nuclear-news

Japanese seismologist predicted nuclear earthquake disaster

Disregard for the science extended to a government panel started in 2001 to revise seismic engineering standards for Japan’s nuclear plants, said Ishibashi. He quit the panel after five years of debate that he called rigged and unscientific…..

an article on Hamaoka published in the October 1997 issue of Japan’s Science Journal that reads like a post-mortem of the Fukushima disaster: A major quake could knock out external power to the plant’s reactors and unleash a tsunami that could overrun its 6-meter
defenses, swamping backup diesel generators and leading to loss of cooling and meltdowns.

Vindicated Seismologist Says Japan Still Underestimates Threat to Reactors, Bloomberg, By Jason Clenfield – Nov 21, 2011, Dismissed as a “nobody” by Japan’s nuclear industry, seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi spent two decades watching his predictions of disaster come true: First in the 1995 Kobe earthquake and then at Fukushima. He says the
government still doesn’t get it….
Haruki Madarame, now head of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, from dismissing Ishibashi as an amateur when he warned of a “nuclear earthquake disaster,” a phrase the Kobe University professor coined in 1997. Ishibashi says Japan still underestimates the risk of operating reactors in a country that has about 10 percent of the world’s quakes.

“What was missing — and is still missing — is a recognition of the
danger,” Ishibashi said, seated in a dining room stacked with books in
his house in a Kobe suburb. “I understand we’re not going to shut all
of the nuclear plants, but we should rank them by risk and phase out
the worst.”
Among Japan’s most vulnerable reactors are some of its oldest, built
without the insights of modern earthquake science, Ishibashi said. It
was only in the last four years that Japan Atomic Power Co. recognized
an active fault line running under its reactor in Tsuruga, which
opened in 1970 about 120 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Osaka and
close to a lake that supplies water to millions of people in the
region…..
Minutes of a June 2009 trade ministry meeting on safety at the
Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant show Tokyo Electric and the regulator ignored
scientific findings that emerged after the power station was built.
“We didn’t think the damage would be that significant,” said Isao
Nishimura, a manager at the utility’s nuclear earthquake resistance
technology center, when asked at the meeting why its safety review
omitted studies showing the area had a history of major earthquakes
and tsunami.
Debate was cut short by an official from the Nuclear and Industrial
Safety Agency, according to minutes of the meeting obtained by
Bloomberg News. ….
Disregard for the science extended to a government panel started in
2001 to revise seismic engineering standards for Japan’s nuclear
plants, said Ishibashi. He quit the panel after five years of debate
that he called rigged and unscientific…..
“The nuclear industry has tended to give you a license and then once
you have that license you are deemed safe,” said Norm Abrahamson, a
seismologist at the University of California at Berkeley and an
adviser at Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the state’s biggest utility.
“Nuclear plants are such huge investments that operators need some
assurance of getting their money back,” Abrahamson said. “They’re
looking for what they would call regulatory stability, but regulatory
stability and scientific change don’t go hand in hand.”….
an article on Hamaoka published in the October 1997 issue of Japan’s
Science Journal that reads like a post-mortem of the Fukushima
disaster: A major quake could knock out external power to the plant’s
reactors and unleash a tsunami that could overrun its 6-meter
defenses, swamping backup diesel generators and leading to loss of
cooling and meltdowns.
When the local prefecture questioned industry experts about
Ishibashi’s paper, the response was that he didn’t need to be taken
seriously.
Ishibashi a ‘Nobody’
“In the field of nuclear engineering, Mr. Ishibashi is a nobody,”
Madarame said in a 1997 letter to the Shizuoka Legislature. Madarame,
then a professor at the University of Tokyo school of engineering, is
now in charge of nuclear safety in the country.
Requests made to Madarame’s office in October for an interview on his
current views of Ishibashi’s work were declined…..
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-21/nuclear-regulator-dismissed-seismologist-on-japan-quake-threat.html

November 23, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, safety