• • •
Jaczko had been scheduled to discuss the NRC’s 2012 budget with two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees, but Fukushima was on everyone’s mind. Before Jaczko could testify, he was summoned to a meeting at the White House. Jaczko told President Obama and his national security advisors that the NRC recommended the evacuation of Americans living within fifty miles of Fukushima Daiichi. It was, the chairman said, the advice the NRC would give if this incident were taking place in the United States.
NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko tells a House subcommittee hearing on March 16 that the NRC believed the spent fuel pool at Unit 4 was dry, raising the possibility that the spent fuel could catch fire and release additional radioactive material. The announcement came shortly after the United States advised its citizens living within fifty miles of Fukushima Daiichi to evacuate or remain indoors if evacuation were not possible. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
A short time later, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney alerted reporters to the expanded evacuation recommendation during a briefing. The State Department had issued a travel warning half an hour before, citing the “deteriorating situation” at Fukushima Daiichi. U.S. citizens living within fifty miles (eighty kilometers) of Fukushima were advised to leave or take shelter indoors if evacuation was not possible. In addition, the warning said, “the State Department strongly urges U.S. citizens to defer travel to Japan at this time and those in Japan should consider departing.”
Washington’s fifty-mile evacuation recommendation was about to get some competition in the news. Before he began his testimony on Capitol Hill that afternoon, Jaczko called in to the White Flint operations center. “[J]ust to repeat, we believe pool No. 4 is dry, and we believe one of the other pools is potentially structurally damaged?” he asked. “That’s correct,” Chuck Casto said from Tokyo. “That’s the best we know.”
“I mean the relevant factor is it’s dry,” said Jaczko. “Yes,” Casto confirmed, “and they can’t maintain [water] inventory at all.”
Jaczko hung up, but the conversation continued between the NRC experts in Tokyo and White Flint. They realized they had neglected to tell the chairman that the Japanese didn’t agree with the NRC’s assessment about the Unit 4 pool. They didn’t call him back, though, because they thought he didn’t want that level of detail. And there were plenty of other problems to worry about. The Unit 2 spent fuel pool now appeared to be in trouble; steam was rising through the hole created in that reactor building’s wall by the Unit 1 explosion, so that pool might be boiling dry. Steam or smoke was coming from the Unit 3 pool, meaning the water level there could be dropping. Unit 1 appeared to have the only pool of the four not in immediate trouble.
When Jaczko took his seat in the large House hearing room, he launched into the latest news from Fukushima. At three reactors there is “some degree of core damage from insufficient cooling,” he said. At Unit 2, cooling was not stable but the primary containment was functioning. Water levels in the Unit 2 spent fuel pool were decreasing. The integrity of the Unit 3 pool had been compromised.
Then he moved on to Unit 4. “We believe that secondary containment has been destroyed and there is no water in the spent fuel pool,” he said, “and we believe radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures.” Jaczko said the highest priority now was to maintain cooling of the reactors at Units 1, 2, and 3 and to keep water levels up in the spent fuel pools. If cooling functions should fail, he warned, “it would be very difficult for emergency workers to get into the site and perform emergency actions.”
What poses the highest risk at the moment, asked Rep. Henry Waxman, a Californian with a long involvement in nuclear safety issues.
“All of the factors together, really, the combination,” Jaczko said. “There’s the possibility of this progressing further.” If the cooling systems failed, he explained, emergency workers “could experience potentially lethal doses in a very short period of time.”
Jaczko hustled out of the House hearing and across Capitol Hill to the Senate, where Bill Borchardt had been pinch-hitting for his boss before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which had convened specifically for a briefing on Fukushima. The chairman was grilled about the safety of U.S. reactors, especially those in seismically active areas, such as the two in the home state of the committee’s chair, California senator Barbara Boxer.
After Jaczko’s testimony, the committee heard from representatives of the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the primary nuclear industry lobbying group in Washington. They were asked to address whether a Fukushima-type accident could happen in the United States and if so, what needed to be done to preclude such a disaster.
Tony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the institute, chose his words carefully: “I think I understand your concern, because I share it, that people are seeing what’s happening in Japan and they’re scared. We can never say that that could never happen here. There’s no such thing as a probability of zero. . . . But what I would tell you is it doesn’t matter how you get there, whether it’s a hurricane, whether it’s a tsunami, whether it’s a seismic event, whether it’s a terrorist attack, whether it’s a cyberattack, whether it’s operator error or some other failure in the plant, it doesn’t matter. We have to be prepared to deal with those events.”
Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed that a Fukushima- type event could not be ruled out in the United States: “We have plants that are just as old. We have had a station blackout. We have a regulatory system that is not clearly superior to that of the Japanese. We have had extreme weather events that exceeded our expectations and defeated our emergency planning measure[s], [such as] Hurricane Katrina.”
While Pietrangelo said that the industry had to be prepared to deal with severe events like natural disasters, he did not say that the industry actually was prepared to deal with them. In fact, he told the committee that Fukushima had prompted an industry-wide effort to “verify each company’s capability to mitigate conditions that result from severe adverse events,” including total loss of electric power, earthquakes, and floods. At the time, he did not anticipate that those reviews would turn up numerous problems, calling into question the level of preparedness of U.S. reactors.
Pietrangelo informed Boxer that “we already have mobile—diesel-driven mobile pumps on every site in the country that can be moved around the site to provide another contingency measure should we lose a cooling source. And there’s countless other measures like that.”
Those measures are known as “B.5.b,” named after the section of the regulatory orders where they appear.4 They were among the steps that the NRC required utilities to take after the 9/11 attacks to prepare for “loss of large areas of a plant due to explosions or fire”—the kind of damage that might be expected from a terrorist aircraft attack. For example, utilities must store B.5.b equipment far enough away that it might be able to survive a plane attack on a reactor. But there is no requirement that the equipment survive other types of disasters, such as an earthquake. When Lyman asked about the ability of the emergency pumps to survive an earthquake, Pietrangelo said that the pumps are not certified to withstand any earthquake at all, much less a severe one.
In other words, in the face of a Fukushima-scale event, the B.5.b measures could well be worthless. But in the days after Fukushima, both the industry and the NRC cited the B.5.b measures in response to the question they had both feared: “Can it happen here?”
Jaczko’s assertion that the Unit 4 spent fuel pool was dry apparently didn’t sit well with the Japanese. Casto and Tony Ulses were invited to the Kantei, the prime minister’s official residence and office. The Japanese wanted to show the Americans a video of the Unit 4 spent fuel pool—indicating it contained water. Monninger told the White Flint crew: “We think the reason they’re doing that is because, I guess, of maybe statements the NRC has made or maybe
the chairman’s hearing testimony . . . saying that Unit 4 the spent fuel pool was dry.”
A short time later, Casto reported back after watching the video, which the Japanese declined to provide to the Americans. “You know, it’s not very clear. You’re talking about a helicopter that’s trying to do a lot of things at once in a field. And they tried to scan all four [reactor] units. You have to look through a window. And they claim there’s a reflection of water on the Unit 4 spent-fuel pool. . . . There’s something there. You don’t know if it’s steel or water. They claim it’s a reflection.”
Steam was visible coming from the side of the building nearest the spent fuel pool, said Casto, obviously frustrated. “You’ve got a building that’s had an explosion and has debris everywhere, and you’re trying to look at it with a helicopter that’s flying by in split seconds. You can’t tell anything in there. You know, they claim there’s a glimmer of a reflection but, you know, it’s steaming. Unit 3 is steaming even harder.”
Jaczko, who had joined the call, interrupted Casto. “So, at this point, you no longer believe that the pool is dry?” Casto replied: “I would say, as of five o’clock yesterday, the pool had some water in it.”
“Okay. Now I’ve said publicly the pool is dry,” said Jaczko. “Do you think that’s inaccurate?” Casto replied: “I would say it’s probably inaccurate to say it’s dry.”
“Do you think I need to roll back any of the statements that I made?” Jaczko asked.
“I don’t think so,” Casto said. “It may not have been dry, but it certainly wasn’t full.” There was no need to change the fifty-mile evacuation advisory, the team assured Jaczko.
As debate swirled at White Flint, President Obama and Prime Minister Kan were on the phone. Obama promised continued technical assistance to Japan and the two leaders discussed the steps the United States was taking to protect its citizens. After the conversation, Japanese cabinet secretary Yukio Edano told reporters in Tokyo that the two countries would do a better job of sharing information.
As for the Americans, everyone understood that the United States needed to tread lightly. As Chuck Casto later observed of the situation: “The best science person can’t bring science to it if they don’t have the right diplomacy skills.”
Convinced that the Unit 4 spent fuel pool held water, the Japanese focused their attention on Unit 3. The white smoke seen billowing from that unit the day before—as well as a spike in radiation—made getting water to the fuel there a priority. A three-pronged attack began shortly before 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 17.
It consisted of dropping water from Self-Defense Forces helicopters and spraying water from the ground using SDF fire trucks and high-pressure water cannon trucks that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department used for riot control.5
An initial attempt to dump water from an SDF helicopter on March 16 had been abandoned because of high radiation levels. Lead plates lined the bellies of the helicopters and the crews wore protective clothing when they took off the next day.
Over the course of ten minutes, two CH-47 Chinook helicopters dropped thirty tons of water on the upper parts of the Unit 3 reactor building during four flights. NHK television cameras, positioned about twenty miles from the plant, captured the drops in footage viewed around the world. Although a small amount of white steam rose from the building, very little water apparently reached the pool. Most was carried off by strong winds, and some was deflected by debris atop the pool. The water cannons were useless and the fire trucks proved inadequate; neither could deliver the water where it was needed. Radiation levels prohibited moving the equipment closer.
TEPCO also focused on restoring power to the plant via a new transmission line, although utility officials were unable to say when that might be completed. The plan called for repowering Unit 2 to restore cooling to its spent fuel pool. Because Unit 2’s reactor building was intact aside from a small hole, it would be difficult to spray water inside (in contrast to Units 1, 3, and 4, which no longer had roofs). But given the extensive damage to the plant’s wiring systems, there was no assurance that off-site power would be of much use.
The first radiation readings gathered by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s Aerial Measuring System, part of the DOE’s Radiological Assistance Program, were providing independent data. Until now, most of the measurements had come from TEPCO via NISA, and Washington wanted its own. The U.S. sensors not only measured how much radiation was present, but also identified the isotopes emitting it—the nuclear fingerprints of dangerous materials including cesium-137. In addition, a U.S. Air Force Global Hawk drone flew over the plant site, measuring temperatures and gathering high-resolution imagery.
While the Japanese struggled to get water into the pools, the Americans were offering five heavy-duty pumps from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency that were available for pickup three hours away from the plant. (Earlier, the Japanese had rejected two fire trucks offered by the U.S. Air Force because the vehicles were not registered in Japan and thus could not be legally driven on the roadways, an act of bureaucratic nitpicking that amazed the Americans.) The pumps could deliver seawater to the fuel pools—assuming the pools were still intact. That worried Casto. “The pumping strategy may not be useful at all if there is no spent fuel pool, and there is just a rubble bed in there somewhere,” he said.
Even so, it seemed a logical plan of attack. At 6:00 a.m. on March 17, the Japanese SDF picked up the pumps at Yokota Air Base and set out for Fukushima Daiichi, 196 miles away.
• • •
Delivering the water would require more than pumps, however, and U.S. experts had spent hours conferring on just what was needed. Pipes and strainers (to keep debris in the ocean water from clogging the pumps or the spray nozzles) had to be acquired. Because of the extremely high radiation, installation of the system had to be completed as rapidly as possible. “[I]t’s got to be on tractor-trailers, minimum disconnect,” one member of the U.S. team said. “They would drive in, hook this thing up, throw the portable submersible pump out in the ocean, and light this system off and leave.” The NRC asked the giant engineering firm Bechtel Corporation to design the complete cooling systems that would be needed and to arrange for procurement and delivery of all the additional equipment to the site, but not to perform the dangerous jobs of installing and operating the systems, which would be left to the Japanese.
The NRC was developing a radiation dose map of the plant site to help installers minimize their exposure. “[I]t’s going to be heroic efforts, because you’re going to have somebody running toward the pool,” said one of the White Flint staffers. Boron would be added to the water to reduce the likelihood of the spent fuel going critical. Twenty thousand pounds of boron had been located at California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and was being flown from Vandenberg Air Force Base to Yokota.
An exhausted Chuck Casto called in to White Flint to say the pumps had arrived at the plant and efforts were now under way to reduce the radiation levels with sand or lead shielding so the system could be installed. “[Y]ou know there are lethal dose rates they’re getting outside that building,” said Casto.
The discussion turned to Unit 2, and Casto was asked about its status: had the primary containment been breached? He did not know. A NISA summary was vague, Casto said, referring only to the possibility of an “incident” in the suppression chamber, based on the sound of an explosion and a subsequent reduction in the measured pressure in the torus.
For a moment, the magnitude of the crisis for the Japanese overwhelmed Casto, who noted that a thousand bodies had washed ashore from the tsunami. “[I]t’s hell over here for that government. I mean, it’s just absolutely hell. And I know we get frustrated with them, but, man, when you think about what they’re faced with, it’s absolutely unfathomable.”
Although the United States was working out details on the pump system, it was a one-sided effort. “We are not getting any takers from the Japanese side of this equatio
n,” Virgilio told his colleagues. Although the SDF had collected the pumps and delivered them to the plant, the Japanese apparently were afraid that trying to hook up the system would be too dangerous because of the high radiation levels. So they were intent on continuing their spraying operations. “They are using helicopters the same way you fight forest fires,” said a member of the American team.
At about 8:00 a.m. Thursday, Dan Dorman, on duty at White Flint, briefed the NRC team via a conference call. Events had moved both Unit 4 and Unit 2 down the list of concerns. The highest priority now was the Unit 3 spent fuel pool, which appeared to have experienced a zirconium-water reaction and a resulting fire, he said. Over the previous twelve hours, the Japanese had tried to drop and spray water into the Unit 3 pool, but without much effect. Seawater injection to the reactor vessels continued in Units 1, 2, and 3, with water levels in the cores at about half the height of the fuel. There were mixed reports on the status of the Units 2 and 3 containments. TEPCO was still trying to restore power to the site. The pumps were in place but it was not certain that they could develop enough pressure to spray water high enough to reach the pools. New radiation measurements had been collected by aircraft overnight and were being analyzed. Radiation levels of 375 rem per hour were measured three hundred feet above the Unit 3 reactor.
To everyone’s surprise, the Japanese asked the NRC to list its priorities on controlling the situation at Fukushima Daiichi. Although the turnabout was welcome, fulfilling the request would put the NRC in the position of directly offering advice, something it had thus far avoided. Making a mistake weighed on Casto. “I don’t want to try any strategy that doesn’t have sound measures, or reasonably sound measures, of success,” he told Virgilio. “Because the last thing we want to do is make the situation worse for the Japanese. We’re going to own this thing if we do.”
Radiation exposure fears were growing beyond the vicinity of Fukushima Daiichi. The NRC was aware that significant levels of fallout could occur outside of the fifty-mile evacuation zone. For data on that, it had to depend on the DOE, which was using its more sophisticated atmospheric modeling tools to develop dose projections extending one hundred and fifty to two hundred miles from the plant, an area that included Tokyo. The DOE was also running simulations to estimate possible doses to the public in Alaska, Hawaii, and the West Coast, and it was getting some alarming results: for instance, doses as high as thirty-five rem to the thyroids of people in Alaska. The NRC didn’t trust the numbers the DOE was coming up with, but it didn’t have the means to disprove them.
Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster Page 13