On November 4, TEPCO got a lifeline from the government in the form of an $11.5 billion bailout. It came with strings attached. The company agreed to cut 7,400 jobs and $31 billion (2.5 trillion yen) in costs. The government asserted it would expect more, including a “thorough reorganization,” Edano told reporters.
Edano, the former chief cabinet secretary, was now minister of Economy, Trade and Industry in the cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. (Edano stepped in as minister after the abrupt departure of the original appointee, Yoshio Hachiro, who, one week into office, joked to reporters that communities near Fukushima Daiichi were “dead towns.” He resigned.)
While Japanese officials had access to TEPCO’s bleak financial picture, the government still remained largely in the dark about what actually had happened at Fukushima Daiichi. On that, TEPCO was stonewalling. Nearly nine months after the disaster, the company finally began revealing that the accident was far worse than it had previously acknowledged.
Clearly, Fukushima Daiichi had come close to a truly major catastrophe. Using computer simulations, TEPCO estimated that the fuel rods in Unit 1 had completely melted through the reactor vessel and eaten through 6.5 feet of the 8.5-foot-thick concrete floor of the containment structure. At Unit 2, more than half the fuel had melted, and at Unit 3, almost two-thirds had melted. The fuel in all three was now sitting in the bottoms of the containment structures. Ongoing pumping operations were keeping the fuel below 100°C (212°F), a threshold at which it no longer posed the threat of boiling dry. But this was not a reliable system; another earthquake could send it careening out of control again.
A few days after revealing its accident findings, the utility released its own assessment of its performance during the disaster. The key conclusion: TEPCO had made no significant errors. It was a self-serving review written by executives and a handpicked committee. TEPCO stressed its view that the tsunami, not the earthquake, was the direct cause of the disaster and said its operators had made no mistakes in dealing with the crisis. The utility also retracted an earlier statement that an explosion had breached the Unit 2 containment on March 15. This statement had contributed to confusion about the source of the large release that day that caused radiation to spike at the plant and contaminated the large area to the northwest. (The report did note that many details were still unknown.)
Other examiners took a more jaundiced view of TEPCO’s role. In coming months, the accident would be scrutinized by multiple investigating committees, none of which would hold TEPCO blameless. The period ahead for the utility would be rocky.
Although the reactors seemingly had been pulled back from the brink, there were constant reminders of the precarious condition of the plant. Areas of high radiation precluded repairs or even inspections, meaning the status of equipment inside stayed a mystery. Mountains of debris, some of it badly contaminated, remained piled up around the facility. The jury-rigged cooling systems were vulnerable to shocks ranging from another earthquake to freezing winter temperatures that could cause ruptures of piping exposed to the elements.
On December 16, 2011, nine months and one week after the disaster struck, Prime Minister Noda went on national television to announce that the situation at Fukushima Daiichi was “under control.” The plant had achieved cold shutdown and the reactors were stable, he said.
Some experts called the assertion premature, motivated more by political exigencies than engineering certainties. “The plant is like a black box, and we don’t know what is really happening,” an official of a neighboring town told the New York Times. “I feel no relief.” Nor, apparently, did a huge crowd of protesters who took to the streets the next day in Tokyo, banging drums, waving signs, and chanting “No Nukes.”
As 2011 came to a close, about 180 police officers and firefighters made one final trip along the rugged coastline of Fukushima Prefecture, searching for bodies of people missing from the earthquake and tsunami.
Although the reactor accident itself was not directly responsible for any immediate deaths, the chaos and releases of radioactivity of the first weeks had hindered rescue efforts. Might some of the tsunami victims have been saved if rescuers had gained access sooner? It was a question often asked, especially in communities near the reactors.
Now, as the dreadful year was ending, emergency workers looked among the rocks and along the breakwaters. Some wore protective clothing, for their search took them inside the evacuation zone around Fukushima Daiichi. Japan’s official death toll from the tsunami was 15,870 people, with nearly 2,800 missing. More than two hundred of the missing were from Fukushima Prefecture. No more bodies were found.
9
UNREASONABLE ASSURANCES
On March 15, 2012, the five NRC commissioners sat in a row in a Senate hearing room, summoned by the Environment and Public Works Committee and its forceful chairman, Barbara Boxer of California. The hearing topic: “Lessons from Fukushima, One Year Later.”
Despite the title, some committee members questioned whether the United States really had anything to learn from Fukushima. When it was his turn to take the microphone, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works nuclear safety subcommittee, decided to play devil’s advocate. The NRC’s critics were saying, he noted, that unless the agency took stronger measures to address the vulnerabilities revealed by Fukushima, then “it may be only a matter of time before a similar disaster happens here.” Pointedly skipping over NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko, Barrasso asked the remaining commissioners to respond to the prediction.
First to reply was Commissioner William Magwood, who declared: “I think that our infrastructure, our regulatory approach, our practices at plants, our equipment, our configuration, our design bases would prevent Fukushima from occurring under similar circumstances at a U.S. plant. I just don’t think it would happen.”
Continuing down the line, commissioners Kristine Svinicki, George Apostolakis, and William Ostendorff echoed Magwood’s assessment.
Technically, the four commissioners were correct in asserting that “it can’t happen here”—if “it” means an event exactly like Fukushima, involving a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, a fifty-foot tsunami, four reactors in crisis, and multiple meltdowns and explosions. For one thing, no U.S. nuclear plant site now has four operating reactors. But as for a different series of calamities triggering a core meltdown, containment breach, and widespread land contamination? The chance of that happening is low—but it isn’t zero.
One year after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, the five nuclear regulatory commissioners appeared before a Senate committee, where they were asked if a similar disaster could happen in the United States. The commissioners, from front to rear, were William Magwood, Kristine Svinicki, NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko, George Apostolakis, and William Ostendorff. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
For example, many reactors in the United States are downstream from large dams. A dam failure, whether caused by an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or a spontaneous breach, could rapidly flood one of these plants with little warning, compounding any problems caused by the same event that breached the dam. Although the NRC had known for many years that it was underestimating the threat of dam breaches, the agency was taking its time deciding what to do about it. To some NRC staff members, the catastrophic flooding at Fukushima was a painful reminder of this unresolved vulnerability at home.
IT COULD HAPPEN HERE
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 reminded the U.S. government of the threat of catastrophic sabotage against critical infrastructure targets. Like other federal agencies, the NRC began to reassess the vulnerabilities of nuclear plants. Those included more than terrorists piloting jetliners. An attack on a dam located upstream of nuclear facilities posed a hazard greater than previously thought. And the terrorist threat alerted the NRC to the dangers of accidental failures of upstream dams as well.
Citing domestic security concerns, the NRC concealed for many years its growing worry
about the threat to reactors posed by a dam collapse. Thirty-four reactors at twenty sites around the country are downstream from large dams.
A dam failure could rapidly inundate a nuclear plant and disable its vital power supplies and cooling systems. The risk of such failures was not taken into account in the design-basis flooding analyses when the plants were licensed. Other causes of flooding, such as rainfall, were considered, but these pose far less risk because the water would rise more gradually, providing greater time to prepare.
The issue became public in 2012 when an NRC whistleblower accused the agency of covering up information about the vulnerability. One plant appeared especially at risk: the three-unit Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina.
Thirty-four reactors at twenty sites around the United States are located downstream from large dams. The threat posed by the failure of those dams was not taken into account when the plants were licensed. One plant especially at risk is the three-unit Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina, which sits downstream of the nearby Jocassee Dam. More than 1.4 million people live within fifty miles of Oconee. Google/Union of Concerned Scientists
For years, the NRC and Oconee’s owner, Duke Energy, have been at odds about the magnitude of risk to the plant from a failure of the nearby Jocassee Dam. Although the agency and the company disagreed about the risks there, they did agree on one thing: the consequences—a prolonged station blackout leading to core melting in less than ten hours and containment failure in less than three days. A “significant [radioactivity] dose to the public would result,” according to Duke’s own estimates.
Although the NRC had been aware of the problem since at least 1996, the agency had not required safety enhancements. NRC staff members themselves were divided on how to proceed, and the issue was still unresolved when Fukushima Daiichi demonstrated that prolonged station blackouts associated with flooding were more than a theoretical possibility.
Five days after the tsunami struck the Japanese plant, an NRC staff member e-mailed a colleague to inquire about the status of a Justification for Continued Operation (JCO) for the Oconee site, which was under dispute within the NRC. “In light of the recent developments in Japan,” he wrote, “is anyone having second thoughts about the JCO, Oconee’s path forward, the entire issue, etc.? Although the scope of such a disaster might be more limited at Oconee than in Japan—that is, the Japanese have other problems on their hands than a nuclear crisis, which is slowing them down to a degree, the Oconee disaster would be no less severe on the [reactor] units. Everything on site would be destroyed or useless.”
In reply, his colleague wrote that the matter was being handed off to regional NRC officials to track as an “inspection project.” “The tsunami should give management pause as the results of it sure look like what I would expect to happen to Oconee.” Except, he noted, Oconee would receive more water.
Plans by Duke Energy to heighten a protective floodwall at Oconee, originally scheduled for completion in 2013, are now reportedly delayed until 2017.
Indeed, in spite of their proclamations to Senator Barrasso, the four commissioners had acknowledged that problems existed a few days earlier when they all voted to approve three major regulatory changes to address vulnerabilities identified by the NRC’s own Fukushima NTTF. However, no longtime observer of the NRC expected the commissioners at the Senate hearing to openly profess doubts about the adequacy of U.S. reactor safety, even with memories of Fukushima Daiichi still vivid. The “it can’t happen here” mind-set is deeply rooted at the NRC, just as it was among Japan’s nuclear establishment at the time of Fukushima. In fact, some would argue, the same mind-set has characterized the NRC’s regulatory philosophy throughout its history.
The legacy of this mind-set cannot be undone without structural reforms. But history holds out little hope that more fundamental changes can occur without a paradigm shift at the NRC. The record is replete with examples of the NRC staying the course even in the face of obvious warning signs.
A tortuous logic flourishes within the commission and influences its decisions. The NRC has always been reluctant to take actions that could call into question its previous judgments that nuclear plants were adequately safe. If it were to require new plants to meet higher safety standards than old ones, for example, the public might no longer accept having an “old one” next door. So the NRC is constantly engaged in an elusive quest for a middle ground from which it can direct needed improvements without having to concede that the plants were not already safe enough, thereby alarming the citizenry. It is not clear, even with the ruins of Fukushima in full view, that the NRC is willing to break out of that pattern.
In that regulatory balancing act, what has evolved over the years is a debate over “how safe is safe enough.” In making its determinations on that issue, the NRC has all too often made choices that aligned with what the industry wanted but left gaping holes in the safety net.
There may be no better example than the long-standing controversy over the Mark I boiling water reactor design. Back in 1989, the NRC staff warned the commissioners that “Mark I containment integrity could be challenged by a large scale core melt accident, principally due to its smaller size.” Staff experts recommended that the NRC require Mark I reactor owners to implement measures to reduce the risk of core damage and containment failure.
If the commissioners had taken effective action—action that would have sent a strong message to Mark I operators around the world, including those in Japan—it is quite possible that the worst consequences of Fukushima might have been avoided. Instead, the matter fell into a regulatory morass of competing interests and emerged with a resolution that accomplished little. It wasn’t the first time that had happened.
In the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the Kemeny Commission made clear that the safety status quo was inadequate. However, the panel explicitly refused to give its own views on “how safe is safe enough.” Without any useful external guidance, the NRC embarked on a multi-decade struggle to provide an acceptable answer to this issue, the bane of regulators everywhere. It is without doubt a difficult public policy question, but the NRC’s methods of addressing it have only created more confusion over the decades. Fukushima makes one thing clear: the process has not yielded the right answer.
In the NRC’s world, the issue of “how safe is safe enough” is addressed through the concept of “adequate protection.” When Congress created the agency out of the ashes of the Atomic Energy Commission, the NRC inherited the mandate bestowed upon its predecessor by the 1954 Atomic Energy Act: to “provide adequate protection of public health and safety.” The NRC watered down this hazy concept even further by adopting a standard of “reasonable assurance of adequate protection” in its own guidance. The standard was so vague that it essentially gave the NRC and its five political-appointee commissioners a blank check for deciding exactly what constituted “adequate protection.” In fact, several months after Three Mile Island, NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie said in a speech that “adequate protection means what the Commission says it means.” L’état, c’est moi.
Even with such wide latitude, the NRC has always avoided specifying precisely what “reasonable assurance of adequate protection” means. This vagueness allows the commission to avoid drawing a line in the sand. In a 2011 speech, Commissioner Ostendorff, trained as a lawyer, emphasized that “reasonable assurance does not require objective criteria, and it is also determined on a case-by-case basis dependent on the specific circumstances.” Although this policy preserved a great deal of flexibility for the NRC commissioners, the lack of a concrete standard injected a measure of subjectivity into NRC decisions that rendered them vulnerable to political shifts over the decades.
After the Three Mile Island fiasco, a key issue the NRC confronted was whether it could plausibly continue to maintain that its regulations provided “reasonable assurance of adequate protection.” Certainly a lot of Americans didn’t think so. But to admit that it had fai
led to meet that standard would have thrown into question the foundations of NRC regulations.
Up to that point, regulations were focused on a nuclear plant’s ability to cope with the series of highly stylized events known as “design-basis accidents.” On the NRC’s list of design-basis accidents, the worst was one that assumed “a substantial meltdown of the core with subsequent release of appreciable quantities of fission products.” But as catastrophic as that seems, it was far from the worst case. Owners did not have to consider the failure of more than one safety system at a time. They could assume that emergency core cooling systems would work, that pressure and temperature increases would be limited, and that core damage would be halted before the fuel could melt through the reactor vessel. And the containment structures needed only to be strong enough to prevent leakage of radioactive material to the environment under these modest accident conditions. (This requirement was typically met through the use of steel shells or liners. Reinforced concrete was used in containment buildings to keep things like tornado-driven objects from getting into the reactor, not to keep material within the reactor from getting out.)
Hypothetical events in which multiple safety systems failed, resulting in a complete core meltdown, failure of the reactor vessel, and breach or bypass of the containment, were considered by the NRC to be “beyond-design-basis” accidents. Prior to Three Mile Island, the agency deemed such events so improbable that, in contrast to its policy for design-basis accidents, “mitigation of their consequences [was] not necessary for public safety.” At that time, to the NRC, to achieve “adequate protection” meant to protect against design-basis accidents.
To critics of the design-basis approach, Three Mile Island demonstrated its failure; to others, however, Three Mile Island represented a validation. The accident did not follow the design-basis script because multiple system failures occurred (owing to faulty equipment and human error); the core was severely damaged; and hydrogen exploded in the containment. However, those who saw the glass as half full pointed out that the accident was terminated before the core breached the reactor vessel; the containment never ruptured; and the amount of radioactive material that escaped was well below what the NRC considered acceptable for design-basis accidents.
Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster Page 24