Re: The bigger picture..
@GrumpyRob : "Look, a squirrel!"
Please don't do that.
Boeing/FAA got it very very wrong. So did TEPCo/NISA (those are the names you didn't mention re Fukushima). Come to think of it, various companies (and *people*) involved in the precursors to the Grenfell Tower tragedy were also variously guilty of complacency, incompetence, negligence, corruption, and other downright criminality.
There was, in each of these cases, money to be made by shortcuts and in particular by "light touch regulation". And what systemic changes are to be made to reduce the chances of similar things happeing in future?
Rules, like taxes, are for the little people.
"Reminds me of the Japanese tsunami and all concentration on the dangers of nuclear power - ... the real culprit, who seems to have got away relatively unscathed, was the plant operator."
The company in question would be TEPCo (Tokyo Electric Power Company?) who indeed had had their wrists slapped pre-Fukushima for a number of operational failures (the usual stuff, missed maintenance etc, and failures to implement required construction changes - e.g. move critical systems to higher levels so they'd be above foreseeable flood levels, rather than below them).
Further reading: see e.g. a 2012 white paper from the Carnegie Endowment on "why Fukushima was preventable", well worth a read:
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361
...
The Fukushima accident was, however, preventable. Had the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and Japan’s regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), followed international best practices and standards, it is conceivable that they would have predicted the possibility of the plant being struck by a massive tsunami. The plant would have withstood the tsunami had its design previously been upgraded in accordance with state-of-the-art safety approaches.
The methods used by TEPCO and NISA to assess the risk from tsunamis lagged behind international standards in at least three important respects:
* Insufficient attention was paid to evidence of large tsunamis inundating the region surrounding the plant about once every thousand years.
* Computer modeling of the tsunami threat was inadequate. Most importantly, preliminary simulations conducted in 2008 that suggested the tsunami risk to the plant had been seriously underestimated were not followed up and were only reported to NISA on March 7, 2011.
* NISA failed to review simulations conducted by TEPCO and to foster the development of appropriate computer modeling tools.
At the time of the accident, critical safety systems in nuclear power plants in some countries, especially in European states, were—as a matter of course—much better protected than in Japan. Following a flooding incident at Blayais Nuclear Power Plant in France in 1999, European countries significantly enhanced their plants’ defenses against extreme external events. Japanese operators were aware of this experience, and TEPCO could and should have upgraded Fukushima Daiichi.
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