Synolakis and Kânoğlu report that the Tokyo Electric Power Co. One set was located in a basement, and the others at 10 and 13 meters above sea level - inexplicably and fatally low, Synolakis said. “What doomed Fukushima Daiichi was the elevation of the EDGs (emergency diesel generators),” the authors wrote.

Unable to cool itself, Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors melted down one by one. Of the 33 total backup power lines to off-site generators, all but two were obliterated by the tsunami. The authors describe the disaster as a “cascade of industrial, regulatory and engineering failures” leading to a situation where critical infrastructure - in this case, backup generators to keep cooling the plant in the event of main power loss - was built in harm’s way.Īt the four damaged nuclear power plants (Onagawa, Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushimi Daini and Toka Daini), 22 of the 33 total backup diesel generators were washed away, including 12 of 13 at Fukushima Daiichi. Fukushima Daiichi was a sitting duck waiting to be flooded.” Regulatory failures “Earlier government and industry studies focused on the mechanical failures and ‘buried the lead.’ The pre-event tsunami hazards study, if done properly, would have identified the diesel generators as the linchpin of a future disaster. “While most studies have focused on the response to the accident, we’ve found that there were design problems that led to the disaster that should have been dealt with long before the earthquake hit,” said Synolakis, professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC Viterbi. They found that “arrogance and ignorance,” design flaws, regulatory failures and improper hazard analyses doomed the coastal nuclear power plant even before the tsunami hit. In the peer-reviewed Philosophical Transactions A of the Royal Society, researchers Costas Synolakis of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Utku Kânoğlu of the Middle East Technical University in Turkey distilled thousands of pages of government and industry reports and hundreds of news stories, focusing on the run-up to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011.

The worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown never should have happened, according to a new study.

Japan nuclear reactor meltdown 2011