Without adequate cooling, those rods would become hot enough to melt through the steel It was a flawless automatic shutdown, but the radioactive by-products in the reactors' fuel rods continued to generate tremendous amounts of heat. Within 5 seconds, control rods thrust upward into the three operational reactors and stopped the fission reactions. In quivering control rooms, ceiling panels fell open and dust floated down onto instrument panels like snow. on 11 March, the ground beneath the power plant shook and alarms blared. When the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the east coast of Japan, at 2:46 p.m. System Failure: On 11 March, a TEPCO worker photographed the tsunami sweeping into the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station and submerging tanks and cars. By piecing together as best we can the story of what happened during the first 24 hours, when reactor 1 was spiraling toward catastrophe, we hope to facilitate the process of learning-by-disaster. (TEPCO), has only made the situation worse by presenting the Japanese and global public with obfuscations instead of a clear-eyed accounting.Ĭiting a government investigation, TEPCO has steadfastly refused to make workers available for interviews and is barely answering questions about the accident. And in the absence of information, the panicked public began to associate all nuclear power with horror and radiation nightmares. The world's three major nuclear accidents had very different causes, but they have one important thing in common: In each case, the company or government agency in charge withheld critical information from the public. And if workers had been able to vent gases in reactor 1 sooner, the rest of the plant's destruction might well have been averted. Some of these are astonishingly simple: If the emergency generators had been installed on upper floors rather than in basements, for example, the disaster would have stopped before it began. On the other hand, close study of the disaster's first 24 hours, before the cascade of failures carried reactor 1 beyond any hope of salvation, reveals clear inflection points where minor differences would have prevented events from spiraling out of control. RADIATION AND RUIN: Evacuees were checked for radiation in the days after explosions tore the roofs off three reactor buildings. Photos: Christoph Bangert/ LaIF/Redux TEPCO Perrow, a Yale University sociologist, identified the nuclear power plant as the canonical tightly coupled system, in which the occasional catastrophic failure is inevitable. Normal accidents" hypothesis developed by Charles Perrow after Three Mile Island. The interlocked and cascading chain of mishaps seems to be a textbook validation of the “ True, the antinuclear forces will find plenty in the Fukushima saga to bolster their arguments. And in the end the calamity will undoubtedly improve nuclear plant design. The struggle to control the stricken plant, with its remarkable heroism, improvisational genius, and heartbreaking failure, will keep the experts busy for years to come. It was precisely the kind of occurrence that nuclear-plant designers strive to anticipate in their blueprints and emergency-response officials try to envision in their plans. Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, the chain of failures that led to disaster at Fukushima was caused by an extreme event. On 11 March, a tidal wave set in motion a sequence of events that led to meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station, 250 kilometers northeast of Tokyo. Or so it seemed, until officials found themselves grappling with the world's third major accident at a nuclear plant. But with nuclear power, learning by disaster has never really been an option. Millions of people had to die on highways, for example, before governments forced auto companies to get serious about safety in the 1980s. In fact, sometimes it takes more than one. Sometimes it takes a disaster before we humans really figure out how to design something.
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