FEATURE column
arcinsight
The 3/11 aftermath Shin Kai of the ARC
On July 22, 2011, four months after the unprecedented earthquake and tsu-nami struck the Pacific Coast side of eastern Japan, Japanese engineers from various process and other industries gathered in Tokyo to participate in a series of panel discussions titled, ‘What Automation Should Learn From the 3/11 Disasters.’
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he panels, held as a session at ARC Advisory Group’s 2011 Japan Forum in Tokyo, were jointly organised by ARC and the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE). The goal of the participating engineers was to review their own notions of safety and control systems in an objective manner. Not surprisingly, many of the discussions focused on the inadequacies of the process control and protective systems installed at the at Fukushima nuclear power plant. However, in most cases, the same lessons learned can also be applied to critical operations in any industrial plant or facility.
underestimated the power of Mother Nature and thereby allowed a runaway chain reaction of accidents. The vulnerability of the artefacts and technologies we ourselves introduced made this crisis worse.” Nagashima continued, “All engineers, whether involved in addressing this crisis or not, must stop and rethink what we have taken for granted. I believe this is a rare opportunity to review our own mindset and behaviours and re-invent ourselves from scratch.”
“Reinvent ourselves from scratch”
The first panellist, Toshiaki Itoh, formerly of Mitsubishi Chemical and current SICE Fellow, took the approach of discussing entire plant system operations. He analysed the causes of the troubles in the Fukushima nuclear power plant from the viewpoint of instrument control engineering. Then, he pointed to irregularities of the accident by showing that fundamental protective control could not be enabled by ordinary steps or procedures. Because the tsunami washed out auxiliary power supply units and cooling systems abruptly, the risk level had not increased sequentially in Fukushima. “By its nature, current protective control is not enough to cope with such unpredictable events,” he said.
Among the 200 attendees at the ARC Tokyo Forum were end-user engineers, integrators and contractors, automation suppliers, consultants, and researchers. Many of the plant-level engineers would not have been able to attend if ARC had held the event one month earlier. Akira Nagashima, co-chairman of the SICE 50th anniversary project steering committee and moderator of the panel, opened the discussion by summarising its purpose: “I think there is a serious task we engineers must address before we think about how to rebuild Japan. Yes, the triggering event of this crisis was a 9.0-scale super earthquake; but we must admit that we engineers had
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Advisory Group on automation lessons learned from March 11 disasters in Japan
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February2012
Protective control meets human beings