The worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown never should have happened, according to a new study.
In the peer-reviewed Philosophical Transactions A of the Royal Society, researchers Costas Synolakis of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Utku Kâno?lu 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 disaster. They found that “arrogance and ignorance,” design flaws, regulatory failures and improper hazard analyses doomed the costal nuclear power plant even before the tsunami hit.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-09-fukushima-disaster.html#jCp
This paper appears in a special Theme Issue of the Philosophical Transactions A of the Royal Society.
Synolakis, C.E. and Kanoglu, U., 2015, The Fukushima accident was preventable, PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS R. SOC. in press.
Kanoglu, U., Titov V.V., Bernard, E., & Synolakis, C.E. 2015, Tsunamis; bridging science, engineering, and society, PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS R. SOC.