Thanks for the generator details. I was curious how that happened.
This may well go down as the worst engineering design disaster in
history. Also, I'd never heard of "The Black Swan" and have just added
it to my Amazon wish list.
Chuck Norcutt
On 3/14/2011 2:15 AM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
> That would make sense but it may be at the cost of other
> functionality - I'm too tired to check. But making it the default -
> dumb stuff. I was listening to a story about the Japanese tsunami on
> the radio an hour or so ago. It appears that the designers of one of
> those nuclear (nooculer if you're murkin :-)) power plants built a
> big concrete sea wall to protect the plant. The tsunami simply swept
> over the wall and drowned the plant generators which had been
> cleverly positioned just below the wall. This shut down power to the
> cooling system and made it impossible to Scram the reactors. It
> sounds really dumb now but I'll bet it didn't at the time they built
> it. As Nick Taleb said in 'The Black Swan', we are hopeless at risk
> management because we can only anticipate risks that fall within our
> experience. Genuine catastrophes are simply not conceivable for us
> and we are never ready for them. Y'know, er, like it's really dumb to
> built reactors on a coast in an earthquake zone but we'll continue to
> do it because we think that we're smart enough to anticipate all the
> possible problems - and we're not. Andrew Fildes
> afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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