Bad industrial accidents have a common thread: They happen when more than one thing goes wrong. At the Fukushima nuclear plant, an earthquake damaged the reactors and a tsunami knocked out the backup generators. At Three Mile Island, a series of small mistakes cascaded into a much larger disaster.
And now a new report shows that PG&E’s Diablo Canyon plant has the same problem: Lots of smaller things are messed up, and they could lead to problems in, say, the inevitable earthquake. A fence could block a fire hose from reaching a burning or overheated reactor. The building that houses fire equipment could collapse. And, according to the Bay Citizen:
The plant’s back-up generators might not be usable during a disaster, because PG&E had not considered how to turn them on under adverse conditions. The generators are all stored in the same spot, which could make them “susceptible to a common made failure because of the similarities in design and location.”
These, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission insists, are just minor problems that can be easily fixed. Maybe so, now that they’ve been identified. But there will be other “minor” problems that haven’t shown up yet (just as the minor problem of blueprints being read backward didn’t show up until the last minute in the plant’s construction), because PG&E has never been serious about plant safety. (If the company was serious, the plant would never have been built on an active earthquake fault.)
That’s the problem with this plant (and with nukes in general). The outcome of an accident is so potentially catastrophic that normal safety measures won’t do. Even extraordinary safety measures won’t do. And Diablo is in a bad place where a predictable event — a strong quake on the Hosgri Fault — could trigger a series of unpredictable events (the fire trucks can’t get out of the shed, the backup generators won’t start, etc.) that could lead to an unimaginable disaster.
Time to shut this thing down.