| ▲ | mpweiher 3 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster. There was another similar plant even closer to the epicenter, and it was hit with a (slightly) higher tsunami crest. It survived basically undamaged and even served as shelter for tsunami refugees. Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. And didn't partially dismantle it to make access easier like what was done in Fukushima. Oh, and for example all the German plants would also have survived essentially unscathed had they been placed in the exact same spot, for a bunch of different reasons. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | scrlk 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Because they had built the tsunami-wall to spec. If you're referring to the Onagawa plant, one engineer (Yanosuke Hirai) pushed for the height of the wall to be increased beyond the original spec: > A nuclear plant in a neighboring area, meanwhile, had been built to withstand the tsunamis. A solitary civil engineer employed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company knew the story of the massive Jogan tsunami of the year 869, because it had flooded the Shinto shrine in his hometown. In the 1960s, the engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, had insisted that the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station be built farther back from the sea and at higher elevation than initially proposed—ultimately nearly fifty feet above sea level. He argued for a seawall to surpass the original plan of thirty-nine feet. He did not live to see what happened in 2011, when forty-foot waves destroyed much of the fishing town of Onagawa, seventy-five miles north of Fukushima. The nuclear power station—the closest one in Japan to the earthquake’s epicenter—was left intact. Displaced residents even took refuge in the power plant’s gym. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/12/06/were-design... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | slightwinder 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Or if you build them there, build them so they can withstand that disaster. You can't build to withstand humans ignorance. You always can argue to do this or that, but if the responsible managers won't approve it, it's all just theory and good hopes. Even worse if the ignorance grows over time; because the last decades it worked out, surely it will work another decade or two... That's why things like nuclear are so problematic, because small neglections can explode into cataclysmic events. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||