It seemed that Noda, given the choice of appeasing Japan’s powerful business community or all those people “making lots of noise” on the streets, had opted for the establishment. The backpedaling continued: when the cabinet met on September 19, it sidestepped approving the energy plan, saying only it would “take it into consideration.” The cabinet’s failure to endorse the plan meant that future governments would not be required to follow it. That prompted the Asahi Shimbun to note, “The government’s commitment to abandon nuclear power by the 2030s is increasingly sounding like ‘maybe.’ ”
The cabinet did approve creation of a new nuclear watchdog, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), after months of political wrangling over the extent of its independence. Even that was cast in doubt when it was reported that most NRA employees had come from the widely discredited NISA and the NSC. The cabinet handed the new agency the unenviable task of deciding whether the nation’s nuclear fleet could safely be restarted. The NRA said the decision could take months. The agency’s rocky start only signaled the tough job it faced in ushering in a new era of nuclear oversight.
The media reported that four of six experts charged with drawing up new safety regulations for the NRA had financial ties to the nuclear industry. (Trying to put the best face on that news, an NRA spokesman noted that the mere fact that the experts had to disclose their personal finances was a positive step.)
In January 2013, the NRA issued a draft set of new safety measures that nuclear plants would have to adopt as a prerequisite for restart. These included upgrades to some of the equipment that had proved inadequate at Fukushima, such as portable power supplies and water sources, so that they would be more reliable in an extended station blackout or other severe accident. Plants would have to show that they could maintain core cooling for a full week without off-site assistance. They would also have to install filtered vents and remote secondary control rooms. In addition, they would have to demonstrate defense against both natural disasters and terrorist attacks, such as a 9/11-style aircraft impact.
The NRA then began a period of “discussion” with the utilities to obtain their views before finalizing the new rules. This was uncharted territory in Japan. It remained to be seen if the NRA would be able to maintain its independence when confronted with predictably intense pressure from the utilities to weaken this stringent and costly set of proposals.
Even as regulators in Japan’s nuclear establishment haggled over details, those whose lives had been disrupted by events at Fukushima Daiichi continued to struggle. For many of them, resuming their normal lives anytime soon seemed unlikely.
A case in point were residents of the “emergency evacuation preparation” zone—a portion of the area between twelve and eighteen miles around the plant. About a month after the accident, the government recommended that vulnerable groups such as children and pregnant women in this zone evacuate, and that all others be ready to flee at a moment’s notice. (In contrast, the highly contaminated area to the northwest of the plant, extending beyond eighteen miles, was a mandatory evacuation zone and remained so.) Nearly half of the 58,000 people in the “evacuation preparation” zone left their homes.
When protective measures were lifted six months later, the evacuees stayed away. Only about 3,100 people had returned as of September 2012. Noticeably absent were young children.
More than a year after the accident, large areas near Fukushima Daiichi remained off-limits. Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations of Tokyo Electric Power Company
For residents of the town of Okuma, home to Fukushima Daiichi, the announcement that it would not be safe to return until 2022 was the first blow delivered by the government. Then came word that Tokyo planned to build as many as nine temporary radioactive disposal facilities in Okuma—possible because no one was living there. That spawned fears that even when it was safe to go back, no one would want to. “We have been living there for 1,000 years,” Okuma’s mayor told a reporter.
In October 2012, some of the workers who had risked their lives to wrestle Fukushima Daiichi back from the brink spoke publicly about their experiences for the first time. Until that moment these men had avoided the limelight. Eight of them met with Prime Minister Noda, who was visiting the plant. They began with an apology to the Japanese people.
Six of the workers declined to be identified, or to have their faces shown on camera. “Many [people] view us as the perpetrators,” explained Atsufumi Yoshizawa, who worked with plant superintendent Masao Yoshida during the accident. Uppermost in their minds as the accident unfolded, the men said, was the safety of their fellow workers and of nearby communities, where many of them lived with their families.
They said they had never intended to abandon the plant during the crisis; they knew that erroneous reports to that effect had led to an angry exchange between Prime Minister Kan and TEPCO’s president. “I thought that maybe I would end up not leaving,” Yoshizawa said, “that, as we Japanese say, we would ‘bury our bones’ in that place.”
But the workers stayed despite the terrifying conditions. “I had no intention of dying,” said the operations chief for Units 1 through 4. “Everyone did their best. Dying would have meant giving up.”
Noda returned to Fukushima Prefecture in early December, to kick off the campaign season for the December 16 parliamentary election. Also in Fukushima that day was Shinzo Abe, seeking reelection to the prime minister’s job that he resigned in 2007 after a troubled year in office. For voters across Japan, the slumping economy occupied center stage, and Abe promised change. When the votes were counted, Abe and his conservative-leaning Liberal Democratic Party won by a landslide.
By month’s end, Abe was sworn in as Japan’s seventh prime minister in six and a half years. Among his first promises was a vow to move ahead with new nuclear development.
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A RAPIDLY CLOSING WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
The accusations began flying almost immediately. Over the ensuing weeks and months, everyone, it seemed, was looking for something or someone to blame for the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Antinuclear activists around the globe looked at the accident and saw irredeemable technical and institutional failures, reinforcing their conviction that nuclear energy is inherently unsafe. Nuclear power supporters indicted the user of the technology—in this instance TEPCO—instead of the technology itself, and thus avoided answering larger safety questions.
TEPCO initially pointed fingers at Mother Nature, asserting that the event was unavoidable. But the utility also blamed Japanese government regulators for not forcing the company to meet sufficiently stringent safety standards.
For its part, the Japanese government blamed the “unprecedented” accident on what it called “an extremely massive earthquake and tsunami rarely seen in history,” suggesting that there was no way authorities could have anticipated such an event. By invoking forces beyond their control, TEPCO and the Japanese government absolved themselves of responsibility.
Some experts in the United States and Japan decided the culprit was the deficient Mark I reactor design, contending that advanced reactor designs, such as the Westinghouse AP1000, would not have suffered the same fate. In response, the Mark I’s designer, GE, asserted that no nuclear plant design could have survived the flooding and blackout conditions that Fukushima Daiichi experienced.
Then there were those who argued precisely the opposite: that the Fukushima disaster was clearly preventable. The Japanese Diet Independent Investigation Commission laid blame at the feet of both TEPCO and Japanese regulators for their incompetence, lack of foresight, and even corruption. The utility and government should have anticipated and prepared for larger earthquakes and tsunamis, and should have had more robust accident management measures in place, the commission concluded.
It is too simplistic to say either that the accident was fully preventable or that it was impossible to foresee. The truth lies in between, and there is plenty of blame to go
around.
NEW REACTOR DESIGNS: SAFER OR MORE OF THE SAME?
The accident at Fukushima provided nuclear advocates with a fresh argument to bolster their support for construction of a new generation of reactors. Certain new designs, they claimed, could have withstood a catastrophic event such as the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi.
Among those designs is the AP1000, built by Westinghouse Electric Company (AP stands for “advanced passive” and one thousand is its approximate electrical generation output in megawatts.) The reactor utilizes passive safety features to reduce the need for machinery, such as motor-driven pumps, to provide coolant in the event of an accident. Westinghouse advertises the AP1000 as capable of withstanding a seventy-two-hour station blackout. Soon after Fukushima, Aris Candris, then CEO of Westinghouse, said that the Fukushima accident “would not have happened” had an AP1000 been on the site.
The design received a significant boost in February 2012 when the NRC commissioners voted 4–1 to approve licenses to construct two AP1000 reactors at the Vogtle nuclear complex, about 170 miles east of Atlanta. NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko cast the lone “no” vote, saying, “I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima had never happened.” Jaczko anticipated that the lessons learned from the Japanese disaster would lead the NRC to adopt new requirements for U.S. plants, and he argued that any new licenses should be conditioned on plant owners’ agreement to incorporate all safety upgrades that the NRC might require in the future.
Other new reactor designs, such as the GE Hitachi ESBWR (“economic simplified boiling water reactor”), also boast passive systems. In contrast, the French company Areva’s EPR (“evolutionary power reactor” in the United States, “European pressurized water reactor” elsewhere) adds redundant active safety systems and new features to cope with severe accidents such as a “core catcher,” intended to capture and contain a damaged core if it melts through the reactor vessel. Both designs await NRC certification in the United States.
Advocates are also promoting development of small modular reactors, those generating less than three hundred megawatts of electricity. In principle, the units can be built on assembly lines and would allow utilities to augment their generating output in smaller increments to meet fluctuating demand.
Backers argue that because the small units could be constructed underground, they would be safer from terrorist attacks or natural events such as earthquakes. On the other hand, critics argue that in the case of a serious accident, emergency crews would have difficulty accessing the below-grade reactors, and multiple units at one site may compound the challenges for emergency response efforts, as was seen at Fukushima.
There is no question that nuclear safety can be improved through thoughtful design of new reactors. However, nuclear power’s safety problems cannot be solved through good design alone. Any reactor, regardless of design, is only as robust as the standards it is required to meet.
Unless regulators expand the spectrum of accidents that plants are designed to withstand, even enhanced safety systems could prove of little value in the face of Fukushima-scale events such as an extended station blackout or a massive earthquake.
In the case of the AP1000, for example, Aris Candris was wrong. Even if an AP1000 had been at the Fukushima site, it would have become endangered after three days of blackout when it would have needed AC power to refill the overhead tank that supplies the emergency cooling water. And if the plant had experienced an earthquake larger than it was designed to withstand, the tank itself might have been rendered unusable.
Perhaps the strongest vote of no confidence comes from the reactor vendors themselves. Even as they heavily promoted the new designs in the United States, the vendors in 2003 successfully lobbied Congress to reauthorize federal liability protection for all reactors—new and old—under the Price-Anderson Act for another twenty years. While they asserted that the next generation of plants would pose an infinitesimally small risk to the public, they wanted to make sure there would be limits on the damage claims they would have to pay if they were wrong.
Those with an interest in advancing nuclear safety need to look past their own biases and recognize the root causes of the accident, wherever they may be. Absent such a clear-eyed appraisal, the opportunity to identify and correct past mistakes will be lost. With it will go the opportunity to prevent the next severe accident. The legacy of Fukushima Daiichi will then be revealed as a tragic fiasco.
There’s no question that TEPCO and the Japanese regulatory system bear much responsibility. Each clearly could have done more to prevent the disaster (like erecting a taller seawall when information about a larger tsunami threat emerged) or to lessen its severity (like equipping the plant with more reliable containment vent valves). Such change could have been accomplished through new regulations or voluntary initiatives, neither of which was forthcoming.
But that is too narrow a focus. TEPCO and government regulators were merely the Japanese affiliate of a global nuclear establishment of power companies, vendors, regulators, and supporters, all of whom share the complacent attitude that made an accident like Fukushima possible.
The safety philosophy and regulatory process that governed Fukushima were not fundamentally different from those that exist elsewhere, including the United States. The reactor technology was nearly identical. The reality is that any nuclear plant facing conditions as far beyond its design basis as those at Fukushima would be likely to suffer an equivalent fate. The story line would differ, but the outcome would be much the same—wrecked reactors, off-site radioactive contamination, social disruption, and massive economic cost.
The catastrophe at Fukushima should not have been a surprise to anyone familiar with the vulnerabilities of today’s global reactor fleet. If those vulnerabilities are not addressed, the next accident won’t be a surprise, either.
Fukushima triggered extensive “lessons learned” reviews in Japan, France, the United States, and elsewhere. Many lessons have indeed been learned, but to date few have been promptly and adequately addressed—at least in the United States. The reason, of course, is the prevailing mind-set.
“It Can’t Happen Here”
That mind-set underlies all that went wrong at Fukushima Daiichi. While numerous technological and regulatory failures contributed to the events that began on March 11, 2011, that pervasive belief stands as the root cause of the accident.
In the United States, “it can’t happen here” was a common refrain while details of the Fukushima accident were still unfolding. In June 2011, for example, Senator Al Franken joked that “the chances of an earthquake of that level in Minnesota are very low, but if we had a tsunami in Minnesota, we’d have bigger problems than even the reactor.”
Senator Franken’s casual attitude illustrates the problem. Yes, it is unlikely that a tsunami will sweep into the northern plains. But serious potential threats to reactors do exist in his home state, as well as the states of many other members of Congress.
Two pressurized-water reactors at the Prairie Island nuclear plant, southeast of Minneapolis, are among the thirty-four reactors at twenty sites around the United States downstream from large dams. A dam failure could rapidly inundate a nuclear plant, disabling its power supplies and cooling systems, not unlike the impact of a tsunami.1
Nor is a dam failure the only type of accident that could create Fukushima-scale challenges at a U.S. nuclear plant. Fire is another. A fire could damage electric cabling and circuit boards, cutting off electricity from multiple backup safety systems as flooding did at Fukushima. The NRC adopted fire-protection regulations in 1980 following a very serious fire in March 1975 at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama. A worker using a lit candle to check for air leaks accidentally started a fire in a space below the control room. The fire damaged electrical cables that disabled all of the emergency core cooling systems for the Unit 1 reactor and most of those systems for the Unit 2 reactor. Only heroic actions by workers prevented dual meltdowns that day at
Browns Ferry.
The threat of fires remains a major contributor to the risk of core damage at nuclear plants. Decades later, fire safety regulations imposed by the NRC in the wake of Browns Ferry have not been met at roughly half the reactors operating in the United States—including the three reactors at Browns Ferry.
So, lesson one: “It can happen here.” And that reality leads directly, once again, to the most critical question.
“How Safe Is Safe Enough?”
Fukushima and other nuclear plants are not houses of cards waiting for the first gust of wind or ground tremor to collapse. They are generally robust facilities that require many things to go wrong before disaster occurs. Over the years, many things have, mostly without serious consequences.
Key to safety at a nuclear plant are multiple barriers engineered to protect the public from radiation releases—the so-called defense-in-depth approach. Each barrier should be independent of the others and provide a safety margin exceeding the worst conditions it might have to endure in any accident envisioned in the design basis of the plant. Regulators regard defense-in-depth as a hedge against uncertainty in the performance of any one barrier.
The design and operation of the damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi were consistent with the defense-in-depth principle as commonly applied around the world. Multiple and diverse cooling systems existed to forestall damage to the reactor cores. When cooling was interrupted and core damage did occur, leak-tight containment buildings limited the escape of radioactivity. When containments leaked and a large amount of radioactivity escaped, emergency plans were invoked to evacuate or shelter people.
Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster Page 32