Lessons Not Learned

Tsunami waves inundate the Fukushima Daiichi NPP

The Mainichi Newspaper reported on September 6, 2012 that the Hokuriku Electric Power Company has refused a request by the Social Democratic Party leader for a visit to the Shika Nuclear Power Plant. A representative told the newspaper, “We determined that those who don't understand the necessity of nuclear plants are low on our priority list.”

International and domestic governments, regulatory agencies and power utilities have consistently boasted about the “lessons learned” from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant catastrophe, but this statement by the representative of Hokuriku Electric illustrates that perhaps nothing has been learned.

Who knew that a tsunami could topple protective barriers, and be large enough to flood a nuclear power plant and disable its backup power systems? Who knew that the preceding earthquake could knock out the main power supply and fatally damage the reactors even before the tsunami hit? Apparently, no one knew, if you listen to the excuses of the electric utilities in Japan. Their standard response, at least for the first few weeks after the meltdowns, was that the natural disaster was beyond all expectation and outside of all risks determined by scientific and historical knowledge.

However, these excuses soon became laughable, as it was revealed that people within Japan’s nuclear village had simply refused to listen to critics and educate themselves about facts in other fields of inquiry. It turned out that many people knew about the high probability of the earthquake-tsunami-meltdown syndrome. They warned their fellow citizens for decades and no one listened. The inescapable conclusion, the lesson to be learned, is that 160,000 evacuees would still be in their homes, TEPCO would still be a financially viable company, and the global nuclear industry would have a much better reputation if the nuclear village had listened to its most despised critics – the kinds of people who “don’t understand the necessity of nuclear power plants.” 

The statement by the Hokuriku Electric representative shows precisely the rigid, uncreative mentality that led to disaster. A wiser person would refrain from stating that there is a “necessity of nuclear power” because what is a necessity is a value judgment to be determined by others. Judgments about necessity depend on who is getting the benefits and who is paying the costs. People who operate nuclear power plants have many responsibilities, but the promotion of specific energy policy for the nation is not one of them.

Hokuriku Electric, like TEPCO, has a disgraceful safety record that calls for a little more humility when requests for visits come from critics. There was a criticality incident at the Shika plant in 1999, but it was covered up until 2007. Reactor 1 was shut down for two years, and the subsequent investigation by the Japan Nuclear Safety Commission concluded that the cause was cost-cutting pressures on staff. Since the Fukushima disaster, all reactors have been shut down while larger seawalls are built and seismic safety is reassessed. According to existing rules about building nuclear reactors on active fault lines, the plant may have to be shut down permanently because new evidence shows that a fault line previously thought to be inactive is now more likely to be active.

TEPCO shows that it too has learned nothing from its mistakes. No matter how many times critics point out the blatant failure to take account of the historical record of tsunami height in the Pacific Rim, TEPCO still stood by its past assessments as recently as April 2012 in a report titled The scale of the tsunami far exceeded all previously held expectations and knowledge. The report concedes that the giant Jogan tsunami of 869 was higher than the design basis of Fukushima NPP, but it splits hairs by noting that studies of this tsunami’s deposits showed a large wave hit the Sendai Plain and the Ishinomaki Plain, and a four-meter wave did hit in Northern Fukushima, but there were no tsunami deposits in the area of the Fukushima NPP. Thus, TEPCO wants to say that because the monster tsunami of 1,200 years ago did massive damage only a hundred kilometers north of Fukushima, it was reasonable to conclude that the next monster tsunami would strike with exactly the same pattern. The question how could we have known? invites the question how could a person of modest intelligence not have known?

If it was too difficult for planners in Japan’s nuclear village to think all the way back to the year 869, they could have checked Wikipedia to get a rough idea of tsunami waves that have occurred recently in the Pacific Rim:

1964, Alaska, 30 m

1993, Hokkaido, 30 m

1998, New Guinea, 15 m

2004, Indian Ocean, 33 m

2007, Solomon Islands, 12 m

2009, Samoa, 14 m

2011, Northeastern Japan, 10-30 m

Tsunami height at Fukushima Daiichi NPP: 14-15 m.

Quoting from TEPCO’s The scale of the tsunami far exceeded all previously held expectations and knowledge:

Later, in 2002, the JSCE published a guideline called the "Tsunami Assessment Method for Nuclear Power Plants in Japan" based on the ongoing technological progress. In this assessment, simulation technology was applied and the results were assumed to be more conservative. Based on this guideline, TEPCO reevaluated the tsunami height, which was assessed to be approx. 6 m. In response to the results, TEPCO has voluntarily implemented measures while reporting them to the government. This tsunami evaluation technology has been the standard method for domestic nuclear power plants up to the time of the accident and is also used for assessing tsunamis at nuclear power plants all around Japan to report to the government including the ones located along the Pacific coastline.

Although TEPCO believed that the nuclear power plant safeguards put in place were sufficient per this standard, we deeply regret the accident that occurred on March 11th.

When Dreams Come True

In 1990, the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa released his film Dreams toward the end of his long career. The aim of the project was to put on film some of the vivid dreams he could recall from his lifetime. The dreams depicted are joined by a common theme of man's relationship to his environment, but otherwise this is a collection of short stories. The film was made in the years immediately after the Chernobyl catastrophe when both the Japanese anti-nuclear movement and nuclear industry were expanding rapidly. Perhaps because it had a strongly anti-nuclear message in the latter part of the film, Kurosawa found it impossible to raise the funding for production. It was Steven Spielberg who helped arrange backing through Warner Brothers.

The film received mixed reviews at the time, and it is likely that no one expected the unconventional, surrealistic concept to be a blockbuster. Regardless of whether you like the film, one of its segments takes on new significance in the post-Fukushima era. The segment titled Mount Fuji in Red depicts the eruption of Mount Fuji which subsequently causes multiple meltdowns at a nearby nuclear power plant (which would be the now idled “time bomb” called the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant in Shizuoka prefecture.) The dream follows two men, a mother and her two children as they flee toward the sea where panicking refugees are throwing themselves into the ocean like lemmings. The dream consists of dark humor and illogic (color coded clouds of radionuclides), which might tempt the literal minded to dismiss it as nonsense, but, in case it needs to be pointed out, the artist was trying to get at an underlying truth.

Some reviewers at the time were withering in their comments:

Time Out London: Not a little reactionary, the film's main achievement is to show a once impressive director quite out of touch both with the world and with developments in cinema. Much of it is like a moron's guide to the Green manifesto, transforming serious issues into banal trivia...

Heroic Cinema: Kurosawa’s message here is as subtle as a brick: humanity is spoiling the world, with pollution, consumerism and ignorance.

Entertainment Weekly: The picture devolves into a series of obscure, finger-wagging lectures on the subjects of nuclear war, pollution, etc. Even for those seeking faint echoes of Kurosawa's greatness, Dreams, I'm afraid, is a dud.

The Washington Post: "Pontifications" might have served as a more accurate header. Or better yet, "Sermons."... There's so much uninflected, cautionary preaching, with so much sage advice being passed down, that you begin to feel as if you're watching some sort of epic after-school special.

At the time, it might have seemed over-the-top and hysterical to preach about a geological event triggering a nuclear meltdown, but now, not so much. Now that it has happened, and now that the destabilizing effects of climate change are plain to see, the visions and warnings of "scientifically illiterate" artists of the past don't seem so easy to sneer at. Tsunamis, massive earthquakes, floods and drought are real threats to the world's 400 nuclear power plants. (For another work of art worthy of mention here, go to The Talking Heads' Nothing But Flowers, which appeared about the same time as Dreams.)

A four-minute segment of Mount Fuji in Red can be seen here on Vimeo.com but it may not last. Hopefully, Warner Brothers will consider it fair use for review such as this, and beneficial promotion for an old film in their catalog. If you can't view the video, the next best thing is to see the storyboard series of photos below.