In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security was screening passengers returning from Japan. In China, grocery stores in several cities were stripped of iodized salt after rumors spread that a radioactive cloud was moving in. Some buyers mistakenly believed that iodized salt would protect against radiation; others feared that sea salt supplies from the coast would be contaminated. The city of Florence, Italy, sent a plane to Japan to pick up its stranded orchestra and the conductor, Zubin Mehta. (Maestro Mehta would return a month later for a performance to benefit disaster survivors.)
Casto and the NRC squad in Tokyo were swamped with meetings—with the ambassador and embassy staff, with other U.S. officials aiding in the American response, with Japanese government officials. The crew was running on six hours of sleep or less, with sessions stretching well into the early morning hours. Noticeably absent, however, were representatives of TEPCO. The utility seemed intent on going it alone.
Finally, TEPCO officials did agree to sit down with the Americans to discuss a pumping system the United States had proposed for cooling the spent fuel pools. It was the first time the utility had heard of the U.S. plan, Monninger told his colleagues at White Flint. Apparently NISA and METI, which had been involved in the discussions of the U.S. plan, had not bothered to apprise TEPCO.
Yet the United States had already given Bechtel the go-ahead to assemble four separate pumping systems, or “trains,” one for each of the fuel pools. By March 18, the components had been gathered in Australia, awaiting an airlift to Japan. Only then did the U.S. team discover that the Tokyo Fire Department had assembled a similar pumping system with local parts for use at Fukushima Daiichi.
No matter whose system would be used, the problem, of course, was the final leg: getting close enough to lay water lines near the reactors and pools. Radiation levels between Units 2 and 3 now ranged between 450 and 600 rem per hour.
TEPCO’s preferred and potentially less risky approach was to use two concrete pumping trucks, similar to those used to encase the Chernobyl reactor after that accident. The trucks, equipped with booms capable of extending about two hundred feet, could remotely spray seawater into the fuel pools with precision. Two such trucks were in Japan, and additional ones could be obtained from abroad.
Casto was still worrying about pumping water onto the hot fuel. The risk was a massive radioactive steam cloud “that’s going to . . . panic everybody.”
“We’re in such never-never land, and I don’t really know how to make decisions when you have very little information,” Casto said, and urged his colleagues to seek additional guidance from experts inside and outside the government. “We’re going to need all the great minds together,” he added. “Let’s solve this as an American nuclear industry helping the Japanese nuclear industry, not just the NRC.”
HELPFUL HINTS
As the experts in Japan and the United States struggled to find ways to cool the cores and stem the radiation releases spilling from Fukushima Daiichi, average Americans had no shortage of ideas—nor any reluctance to share them. They flooded the NRC with suggestions via e-mails and phone calls.
“I’m sure y’all have many experts trying to assist in the emergency in Japan,” wrote Sharon H., “but I thought I would write just in case this idea had not been considered”: cornstarch.
“Have you considered . . . fine ground black pepper to seal the crack at Fukushima Daiichi?” wrote Shawn M. “Yes, common household pepper is very effective as a crack sealant. I once sealed a long crack (8") in an engine block. It held for years and I did not need to replace the engine.”
Among other suggestions: Ping-Pong balls, antifreeze, a ski resort snowmaker to blow snow into the core. Coal ash. An asbestos blanket. Liquid nitrogen. Putty.
Vinny S. proposed using tiles from the space shuttle. “The shuttle program is ending and we could recycle materials and be eco-friendly while ensuring safety at the reactors.”
Others were more insistent: “Get this information to Japan or tell them when they call you,” directed one e-mail. “I was divinely led. God is telling me it will work.” What followed was a detailed list of instructions entailing “vector forces,” a “metrogravitron particulator,” and a device known as the “Deometrian.”
Most suggestions received a standard response from the NRC’s Office of Public Affairs: “We appreciate suggestions that work toward resolving the situation in Japan; it’s reassuring to see how helpful and dedicated private citizens have been in light of this disaster. . . . Please understand that the NRC has some of the most expert people in the world available to assist the Japanese authorities in whatever way they request.” The NRC suggested the Americans also contact the Japan Atomic Energy Commission.
One public-spirited citizen apparently got a runaround before finally landing at the Office of Public Affairs. His name was Harold Denton. He’s “been calling all over NRC,” wrote staffer Amy Bonaccorso. In case the name didn’t ring a bell, she added that Denton was the “spokesperson for the NRC during Three Mile Island—he also was the person [who] provided daily reports to Pres. Jimmy Carter.” Denton, who also delivered daily briefings to hundreds of reporters during the Three Mile Island accident, wanted to urge the commission to make its experts available to the media, she wrote, because reporters “are reaching out everywhere for info . . . including retired employees (with old information).” Bonaccorso’s boss promised to call Denton.
Stepping into the information void on March 15 was TV personality Glenn Beck. “Glenn Beck is now explaining the China Syndrome, using a wok as a containment vessel,” an Office of Public Affairs staffer e-mailed his colleagues, to which one responded: “ohmigod.” “Maybe it’s a big mixing bowl, I can’t tell,” said a follow-up e-mail. That wasn’t Beck’s only prop: M&Ms made handy fuel pellets.
That collaboration was already in the works. The next day, Saturday, March 19, a group of experts from industry met with their government counterparts at White Flint. The model, Virgilio explained, was the public-private response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Attending were representatives from the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations, which was organizing the meeting, GE, Exelon, the French nuclear conglomerate Areva, the DOE, and the Electric Power Research Institute. Experts within the nuclear industry had regularly been conferring with the NRC and Japanese authorities as well as conducting their own research. The Americans hoped that by merging the private and public response, TEPCO might become more receptive to outside help.
The Japanese government might also need some convincing. “We’re going to start working through diplomatic channels in-country to try to make sure that what we develop is implementable from a political standpoint,” said Virgilio. Key to any public or private response was reliable data. And that was still in short supply.
5
INTERLUDE—SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS: “PEOPLE . . . ARE REACHING THE LIMIT OF ANXIETY AND ANGER”
From the first days of the accident, Yukio Edano, a forty-six-year-old lawyer, became the face of the government. As chief cabinet secretary, responsible for coordinating the executive ministries and agencies, he was omnipresent on live TV.1
Although Edano gained certain celebrity status, his carefully worded statements later came in for criticism. Even as he announced evacuations, he failed to adequately explain to the public the reason for the orders; other important details often were missing from his summaries.
As the accident unfolded, the briefings of various government agencies, as well as the updates provided by TEPCO and NISA, other government ministries, and local governments, were a disjointed mix of reassurances and frustratingly vague descriptions of what was taking place at the plant. At times, the authorities provided conflicting information.
By March 18, official responses to the accident seemed to become a numbers game, with statistics bandied about in a confusing blur. That day, NISA elevated the ranking of the Fukushima Daiichi accident from a level 4 to a level 5 on
the seven-level International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) because of fuel damage to the cores at Units 1, 2, and 3. In a press release announcing the change, TEPCO blamed the reactor crisis on “the marvels of nature,” a reference to the tsunami and earthquake.
While the significance of that increase from level 4 to level 5 undoubtedly escaped many in the public, for regulators and the Japanese nuclear industry it was as much a symbolic as a substantive change. Japan’s worst nuclear accident to date, the 1999 criticality incident at the Tokai fuel fabrication facility that killed two workers, had rated a level 4 on INES. Three Mile Island was a level 5, and now Fukushima Daiichi was joining Three Mile Island on that dubious global list.
What Tokyo and the Japanese nuclear industry dreaded even more was having to acknowledge that the accident warranted a level 7 rating, defined as a major accident with widespread health and environmental effects and the external release of a significant fraction of reactor core inventory. Only one accident in history had been deemed that serious: Chernobyl.
It would be almost four more weeks before Japanese authorities announced—belatedly, according to many—that the events in Fukushima indeed rated a level 7 ranking. In the annals of nuclear history, Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl would forever be linked.
Edano’s news briefings routinely contained two messages: the latest radiation readings posed no “immediate risk to health,” followed by these words: “Remain calm.” The Japanese heard that advice from their government frequently during March as radioactive plumes spilled from the plant, as the expanding danger zone forced evacuees to move repeatedly, and as authorities continually failed to contain—or even explain—the accident. If more evidence was needed that things were out of control, videos of the explosions and damage at Fukushima Daiichi played repeatedly on TV and websites, occasionally serving as background illustrations for newsreaders repeating the government’s reassuring statements.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano was the government’s primary spokesperson during the accident. Frequently advising the public to remain calm, he later came under criticism by investigators for downplaying the seriousness of threats posed by events at Fukushima Daiichi. AP
Such assurances had begun to ring hollow. “People in Fukushima are reaching the limit of anxiety and anger,” the governor of Fukushima Prefecture complained a week into the accident. They weren’t the only ones. Across Japan, millions of people struggled to make sense of what was happening, and many began looking for alternative sources of information.
Criticism was also mounting internationally about Japan’s candor regarding conditions at the plant and the degree of risk posted by radiation emissions. This clearly had grown beyond a domestic event. Early on, fears that dangerous levels of radiation could contaminate areas far beyond Japan gained legitimacy in part because of the dearth of information. The fragments of data experts could glean from Fukushima Daiichi painted a picture often at odds with the assessments coming out of Tokyo. The NRC’s experts undoubtedly were not the only ones abroad engaged in debates about the potential radiation hazard.
The International Atomic Energy Agency was faulted for its sluggish and confusing response. The agency’s head, Yukiya Amano, a career Japanese diplomat, paid a one-day visit to Tokyo on March 18 to announce that the IAEA and the international community were “standing by Japan.” Critics argued that instead of standing by, the IAEA should be wading in and participating much more directly in efforts to assess the threats posed by the reactors. Some blamed the organization’s backseat role in part on Amano’s ties to Tokyo’s political and nuclear establishment. (That criticism increased when the IAEA declared in late May that Japan’s response to the accident had been “exemplary.”)
However, even if the IAEA could have done more, it was hamstrung by its lack of authority to intervene in the internal nuclear safety affairs of sovereign states. With regard to civilian nuclear power safety, the organization functioned more to set standards and practices than to be a nuclear cop on the beat. And at the beginning, the IAEA scientists were as starved for information as those everywhere else outside the Japanese government and TEPCO.
Logically, many Japanese turned to the news media for help. There, too, they were often ill served. For journalists, the events at Fukushima Daiichi posed unique reporting challenges. The accident superimposed a complex technological failure involving multiple reactors on a catastrophic natural disaster that itself was a major story. Nuclear jargon was confusing and unfamiliar; radiation measurements were baffling. Information came secondhand; access to the plant and those working inside was impossible.
Reporters from Japan’s major media outlets stayed well outside the twelve-mile (twenty-kilometer) evacuation zone, not traveling closer for more than a month after the accident. Rather than do on-scene reporting, journalists often just repeated government and utility statements, supplementing them with interviews of academics or industry spokesmen, whose objectivity soon came into question.
Some foreign journalists and Japanese freelance reporters ventured as close to the disaster scene as they could go, talking with evacuees and providing vivid descriptions of the confusion and miscues in the accident response. At times their accounts were so at odds with what major Japanese media were reporting that these journalists were accused of sensationalizing.
The international and independent reports were often posted or streamed on websites. For those with Internet access who saw the accounts, the events at Fukushima Daiichi seemed far more alarming than how they were portrayed in regular updates from official sources.
Advocacy groups, including the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, quickly became sought-after providers of trusted information. On March 12, the center began conducting extensive daily briefings in Japanese and in English, delivered by independent nuclear experts. Streamed live on the Internet, the sessions provided details and analysis often unavailable elsewhere. They quickly developed a large following, with viewers e-mailing questions for the experts to answer. International organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, also conducted detailed briefings, posting transcripts and relevant documents online and responding to hundreds of media inquiries from the United States, Japan, and elsewhere.
As the days progressed, and the hunger for information grew, new media outlets—the Internet, Twitter, blogs, Web-based broadcast media—played an increasingly vital role. Some of the content for these outlets came from those most immediately affected: disaster victims, evacuees, and even emergency workers who captured events on cell phones or reported them via text messages, blogs, and Twitter feeds. Again, the stories they told were often at odds with the official assessments.
One of the most compelling accounts came from Katsunobu Sakurai, the mayor of Minamisoma, a devastated coastal community about fifteen miles from Fukushima Daiichi. Sakurai sat down in front of a camcorder in his office and pleaded for assistance from anyone. The natural disaster and the nuclear accident had made conditions in his city untenable, he said. Food and fuel deliveries had stopped; residents who had not already fled had been ordered to remain indoors. “With the scarce information we can gather from the government or TEPCO, we are left isolated,” Sakurai said, looking into the camera. “I beg you to help us. . . . Helping each other is what makes us human being[s].” The eleven-minute recording, posted on YouTube, was viewed by more than two hundred thousand people in the course of three weeks, and relief poured into the beleaguered city.
Even as up-to-date technology made disseminating the news faster and simpler, many Japanese journalists labored under the influence of traditional politics, economics, and culture, which did not reward confrontation.
As a result, TEPCO often got a free ride from potential critics in and out of government, and it grew to symbolize much of what was wrong in corporate management and regulatory oversight in Japan. Despite its well-known history of covering up safety problems, the utility was regarded by many as
a “cornerstone of corporate Japan,” relying on political muscle, public goodwill, and deferential watchdogs to keep its nuclear facilities and the billions invested in them operating without serious challenge. TEPCO had committed to building more reactors at home and overseas, and was even planning to help fund a two-reactor project in Texas. What confidence could reporters have that the company was now being forthright?
In the absence of company president Masataka Shimizu, who had vanished from public view, the utility put junior executives before the cameras to apologize for “causing inconvenience.” But they offered little in the way of new details. TEPCO’s press releases occasionally omitted crucial information. The utility announced that it had successfully begun injecting seawater into the Unit 2 reactor at 11:00 p.m. on March 14, for example, but failed to mention that radiation levels had jumped at the plant entrance about four hours earlier.
Members of the media camped out for days at TEPCO headquarters, squeezed into a cluttered room off the first floor lobby. Utility officials would appear to make brief announcements at all hours. When pressed by reporters for details and explanations, they often were unable or unwilling to answer.
In better times, TEPCO had been a savvy corporate communicator with deep pockets and enviable national clout. For years the company had financed a sophisticated and expensive public relations program to promote the benefits—and safety—of nuclear power. TEPCO, like Japan’s other nuclear utilities, erected elaborate visitor centers that resembled theme parks, filled with animated characters extolling the wonders of nuclear power. TEPCO’s mascot, Denko-chan, promoted the company to the younger set and their families.
Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster Page 14