Towards Data Democracy Beyond Fukushima - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 101

pre-determined design window defined by established design standards. Shifting to
these traditional ways of engineering has enhanced standard-based design. However
design engineers lose traceability before the complexity of products and/or in situ
feeling to the fact and field. Specialization of expertise, division of labor and domain
differentiations increase efficiency of production, but holistic views of design are
sometimes lost. This tendency is especially true for complex and complicated
engineering products for which a large number of experts need to work together.
And technology transfer and inheritance of tacit knowledge for such products
become more and more difficult, so that it is essential to keep a perfect traceability
from raw data to design decisions.
Following established rules, here standards, is carried out by single-loop learning,
which assumes that the problem and their solutions are close to each other in time
and space due to no needs to change rules but safety factors. This single loop learning
works within a design sub-window of complete space, or of no singularities as
materials of a structure. In this loop of learning, we are primarily considering our
design as redesign of no changes on industrial standards, which can be implemented
as established design codes. Small parametric changes are made to specific practices
or behaviors, based on what has or has not worked in the past. This involves doing
things better without necessarily examining or challenging our underlying beliefs
and assumptions. However it does not work if we go beyond the boundary of a
complete space, so that we need to be ready to violence to each rules, in other words,
beyond the boundary of each valid domain. Single-loop learning leads to making
minor fixes or adjustments within safety factors and/or allowances. Are we doing
things right in accordance with established industrial standards and regulations?
Here's what to do—procedures or rules or industrial standards. Key points here are
openness on where we are within a set of rules and actions what to do if else.
The 14-metre-high tsunami after the magnitude nine earthquake of 11 March
2011 severely damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant of the Tokyo
Electric Power Utility Company (TEPCO), in particular, the plant's principal power
supply. The wave also took out the backup electricity sources, leaving four reactor
buildings—including four pools containing spent fuel elements without power.
Consequently the earthquake and tsunami caused the station blackout (SBO) by
losing all power sources, which has resulted in a kind of “multiple organ system
failure” of the Plant bereft of coolant. We had no light, we could not cool the reactor
core and spent fuel pool actively, and we could not measure the exact status of the
plant by taking advantage of a set of advanced instruments and tools to do
so. Available tools to measure radiation doses have been given priority for the
ongoing emergency and to workers health management. Without enough sensors
and “powerful hands”, careful and coordinated efforts have been continued with
perseverance to make each unit more stable and safer in a step-by-step manner by
TEPCO and other experts. We had no “CPU” and no “Intensive Care Unit” to
support and restore damaged parts in the beginning. All these accident sequences
was triggered due to differences of safety design guidance on the position of
emergency power supply facilities.