Although TEPCO called its plan a roadmap, it was a map that carried the utility and its government overseers through largely uncharted territory. The few precedents that existed—notably the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—offered limited guideposts, none suggesting that the final resolution would come quickly, simply, or cheaply. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl each had involved only one reactor, so a multiplier effect was immediately tacked onto projections about Fukushima Daiichi.
The cleanup at Three Mile Island Unit 2 took fourteen years and cost about $1 billion in 1993 dollars. (Final dismantling of the damaged Pennsylvania reactor awaits the decommissioning of the still-operating Unit 1 reactor, set for some time after 2018.) And at Three Mile Island, there was no need for off-site cleanup because very little radiation spread beyond the plant property.
At Chernobyl, radiation contaminated a huge area. Although some cleanup occurred, the Soviet government exercised an option unavailable to land-starved Japan: it simply moved people out of harm’s way. Ultimately about 350,000 people were resettled, and an area within a radius of about nineteen miles (thirty kilometers) around the plant remains an “exclusion zone.”
Just as the Fukushima accident was unrivaled in its engineering challenges, so too was it unprecedented in its economic consequences. That TEPCO faced a huge financial toll went without saying. Two weeks after the accident, TEPCO sought a $25 billion loan from Japanese banks to help cover the cost of repairs. By mid-April, the utility was huddling with the government in an effort to devise a compensation plan for victims. The price tag ballooned. The government was estimating that the accident would cost the national economy as much as $317 billion (25 trillion yen).
On April 15, TEPCO announced it would pay “temporary compensation” of 1 million yen per household (about $12,700) to those forced to evacuate because of the reactor accident. If the evacuees needed the money anytime soon, however, they were due for disappointment. TEPCO required them to fill out three forms, one of which contained fifty-six pages and was accompanied by a 156-page instruction booklet. The evacuees, many of whom had been living in crowded shelters, were required to submit receipts for their living expenses. They were expected to provide medical records and proof of lost wages. Amid public outcries, TEPCO eventually dispatched employees to help evacuees fill out the forms, a process that required about two hours per applicant.
The growing weekly protests outside the prime minister’s office in Tokyo served as a barometer of Japan’s shifting attitudes toward its nuclear-dependent energy policy. But it wasn’t until June 28, 2011, that the depth of that discontent could actually be gauged. The event: TEPCO’s annual meeting. Well in advance, there were abundant indications that this was not going to be the normal, respectful assembly of contented shareholders in a company that the year before had posted annual revenues of nearly $54 billion.
In May, TEPCO had announced a record loss of almost $15 billion, the largest by a nonfinancial institution in Japan’s history. (The loss did not include compensation claims.) President Shimizu announced he intended to resign. The utility said it would sell off more than $7 billion in assets to help cover the looming costs of compensation. On the heels of these announcements, the government made clear that it wanted more reforms. “This is just the start,” said chief cabinet secretary Edano. “There must be more scrutiny and more effort.”
As antinuclear protesters gathered at a nearby park, about 9,300 shareholders—the largest crowd in TEPCO’s history—packed a hotel meeting room and spilled out into other rooms and hallways. Riot police helped maintain security. During the meeting, apologies from executives were drowned by shouts and jeers. The second investor to speak called on the executives to “jump into a nuclear reactor and die.”
About 44 percent of TEPCO’s shareholders were individual investors; financial institutions held about 30 percent of the stock and overseas investors about 17 percent. Many of the individual shareholders were elderly, including pensioners, who had seen the value of their stock plummet 90 percent since the accident.
Regardless, the renomination of all sixteen current members of the board was approved. Fifteen of them were lifetime TEPCO employees; the sixteenth—a former vice governor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which was a large TEPCO shareholder—had been on the utility’s payroll as a “crisis management” consultant for two years. The grueling six-hour meeting ended after a motion to shut down TEPCO’s nuclear plants and halt new construction was defeated. The media reported that exiting shareholders looked exhausted and complained that their views had not been heard.
The only fresh face in the TEPCO boardroom was Toshio Nishizawa, named to replace Shimizu as president. He was hardly a newcomer, however, having spent his career at TEPCO, most recently as managing director. (Nishizawa in turn would be replaced eleven months later after a struggle over control of the company.) If TEPCO’s shareholders weren’t ready for a corporate overhaul, the national government was.
While the NRC team in Tokyo was doing its part to help the Japanese better understand what happened at Fukushima Daiichi—and how to move toward recovery—the staff at White Flint had been handed a mandate by Chairman Gregory Jaczko and the other four NRC commissioners.
A worried White House, members of Congress, and the American public were pressing the NRC for answers to two fundamental questions: Can an accident like Fukushima Daiichi happen here? And if so, what needs to be done to prevent it? The answers recited so often in the past—that nuclear power was inherently safe and that the existing regulations provided ample public protection—might not wash this time. After all, that’s exactly what the Japanese had claimed.
The hastily formed NRC Near-Term Task Force (NTTF), consisting of six senior experts, began its review on March 30, 2011. One of the first and most obvious issues it would have to take on was whether U.S. plants were adequately prepared to deal with the kind of prolonged station blackout that Fukushima had experienced. Under the rule in existence since 1988, all American plants had to show they could cope with a simultaneous loss of off-site and on-site AC power for a certain period. At the majority of plants, the required coping time was just four hours; at one it was sixteen hours; for the remainder, it was eight.
The NRC countenanced several different approaches for coping with a blackout. One was to rely on batteries for DC power to control plant cooling systems that did not require AC power to function. Because these systems eventually would stop working even with DC power, the NRC restricted reliance on batteries for coping to no more than four hours. To prove they could cope for longer periods, plants would have to add AC power sources beyond the two emergency diesel generators they were already required to have. They could do this by purchasing additional generators or by connecting to power supplies from gas turbines, hydroelectric dams, or even adjacent reactors. (The latter option was possible because the NRC permitted licensees to assume that a station blackout would affect only one reactor at a site. Consequently, licensees could assume that equipment from a “nonaffected” reactor would be available to assist the “affected” reactor.)
Each plant determined the coping time it would need based on specific factors such as the duration of off-site power outages experienced in the past. But the NRC did not require that coping time analyses postulate extreme events that could cause prolonged outages. Nor did it require that coping strategies evaluate the possibility that alternate AC sources—like those at a reactor next door—might also become unavailable. And finally, it did not envision the possibility that flooding or fire could disable a reactor’s own electrical systems, so that even if power sources were available they might not be usable.
The station blackout rule was casual about these matters in part because a blackout was considered a beyond-design-basis accident. Therefore, the requirements addressing it did not need to be as stringent.
The lax provisions of the station blackout rule were consistent with the NRC’s logic: more robust prote
ction simply wasn’t needed because this kind of event was so improbable. Still, after the ten-day-long blackout at Fukushima Daiichi, these coping times appeared ridiculously low, and the agency found itself having to justify why immediate action wasn’t needed to extend them.
At an NRC briefing on station blackouts on April 28, Commissioner Kristine L. Svinicki asked the staff a question that might have reflected some of what she and her colleagues were hearing, especially about the four-hour limit on batteries. “Just to a layperson, when they come to you and say, ‘Is it really only four hours that nuclear power plants have to cope with some sort of event of a long duration?’ . . . if you were talking to a family member, what would you say to that?”
The reply of NRC staff member George Wilson had a familiar logic: “[H]ow I’ve answered is that we’ve only had one station blackout in the United States. Our diesels are very reliable, and they restored that power within fifty-five minutes. I also explain that we have redundant power supplies. So you have to have something to take out multiple sources of power. And once I explain that . . . usually they stop, or I run overboard.”
It seemed the NRC’s only fallback was to say yet again, in effect, “It can’t happen here.” The task force had its work cut out for it.
By July 12, the NTTF turned over its first findings, a dozen multipart recommendations for the NRC commissioners to consider—hyperspeed for an agency known for taking years to debate even modest rule changes, let alone employ them. The task force dedicated its report “to the people of Japan and especially to those who have responded heroically to the nuclear accident at Fukushima,” and expressed its “strong desire and our goal to take the necessary steps to assure that the result of our labors will help prevent the need for a repetition of theirs.”
In directing the task force, the commission had been mindful of criticism the NRC received from the industry after the Three Mile Island accident: that the resulting recommendations were too broad and should have concerned only issues specific to events at Three Mile Island. (Others who had the opposite opinion—namely, that the corrective actions ordered after Three Mile Island were too narrowly focused—apparently were not given much weight.) This time around, the commission gave its task force a very specific scope of inquiry: “areas that had a nexus to the Fukushima Daiichi accident.”
Even so, given the many similarities between the U.S. and Japanese nuclear operations, that left plenty of areas ripe for scrutiny—and, many believed, for overdue and fundamental changes. High on that list, the task force noted, was the need for U.S. nuclear facilities to better prepare for station blackouts. The blackout rule should address the possibility that a major natural disaster could disrupt both on-site and off-site AC power for extended periods, and knock out multiple reactors simultaneously. In other words, exactly what happened at Fukushima.
The task force recommended requiring U.S. plants be able to cool fuel for at least eighty hours during a station blackout without needing any assistance, equipment, or materials from off the site. For the first eight hours, the plant’s permanently installed safety systems should be able to do the job with as little operator action as possible. This would give the operators time to set up emergency equipment, such as diesel-powered pumps and portable generators, that could be used for the next seventy-two hours, until the off-site cavalry arrived. From that point on, the plant should be prepared to cool the fuel indefinitely without power from off-site or from the on-site primary diesel generators.
The task force also emphasized that the equipment needed for that first eight-hour period should be protected to some degree from flooding beyond the design basis. It proposed storing the equipment fifteen to twenty feet above the design-basis flood level or in watertight enclosures. (The task force was more concerned about flooding than about earthquakes because it believed that nuclear plant structures could withstand beyond-design-basis earthquakes better than beyond-design-basis floods. It cited evidence that structures could survive ground shaking twice as powerful as they were designed for. In contrast, it argued that flooding was a “cliff edge” phenomenon: a plant site could be flooded even if the water level only slightly exceeded the design basis. As Charlie Miller, head of the task force, observed, it doesn’t take a tsunami to create a crisis at a reactor: “[R]egardless of the way that the water gets in there it’s going to cause the same effect if your equipment is not protected.”)
The task force believed that these requirements should be codified in a new rule. But, recognizing that creating new blackout rules could take a long time, it urged the NRC to take interim measures by issuing orders to plant licensees. This could be accomplished by upgrading protection of the plants’ so-called B.5.b equipment to ensure it would escape damage in a natural disaster.
Another issue the task force flagged was the need for reliable means to vent gases from Mark I and Mark II BWR containments should that be needed in a station blackout or other severe accident. Although the Fukushima Daiichi reactors had been equipped with hardened vents capable of withstanding high gas pressure during an accident, the vents had proven extremely difficult to operate in an extended blackout. Noting that U.S. plants would likely experience similar problems under similar conditions, the task force recommended that the NRC order plants to upgrade their vent systems.
Most of the task force’s other recommendations were in a similar vein, addressing specific shortcomings in protection against beyond-design-basis earthquakes and floods, requirements for emergency plans and communications, and spent fuel pool safety. But the task force also saw a need to address the bigger picture, despite its mandate to focus only on issues with a “nexus” to Fukushima.
Priority number one, according to the task force, was to clarify the commission’s “patchwork of regulatory requirements,” developed “piece-by-piece over the decades,” for dealing with beyond-design-basis accidents. The task force pointed out that these requirements did not amount to a set of coherent guidelines. Some issues were given higher priority than others by operators and regulators; as a result, some measures to address them were mandatory while others were only voluntary. The task force recommended development of an “enhanced regulatory framework intended to establish a coherent and transparent basis for treatment of Fukushima insights.” Although the report did not say it explicitly, the implication was that the current regulatory framework was incoherent and opaque.
Despite these criticisms, the task force asserted that the “continued operation and continued licensing activities [for new reactors] do not pose an imminent risk to public health and safety.” If the task force had concluded otherwise, it would have set off a firestorm. Still, the mixed messages weakened the overall impact of the report as a driver for change. Elsewhere, however, the Fukushima accident prompted some soul-searching and surprising declarations.
On May 6, Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked the owner of the Hamaoka nuclear plant, located about 125 miles (two hundred kilometers) southwest of Tokyo, to shut down two reactors and to refrain from restarting a third. Hamaoka sits atop a major geologic fault and seismologists believed there was a high likelihood of a magnitude 8.0 earthquake in the area in the next thirty years. Hamaoka had long been considered the most dangerous plant site in Japan because of its location. Although the plant’s owner, Chubu Electric, initially refused Kan’s request, it agreed a few days later.
The government’s action was seen by some as a harbinger of things to come. Would the Kan government make similar requests of other plants? Would reactors currently shut down for routine inspections be allowed to restart?
In early July, the Kan government dropped the other shoe. To reassure the public, Japan’s reactors would be subjected to a two-stage safety check known as stress tests. The first stage would be conducted at the nearly three dozen reactors currently out of service for maintenance or other safety issues to determine their ability to withstand large earthquakes and tsunamis. The results of that stage would be used to determine whethe
r plants could restart. The second stage would be a more comprehensive review, and its results would determine whether plants should continue to operate. (Despite their name, the stress tests were merely paper studies. No actual stressing of facilities was involved.) Utility officials were required to submit the first-stage test results to Tokyo by the end of October. Only after government approval could the reactors be returned to service. Any plans for a quick restart during the summer of 2011 were now on hold.
Kan wasn’t finished. A few days later, before a national television audience, he called on his country to phase out its reliance on nuclear power.
In his view, the safety myth surrounding nuclear power was exactly that: a myth. “Japan should aim for a society that does not depend on nuclear energy,” Kan declared. “When we think of the magnitude of the risks involved with nuclear power, the safety measures we previously conceived are inadequate.” To all outward appearances, he had become a nuclear apostate.
Kan was echoing sentiments taking root across Japan. Nearly three quarters of the public supported an energy policy that would eliminate nuclear power altogether, according to one survey. In an editorial, the Japan Times noted that nuclear power “worked for a while, until, of course, it no longer worked. Now is the time to begin the arduous process of moving towards safer, renewable and efficient energy resources.”
One newspaper described Kan’s phaseout announcement as “a complete turnaround of the government’s basic energy plan.” And indeed it was. Back in 2010, the cabinet had approved a Strategic Energy Plan that called for building fourteen new reactors by 2030, which would mean that half the nation’s electricity would come from nuclear power. Only China was planning a more aggressive construction program.
The nuclear push was designed to give Japan greater energy security—the rationale for initially embracing the atom decades before. A larger fleet of reactors would provide a cushion against supply or pricing problems with imported fuels, such as oil. However, nuclear power would not deliver energy independence, because the Japanese imported almost all of the uranium needed to fuel the nation’s plants. To provide a secure domestic supply of nuclear fuel, Japan was intent on developing fast breeder reactors and the reprocessing plants needed to provide them with plutonium fuel. In practice, however, these facilities were proving technically challenging and extremely expensive.1
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