Re: [tlug] silicon cash eater

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2017-06-29 21:33 +0900 (Thu), Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:

> And Fukushima is a good example of cost cutting without any concern
> for safety whatsoever.
> 
> Which f***ing idiot would have been so f***ing stupid to put a
> backup diesel generator for emergency cooling on the ground between
> the beach and the plant?

I'm not buying this. My understanding is that the size of the tsunami
wave exceeded their design parameters. Thus you can't call them idiots
for a design that appears to have been adequate to handle the given
design parameters; you can only claim that they were wrong to go with
those design parameters.

> Very evidently, they were more concerned about saving 50.000 to
> 100.000 USD and not concerned with safety at all.

Wrong on two counts. They clearly had some concern about safety; that
they had backup generators at all shows that. And _every_ engineering
decision is about cost-cutting because you can _always_ spend more.
There's a point to this: as a society, every dollar you save in one
place can be spent on safety somewhere else, or spent on things more
important than the additional safety. We're prefectly happy as a
society to live with thousands or tens of thousands of traffic
fatalities every year for the convenience of being allowed to drive
our own automobiles, for example.

> It was blatantly obvious that any flooding from the beach would
> flood the generators where they were....

Sure, but it wasn't blatently obvious that a flood of that level would
happen.

On 2017-06-30 13:34 +0900 (Fri), Benjamin Kowarsch wrote:

On 2017-07-03 09:56 +0800 (Mon), Raymond Wan wrote:

> I'm somewhat late to this discussion...but all this talk about
> Fukushima and Tepco's management failure and we rarely talk about the
> successes.

Ok, let's talk about a success: Fukushima.

When you consider the hundreds or possibly thousands of people that
would have been killed by an equivalant coal-fired power plant over
the course of forty years, it's looking pretty good. (Unless, of
course, you for some reason consider it "okay" to die in a coal mine,
in a vehicle carrying coal to the power plant, of lung disease caused
by the emissions of a coal plant, or whatever.)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch