LOST After an Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Meltdown Catastrophe

LOST After an Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Meltdown Catastrophe

“This city has to survive. It’s beautiful. People have to come back. They’ll come back one day. They have to. It’s a beautiful city. I was just at the stadium. There needs to be children here. There is no life without risks.” [1]

 (first posted in 2011, revised on March 30, 2017)

People who have been following Japan’s reaction to its nuclear crisis have had many moments of dumbfounded, slack-jawed amazement as they hear of plans to move people back into the disaster zone, clean up the enormous levels of radioactive fallout and restore life as it was before–all while three nuclear reactor fuel cores lie in a melted heap and tons more of spent fuel lies in a precarious, exposed state.

This situation is enough to make a person feel like she has awoken in an episode of the sci-fi drama LOST (2004-2010).  In that story, the traumatized victims walked dazed and confused in an island paradise that had been uncannily transformed by various technological interventions imposed by previous human intruders. They were slow to figure out that their lives were over, as they obviously must have been after their airplane crash. Several times over the seasons the lead character, Jack, was knocked unconscious and had to awaken each time and make sense of his surroundings while befuddled by each knock on the head. In fact, this was the defining aspect of his character. He was always slow to figure things out, always striving to deny reality, and thus knocking himself out for a lost cause and making poor decisions. He would have fit right in during the nuclear disaster aftermath on “the island” that is Honshu.

The Japanese government, and many of the residents of Fukushima who are going along with its plans, seem to be in the same state of traumatized denial. They are like a bloodied driver emerging from a car accident who is oblivious to what has happened. He stumbles around and stammers about being late for work and needing to go, becoming all the more confused by the perplexed reactions on people’s faces. For the first months, the trauma victims of Japan and Fukushima lived in denial about what had happened, aided in their delusions by the global nuclear industry, as well as by cynical financial interests and government officials who want to save the economy and the tax base. The pressure came from overseas as well, as the United States and other nuclearized nations needed Japan to continue with its nuclear program in order to sustain the international nuclear program.

The plans so far have all been about cleaning up and restoring the contaminated communities, regardless of how hopeless, expensive and dangerous this will be. These citizens ignore inconvenient facts, such as the fact that the young, educated and wealthy are not coming back, which assures that these communities will be populated only by the elderly. They are abetted by cynical exploiters in the bureaucracy who want to spend the nation’s finances on such an ill-advised “revitalization” that is most concerned with saving the corporations that build nuclear plants or sell electricity from them.

While there is much evidence that adults may be able to live in low level radiation with an “acceptable” risk of being affected, the risks for embryos are much higher. The people who are in a rush to rebuild communities in Fukushima haven’t stopped to ponder the futility of resettling in towns where the soil is condemned and procreation involves an unacceptable risk of birth defects and lifelong harm to health.

One can go on at length with a comparison of how the people of Japan are like the lost souls in LOST. The cleanup workers at the Daiichi plant resemble the bewildered workmen and the survivors who were enslaved into a legacy of 1970s technology and experimentation gone terribly wrong. They are down in the metaphorical hatch desperately pressing a button to save their world, or maybe just performing a fool’s errand, but they don’t dare stop pressing that button. They carry out compartmentalized tasks without knowing who is in charge, who to trust, or what the master plan is, if there ever was one. The survivors fight among each other about whether to leave or stay, while they simultaneously fight and form alliances with “others” and “other others” who come from afar with mysterious agendas. There are weird health effects and malevolent, intangible forces. Like radiation, the mysterious force on the island can heal or kill, but most crucially, it puts a stop to procreation by killing all pregnant women. There is a 19th century shipwreck in the middle of the jungle named the Black Rock, which, incidentally, is what Dene elders in northern Canada warned their people to stay away from. Their black rock is the black ore which the outsiders found was rich in uranium.

Alliances in LOST shift from day to day. Certain people are deemed expendable for the greater purpose of achieving the opaque goals of the competing groups. The original motivation for humans coming to the island was to master the limitless energy supply hidden within it, but one thing the inhabitants must do first is understand why humans cannot reproduce on the island. Whatever the secret of the energy source is, the problem must be resolved if humans are to have a future on the island. As the story proceeds, the survivors learn that in the 1950s the American military brought a hydrogen bomb to test on the island, but they were chased off, with their undetonated bomb left behind to cause future problems. They also learn in the final episodes that the island is a battleground between God and the Devil. God works on the island to contain the Devil on it, to keep him from breaking free to roam the world. He has his chosen representatives to intervene on his behalf and guide others, but God himself cannot intervene for the humans he has given free will. By the end of the tale, God is “very disappointed” in mankind. The intrusions by outsiders, who have come in pursuit of the island’s energy supply, have threatened to give the final victory to the Devil, now poised to finally get off the island. What started off looking like science fiction is now a religious parable as well.

In similar ways the people of Japan and the workers at the Daiichi plant are pawns in a game between competing powers that they cannot comprehend, in a battle with technology that has escaped human control. They must look at their various levels of government, the IAEA, the WHO, and corporations like TEPCO, Toshiba, Westinghouse, and Areva as a bewildering parade of suspicious strangers arrived from over the horizon. The similarities between “the island” and the island where Fukushima is located can be stretched too far, but they illustrate how LOST was more than just the usual light entertainment offered up on prime time television. It had moments of brilliance when, between advertisements for technological gadgets, it subverted the institutions that produce entertainment, depicting humanity’s tortured relationship with its technology.

LOST also managed to reflect the horrible direction of American foreign policy at the time in a way that mainstream television news wouldn’t. When the cunning Benjamin Linus, leader of “the Others” in the island’s multi-sided civil war, liked to declare, “We’re the good guys,” the allusion to President Bush’s use of the same phrase was clear to all. In several episodes, the characters resort to terror and torture to manipulate the behavior of their enemies. The debates held among them were a reflection of what was happening for real in American society.

Another analogy with LOST is in the way the survivors split over having false hope and blind faith or making rational choices to cut losses. An article in the New York Times in December, 2011 illustrated how the Japanese are slowly waking up the extent of the catastrophe that has fallen on them.

Critics of the revitalization effort were growing more vocal. They believed it “… could end up as perhaps the biggest of Japan’s white-elephant public works projects–and yet another example of post-disaster Japan reverting to the wasteful ways that have crippled economic growth for two decades.” [2] The trial cleanups had stalled because there was no place to put the removed soil, and even after “decontamination,” more radioactive particles blow down from the forests and hillsides. Levels remain above international safety standards for long-term habitation.

The director of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo, Tatsuhiko Kodama, said, “I believe it is possible to save Fukushima, but many evacuated residents must accept that it won’t happen in their lifetimes.” Thousands of buildings have to be scrubbed and people will have to wait while “… the topsoil from an area the size of Connecticut is replaced. Even forested mountains will probably need to be decontaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutting and literally scraping them clean.”

Japanese officials said that they don’t have the luxury of evacuating a wider area as was done in Chernobyl because the area covers 3% of the land mass of Japan. A reasonable question to ask here is “Only 3%?” If that’s all, people could easily move to the remaining 97%. Japan is a densely populated country, but its rural areas have been depopulated in recent decades. There is a lot of unused real estate, in big cities and rural areas, and room for the affected 2% of the population to move elsewhere. Besides, the decision to evacuate should be decided by the level of contamination, not the availability of land. If land really is so scarce, the logical next question is whether Japan can continue with the risks of nuclear energy.

Pride was on display in one quote in the NYT article that showed what will probably prove to be a fatal arrogance in the Japanese mindset. One man seems to suggest that those backward and impoverished Ukrainians and Russians were just not up to the task of dealing with Chernobyl. “We are different from Chernobyl,” said Toshitsuna Watanabe, 64, the mayor of Okuma, one of the towns that was evacuated. “We are determined to go back. Japan has the will and the technology to do this.” 

It is stunning that this senior citizen and community leader made an unfounded claim about the nation’s technological capacities and saw only his own need to return to his home, while he ignores the interests of young people who wisely choose to stay away. The young are expected to go along with the elders so that they can spend their old age on their native, radioactive soil.

The article mentions the long roots of local families in the land, and the sympathy they have gained throughout Japan, but now “… quiet resistance has begun to grow, both among those who were displaced and those who fear the country will need to sacrifice too much without guarantees that a multi-billion-dollar cleanup will provide enough protection. Soothing pronouncements by local governments and academics about the eventual ability to live safely near the ruined plant can seem to be based on little more than hope.”

In one town visited by the NYT writer, there was an obvious split in opinion between the old and the young, especially the young families with children. One old-timer said, “Smoking cigarettes is more dangerous than radiation. We can make Okuma a model to the world of how to restore a community after a nuclear accident,”–as if that would be something to be proud of. One might argue that the best demonstration of what happens after a nuclear accident of this scale is the establishment of an evacuation zone that cannot be inhabited for 10,000 years. One does not want to create a moral hazard or an impression that a nuclear disaster is a casual thing that can be cleaned up easily.

To conclude, the article quoted Professor Kodama saying, “… victory would be hollow, and short-lived if young people did not return… Saving Fukushima requires not just money and effort, but also faith. There is no point if only older people go back.”

As time has passed, it has become more obvious that young people are not going to go back. Rural communities struggle to retain the younger generation even under normal conditions. In addition, not only young people, but intelligent people, and people with any options to live elsewhere, will not go back.

There was one memorable scene in an early episode of LOST when Jack is desperately trying to save a patient who has been killed during a surgery botched by his drunken father. He labors over the patient long past the point when it has become obvious that she is gone. His father stands behind him insisting repeatedly, “It’s over, Jack. Call it.” In all other disasters, there comes a time to call it.

Yes, as Professor Kodama says, it’s a matter of faith, and I am losing faith that the Japanese people have the collective intelligence to save themselves and call it for what it is. Wake up, and give up on this notion that the contaminated regions of Fukushima can be restored or that this island nation can continue with its nuclear program. Accept the reality of what happens when you lose control of a nuclear power plant. As a foreigner watching on the sidelines, with a passport I can use to go live somewhere else, that is a harsh judgment to make, but Japanese critics have come to a similar conclusion. The long-time anti-nuclear critic Takashi Hirose wrote after the disaster:

When politicians come from abroad with the intention of helping, the result is no more than a revolting solidarity among politicians and a string of falsehoods tossed off to the media. If the Japanese people continue to believe this kind of low-level news reporting and keep their mouths shut, the world will pass on by and leave the country and its industry behind and isolated. If the people don’t come to grips with the seriousness of the danger of the ongoing nuclear disaster and show the decisiveness to put an end to the nation’s nuclear power program immediately, the world will have no reason to believe in Japanese intelligence. [3]

That was written in 2011. It’s over, Jack. When is someone going to call it?

Notes

[1] Thomas Johnson (Director), The True Battle of Chernobyl, (M Way Films / Discovery Communications, 2006), 16:00 ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAT13Bt9Ic or http://www.mwayfilms.com/en/films/the-battle-of-chernobyl . These words were spoken by one of the elderly evacuees from Pripyat on the day of departure. No one ever came back.

[2] Martin Fackler, “Japan Split on Hope for Vast Radiation Cleanup,” New York Times, December 6, 2011.

[3] Takashi Hirose, Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster (fukushima genpatsu merutodaun) (Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2011). The English translation was published independently and sold only as an e-book, with permission of the original publisher.

Following the Decay Chain of Nuclear Safety: How the IAEA's Focus Nuclear Weapons Led to the Fukushima Daiichi Catastrophe

IAEA Too Distracted to Deal with Nuclear Energy Regulation

(originally posted in December 2011, revised on March 30, 2017)

There are many anti-nuclear advocates who work toward the abolition of nuclear weapons but hold onto a belief that nuclear energy could be deployed in a world made free of nuclear weapons. Others define anti-nuclearism as opposition to both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. They argue that simply the extraction of uranium from the ground poses unacceptable risks and leads unavoidably to nuclear weapons proliferation. It would be impossible for any international regulator to supervise and prevent nuclear reactor operators from diverting spent fuel to weapons production. The actual state of nuclear regulation in the world, not an imagined future state, shows that this problem has already been illustrated. In addition to its neglect of many hazards, the IAEA has no enforcement powers.

 An article published in Bloomberg Business Week in late 2011 (the farthest thing one could imagine from a bastion of left wing, peacenik radicalism) makes the connection between nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear reactor safety. It is noteworthy that it is not just the granola and sandals crowd that wants nuclear safety to be overhauled. Corporations have their vital interests at stake, too. The article describes how the IAEA is not sufficiently empowered or funded to police both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and the emphasis on the former led to serious lapses in the latter.

The reports describes how the IAEA has devoted most of its resources to stopping “rogue states,” from obtaining nuclear weapons, while enforcement of reactor safety has been ineffective and collusive with the industry it is supposed to oversee. In recent years, pro-American (and thus pro-Israel) officials from the Japanese nuclear industry were promoted to high positions in the IAEA for their tough-on-Iran positions. Yet at the same time, there was concern in diplomatic circles about this emphasis. The Bloomberg article describes how the rise of Japanese nuclear bureaucrats in the IAEA was related to their willingness to go along with American and Israeli interests:

Since coming to office in 2009, Amano has spent five times more money fighting terrorism and preventing proliferation than on making the world's 450 nuclear reactors safer…

The agency's safety division garnered little respect in U.S. diplomatic cables that described the department as a marketing channel for countries seeking to sell atomic technology.

They also questioned the credentials of Tomihiro Taniguchi, the IAEA's former head of safety who helped create the regulatory regime in Japan, which is being blamed for failings that led to the Fukushima disaster.

“The department of safety and security needs a dedicated manager and a stronger leader,” U.S. IAEA Ambassador Glyn Davies wrote in December 2009 in a cable released by Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy website. “For the past 10 years, the department has suffered tremendously because of Deputy Director General Taniguchi's weak management and leadership skills.”

The U.S. backed Amano's bid to replace Mohamed ElBaradei in 2008 because he was believed to be supportive on confronting Iran. ElBaradei was accused by the U.S. and its allies of overstepping his IAEA mandate in seeking compromise solutions to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue. Amano was “solidly in the U.S. court,” according to a U.S. cable in October 2009 released by Wikileaks. The U.S. IAEA mission declined to comment on the cables. [1]

The flaw of the Bloomberg article is that it doesn’t trace the roots of this problem back far enough. It is extremely rare to find any article in commercial media about the role that Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons have in the long history of attempts to stop nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East and South Asia. It is Israel’s insistence on keeping its nuclear arsenal, and keeping it undeclared and untouchable by IEAE inspectors, that motivated Iraq and Libya, and now Iran, to have their own arsenals. In her comprehensive history of the nuclear age, In Mortal Hands, Stephanie Cooke describes the situation this way:

…. the United States adjusted, and readjusted, its sights. How, after all, should it respond to what it knew was happening? Each new entrant to the nuclear weapons club would over time pose the same conundrum. Could they be stopped? Should they be stopped? And if so, how? In Israel’s case, accommodation became the easiest way out, but there would be a price to pay for that, in Iraq, then in Libya, and more recently in Iran. But it also added to reasons for restraint against India, and hence Pakistan, after those countries joined the club, because any other response would have raised questions about the treatment of Israel. [2]

The world found out about Israel’s undeclared possession of nuclear weapons thanks to the Israeli dissident nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu who was illegally extradited (abducted) from Italy by Israeli agents. He has lived imprisoned or under house arrest for the last twenty years for the crime of having told the world about Israel’s covert nuclear weapons [3] (In Mortal Hands, p. 241-242).

Thus there is a connection between Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe. Iran could have been demotivated from developing nuclear weapons if Israel and other nuclear powers had made serious proposals about disarmament and creating a nuclear-free Middle East. With that distraction out of the way, there would have been no pressure to promote individuals who were products of the collusive and incompetent Japanese nuclear regulatory culture. Serious efforts could have been made to secure the safety of nuclear reactors, decommission aging plants, put diesel generators out of the reach of tsunamis, and find the best option for long-term storage of nuclear waste. However, in reality, the dread of nuclear weapons has diverted international attention from preventing the nuclear disasters that have actually happened.

The result of this misguided approach was the destruction of at least 8,000 square kilometers of human habitat in Japan, destruction of the natural environment, a massive poisoning of the North Pacific, and an unknowable amount of future diseases and destruction of livelihood for the people of Japan, and the intractable problem of what to do with three melted reactor cores, in addition to the tons of spent nuclear fuel under the twisted metal wreckage of Fukushima Daiichi NPP Unit 3. Other pressing issues, like giving the IAEA the authority to shut down dangerous reactors, still remain, which is something the former head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei (who was replaced by Amano because he was considered too soft on Iran) has spoken of as an urgent necessity. [4] Meanwhile, no nuclear incident has happened in the Middle East, unless you want to count the scattering of depleted uranium throughout Iraq since the first Gulf War in 1991.

Notes

[1] Aaron Sheldrick and Jennifer M. Freedman (Editors), “UN Atomic Agency Money Goes to Terror Fight, Not Nuclear Safety,” Bloomberg Business Week, December 2011. The article is no longer available on the Bloomberg website.

[2] Stephanie Cooke, In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 229.

[3] Ibid, 241-242.

[4] Jean-Michel Bezat and Bertrand d'Armagnac, “‘On ne peut se passer du nucléaire (We Cannot do without Nuclear Energy),’” Le Monde, September 28, 2011,

http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2011/09/28/mohamed-elbaradei-on-ne-peut-se-passer-du-nucleaire_1578873_3244.html#meter_toaster .

This former head of the IAEA was, unsurprisingly, in favor of continuing with nuclear energy, but he advocated for stronger action being taken towards some of the aging and unsafe nuclear reactor designs in the world: “We shouldn’t hesitate to close old reactors the safety of which cannot be guaranteed. I suggest starting with the RBMK type (as at Chernobyl) which don’t have a containment structure, and reactors of the same type as at Fukushima. We also have to have a way of inspecting military reactors.”

_____

The article mentioned in [1] has been removed from the Bloomberg site. For non-commercial use to benefit research on nuclear technology, an archived copy is posted below:

UN Atomic Agency Money Goes to Terror Fight, Not Nuclear Safety

Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Nine months after the worst nuclear disaster in decades, the world's atomic-energy watchdog has yet to dedicate additional money to improve reactor safety.

The delay has prompted the U.S. to call for the International Atomic Energy Agency to prepare a budget for its so-called action plan and to clarify how it will respond to future nuclear emergencies. The United Nations-funded agency said the allocation will be determined after a team draws up the “main activities associated with the action plan,” according to a Dec. 5 statement to Bloomberg News. Money wasn't included in the IAEA's budget agreed to in September.

The agency classifies safety as one of its top three priorities, yet is spending 8.9 percent of its 352 million-euro ($469 million) regular budget this year on making plants secure from accidents. As it focuses resources on the other two priorities -- technical cooperation and preventing nuclear- weapons proliferation -- the IAEA is missing an opportunity to improve shortcomings in reactor safety exposed by the Fukushima disaster, said Trevor Findlay, a former Australian diplomat.

“The IAEA did not seize the opportunity of this dreadful event to advance the agency's role in nuclear safety,” said Findlay, who is finishing a two-year study of the Vienna-based agency at Harvard University. Director General Yukiya Amano “has been tough on Iran and Syria, but not when it comes to nuclear safety.”

The IAEA was founded in 1957 as the global “Atoms for Peace” organization to promote “safe, secure and peaceful” nuclear technology, according to its website. A staff of 2,300 work at the IAEA's secretariat at its headquarters.

Conflicting Role

Its mission statement encapsulates the same conflict as Japan's failed nuclear-safety regime: playing the role of both promoter and regulator of atomic power, according to scientists, diplomats and analysts interviewed by Bloomberg News.

About half of the IAEA's budget is devoted to restricting the use of nuclear material for military purposes, and the agency has spent a decade investigating Iran's atomic program because of suspicion the country is developing weapons.

As the agency targeted weapons, the meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant capped years of faked safety reports and fatal accidents in Japan's atomic-power industry. The country's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency was in a conflict of interest because it was under the control of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which had a mandate to promote nuclear power.

Accepting Overlaps

The IAEA “accepted for years the overlap between regulation and industry in Japan,” said Johannis Noeggerath, president of Switzerland's Society of Nuclear Professionals and safety director for the country's Leibstadt reactor. “They have a safety culture problem.”

The agency encourages “safe, secure and responsible use of nuclear energy in those countries that independently decide to embark on a nuclear power program,” said Gill Tudor, an IAEA spokeswoman. “Part of the agency's mandate is to advise and work with independent national regulators.”

Since coming to office in 2009, Amano has spent five times more money fighting terrorism and preventing proliferation than on making the world's 450 nuclear reactors safer, UN data show.

The agency's safety division garnered little respect in U.S. diplomatic cables that described the department as a marketing channel for countries seeking to sell atomic technology.

Credentials Questioned

They also questioned the credentials of Tomihiro Taniguchi, the IAEA's former head of safety who helped create the regulatory regime in Japan, which is being blamed for failings that led to the Fukushima disaster.

“The department of safety and security needs a dedicated manager and a stronger leader,” U.S. IAEA Ambassador Glyn Davies wrote in December 2009 in a cable released by Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy website. “For the past 10 years, the department has suffered tremendously because of Deputy Director General Taniguchi's weak management and leadership skills.”

The U.S. backed Amano's bid to replace Mohamed ElBaradei in 2008 because he was believed to be supportive on confronting Iran. ElBaradei was accused by the U.S. and its allies of overstepping his IAEA mandate in seeking compromise solutions to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue. Amano was “solidly in the U.S. court,” according to a U.S. cable in October 2009 released by Wikileaks. The U.S. IAEA mission declined to comment on the cables.

Threat Downplayed

By the time Amano reached office, the IAEA's nuclear-safety division had downplayed the threat from natural disasters. In 2010, the director general's first full year in office, anti- terrorism spending rose at three times the rate of safety expenditure.

“Tsunamis, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes have affected many parts of the world and nuclear installations everywhere responded admirably,” Taniguchi said in a December 2005 speech. “The design and operational features ensured that extreme natural conditions would not jeopardize safety.”

Taniguchi was also an executive of Japan's Nuclear Power Engineering Corp., which promotes public acceptance of the operation of atomic-power plants, before joining the IAEA.

“I made contributions to significantly improving safety systems around the world,” Taniguchi said when asked about the U.S. cables. Now a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, he lectures graduate students on nuclear security.

Promoting Atomic Power

The IAEA's own mission to promote atomic power may also contradict the Convention on Nuclear Safety.

“Each contracting party shall take the appropriate steps to ensure an effective separation between the functions of the regulatory body and those of any other body or organization concerned with the promotion or utilization of nuclear energy,” says article 8.2 of the convention.

In the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports to Congress and is responsible for the licensing and oversight of atomic power operators, according to its website.

The IAEA has been tarnished by a series of nuclear-safety mishaps, including the combustion of plutonium in 2009 at an Austrian lab and a mishandled vial that contaminated part of a Belgian facility in 2011, according to the agency.

One IAEA plant inspector fell into a Czech nuclear-fuel cooling pond in 2007, according to four officials who declined to be identified. The agency won't make public a full list of incidents involving its own staff.

“IAEA inspectors and field workers are largely on their own when it comes to safely carrying out their jobs,” said Robert Kelley, a former IAEA director who led inspections in Iraq. “They receive little guidance or support and they are very dependent on the facilities they are inspecting to protect their health.”

Fukushima Failure

The agency's failure on Fukushima is due to its timid leadership and an over-reliance on Japanese data, said Findlay, who will present the Center for International Governance Innovation's report on the IAEA in Vienna in April. “The agency's self-promotion led outsiders to naturally expect the agency to leap into action, so it only has itself to blame for that.”

Japan's public remains uneasy about the reactors at Fukushima, which are still exposed to damage from earthquakes, said Akio Matsumura, a former diplomat and chairman of the World Business Academy. The absence of independent information about the meltdown compounds those fears, he said.

“The IAEA has disseminated reports on updates at Fukushima, but the source of the information is the Japanese government,” Matsumura said. “If the Japanese government chooses to remain opaque in its dealings, then the IAEA reports will be useless.”

Deflecting Criticism

The IAEA had to deflect criticism from its members for weeks following the Fukushima disaster because it refused to analyze risks from the meltdown. The U.S. NRC provided more risk assessments than the IAEA by independently widening the areas it labeled dangerous around the reactors beyond where Japanese officials set limits.

The Fukushima meltdowns have already spread more radiation over Japan than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs combined, Arnie Gunderson, a U.S. nuclear engineer who testified before the NRC on the Fukushima meltdowns, wrote in an e-mail. The stricken plant is expected to be brought under control before the end of the year, according to Tepco.

--Editors: Aaron Sheldrick, Jennifer M. Freedman

When my baby smiles at me I go to... Fukushima?

This is not a joke, but you can laugh anyway. The Japanese government has 
decided that an urgent thing to do for the people of Northern Japan is to encourage domestic and international travelers to go there. It calls to mind President Bush urging Americans to keep shopping in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Just save the economy and all will be well.
The subtitle says "If not now, when?" and the ad seems to suggest that women of child bearing age should go. This message may be apt in a way that the campaign planners didn't intend. Indeed, if the melted nuclear fuel cores sink into the water table, no one may be able to visit Fukushima for a long time to come. 
So go now while you have the chance!

I bet Alex Trebek never asked this question on Jeopardy

What nuclear accident on American soil is said to have released 459 times as much radiation as the Three Mile Island accident?

It is stunning to discover occasionally one of the many events in this world that are known, and should be widely known, but which remain off the record of the wider public consciousness of historical events. If you ask any informed citizen to name three nuclear accidents in history, they will easily tell you the big three: Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011), with the last two being major catastrophes and the first being mostly a catastrophe averted. Actually, Three Mile Island should be bumped down the list to a lower ranking, but for many reasons the much worse accident in 1959 at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Simi Valley, near Los Angeles, has fallen down the memory hole.

The reasons for this lapse are that by 1979 the media, environmental groups and government agencies had evolved enough to make a cover up impossible. Twenty years earlier, it was still the early days of nuclear energy, the Cold War was at its height, and the public still had little awareness of the dangers posed by radiation. The IAEA had been established two years earlier, but there was no IAEA report on this accident.

Since the accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi, many people have turned to the Chernobyl accident to look for answers as to what the future effects will be. The difficulty with this comparison is that there were so many cultural differences between Ukraine of 1986 and Japan of 2011. Those who would like to play down the effects of Chernobyl say that people in that area were poor, living under a dictatorship, and they were forced by circumstances to eat food off the contaminated land. Meanwhile, the government lacked funds to provide proper protection and health care.

For these reasons, the accident near Los Angeles might provide some useful insights as to what is in store for Japan over the next few decades. The Santa Susana meltdown was no doubt of a smaller scale than Chernobyl and Fukushima, but it involved a heavy fallout over an urban area in a developed, wealthy nation. Today, residents in the surrounding areas sometimes say they are shocked by the number of people in their neighborhoods who have had cancer. Scientific studies, as usual, reveal nothing conclusive because of the confounding factors, but a study completed in recent years concluded there were 300 – 1800 extra cancer deaths off site, while workers on the site suffered very high rates of cancer.

This number actually adds little to the total number of cancer cases in the Los Angeles area over fifty years, and findings like this are often used to assert that radiation is actually not something we need to worry about. What remains unknown is what effect a nuclear meltdown would have on a population that did not breathe a toxic soup of smog, did not smoke, did not drink alcohol, did not eat junk, and did not consume a lifelong cocktail of legal and illegal pharmaceuticals. Radiation gets off the hook only because other things kill us first in most cases.

An excellent article on the meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory appeared in the online magazine Miller-McCune on August 24, 2009. Excerpts of this long report appear below, along with the link to the full article.

Update, March 12, 2012

Information in the report below can be supplemented with a recent announcement of results of the latest soil testing on the Santa Susana site, reported this way in the Contra Costra Times:

"The results of the radiological survey show that of the 437 samples collected, 75 [17%] exceeded standards agreed upon by the DOE and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control in a cleanup agreement signed in December 2010. Seven radioactive isotopes, including one known as cesium-137, measured at levels between 100 to 1,000 times higher than the standards. Other radionuclides that suggest nuclear presence include strontium-90, tritium, plutonium, and carbon-14... 'People have been waiting for this information for years,' said Dan Hirsch, president of the activist group Committee to Bridge the Gap. 'All those years, we were told it was clean. This data prove we're not just a bunch of unknowledgeable people, but that everyday people are proven right.'"
___________

August 24, 2009

50 Years After America’s Worst Nuclear Meltdown

Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles, and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive cleanup for half a century.

By Joan Trossman Bien and Michael Collins

For Release Saturday A.M., August 29, 1959
CANOGA PARK, CA

“During an inspection of fuel elements on July 26 at the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated for the Atomic Energy Commission at Santa Susana, California by Atomics International, a division of North American Aviation, Inc., a parted fuel element was observed.

The fuel element damage is not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions. No release of radioactive materials to the plant or its environs occurred and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful conditions…

In each case, all seven tubes of the fuel element remained in the core. This fuel loading, nearing the end of its useful life, was scheduled to be removed in the near future.”

This press release — issued five weeks after the end of the United States’ worst nuclear reactor meltdown — was the public’s first notification that something unusual had happened up on “The Hill.” For the next 20 years, it remained the only public notification about the accident at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory on a mountaintop in California’s eastern Ventura County, on the border with the San Fernando Valley.

In fact, from July 12 through July 26, 1959, an unknown amount of radioactive gases were intentionally vented to prevent the Sodium Reactor Experiment from overheating and exploding.

…Due to the experimental nature of the SRE, it was built without a containment structure — the distinctive large dome associated with nuclear power plants — so any radiation vented hot out over the San Fernando Valley, which the city of Los Angeles was busily annexing…

“We know there was a fuel meltdown,” said William Taylor, the current spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy. “We don’t know how much [radiation] or if any was released.”

According to an analysis of a five-year study by a panel of independent scientists convened years after the incident, the SRE accident spit out up to 459 times the amount of radiation released during the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island.

Fifty years later, the contaminated site has yet to be cleaned up…

…the SRE was but one of 10 nuclear reactors at the site, plus a “hot lab” to cut apart and work on nuclear fuel for Santa Susana, Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission facilities from around the country. The site also hosted a plutonium fabrication fuel facility

… workers routinely disposed of barrels of highly toxic waste by blowing them up with shotguns and releasing the contents into the air. That practice was halted in 1994 when two workers were killed and one severely injured when the procedure went terribly wrong. One worker was blasted so forcefully into a rock that all that remained was a gruesome petroglyph.

John Pace… is now the last surviving worker to have witnessed the 1959 meltdown and its immediate aftermath — an often chaotic attempt to prevent an even larger disaster as workers compromised their own safety to keep the SRE from overheating into a runaway meltdown…. They were only partially successful… one third of the fuel rods ruptured and had begun melting.

“… The radiation monitors went off scale. They were too hot to measure… A few hours after it happened, I found out that the reactor had run away from them and they had to release the gases. After leaking the gases, they discovered that the winds were headed toward the San Fernando Valley. All of our families lived [there] and all that radiation went over their homes.”

A 2006 report by David A. Lochbaum, the nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, determined that up to 30 percent of the reactor’s radioiodine and cesium could have vaporized during the accident.

After the reactor was shut down two weeks later, Pace said the workers started cleaning up the immediate contamination so that they could reach the fuel rods and see what had happened. “We scrubbed it down with water and sponges,” Pace said. “We tried mops. They’d get contaminated real quick and that was getting pretty expensive, so we ended up using Kotex.”

… All this was done without protective clothing beyond coveralls and cotton caps that read, “Your Safety is Our Business — Atomics International.” There were no fully-enclosed radiation suits with face masks that nuclear workers routinely use today, designed to be dissolved and disposed of after one use.

… As the workers removed the fuel rods, one broke off. The worker accidentally dropped the broken rod back into the reactor. “He realized what had happened and panicked,” Pace said. “All he could think of doing is run. And as he was running, he was pulling alarms and ran out of the building and got outside.”

Pace said the situation deteriorated from there. “Now you have the rod up out of the shield. They were realizing radiation was leaking out into the atmosphere. There was one more fuel rod in there. They pulled it out and it broke off and hit the reactor floor. Now you have two broken off in the reactor. I could tell from the looks on their faces something was wrong.”

None of what John Pace described was ever revealed publicly. Atomics International prepared an unclassified report — it was titled “SRE Fuel Element Damage” — on the accident and delivered it to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1961.

 “They found that the workers had increased death rates from key cancers like lung cancer, cancers of the lymph and blood systems, than did workers at the same facility that had lower exposure to the radiation,” Hirsch said. “That then led our panel to study the offsite population. We needed to know the wind data. And Boeing (now the owner of the site) refused to release it. So we had to draw more general conclusions.”

Those conclusions were released in October 2006 and they were stunning. Based on the ratios of volative radionuclides found in the coolant, the panel estimated that the release of radiation in 1959 was hundreds of times the amount of radiation that was released at Three Mile Island — and that radiation was estimated to have caused between 300-1,800 cancer deaths.

Bonnie Klea of the San Fernando Valley suburb of West Hills worked at SSFL from 1963 to 1971. She has survived a 1995 episode of bladder cancer, which she is convinced was caused by the contamination that lingers on the site. “I have uranium in my body that is seven times the normal,” she said. “The bladder cancer in the workers is abnormally high. Every single house in my neighborhood had a cancer death.”

The area is prone to brushfires, such as the 2005 Topanga Canyon Fire, which swept through the contaminated site.

Fifty years have passed since that first press release told the world about a close brush with disaster just outside Los Angeles. Today, radiation remains on and off the premises, outliving a generation of workers.

Reports of cancer start to be more than just rumors

I have resisted paying attention to tweets and anonymous blog posts about sicknesses emerging in Fukushima, but recently there have been a number of credible reports of leukemia being diagnosed among people who have spent time in Fukushima since March 11th, 2011. We can expect TEPCO and other authorities to deny any link between these cases and radiation exposure, and they will probably get away with doing so as long as hospitals don't overflow with hundreds of patients dropping on the sidewalks, banging on the doors begging for treatment. It is impossible to prove definitively that any single case of cancer was caused by radiation or a given exposure to a carcinogen. Even when cases cluster in a certain time and place, the patterns of distribution may resemble random distributions. Real, naturally occurring random distributions show clusters in ways that appear to be non-random and deceive human observers into thinking there is a pattern.

But here's the thing. There is a chance that these cases below were cherry picked out of the number of leukemia cases that occur in a large population every year, but when you reduce that population to the much smaller number of known public figures and persons working at a nuclear accident site, the evidence of a causal relation becomes more persuasive. Another suspicious factor is that some of the cases reported are acute types of cancer and types that occur more commonly in children.

In the list of five people below, one of them was working at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site, two are public figures, one was known through appearances in a local hobby magazine, and the last one is both a public figure and a worker at Fukushima Dai-ichi site. In your country, when was the last time you heard of five prominent personalities being diagnosed with acute, rare types of leukemia in a period of a few months?

1. A 40-year-old Fukushima radiation worker died of acute leukemia after working at plant for week.
2. Nagashima Kazuyuki, 30, won a silver medal at Asian wrestling league last year. He has been diagnosed with acute myelocytic leukemia. He trains in Iwaki, Fukushima.
3. Nationally known broadcaster Mr. Otsuka Norikazu was diagnosed with acute lymphatic leukemia. In the months after March 11th, 2011, he spent a lot of time in Fukushima and he made a point of demonstrating the safety of Fukushima food products by eating them on air. 
4. Mr. Abe Hiroto, 23, of Fukushima Prefecture, who wrote columns for a fisher’s magazine called Rod & Reel, died of acute lymphocytic leukemia. He prided himself on living off fish from the local rivers and sea.
5. Masao Yoshida, Plant manager of Fukushima Daiichi
Hospitalized mid-November with an unspecified serious illness that required him to resign. TEPCO denies that his illness was caused by radiation, but of course they would. TEPCO has little credibility left. Besides, they have a motive to not discourage workers still toiling in the danger. If his illness were really unrelated to radiation exposure, they would be eager to tell us what it is. (UPDATE: On December 9, 2011, Mr. Yoshida decided that he wanted the nature of his illness to be made public. TEPCO announced at a press conference that he has esophagal cancer, and insisted it was not caused by radiation, in spite of such a claim being unprovable).

How much evidence would you need to decide to remove yourself to a safer location? I suspect it has always been clear to all authorities involved that large numbers of people are going to get sick. They have probably just decided that, on balance, a massive evacuation would cause more suffering than the illness caused by radiation. From the outset, it's been a given that X number of people are going to suffer loss of livelihood, health or life. They are hoping they will be able to treat most of the cancers and other health problems with good chances of survivability (money has been pledged for a new cancer hospital!) and still keep Fukushima City and Prefecture functioning as some kind of viable human settlement. Good luck with that as the cases pile up. Time will soon tell how wise this decision was.