Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster Page 6

  Government response to the accident was slow, even as radiation spread nearly a mile away. Almost three hours elapsed before a radiological monitoring team from the national Science and Technology Agency was dispatched to the scene; the team members initially did not believe there was much reason for concern. Five hours after the incident began, about 160 residents were ordered out of their homes. Seven hours after that, about 310,000 people were told to stay indoors for twenty-four hours. Workers piled sandbags and other shielding materials around the facility to reduce dose rates outside the fence. It took twenty hours to halt the criticality. The three workers at the plant were severely overexposed; two died.

  Reaction to what was at the time Japan’s worst nuclear accident was muted. Two-thirds of Tokaimura residents surveyed said they were now critical of nuclear power. But about half saw their village’s future as “co-existing with the nuclear industry,” not surprising since a third of the populace worked at one of the dozen or more nuclear facilities nearby. (This part of Japan is known as “nuclear alley.”)

  Outside Japan, however, the events in Tokaimura and Tokyo’s response came under sharp attack. A week after the accident, a scathing editorial in the British journal Nature placed responsibility “squarely on the shoulders of government,” specifically, its Science and Technology Agency, “which is proving itself incapable of adequately regulating the safety of nuclear power.” (A government reorganization in 2001 shifted regulatory responsibility to a new body, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, or NISA, which would be overseen by the Nuclear Safety Commission.)

  “The Japanese government seems unable to set up competent regulatory bodies with sufficient staff and expertise,” the Nature editorial continued. The NSC “is a group of part-time academic experts who rubber-stamp documents produced by a small team of officials, who are far too few in number and lack the expertise needed to regulate the safety of such a huge and potentially dangerous industry.

  “Will the situation improve significantly after this accident? Based on the record to date, probably not.”

  Before the end of 1999, Japanese lawmakers passed the Nuclear Emergency Preparedness Act, intended to improve cooperation among various levels of government in the event of an accident. The law also established an elaborate notification and response framework. Sadly, however, Nature’s pessimistic assessment was on the mark. The modest reforms implemented after Tokaimura did not forestall the confusion and lack of preparedness that helped make the Fukushima accident so much worse than it had to be.

  While the Cold War helped drive support for the nuclear industry in the United States, the industry’s privileged status in Japan has much deeper economic roots. Japan is a nation that consumes large amounts of energy but has few resources of its own; it currently imports all but 16 percent of its energy needs. Only China, the United States, India, and Russia consume more energy than Japan, and they are much larger countries.

  Achieving energy self-reliance has long been a major preoccupation for the Japanese. As the nation struggled toward recovery after World War II, energy security became the lynchpin to its comeback. Power shortages during the Korean War, coupled with soaring demand from industry and new residential customers, led the Japanese government to step in with assistance for the country’s utilities, of which TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, was the oldest and largest. “Through direct and indirect means, the power companies reaped enormous sums from Treasury coffers,” according to scholar Laura E. Hein. Once the utilities, which held regional monopolies, had improved their solvency and invested in additional fossil and hydro plants, Japanese authorities turned their attention toward atomic power.

  In Japan, radiation has a heightened symbolism. In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in an estimated 140,000 deaths and leading to Japan’s surrender in World War II. Despite this indelible legacy, the prospect of deriving abundant energy from the atom was too enticing to ignore. On March 4, 1954, the Diet approved a budget for nuclear energy development.

  The United States stood ready to help. Cold War tensions were increasing; the Soviet Union was becoming a global threat, and the United States was eager to cement an alliance in the Pacific. Washington’s Atoms for Peace plan became the ideal vehicle. The Eisenhower administration and those who favored private nuclear development in the United States were looking for ways to promote peaceful uses at home and abroad.

  In September 1954, Thomas E. Murray, a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), delivered a speech to three thousand members of the United Steelworkers of America. His topic was the development of nuclear power, but he was just as concerned with flag waving. Optimism was already in the air. Just five days earlier, Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the AEC, had delivered a similarly upbeat message to the National Association of Science Writers in which he uttered an oft-quoted (later oft-derided) prediction: “It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.”

  Murray, in his address, spoke eloquently about nuclear power and America’s stature. One way to assert and maintain its global leadership, he said, was for the United States to build a nuclear reactor in Japan before the Soviets could.

  A reactor would be a “lasting monument to our technology and our goodwill,” Murray told the union members. “Because the economics of nuclear power are so uncertain, it is unrealistic to expect private industry to undertake on a purely risk basis anything like the effort that the world atomic power problem demands.” Shying away from nuclear power for cost reasons alone would be “inconsistent with all this nation stands for” and would “play into the hands of the Soviets.”

  This came as great news, certainly for the steelworkers, who would reap skilled manufacturing jobs, but also for U.S. companies like Westinghouse Electric Corporation and GE, which already had a toehold in Japan. The previous year the two manufacturers had loaned Japan $6.1 million to help the government purchase thermal generating equipment. Now, with the U.S. government proselytizing its benefits, they saw an opportunity to market their newest technology: nuclear energy. For the Japanese, the atom held out the promise of finally attaining a secure energy future and fueling growth. In August 1956, construction began on the country’s first nuclear facility, a research center, in Tokaimura. The village soon would also become home to Japan’s first nuclear reactor.

  The appeal of nuclear power in Japan went beyond central government bureaucrats. Where plants were built, local economies benefited in ways that strengthened the nuclear industry’s political as well as economic clout.

  In 1958, the governor of Fukushima Prefecture approached TEPCO, hoping to persuade the utility to build its first reactors along an underdeveloped stretch of coastline. The motive was purely economic. Rural areas of Japan, like this region and the Sanriku Coast to the north, were losing population to cities. Eventually, a portion of the coast shared by the towns of Futaba and Okuma was chosen for the new plant.

  Local officials welcomed the project, but kept their negotiations with TEPCO secret, fearing some residents might not be so enthusiastic. TEPCO, for its part, dispatched young female employees to accompany utility engineers inspecting the proposed site, both disguised as vacationing hikers to avoid arousing public suspicions. Only two years after a deal was sealed did local residents finally learn of the construction plans.

  Ground was broken for the first reactor at Fukushima Daiichi in July 1967. TEPCO chose GE as the contractor, a vendor it had used for conventional power plants. GE would build one of its new designs, the Mark I boiling water reactor. (The first two Mark I reactors, at Oyster Creek in New Jersey and Nine Mile Point in New York, began generating power in 1969, while the Fukushima plant was under construction.) TEPCO, which by 1970 was the world’s largest privately owned utility, would stick with GE designs for the five other reactors eventually built at Fukushima Daiichi and for two of four units at nearby Fukushima Daini.

>   Local officials’ predictions that the giant Fukushima Daiichi complex would deliver a financial bonanza proved true. In an effort to promote nuclear projects, the national government provided subsidies to local governments. As the reactors were constructed and came on line, local property tax revenues soared. By 1978, the town of Okuma derived nearly 90 percent of its tax revenues from the plant, which also provided badly needed jobs. Residents enjoyed sports facilities and other amenities. Many other reactor projects were launched along Japan’s coasts to take advantage of seawater for removing waste heat.

  Japan’s nuclear quest entwined government and private industry in a tight alliance. The push by business leaders, politicians, academics, and bureaucrats steamrolled the few experts who raised warnings. One such expert was a young seismologist, Katsuhiko Ishibashi. A newly minted PhD from the prestigious University of Tokyo, Ishibashi discovered that a fault line west of Tokyo was much larger than previously assumed. The Hamaoka nuclear power plant sat atop that fault. Ishibashi’s research findings were published in 1976, the same year Hamaoka’s Unit 1 began producing electricity. By then, Japan had twenty reactors operating or under construction. Not until two years later, in 1978, did Japanese authorities draft seismic guidelines for reactor design.

  Finding an area in Japan not susceptible to seismic activity was difficult. Advances in seismology were revealing the existence of heretofore unidentified faults that had produced massive earthquakes in the past, and most likely would produce them in the future. The embrace of nuclear power by government and industry was not about to be slowed, however. Time and again, utilities and regulators downplayed or ignored the threat posed by earthquakes.

  For Ishibashi, the issue became a lifelong crusade. In 1997, he coined the term genpatsu-shinsai, a catastrophe involving a quake-induced nuclear accident. He envisioned a scenario in which there was a loss of power to a reactor and “multiple defense systems lose their function simultaneously,” resulting in the release of radiation over a wide area.

  Most members of the Japanese public paid little attention to such warnings; for them, the development of nuclear power went hand in hand with an improving economy. Japan boasts one of the most reliable electrical delivery systems in the world. Its ten utilities promoted reactors as a way to ensure that economic growth—and the lifestyle it provided—would continue.

  Not everyone was happy. In 2003, residents living near Hamaoka—which by now had four operating reactors—sued to shut them down, arguing that they were unsafe and could not withstand a major earthquake. Testifying on behalf of plant owner Chubu Electric was Haruki Madarame, a University of Tokyo professor and nuclear proponent, who would eventually be appointed chairman of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, a position he held on March 11, 2011. Madarame had publicly scoffed at the warnings of Ishibashi and the Hamaoka plaintiffs—including the possibility of a simultaneous failure of emergency generators—saying such concerns would “make it impossible to ever build anything.” A court concluded that the safety measures at Hamaoka were adequate.

  Other lawsuits challenging reactor safety also met with defeat. In 1979, residents in the area of Kashiwazaki, a town in Niigata Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, asked the courts to overturn a license granted to TEPCO to build what would become the world’s largest nuclear plant, with seven reactors. The lawsuit claimed that the government had failed to perform adequate inspections of the geology of the plant site and had overlooked an active fault line. The lawsuit wound on for a quarter century, while the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant was built and began operating; then, in 2005, a court ruled there was no fault line. Two years later, a magnitude 6.8 quake struck off the coast ten miles from Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. A fire broke out at the plant, which was designed to withstand only quakes of magnitude 6.5 or lower.

  “What happened to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant should not be described as ‘unexpected,’ ” Ishibashi wrote in the International Herald Tribune shortly afterward. This was the third major earthquake to strike near a Japanese nuclear facility in two years. But as the plant suffered no significant damage from the quake, regulators remained confident that existing seismic standards were adequate.

  Other legal challenges on safety issues routinely failed. According to an analysis by the New York Times after the 2011 earthquake, fourteen major lawsuits raising reactor safety questions had been filed against the Japanese government or utilities since the late 1970s. Evidence often revealed that operators had downplayed seismic hazards. In only two instances did courts rule for the plaintiffs, and those decisions were overturned by higher courts, the Times reported. “If Japan had faced up to the dangers earlier,” Ishibashi told the Times soon after the March 2011 disaster, “we could have prevented Fukushima.”

  That’s not to say the Japanese authorities simply dismissed the earthquake threat. In 1978, parliament passed the Large-Scale Earthquake Countermeasures Act, a law based on the belief that quakes could be predicted well in advance.

  The quest to forecast earthquakes is as old as the science of seismology itself. “Ever since seismology has been studied, one of the chief aims of its students has been to discover some means which would enable them to foretell the coming of an earthquake,” wrote John Milne in 1880. Milne, an English geologist and mining engineer who became interested in earthquakes while teaching in Japan, helped found the Seismological Society of Japan that same year. He is considered the father of modern seismology in part because of his work in that country.

  Accurate predictions, however, have remained a tantalizing but elusive quest. “Journalists and the general public rush to any suggestion of earthquake prediction like hogs toward a full trough,” said C.F. Richter, from whom the scale measuring earthquakes’ energy got its name, when accepting the Medal of the Seismological Society of America in 1977. “There is nothing wrong with aiming toward prediction, if that is done with common sense, proper use of correct information, and an understanding of the inherent difficulties.”

  Richter’s admonition notwithstanding, many came to believe they could not only predict earthquakes with accuracy but also determine which areas were likely to be safe from serious damage and therefore suitable for nuclear reactors and other potentially hazardous facilities.

  Debates over site suitability or the adequacy of standards ignored the inescapable fact that no one could claim true knowledge of the massive forces always at work far below the topography of Japan. No matter how rigorous the standards applied to nuclear plant siting and construction, there would always be uncertainty; and it wasn’t clear if science could say how large those uncertainties actually were.

  That reality didn’t deter the adherents of prediction or those who believed that limited standards could ensure public safety. Among those promoting this belief were the nuclear industry and those charged with regulating it.

  Japan’s new seismic protection law was directed toward a single event: a shallow magnitude 8.0 earthquake in the Tokai region, about sixty-two miles (one hundred kilometers) southwest of Tokyo. Seismologists such as Kiyoo Mogi of the University of Tokyo had long warned of a disastrous quake in the densely populated region. (While the legislation was pending, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck nearby, causing twenty-five deaths and widespread property damage.) The act set up a network of monitoring stations intended to give three days’ advance warning. Soon, the public—and government—came to assume that the next Big One in Japan would hit Tokai. And they’d get plenty of notice.

  Mogi cautioned that the underlying concept of the law—that there would be an unmistakable warning—was flawed. Earthquakes aren’t predictable in the same way tides or sunsets are, he wrote in 2004; instead, scientists must base judgments on complex data whose relation to seismic events is not fully understood. Mogi was troubled that the government was so confident in its ability to predict earthquakes that it continued to license nuclear plants in an area of high risk: namely, Hamaoka.

  Japanese officials had begun to let the
numbers take on a life of their own. The probabilities—themselves subject to debate—began to be viewed as accurate predictions, and they contributed to the overconfidence that would be shattered in March 2011.

  Japan later added another layer to its earthquake prediction system. In the aftermath of the deadly 1995 Kobe earthquake, the government established the Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion. In 2005, the first National Seismic Hazard Maps of Japan were published. The maps are based on surveys of active faults, long-term estimates of the probability of earthquake occurrence, and evaluations of strong ground motion. They reflect a belief that “characteristic earthquakes” occur at predictable intervals.

  The concept of hazard mapping provokes controversy among seismologists and emergency planners around the globe. Some geophysicists argue that accurate hazard maps are impossible to produce. Rather than providing reliable information, they say, the maps tend to create a false sense of security. Others, including the U.S. Geological Survey, support hazard mapping, arguing that although the maps are not perfect, they do offer some guidance for purposes such as setting building codes.

  The maps are based on centuries’ worth of data about earth movements. Even so, some of the largest earthquakes in recent years, even before March 11, 2011, occurred in areas or with a degree of force that surprised many scientists: the Indian Ocean (2004), China (2008), New Zealand (2010 and 2011).