Should We Bury Fukushima?

I've watched this Fukushima situation with concern for a few months now. I have an interest in it partly because I worked in disaster response simulation design. My specialty was in designing simulations that dealt with what you might call the meta-level of situational events. (I worked on sims that dealt with how hospitals manage their resources at an overarching level during terrorists bombings and epidemic events.)

The Fukushima Diachi Nuclear Facility (displaying the 4 reactors)

Decision-Making During Disasters
I've studied the patterns of system-level decision-making and how they sometimes lead to preventable deaths. What you learn in these cases is that preventable deaths occur not because of failures in conventional training for specific protocols. The responders do very well if presented with a classic case inside the response environment they are familiar with. Rather breakdowns occur because of failure to see a larger picture, a failure to deal with the odd things that happen. And "odd things happening" is the very nature of a disaster.

In other words people die for "dumb reasons" - because of system breakdowns that no-one anticipates, which show up in strange, unexpected ways, and which people are not quick to adapt to. Hospital systems, as are all organizations, are built as communicating silos. If a critical patient reaches or is brought into a silo - an ER, a CT scan area, surgery, whatever - they're probably going to live. Healthcare providers are experts at doing their jobs.

But sometimes things confound these systems. Disasters do this by their very nature. People trained to work inside a gerbil maze lose their bearings when something shifts about or knocks over the maze. The problems emerge in the grey zones between the silos... People slipping through the cracks, or being parked and forgotten about. Really, these are what you might call stupid mistakes that, when everyone looks back, appear to be so obvious that when they are over people say, "Why didn't somebody do something about this...? It's common sense!!!"

Take for example the recent deaths of two elderly people, dropped off by taxi after being discharged from hospital in Manitoba, finding themselves stranded on their doorsteps of locked houses in minus 30-plus weather. This kind of thing seems so obvious it couldn't happen, right? Well... No, actually. That's exactly the kind of scenario that manifests. It's a classic situation of system breakdown caused by a disconnection of silos (the silos being hospital-care-of-patient, transportation-care-of-patient, patient-self-care [i.e. home]) and nobody anticipating it.

"Normal" training does little to address these situations. In fact, normal training discourages people from even thinking about these situations. Normal training is myopic. It frames things within a typical situation. When an unusual situation occurs, such as a disaster, people are left to their own mental devices to figure things out. Alertness and creativity are what is needed. People need to see patterns, but they aren't trained to do that, or they are often discouraged from looking at those things. The system needs them to be worker bees inside their cells and not question or contemplate the layout of those cells. But in a disaster, you need to step back and rebuild your system on the fly. If you don't, you'll lose badly and people will die. The unthinkable will occur, and does occur.

So when looking at the Fukushima situation, where others see things under control, I don't. I see rigid thinking and a slow, contemplative response that could be fatal. I see red flags all over the place.

The Situation Now
Here is the situation at Fukushima now...

First, this incident is not being lead by people experienced in disaster response. Initially, it was lead entirely by TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company), but red flags emerged there. (For example, TEPCO continued to report radiation readings at some location of 100 milliseverts per second. Eventually the press pushed them on this and TEPCO admitted they were using an instrument with a metre that only read up to 100. A new instrument revealed readings of 1800. I have no idea what they are now.)  Now it is being controlled by the Japanese federal nuclear regulators. But regulators write legistlation and perform inspections. They have no experience dealing with fast-moving crises. That too is a red-flag.

They've started the bringdown of tons of contaminated waste suspended 100 feet up in Fuku 4. Hopefully it will all be down before the next big earthquake because if that reservoir ever collapsed we have the possbility of a burning plutonium fire... which is a nightmare. (However, this article doesn't deal with that situation... Let's just hold our breaths and hope it works. They're doing their best now.)

Let's look instead at the reactors that have melted down...

The technology doesn't exist to remove the fuel at Fuku 1 and 2. The plutonium is a molten slag somewhere below the reactor. That area is highly radioactive - instantly lethal to humans. They're building a sarcophagus, but that will take... how long? Months? Years?

The entire site is a mess. It's covered with temporary holding tanks full of irradiated water, each suceptible to rupture by earthquake.

People go in, do jury-rig things, then leave never to return (only one day or a few hours of work permitted before your maximum annual radiation exposure level is reached)... So command-control and intelligence must be difficult beyond words. (In fact there are reports of organized crime being involved - via construction sub-contractors tasked to do some of the work - and temp workers being tricked into doing things they hadn't agreed to.)

But the radiation is attacking more than people: it's also burning out electronics. This means that things like robots and remote cameras are getting fried. That blinds us as well.

The combination of jury-rigged measures, reduced electronic means to gather intel, and dwindling detailed knowledge as they lose workers threatens to turn the place into a dark zone...

The sarcophagus that they are planning to build will be a big boxy structure. I have no idea how they'll deploy that thing over Fukus 1 or 2, but I do know one thing: the longer they delay, the worse it gets. The fact that they've focused on this displays, to me, classic "doctrinaire" (rigid) thinking. They need to move faster and think outside of the box (definitely no pun intended).

I still think they need military-level intervention in there.

From what I know of disaster situations, from all the various scenarios I've studied, I see red flags popping up all over this situation. It does not look to me to be "under control" at all. I think we've been lucky so far.

What About Burying Fukus 1 and 2?
Here is the response I've considered. As a backup, why don't we just bury Fukus 1 and 2? This would be a lot faster than building this sarcophagus, and probably a lot more stable.

I've seen the specs for the sarcophagus, though I don't remember them. They're building it to a level that would resist x windspeed and y richter level... But a mountain of soil may be far more resilient.

At Chernobyl they used helicopters to "bomb" the site with concrete. However, concrete is probably not the best material to use, and at any rate, helicopters are a fragile and expensive deployment system.

A much better system to use would be conveyor belts.

Conveyors could be deployed by ship or armoured vehicle - both systems that could be heavily shielded against radiation, protecting personnel and electronics. They could be fed continuously over time.

This would be a lot faster than building this elaborate sarcophagus.

Once deployed, we could slowly bury those sites with a mountain of soil. We could use different kinds of soil to provide different kinds of protection.

That was also inspired by a mining professor I met who was studying mine containment. Using concrete is not effective over time. They built an experimental plug for one dead mine in BC that was leaking acid. The plug was made of different layers of soil, each serving a different protective purpose, and held in by a concrete cap at the end. Loose soil is more pliable, moving with the earth (and thus resistant to earthquake), whereas concrete breaks and fractures and doesn't conform to its surroundings.

One problem, however, is that Fukushima is on a steep coastal slope, and the site is underlain by an aquifer (the many water tanks mentioned before are holding contaminated water from this aquifer). So I don't know how much weight the coastal area could support. The soil there is becoming gelatious, so an earthquake could case a landslide-style collapse of our mountain sarcophagus. Still, a giant, intricate sarcophagus, I would think, would be even more vulnerable to this kind of foundational threat than a pile of soil. And a pile of soil can easily be refed and rebuilt with a daisy-chain system of conveyor belts.

Conclusion
I'm throwing this out there because speed is an issue in this situation, and the approach that I'm seeing them using seems to be a little too contemplative, intricate and design intensive. The longer those reactors are left uncontained, the worse the situation becomes.