For some experts, the underestimate of the tsunami threat at Fukushima is frustratingly reminiscent of the earthquake — this time with no tsunami — in July 2007 that struck Kashiwazaki, a Tokyo Electric nuclear plant on Japan’s western coast.. The ground at Kashiwazaki shook as much as two and a half times the maximum intensity envisioned in the plant’s design, prompting upgrades at the plant.
“They had years to prepare at that point, after Kashiwazaki, and I am seeing the same thing at Fukushima,” said Peter Yanev, an expert in seismic risk assessment based in California, who has studied Fukushima for the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department.
There is no doubt that when Fukushima was designed, seismology and its intersection with the structural engineering of nuclear power plants was in its infancy, said Hiroyuki Aoyama, 78, an expert on the quake resistance of nuclear plants who has served on Japanese government panels. Engineers employed a lot of guesswork, adopting a standard that structures inside nuclear plants should have three times the quake resistance of general buildings.
“There was no basis in deciding on three times,” said Mr. Aoyama, an emeritus professor of structural engineering at the University of Tokyo. “They were shooting from the hip...”
The first time the word "tsunami" was used by government about the plants was five years ago. When it did come, the tsunami was over twice as tall as any flood preparations at the Fukushima nuclear facility. Engineers had never taken into account a "worst case scenario." There was an almost cultural refusal to deal with what "might" happen or even react when history showed that Japan had experienced a similar tsunami -- or worse -- in 869.
The Japanese approach, referred to in the field as “deterministic” — as opposed to “probabilistic,” or taking unknowns into account — somehow stuck, said Noboru Nakao, a consultant who was a nuclear engineer at Hitachi for 40 years and was president of Japan’s training center for operators of boiling-water reactors.
“Japanese safety rules generally are deterministic because probabilistic methods are too difficult,” Mr. Nakao said, adding that “the U.S. has a lot more risk assessment methods.”...NYT
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Japan and its economy should come out of the disaster well, surprising though that may seem, says James Surowiecki, business and economics writer for the New Yorker.
...History suggests that, despite the terrifying destruction and the horrific human toll, the long-term impact of the quake on the Japanese economy could be surprisingly small.
That may seem hard to reconcile with the scale and the scope of the devastation. But, as the economists Eduardo Cavallo and Ilan Noy have recently suggested, in developed countries even major disasters “are unlikely to affect economic growth in the long run.” Modern economies, it turns out, are adept at rebuilding and are often startlingly resilient.
In fact, the benefits may help those at the lower end of the economic ladder.
...It’s important to remember that even cities that do successfully rebuild still lose enormous amounts of capital. In that sense, the biggest economic effect of disasters is to redistribute resources rather than create them. Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It’s remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months. But that doesn’t make the devastation any less real. Modern economies are good at recovering from disasters, but it’s a tragedy that they’re getting so much practice.
It would be interesting to see just how well that holds up in New Orleans.
