Panic Selling on the Nikkei

It is easy to be smart after the fact. Not so easy is to anticipate everything.

I realize that, however, I am also aware of a few of the intricacies of the Japanese social order.

I can practically guarantee that some junior engineer involved with facilities design on this plant questioned, to himself, as to weather putting the generators at ground level was a good idea and anticipated a water problem in the event of a tsunami.

However, in Japanese society, "the nail that sticks out gets pounded down". I have seen this principle in action. This make for a real reluctance to become the nail that sticks out amongst the Japanese. The junior facilities engineer most likely failed to press his case to elevate the generator house based on this principle. He didn't want to be the nail that stuck out. I am sure he now regrets this.

As a result of these dynamics, we now have a stock market and nuclear contagion that threatens to affect me directly.

The idea with building a nuclear plant is to get it right the first time. Hindsight is now worthless. Dave

Engineering is really the art of optimizing trade-offs. They said they thought the generators were safe from a tsunami due to the sea walls, so there were probably other issues that made it seem better to put the generators lower. Perhaps a man-made hill would be more likely to fail in an earthquake. Perhaps placing them higher would make them more prone to typhoon damage. If there is a perfect solution to an engineering problem, it is not called a problem.

The systems of a nuclear plant will never be designed perfectly. In my mind the only safe way to make a nuclear plant is to have a reaction process that does not go out of control even if EVERYTHING fails. There are new designs that might meet this criteria. The pebble bed design has some promise but research reactors have had some minor radiation releases that show every technology has un-anticipated pitfalls. The key, I think, is to make everything as safe a practical, but inherently limit the worst possible case.

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Dave, can you point out the diesel generator towers at the San Onofre site, please?

--Winston