tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9140612503596105113.post3294075276840371457..comments2023-04-07T14:21:19.083+03:00Comments on Decisions and Info-Gaps: No-Failure Design and Disaster Recovery: Lessons from FukushimaYakov Ben-Haimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10765902456064490854noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9140612503596105113.post-14967169591222710272011-08-24T15:29:28.813+03:002011-08-24T15:29:28.813+03:00Everybody is behaving irrationally.
In Japan, the...Everybody is behaving irrationally.<br /><br />In Japan, they built Nuclear Reactors in very high risk land, prone to huge eathquakes and even huger tsunamis, and then Fukushima happened.<br /><br />In Germany, the exact opposite happened. While most or all locations are extremely low risk there, they decided, in mindless panic, to eliminate all their nuke plants (which means far, far more pollution, not to mention far more e3xpensive energy)<br /><br />In the US, the utterly insignificant INcident (not even an accident!) at TMI in 1979 resulted in no new Nuke plants built in 30 years!<br /><br />Only France got it right, and even exports nuke-produced electricity to its neighbors!<br /><br />I also expect China to act rationally and build as many nuke plants as it can in safe locations.Tassos Perakisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9140612503596105113.post-8227399422882400542011-08-19T01:25:27.969+03:002011-08-19T01:25:27.969+03:00‘Passive defense’ is a key concept for maintaining...‘Passive defense’ is a key concept for maintaining and enhancing earthquake (or disaster) resilience of structures. Stoppers, fail-safe mechanisms, specification-based (not performance-based) design concepts, etc. may be examples of passive defense. If the electric batteries had been moved to higher levels in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (this action is passive action), the catastrophic event might not have occurred.<br /><br />Recently the terminology of ‘out of scenario’ is often used in Japan after the Tohoku earthquake of March 11 for expressing the issue of extremely low probability. A scientific writer in USA uses the words of Black Swan. However it depends on the knowledge or understanding of users whether the event is the Black Swan or not.<br /><br />In the field of building structural engineering under severe uncertainty, three important concepts are getting strong interests recently. The first one is redundancy, the second one is robustness and the third one is resilience. If a building structure is redundant (sufficient safety factor or sufficient mechanism for fail-safe), the building structure must be robust. Furthermore if a building structure is robust, the building structure must be resilient for disasters. A more redundant structure is strongly desired after recent catastrophic natural disasters and terrorism<br /><br />The most important one is to narrow the range of Black Swan and reduce the possibility of catastrophic events, desirably to zero. It is hoped that structural engineers concentrate their skills to this theme by creating new kinds of ‘passive defense’.Takewakinoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9140612503596105113.post-113368536312022822011-08-17T23:58:36.793+03:002011-08-17T23:58:36.793+03:00Another case where one cannot get insurance (excep...Another case where one cannot get insurance (except from the government) is building on a floodplain. Recent experience on the Missouri River is reminding people why - even the biggest reservoir system in the world can be overwhelmed by sufficient rainfall and snowmelt! What makes the Missouri particularly interesting is that the magnitude of the flood storage ability is reduced in order to ensure water storage to support navigational traffic. Guaranteeing navigation reduces the magnitude of runoff that can be safely stored.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16749417303643546408noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9140612503596105113.post-69283006712493209972011-08-16T00:16:29.637+03:002011-08-16T00:16:29.637+03:00Insurance companies usually mitigate this problem ...Insurance companies usually mitigate this problem by penalizing designs that can cost them a lot of money. So the fact that insurance companies won't undertake to insure nuclear reactors can teach us something.Rafi Haftkahttp://www.mae.ufl.edu/haftkanoreply@blogger.com