by Craig Nelson
Workers trying to repair Unit 3 were found to have elevated radiation levels on March 25, which implied that its containment walls were leaking. As Unit 3 was an advanced design using MOX fuel—a reprocessed combination of uranium and plutonium—an escaping plume would be even more toxic than that from a common core meltdown. The Tokyo police were finally able to bring in a water cannon—normally used against rioters—and sprayed Unit 3 down with thirty tons of seawater.
That day, Japan recommended widening the “voluntary evacuation” zone from twelve to nineteen miles. Yet, twenty-five miles away from the plant, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency found cesium-137 in amounts up to twice as high as the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl cutoff point for judging land unfit for human habitation. Spinach and milk had been contaminated, as was, disturbingly, the tap water of Tokyo, testing positive for radioactive iodine. Seawater collected three hundred yards away from Daiichi had iodine-131 at 3,355 and 4,385 times the legal limit. From its history with tests in Bikini, however, the Americans knew that the ocean has a remarkable ability to absorb and disperse radioactive contaminants. Radioecologist F. Ward Whicker: “The most likely effects would be reductions in reproductive potential of local fishes.”
Inspectors finally uncovered the source of Unit 2’s leaks on April 1—a twenty-centimeter crack in its maintenance pit, which had ten thousand times the legal concentration of iodine-131. They tried to plug it with sawdust and polymeric gel (the secret ingredient of disposable diapers). This effort failed.
That same day, the Tachikawa squad, a specially trained unit of the Tokyo fire department, finally reached the plant after driving their equipment across seventy miles of earthquake- and tsunami-destroyed roadways. The two requirements for being one of the thirty-two members of this team were to be over the age of forty and not hoping to sire any children.
The squad needed to set up a pumping truck next to the ocean. These pumps were designed to quench severe jet-fuel-ignited aviation fires. Squad deputy commander Kenichi Kunisawa: “When I heard that the operation was to spray water to the reactors, I felt that we were the right people to do it. We are good at spraying water. . . . We firefighters, even if we feel fear, we never show it to the others. We have high morale and were resolved to accomplish the duty. We only think how to accomplish our duty—even when we are afraid to do it. It would be a lie if we say we did not feel the fear. I admit we had concerns about [Reactor #3], but we’d been trained to do this. That’s how we became members of a special unit. We’re proud of being special guys, like the Green Berets.” The team had to lay eight hundred yards of hose, connect the system, and begin to spray down the containment pools with seawater. To keep from being dangerously contaminated, they had a mere hour to accomplish all of this. And they did it.
Kunisawa: “We had to decide so many things at the site. Things were changing all the time. There was a lot of commotion and people were yelling at each other, to be heard. But the older members over forty took charge and things went okay. We were basically cool. Our minds were on the job and we didn’t really feel fear. We didn’t have time for that.”
Fixing the pools dropped the radiation enough so that TEPCO workers could return. Miles of pipe were laid connecting the sea to each out-of-control reactor. After twenty-two days of battle, the worst was over.
On April 4, TEPCO started dumping eleven thousand tons of water one hundred times as radioactive as the legal limit into the Pacific. Edano: “Unfortunately, the water contains a certain amount of radiation. This is an unavoidable measure to prevent even higher amounts of radiation from reaching the sea.” Daiichi detected new levels of hydrogen accumulating in Unit 1 on April 5 and decided to inject nitrogen into its containment shell to keep any combustible oxygen from entering. It also plugged the maintenance pit leak and tested the ocean three hundred yards from the plant, which had previously registered radiation levels 4,000 times the legal limit. Those levels had fallen to 280.
Accused of mismanaging the crisis, Prime Minister Kan was forced to resign.
By August 25, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology announced that the cesium-137 contaminating the country from Daiichi was equal to 168 Hiroshima bombs and admitted that thirty-four of the plant’s neighboring districts were more radioactive than the threshold set by the Soviets for Chernobyl, making them uninhabitable for humans. That same month, TEPCO started building a sixty-foot underground wall to keep more radioactive water from seeping out of the ground and into the Pacific.
By December 6, traces of cesium appeared in Japanese milk, beef, vegetables, fish, rice, spinach, tea leaves, and baby formula. Manufacturer Meiji insisted that babies could drink its “formula every day without any effect on their health.” The government found contaminated rice over the safety limit grown thirty-five miles away, and beef raised more than forty miles away from Daiichi, and kept both from being sold. But when used cars were tested as too radioactive to be exported to Russia, Australia, and North and South America, some Japanese dealers reregistered them with new plates and sold them, illegally, to their countrymen.
A group of concerned Tokyo citizens paid for soil sample testing of their own neighborhoods and uncovered, in the capital of Japan 150 miles away from the plant, Chernobyl-level readings of radioactive cesium. Of 132 areas sampled, 22 were over the Soviet limit for contamination. Japan’s press ignored this story, instead widely broadcasting another about an adorable rabbit baby born near Fukushima that had no ears. Was it a genetic mutation caused by the accident? Would the prefecture be run amok with earless rabbits everywhere, like radiant mascots? It was so cute!
Now Japan faced a choice. She could follow the Soviet lead, cleaning up as much as feasible, then keeping humans from living in her own Zone of Alienation for decades . . . or she could rehabilitate the New Jersey–sized prefecture and return its citizens to their homes. Japan’s Diet chose this latter course, at a cost of a trillion yen, but after a year of effort, the results are not promising. A day laborer said, “We are all amateurs. Nobody really knows how to clean up radiation,” and decontamination worker Takeshi Nomura insisted, “They tell us decontamination would take three years. It’s utter bullshit. It’s going to take longer than that before people are going to feel safe enough to come back. . . . That day may never come.”
The rehabilitation began by hosing down every building, removing all the leaves from the trees, and digging up the top two inches of earth. Fukushima now has a billion cubic feet of contaminated detritus sitting around in garbage bags like a tidy regional dump—enough to fill thirty-three domed football stadiums. The refuse needs to be landfilled, but no community will accept it, including Fukushima itself.
When it comes to convincing Fortunate Island’s residents to move back home, imagine the amount of dust your house reveals every time you clean it, then imagine living in a community where that dust might, over time, give your kids cancer. The chances are remote, but still. After her eight-year-old son, Yuma, was discovered to have been contaminated with cesium, Mitsue Ikeda said she would never return to Fukushima: “It’s too dangerous. How are we supposed to live, by wearing face masks all the time?” With Japan’s cratered economy, though, Kunikazu Takahashi thought he had no choice but to continue his job as a nuclear technician at Daini, a mere six miles from Daiichi: “They called several days ago, asking for me. I have to go back.” When he was asked about contamination, he said, “I try not to think about it.” Those trying to start a new life elsewhere have found themselves stigmatized. Being from Fukushima turns out to be as much of a social disgrace as being from Hiroshima or Nagasaki used to be.
On May 9, 2012, the Japanese government announced it was ready to spend 2.4 trillion yen ($30.1 billion) to pay compensation to Fukushima victims and 1 trillion yen ($12.5 billion) on a bailout to temporarily nationalize TEPCO—supplier of all Tokyo’s electricity and one-third of the nation’s as a whole—a “too big to fail” move of public largesse. All of the compa
ny’s current directors would resign. Regarding the dark history of plant workers’ ties to criminal gangs, a Japanese senator explained, “Nuclear energy shouldn’t be in the hands of the yakuza. They’re gamblers, and an intelligent person doesn’t want them to have atomic dice to play with.” When TEPCO has regained enough credibility to sell corporate bonds, the nationalization will end.
On May 28, former prime minister Naoto Kan appeared at a Diet inquiry and testified that the country should forgo nuclear power since, if Daiichi had not been brought under control, it would have meant evacuating the whole of Tokyo, paralyzing the government—“a collapse of the nation’s ability to function.” Kan accused the nuclear establishment of “showing no remorse” post-3.11 and summed up, “Gorbachev said in his memoirs that the Chernobyl accident exposed the sicknesses of the Soviet system. The Fukushima accident did the same for Japan.” Novelist Haruki Murakami: “This is a historic experience for us Japanese: our second massive nuclear disaster. But this time no one dropped a bomb on us. We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives.”
On July 19, 2011, TEPCO announced it had stabilized the reactors’ temperatures, and on December 15, Kan’s successor as prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, declared the crisis over, with Daiichi in “a state of cold shutdown.” This was not true at the time, or even as this book was being written. One engineer working at the plant a year later admitted, “The coolant water is keeping the reactor temperatures at a certain level, but that’s not even near the goal [of a cold shutdown]. The fact is, we still don’t know what’s going on inside the reactors.”
In the end, for all the world’s obsession with Japan’s nuclear disaster, Fukushima was almost wholly insignificant compared to the 3.11 tragedy for the nation as a whole. The country’s National Police Agency official tally as of December 12, 2012, itemized the horror:
Dead
15,878
Injured
6,126
Missing
2,713
Damages
over $300 billion
As of July 2013, thirty-one countries burn 432 nuclear power reactors generating 13.5 percent of the world’s electricity. In the wake of Fukushima, Germany and Switzerland began phasing out nuclear power within their borders, joining Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, and Portugal in foreswearing nuclear power. In the opposing camp stand Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ukraine, each of which gets more than a third of its energy from reactors.
Many Germans are profoundly antinuclear and supportive of the country’s turn to wind and solar, but unfortunately, we are currently mired in a fossil-fuel world, and turning to green energy is arduous and expensive. Coal, gas, and oil are so much cheaper than every other source that they have remained the most used energy forms for a century, even though two pounds of coal creates three kilowatt-hours of electricity, while the same amount of oil generates four, and two pounds of uranium can create 7 million kilowatt-hours, with none of fossil fuel’s air pollutants or greenhouse gases. Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Gaia theorist James Lovelock, NASA climate scientist James Hansen, and Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs, among many others in the environmental movement, are convinced that we need nuclear power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, a greenhouse gas.
Like most of the world, “Americans have never met a hydrocarbon they didn’t like,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert said. “Oil, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, tar-sands oil, coal-bed methane, and coal, which is, mostly, carbon—the country loves them all, not wisely, but too well. To the extent that the United States has an energy policy, it is perhaps best summed up as: if you’ve got it, burn it.” For of all the ways we have right now of producing electricity, nuclear is in many ways the least of our worries, so much so that perhaps antinuclear activists should refocus on the far greater menace of coal. Thanks to coal, the skies of China are annually filled with 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, and 26 million tons of sulfur dioxide. Political commentator William Saletan: “The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last forty years, Chernobyl, directly killed thirty-one people. By comparison, Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than twenty thousand people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than fifteen thousand people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—eleven thousand in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is eighteen times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power. Even if you count all the deaths plausibly related to Chernobyl—nine thousand to thirty-three thousand over a seventy-year period—that number is dwarfed by the death rate from burning fossil fuels. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2008 Environmental Outlook calculates that fine-particle outdoor air pollution caused nearly 1 million premature deaths in the year 2000, and 30 percent of this was energy-related. You’d need five hundred Chernobyls to match that level of annual carnage.”
So while France’s fifty-eight reactors generate over 80 percent of its electrical power, India plans to build at least five more burners, Vietnam wants at least eight, and China will build fifty. By 2025, Southeast Asia is expected to go from zero to twenty-nine atomic plants. Of the sixty nuclear power plants being built around the world now, fifteen are engineered and constructed by Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, the most of any nation.
Would these governments—notably top-down operations such as China and Vietnam—be so enthusiastic about nuclear power if they knew Mikhail Gorbachev’s opinion of Chernobyl? That it was, in his words, “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union . . . [a] turning point [that] opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue.”
Journalist Mark Joseph Stern: “By 1987, the year following Chernobyl, glasnost had taken hold of Soviet society, with sudden openness dominating the press and the public forum. Outrage over the catastrophe began to spread among even loyal citizens who had never questioned the infallibility of their government. This opened the door to comparison with the West, a toxic line of thought in this famously closed society. Soviets had been told for decades they were the best in the world—at everything. Through the mid-1980s, they still believed they were a major superpower, facing only the United States as serious competition. When information about Chernobyl and the public health crisis leaked, though, Soviet citizens realized that their government and industries were startlingly incompetent. Before the explosion, most Soviets were not discontented dissidents; they believed in the Soviet system, forgave its flaws, and hoped for a better future within its confines. But after Chernobyl, the system seemed potentially unredeemable—and actively dangerous. In the early days of glasnost, stories of Stalin’s mass murders decades earlier slowly bubbled to the fore, but those generally receded, so far removed were they from everyday life. After Chernobyl, though, every citizen’s safety was at stake.”
There is one solution: engineers creating technological breakthroughs to end the ever-present threat of atomic and political meltdown. China is testing a “pebble bed” reactor design, where reactor fuel comes not in big rods but as four hundred thousand billiard ball “pebbles,” coated in graphite and cooled by helium. If a pebble bed reactor is SCRAMed, the graphite shell quiets the fission without threat of infinite afterheat and meltdown, while the helium is inert, so if it has to be vented, it won’t be radioactive.
Another breakthrough may come with the thorium breeder reactor, which through an ingenious weaving of half-lives creates its own fuel. The pile’s uranium-233 fissions throw neutrons into the surrounding layer of thorium, which becomes thorium-233. The 233 decays, becoming protactinium-233. The protactinium decays, becoming uranium-233, and the cycle repeats. Unfortunately,
the history of breeder reactors is not good; all four of the AEC’s test breeders of the 1960s were failures. But a number of physicists and engineers insist that the thorium design will solve all of those problems, with less maintenance, and less waste. Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold are, meanwhile, investing in a “traveling wave reactor” process, a type of breeder reactor fueled by ordinary uranium instead of enriched, which, if it works, won’t require massive Oak Ridge–like industrial plants isolating near-weapons-grade isotopes.
Breeder reactors are so interesting that Eagle Scout David Hahn decided that, for his 1994 Atomic Energy merit badge, he should build one in his parents’ suburban Detroit potting shed. “His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the periodic table,” Hahn’s high school physics teacher remembered. “I don’t know about you, but my dream at that age was to buy a car.” On August 31 at 2:40 a.m., Clinton Township police were looking for a boy seen stealing tires from cars when they came across David in his Pontiac, acting suspicious. In his trunk they found acids, fireworks, antique clockfaces, rocks, lantern mantles, a box of dismantled smoke detectors, assorted chemicals, fifty cubes of white powder wrapped in foil, and a toolbox sealed with duct tape and a padlock. To build his test reactor, David had amassed americium-241 from smoke detectors, radium-226 from glow-in-the-dark clocks, thorium-232 from the mantles of kerosene lamps, and uraniums-238 and -235 from pitchblende ore. The cops called in the State Police Bomb Squad and radiologists from the Department of Public Health, who found so much radioactivity coming from the Pontiac’s trunk that they had to invoke the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, bringing a coterie of agents from the DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC to Golf Manor.