Towards Data Democracy Beyond Fukushima - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 102

In short, the nuclear reactor systems were damaged mechanically and
chemically, but they shut down perfectly with respect to nuclear chain reactions.
Therefore, the Fukushima Plant is different from the accident at Chernobyl. At
Fukushima, ranging fuel burn-up (averaged for each fuel assembly) from 3,200 to
41,100 MWd/t, 1,498 fuel assemblies in Unit 1-3 reactor cores, 2,724 fuel assem-
blies in spent fuel storage pools are producing decay heat, and at high temperature a
part of cladding materials zircaloy of the fuel assemblies had reacted with steam/
water to produce hydrogen. Three buildings were severely damaged due to the
hydrogen explosion, and explained less exploded where a blow-out panel worked
properly. Radioactive materials have been released from containment vessels on
several occasions after the Tsunami, and this was the result of deliberate venting in
an attempt to reduce gas pressure in each containment vessels and/or spent fuel
exposures due to dry out. It is said the radioactive level was too high for workers to
open the valve for venting if they follow the conservative regulation. The radiation
dose rate at one location between reactor units 3 and 4 was measured very high at
400 mSv/h, at 10:22 JST, on March 13th of 2011 and the dose rate level near the
road of the two units was about 1 mSv/h at 13:30 JST on January 27, 2014 by the
author's measurement.
Risks to natural disasters, levels of safety technology, social risks, political risks
and consequent crisis are different from place to place, from company to company
and from country to country. Therefore in introducing an engineering product,
designers need to rewrite the set of standards to meet engineering requirements of
their own organization or country by retroactively checking semantics of the
standards up to a set of raw data. By such rewriting designers get a realistic
image of each engineering product at the site where and when the product is in
service. When introducing new safety guidelines and standards into one engineer-
ing product, for example, stress test to evaluate safety against terrorist attack,
natural disasters and cyber attack we need to follow double-loop learning which
leads to insights about why a solution works. In this loop of learning, we are
considering our actions in the framework of our up-to-date scientific knowledge
and our operating assumption as engineering actions. This is the level of process
analysis where people become observers of themselves on the basis of their own
holistic viewpoints, asking, “What is going on here and there? What are the patterns
as a whole?” The so-called linear model from idea inspiration and intuition, proto-
typing, manufacturing, marketing, operation and maintenance and waste manage-
ments used to be modified in accordance with in situ requirements at each phase.
We need insights to understand each unexpected pattern. We change the way-rules,
standards, regulations and operational guidelines etc., and we make decisions and
deepen understanding of our assumptions. Double-loop learning works with major
fixes or changes, like redesigning an organizational function for new safety stan-
dards or structure of artifacts. The more complicated and complex a targeting
artifact becomes, the more times we ask at each phase of design. We are checking
continuously “Are we doing the right things? Here's why this works—insights and
patterns are reported to generate big files adding additional complexities due to
human-made combined uncertainties.