| ▲ | mpweiher 3 days ago | |
That Tsunami also knocked out most of the Tsunami walls it encountered, because it was so much bigger than expected. Nevertheless, a nearby power plant of the same design survived a slightly higher crest than at Fukushima unscathed and even served as an emergency shelter for Tsunami victims. That plant had always had the higher wall due to one engineer who insisted, and Fukushima actually had a natural barrier that was higher, but lowered during construction for convenience. And TEPCO dragged their feet on increasing the height to the new norm that had recently been made mandatory. My understanding is that this is one of the reasons TEPCO got dinged. And even with all that, a German reactor, for example, would have remained undamaged due to various mandatory safety features even without a sufficiently high tsunami wall. For example, multi-sited and bunkered diesel generators, so no flooding. Also Hydrogen recombinators, so none of those lovely hydrogen explosions that blew the roofs off. But of course Germany had to shut off its nuclear plants due to the regular occurring 1000-year Tsunamis in Germany that German plants would have survived. We're crazy. Oh, and still exactly 0 radiation deaths from Fukushima, and no measurable health impact expected. All health effects, including deaths were due to the unnecessary evacuation. And not just unnecessary in hindsight, this was known beforehand, gut officials panicked. Did I mention that Japan is restarting their reactors and considers nuclear an essential part of their future energy strategy, as it is the cheapest baseload power source? The monetary cost of importing Gas exceeds even the vastly inflated cleanup and compensation costs (due to the unnecessary evacauations) by at last an order of magnitude. And of course the health impact of those fossil fuel plants during normal operations is higher than that of the nuclear accident. | ||