fire to the hydrogen explosion at Fukushima Daiichi Unit #1.
I have changed the images to reflect the recent events in Japan.
With all of the disarray in the nuclear village of Japan, there had to be a story of someone doing something right. I finally found one: Tōhoku Electric Power Company, called Tōho Den, which is located in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, which runs the Onagawa nuclear power plant.
And here, exhorting us to “Make friends with electricity!”
