A blunt report on Japanese TV about the Fukushima Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool and the possible end of Tokyo

How commercial TV covered the hazard of the Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool at Fukushima Daiichi: A segment of the program Morning Bird, broadcast by TV Asahi on March 8, 2012

Over the summer, the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe came back as a major story in world media. There was alarming news about large leaks of radioactive water, and each story carried mention of the potential of a larger disaster that could happen if the spent fuel rods of unit four are not safely removed. (For full coverage, go to the interview Arnie Gundersen on the radio show Nuclear Hotseat.)

Eighteen months ago, at the one year anniversary of the catastrophe, the journalist Toru Tamakawa hosted a panel discussion on Japanese TV about the perilous condition of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool. The segment includes an interview with Hiroaki Koide, professor at the Research Reactor Institute, Kyoto University.

At one time there was an English-subtitled version of this report on Youtube, but TV Asahi had it removed. For some reason, they haven’t done the same thing with the French-subtitled version which is still at the link above.

I translated the report into English, but decided not to upload an English-subtitled version on Youtube. It could be taken down at any time, and I wanted to preserve the report as a historical document.

The report is significant because it shows that the mainstream media is not always lamestream media. This report was broadcast on a major commercial network, for a target audience of housewives and senior citizens and whoever else is home during the day. The standard theory in media studies says that the purpose of such programming is to keep the audience comfortably stimulated with mild controversies, but not with extreme topics that could diminish interest in the advertised goods. But in this case there was a crack in the usual facade, as the host of the report told the panel and the viewers that there is a high chance that the accident could still turn bad and spell “the end” for northern Japan and Tokyo. It kind of spoils one’s motivation to buy luxury brand soaps. People overseas might wonder how people can live with this knowledge from day to day, but it's not that much different than the threat of nuclear annihilation that we've all lived with for sixty years. President Kennedy said it was like a Sword of Damocles above our heads. Now we have two.

This report shows that the media cannot take all the blame for public apathy on this issue. The very shocking and disturbing truth of the situation has been shown to the public. Other aspects of social control and mass psychology must explain why there hasn't been more widespread opposition to the mishandling of the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe. One thing I can fault the journalist and the panelists for is their naïve view that they could change things by voting for someone different, or that proper action will be taken if the matter is debated in parliament. They have too much faith. The passage of time has proven that the government is more interested in building Olympic facilities than in telling the nation the truth of the Fukushima catastrophe. It’s more likely that nothing will improve until there is a mass movement to block government plans. When the Soviet bloc was collapsing, it was solidarity movements and general strikes that brought change for workers and for Chernobyl victims (see my earlier post on the book Chernobyl: Crime without Punishment). Such a trend is yet to materialize in Japan.

Transcript: Morning Bird, TV Asahi, March 8, 2012

IN THE STUDIO, SPEAKING TO THE PANEL
Tamakawa:	You might think it’s been a year now, it’s over, but actually it’s been only a year, and it’s far from over. The real cause of the accident has still not been identified. The results of the National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) have not yet been published. Yet the government is talking of restarting nuclear power plants. I have to ask exactly what lessons they have learned from this accident. I ask you whether the Fukushima Daiichi site is really safe at this time. They speak as if the accident has been resolved, but look at this. The two big political parties hope to restart reactors, but is the accident really resolved?  For example, Unit 4. Professor Koide of Kyoto University is one of the experts most concerned about it. He says it is the most dangerous aspect of the situation. Here’s the actual state of Unit 4. You can see that it practically has no walls. They were blown out by the explosion. It’s a ruin, and inside it is the spent fuel storage pool. Until here, the space is taken up by the reactor, and here, beside it, is the storage pool. 1,500 rods of spent fuel are stored here, 2.8 times more than in a reactor. These rods have to be constantly cooled. So what will happen if an earthquake strikes and water begins to leak out of this pool? I asked this question to Professor Koide. Please listen to his answer.
INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR KOIDE
Koide:	As you see, this is the spent fuel pool with numerous spent fuel rods stored in it. If a strong earthquake comes, these walls could collapse, the water could spill out, and the rods would no longer be cooled. So they would begin to melt, probably entirely. An enormous amount of radioactivity would be released without any way to contain it. We don’t know when an earthquake could come.
Tamakawa:	Couldn’t we just build another pool beside the old one and transfer the rods into it before an earthquake strikes?
Koide:	If you removed a fuel rod and lifted it through the open air, an enormous amount of radiation would be released. It would kill everyone working there.
Tamakawa:	It’s that strong?
Koide:	Yes.
IN THE STUDIO, SPEAKING TO THE PANEL
Tamakawa:	So the spent fuel rods are in the pool, but that doesn’t mean that we are safely done with them. They continue to produce heat and deadly levels of radiation if they are exposed to air. They are not dangerous now only because they are under water and the radiation is blocked. As you saw in the video, I asked why we couldn’t simply move the rods to a new storage pool. First, let’s look at how they transfer the spent fuel rods in normal circumstances. The rods are at first inside the reactor. Then they are transferred to the spent fuel pool. At first, they lower a large container into the water. Then they do the transfer underwater. They put a cover on it, then they hoist the container out of the pool. But now, because of the earthquake, this crane no longer exists. So how are they going to do it?
INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR KOIDE
Koide:	You see here there is a giant crane which is used to raise and lower the container, but this can no longer be used. So there’s a lot of work to be done. First, they have to take out the debris and other things that have fallen into the pool. Next, they have to build a new crane to lower the container into the pool. They have to prepare some way to do that from the outside of the building. They will have to lower the container into the pool and transfer the rods, and many of them appear to be damaged. Then they have to pull them up and out of the pool. All this is going to take years to complete.
Tamakawa:	And what will happen if an earthquake occurs during that time?
Koide:	That will be the end.
Tamakawa:	The end?
Koide:	Yes.
IN THE STUDIO, SPEAKING TO THE PANEL
Tamakawa:	You see: the end.
Panelist 1:	Unbelievable.
Tamakawa:	So it’s a serious problem. TEPCO knows this is the most serious problem. And today, as if this was announced just in time for our program, TEPCO has announced its plan for this operation. It could begin taking out the spent fuel as early as January next year [2013]. So if an earthquake happens before that time, perhaps not even a very big one, the pool could crack and leak, and it would be, as Professor Koide said, “the end.” That means the end for a large area, including Tokyo.
Panelist 1:	And unbelievably, they are talking about restarting nuclear power plants.
Tamakawa:	I think it is out of the question to restart them before the NAIIS report comes out, and before the new regulatory agency has a chance to assess the report.
Panelist 2:	For such an important issue, the opposition parties should question what the government plans to do, but in this case even the opposition parties want to restart nuclear power plants. They all want to make use of the power plants again.
Tamakawa:	But there are people within each party who disagree with this policy.
Panelist 2:	But they are the minority, aren’t they?
Tamakawa:	No, this is not the case. There are people who think the same way even inside the party in power (DPJ), but there are also people who want to restart.
Panelist 1:	I want to vote again.
Panelist 2:	They talk of restarting after they have obtained the consent of local affected communities, but actually all of Japan, and even neighboring countries, are part of the “local affected communities.” It isn’t just the vicinity of the power plant that should be considered as affected.
Panelist 3:	We have to recognize that the accident is far from being resolved. The crisis is in fact ongoing.
Tamakawa:	That’s right, and I have a correction to make. The removal won’t start until December next year [2013] at the earliest, not January as I said before.
Panelist 3:	December next year? Seriously?
Tamakawa:	Yes. Sorry, what I said before was too optimistic.
Panelist 1:	About those members of parliament who want the restarts – I want them to resign.
Panelist 3:	We’ve got to rethink this problem.
Panelist 2:	I want the names of all those members who want the restarts. I want to ask them about their opinions.
Tamakawa:	Well, I hope this issue will be discussed in parliament soon.

Matsuhiro Imperial General Headquarters: the World's First Fallout Shelter?

    In the 20^th century nation states and their empires vastly increased the energy resources, technology and labor forces at their command. War became mechanized and industrialized on such a scale that losing a war no longer meant only military defeat. Entire cities and civilian populations could be wiped out in a short time. This gave rise to new thinking about how leadership could preserve itself in case of a sudden devastating attack. During the Cold War, when nations had to respond to the possibility of nuclear war, they built large networks of underground shelters that would allow for military and civilian leaders to have “continuity of operations.” A little-known chapter of this history is that of the Matsuhiro Imperial General Headquarters which was built by Japan during the final year of WWII. It could conceivably be called the world’s first fallout shelter, or first continuity of operations center, built for the imminent arrival of the atomic age.

We might assume that the Americans and the Soviets were the first to think on such a scale about preservation of government, but the nuclear age was actually born in 1938 when Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman showed that uranium atoms could be split and that they would release tremendous amounts of energy. All through World War II, all sides of the conflict were worried  that the enemy might be the first to attack with a nuclear weapon. Japan tried to build a nuclear weapon, and they worried that America might beat them to it. Nothing is known for sure about what they feared and what they knew about America’s progress with the bomb during the war. An NHK documentary claimed that Japanese military intelligence knew about the Alamogordo test in July 1945, and knew about some unusual preparations that were going on with a team of B52 bombers in the South Pacific over the next few weeks.

In addition to these vague fears of a new kind of weapon, major cities had already been devastated by air raids and military planners knew that Tokyo would be vulnerable to a devastating attack. Conventional warfare had become vastly more destructive than it used to be, and this was reason enough to worry about ways to protect the nation’s leadership functions.

In response to these fears, in the fall on 1944, Japan began to build what may have been the world’s first continuity of operations headquarters in the mountains of Nagano. It was a massive underground network of tunnels designed to shelter the government, the military leadership, and the imperial family. At a time when human and material resources were scarce, and the war was sure to be lost, the military leadership made this project a top priority. Thousands of laborers were conscripted and brought from Korea. There is a lack of definitive knowledge about the undertaking because all of the records about it were destroyed right after the war. In addition, within Japan there has been little interest in knowing more about the project because of its potential to embarrass the imperial family, for whom treasure and lives were wasted to build the headquarters. The Matsuhiro Imperial General Headquarters became just another of many delicate historical controversies about the Pacific War which most Japanese people would prefer to forget.

The English Wikipedia page describes the Korean slave labor that was dragooned into service to build the headquarters. It tells of workers who died in the tunnels, and of the sex slaves brought in to protect local women from the influx of single men. The tone is generally focused on the tragic waste of lives and resources for a project that had no hope of preventing eventual defeat.

The Japanese Wikipedia page has a decidedly different view of the enterprise. It points out that the Korean workers were tough and good-hearted. They helped with farm work too and enjoyed good relations with the locals. There was even some inter-marriage. One negative thing described is the locals’ resentment of the Koreans’ favorable treatment. Because they were working on a project of national priority, they got a larger rice ration at a time when many people were starving. Whoever wrote this may have failed to consider that the workers were simply regarded as machines with high fuel requirements. The tunnels wouldn’t get dug without the required energy input. Most amusingly, the writer notes that because Koreans had no Japanese names, they couldn’t legally open bank accounts. Apparently, many local people kindly offered to lend their names for this purpose. The article concludes that at the end of the war these honored workers were sent back to Korea with a generous payment.

A rare English language description of the Matsuhiro project can be found in the book The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon and I. This is a translation of a book written by Matashichi Oishi, the survivor of the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident – the Japanese tuna boat that was showered with heavy fallout from the American Bravo H-bomb tests in the Bikini Atoll. The book is mostly concerned with his long battle to restore his life, to gain compensation and proper health care, and to teach future generations how individuals have been victimized by their own nations’ military and development policies (my previous posts about this book are here and here). Matsuhiro interested Mr. Oishi because it stands as a grand example of a government’s tendency to protect the interests of a few to the expense of the many. It shows a government’s inability to admit failure, cut short its losses and do what is necessary to protect its own people. We presently see the Japanese government doubling down on its investment in nuclear energy, in both its intent to restart its nuclear power plants and its attempts to export nuclear technology, and it does this while denying the horrific costs of its nuclear disaster and its ongoing potential for causing greater harm than it has already.

In retrospect, it is easy to mock the thinking behind the Matsuhiro project, but such madness was not unique to Japanese culture or this historical context. Ten years later American school children were being told to “duck and cover” under their school desks in the event of a nuclear attack, fathers were digging bomb shelters in backyards, and the official policy was to guide the nation in ways to survive all out nuclear war. The civil defense films of the era seemed laughable to many even then, and the absurdity of them became widely apparent over time. The good question to ask now is what we are doing today that will seem like madness to future generations.

Some might be tempted to say that the Matsuhiro Headquarters would have been seen differently by history if the Emperor had evacuated to it and if a nuclear bomb had been dropped on Tokyo during a fight to the bitter end. Yes, this could be seen a measure of the prescience of the military leadership, but only through the prism of a narrow system of values that favors expending many lives in order to save a few. Defeat would have come eventually in any case. The greatest irony of the story is that in July 1945 when the Emperor was advised to go to the refuge that had been built for him, he refused to leave Tokyo. He still had some influence on decisions, and he intended to keep it. According to the history told in Japan’s Longest Day, the Emperor’s surrender announcement was broadcast only because of the persistence of the Emperor and his allies in the government who got the recording out of the palace and past the military die-hards who wanted every Japanese man, woman and child to fight to the last with bamboo spears.

The excerpt from The Day the Sun Rose in the West follows below:

_________________________

From The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon and I:

On January 11, 1997, I was invited to speak about my experience as a hibakusha at a New Year’s seminar of the East Japan Railway Workers’ Union (Nagano branch)… The next day the union’s secretary and its vice-chair took me to the site of the “Phantom Matsuhiro Imperial General Headquarters,” under construction in secret toward the end of the Pacific War.

This underground shelter was for the Emperor and Empress, first of all, and for Japan’s military high command to move to in case of any enemy landing on Japan proper. It was built to make it possible for the Japanese people to fight to the very last person. Construction was carried out at top speed; after nine months, when it was 75% finished, the war ended with Japan’s defeat. It remained unfinished.

What an idea! What scope! What cruelty! Having heard the story, leaving the cave, I turned and for a moment looked back again, as if peeking, at the inside, which was lit dimly by naked light bulbs. From the cave came bitter hatred and groans, in Korean. A document compiled in 1993 by a research group of the JR East Workers’ Union, Nagano branch, states:

The Imperial Japanese Military Headquarters, supreme command of the Japanese military, was established in 1893; it was comprised of the Army Chief of Staff and the Navy Command. It lasted through the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, and down to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War. Although all signs indicated that Japan’s defeat was imminent, the Japanese government and military provided the Japanese people with false information that Japan was winning the war, while at the same time it constructed in secret this underground shelter known as “Matsuhiro Imperial General Headquarters” in preparation for the “final battle at home.”

The plan to move Imperial General Headquarters to Matsuhiro involved key state organs: the Imperial family, government agencies, the military leadership, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation [NHK], and others; the project covered a vast area of over 150 square miles, all of the Zenkoji Flat.

The underground tunnels, excavated in the last nine months before Japan’s defeat, reached eight miles in length; the total cost was 200 million yen, equivalent to about 2 billion yen ($19 million) today.

The construction was led primarily by the Eastern Army, Nishimatsu Construction Co., and Kajima Corporation, and a total of three million workers were mobilized. The dangerous underground work, such as dynamiting and digging, was done by more than 7,000 Koreans who in the guise of “conscription” had been brought from the Korean Peninsula and made to do forced labor. They worked in two shifts. If they started at 5 a.m., they weren’t allowed to quit until after dark; they were not allowed to speak Korean, their mother tongue, among themselves. Under strict surveillance, they were exploited, and countless lives were lost.

On October 7, 1947, when Emperor Showa visited this area, he is said to have asked about the site, “I hear that somewhere in this area during the war they excavated tunnels wastefully. Where is it?”

This tragic shelter that the war produced, this cave, that claimed so many lives and cost such an enormous amount of money, is now equipped with instruments for seismological observation and is used in part as a Meteorological Agency observatory.

_________________________

Sources:

Effron, Sonni. “Digging up the Past.” The Los Angeles Times. February 9, 1998.

Harrington, Jean. “Two Elements from One: The Most Important Discovery of the Present Year is also the Biggest Explosion in Atomic History – Splitting the Uranium Atom.” Scientific American, October 1939.

Oishi, Matashichi. The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon and I. University of Hawaii Press, 2011, p. 108-109.

The Pacific War Research Society. Japan’s Longest Day. Kodansha International, 1968.

Legal Decision in France Shifts Burden of Proof to Nuclear Plant Operator

A legal decision in France this week set a notable precedent in the history of what is called "health physics." In a case concerning a nuclear power plant worker who died of lung cancer, a French tribunal shifted the burden of proof onto the operator of the nuclear power plant. The tribunal judged that it was irrelevant that the employee smoked and was exposed to radiation below legal limits. It found that the utility could not prove that radiation was not a factor in the employee's death at age 53. The radiation exposure of the employee was far below what hundreds of thousands of people are presently exposed to in Fukushima Prefecture.

Translation of the article published in Le Monde, September 8, 2013:

Nuclear: Electricité de France (EDF) liable for the cancer of an employee

Le Monde, with Agence France Presse, 2013/09/08 13:20, updated 13:34

For the first, time EDF has been found guilty of gross negligence in the case of an employee of a nuclear power plant (at Dampierre-en-Burly, Loiret) who died of lung cancer. The decision of the tribunal of the Orléans office Social Security Affairs was made on August 27 and revealed by Journal du Dimanche on September 8. The tribunal stated, “The occupational disease that afflicted Jean-François Cloix and led to his death is the result of gross negligence on the part of EDF.”

Mr. Cloix, who had worked in the power plant for thirty years as a boilermaker, died in 2009 at the age of 53. In his work for EDF he was exposed to low levels of ionizing radiation. The Orléans tribunal deemed that EDF could not prove that the employee’s cancer was not linked to the radiation he absorbed, regardless of the numerous scientific documents presented and the “undisputed” standards of safety practiced in nuclear power plants.

EDF PLANS TO APPEAL

According to the judgment, the fact that the employee smoked, the most common cause of lung cancer, did not exculpate the company. In its report, the tribunal stated, “Even though smoking is one of the undisputed causes of this malady, this fact excuses in no way the extra risk imposed by exposure to ionizing radiation.”

The lawyer for the giant electrical utility, Philippe Toison, said, “EDF is going to appeal this decision.” The operator of 19 power plants and 58 reactors in France noted that the total exposure of the employee over the length of his career was about 3% of legal limits. This was a total of 54.4 millisieverts (mSv) over thirty years, while the maximum limit was 50 mSv per year (later lowered to 20 mSv per year during Mr. Cloix’s career). The lawyer indicated that he knew of no precedent of other judgments like this implicating radiation. 
The determination of gross negligence increases the compensation due to the widow and two children of Mr. Cloix, which will increase to a total of 95,000 euros according to the judgment.

Bring on the Games

While Tokyo celebrates getting the 2020 Olympics, a video blogger in Fukushima City reminds us of the enduring legacy of the 'closing ceremony' of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

So Japan has been awarded the 2020 Olympics, and Shinzo Abe says he is more delighted than when he became prime minister. Nice for him. He spoke almost as if it were all about him. I could be annoyed by this turn of events, but I have to admit that it will make for good drama over the next few years in a mixed genre combining comedy, horror and organized crime, better than any of those surrealistic dream sequences Tony Soprano ever went through.

The essence of all good narrative fiction is that the audience knows what the protagonist does not, and this gap in knowledge is what creates the dramatic tension as they watch him walking blindly toward his tragic ending or comeuppance. We watch him move through the plot thinking, “no, don’t open that door” but we know he will. He must. In the next episode it’s a door he should open, but doesn’t, and he passes up his last chance at salvation. In this sense, Shinzo Abe is the perfect hapless antihero. He’s haunted by the ghost of his grandfather (a post-war prime minister), he’s got a big heart and all that sad ambition to restore his nation’s lost glory, but when there is a mistake to be made, he will make it.

If the Fukushima Daiichi disaster were a cable TV drama, the writers would sit around a table hashing out ideas about how to stretch and build up the suspense for another season. It would be too boring if the characters just plodded ahead with logical, cautious solutions like turning away from nuclear power. At some point, some young genius writer would say, “OK, get this. The country is broke. They borrow half the national budget every year. Government debt is 230% of GDP – totally un-repayable without a national default. A nuclear disaster in the hinterland is unresolved and threatens to become a global catastrophe. So what do they do? They double down on bread and circuses! Get this: they decide they want to host the Olympics – no one thinks they’ll get it, but the IOC actually lets them have it! With this, we’ve got enough for seven more seasons before we have to wind it down in a grand finale.” The idea might be a hard sell at first. The show runner wouldn’t be convinced easily that the audience could accept the plausibility of it. But they go with it, and it’s a hit!

Alas, too bad it’s not fiction. Nonetheless, it’s going to be interesting to watch this story unfold between now and 2020. Shinzo Abe has set the stage well. All his ducks are in a row. His country awaits either his promised Disneyesque happy ending or a run-up to a Shakespearean downfall punctuated with much awesome hubris and comic relief.

While the country was rejoicing the IOC announcement on September 8, youtube user Birdhairjp had been kind enough to remind us of what life is like on the ground in the still very-inhabited Fukushima City. This drama doesn’t have high ratings. On the ground, literally, there are 20 microsieverts per hour hitting the Geiger counter – 400 times above those safe levels in Tokyo that Shinzo Abe described to the IOC last week. Birdhairjp has shared a video demonstrating the radiation hazard outside the Abukuma Incinerator in Fukushima City. He is to be commended for producing this video and sharing it with the world, and also for demonstrating to other Japanese citizens that they need not be shy about getting their message to the world in other languages. As he proves in this case, simple English can be enough to get the point across.

I thought it would be helpful to put the data from his video in context of international norms for radiological protection.

For conversion:

1 Sievert = 1,000 millisieverts, 1 millisievert = 1,000 microsieverts

There are  8,760 hours in a year, so in the tables below the risk of the radiation levels at the incinerator are shown as the accumulated annual doses to someone who is exposed to these levels of microSv/hr for a whole year. Note that at ground level the feet get a much higher dose than the chest:

Table 1. Outside the Abukuma incinerator, Fukushima City

(55km from Fukushima Dai-ichi Power Plant)

	microSv/hour	mSv/year
at chest level	varies from 0.82 ~1.27	7.18 ~ 11.13
at feet	20.46	179.23

Table 2. For comparison, other times and places in Japan

natural background level in Japan before 2011	about 0.05 microSv/hour
present background level in Narita, Chiba (200 km from Fukushima Dai-ichi Power Plant)	0.12 microSv/hour = 1 mSv/year

Table 3 and Table 4, showing international norms in effect in 2007, are from data compiled from Nucleonica Wiki.

For occupational exposures, the 1990 recommendations of the ICRP limit the effective dose to 100 mSv in a 5 year period (giving an annual value of 20 mSv).

Table 3

	Euratom	ICRP	IAEA	Germany	Japan after its nuclear disaster
Dose limits for members of public, for whole body exposure	1 mSv/y	1 mSv/y	1 mSv/y	1 mSv/y	changed from 1 mSv/y to 20 mSv/y

Table 4

	Euratom	ICRP	IAEA	Germany
Dose limits for exposed nuclear industry workers, for whole body exposure	100 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y
Limit on effective dose for exposed workers in a consecutive 5-year period:	100 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y	20 mSv/y
Maximum effective dose in any single year:	50 mSv/y	50 mSv/y	50 mSv/y	50 mSv/y
Equivalent dose limit to the fetus, accumulated during the pregnancy	1 mSv	2 mSv		1 mSv
pregnant woman				2mSv/mo.
total work life (50 years)				400 mSv

Of course, no one stays all the time in one spot like the one outside the Abukuma incinerator. Some places have higher or lower radiation, and levels are lower indoors. It is impossible to know the accumulated annual dose people receive as they move about Fukushima City over a year. Officials don’t seem to be collecting this data, for obvious reasons. This video shows that the radiation level is high around this incinerator, and probably others, so this implies also that people are being further exposed to internal contamination as they breathe in the emissions from such facilities.  

Although there are variations in exposure levels, it is clear that residents of Fukushima City are being exposed to levels far above the international standards for the public. They are more likely to get exposures equivalent to those which are allowed for nuclear industry workers, and in some cases even more. This applies to adults, children, pregnant women and fetuses. Exposing a child to 20 mSv is the equivalent of two adult full body CT scans. Adults are advised not to have even one of these without a compelling medical reason for it.

Japanese officials simply decided that the economic and social impacts of evacuation outweigh the risks to health, which the WHO claims to be only a small percentage increase in lifetime risk of getting cancer. All other health effects are ignored, and they would be difficult to link definitively to radiation exposure. The global nuclear industry says now, in retrospect, the exposure limits for the public and for nuclear workers were overly conservative and established with normal operations in mind. They say that actually there are only very minimal risks at levels up to 100 mSv, so in an emergency we should all relax and just live with the higher levels. Would you abandon your home and livelihood just because of a sudden small increase in the risk of getting cancer twenty years or more in the future?

Only time will tell the result of this human experiment, but before the IOC vote last week Shinzo Abe said the radiation released by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster has harmed no one. This was a shamelessly false claim that cannot be supported by any evidence. It may be equally difficult to prove harm, but scientific knowledge is developed enough to let us know that the amount of radiation released had to have done some harm. Just ask the sailors on the US Ronald Reagan who were stationed offshore assisting with disaster relief. Because Abe made this statement to the IOC, he showed that he is either a shameless liar or shamelessly (willfully?) ignorant about the grave dangers that Fukushima Daiichi still poses to his country.

As much as this is a dramatic illustration of a population suddenly being put at risk for the convenience of the majority, it is not much different from other atrocious situations advanced civilizations impose on the unfortunate minorities who live in the shadow of the energy industry. Just two examples: native people in Northern Alberta have been poisoned by the exploitation of the tar sands, and the people in the coal mining regions of West Virginia have been horribly poisoned for over a century. The majority living in big cities ignores them, but they too live in their own toxic clouds. This is what we do. Bring on the games.

Syria’s Nuclear Deterrent

    The present showdown over chemical weapons in Syria may not appear to have any relation to the nuclear theme of this blog, but it would be impossible for such a major conflict not to be connected to the balance of power in nuclear weapons. In the case of Syria, the phrase “nuclear deterrent” might seem odd because Syria has no nuclear weapons. But the phrase can be ambiguous. Is it a nuclear arsenal built to deter nuclear attack, or is it any type of weapon designed to deter a nuclear attack? It is usually assumed to be a nuclear arsenal, but Syria’s nuclear deterrent fits the latter description.

This is an important but neglected factor in the recent preoccupation that America has with Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons. No one seemed to care until recently that Syria has for a long time maintained a stockpile of chemical weapons. America never really wanted to talk about why this situation was tolerated because doing so would have thrown light on the factor which made Syria want a chemical deterrent: Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal of approximately 300 warheads. Syria has long insisted on keeping chemical weapons as its sole means of countering the nuclear threat from Israel. A report in The Telegraph from 2004 quoted Assad as saying, "Syria would agree to destroy its chemical and biological capability only if Israel agreed to abandon its nuclear arsenal."

    Israel obviously has every reason to want to topple the Syrian regime and eliminate its chemical stockpile (see this on the New York Times accidental recent revelation that the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPEC was exerting heavy pressure on the US administration to strike Syria). The civil war in Syria has been fomented by non-state entities and by Israel, Turkey and Western countries, as well as by Sunni Arab countries who feel threatened by the Shiite alliance between Syria and Iran. The truth about who fired the chemical weapons in Syria on August 21 may never be known, but as far as plausibility goes, it reeks of a set up. Assad had nothing to gain by using chemical weapons, and everything to lose by crossing a line that he knew would invite retaliation fatal to his regime. On the other hand, rebel forces had much to gain by masking a chemical attack as coming from the Syrian government forces. This is entirely plausible, unless you believe the rebel forces would hesitate to sacrifice innocent lives to carry out this plot (read this testimony of a nun who witnessed rebel atrocities). Based on what’s happened so far in this war, it’s unlikely either side cares about the lives in the balance. What really seems to be at stake is the large stockpile of chemical weapons. 
    We could speculate that the original plan two years ago was to quickly topple Assad's regime by supporting proxy forces, then secure and destroy his chemical deterrent. Obviously, that hasn't gone as planned. Now Israel and the US must be desperate to do something, anything, to secure the stockpile before Assad uses it to deter attack, or before it falls into the hands of rogue elements. A RAND report on Syria addressed the difficulties, the risks and the fact that the objective could not be reached without ground forces:

In spite of often casual rhetoric about “taking out” Syria’s chemical weapon capability, the practical options for doing so have serious limitations, and attempting it could actually make things worse. Locating all Syrian chemical weapon facilities (e.g., storage sites, production facilities) and defining them well enough to design effective conventional air strikes against them would require very precise and detailed intelligence. And depending on the weapons employed in the strikes and the exact nature of the chemical weapons to be destroyed, collateral damage from the attacks could be substantial. Prospects for eliminating Syria’s extensive chemical weapon capabilities through air attack do not appear promising. At the very least, accomplishing this objective would require ground forces, and even then it may not be possible to neutralize the regime’s entire arsenal. Air power could be used, however, for retaliatory threats or attacks to deter further chemical weapon use. Air power could also be used to target the regime’s most efficient ways of delivering chemical weapons, thereby decreasing the regime’s capacity to inflict mass casualties through their use. Above all, it is essential to note that each of these aerial intervention measures could lead to further, more-extensive U.S. military involvement in Syria, particularly if it did not achieve its initial strategic objectives. Also, it could trigger serious escalatory responses from other parties such as Russia. Therefore, anticipating and assessing potential next steps beyond an initial intervention effort should be central to any strategic planning for using air power in Syria.

Since America threatened to attack Syria over the recent use of chemical weapons, much has been written about the enormous hypocrisy of America’s moral outrage over a thousand deaths by chemical weapons, in a war that has had an estimated 100,000 deaths already. In all of America’s wars of the late 20th century, a tremendous amount of chemicals have been rained on civilian populations, but unfortunately for the victims, they don’t qualify as “chemical” weapons under the terms of international agreements banning them. These agreements (The Hague Treaty, 1899, Geneva Protocol, 1925 ~) were drawn up in the early 20th century when the world was familiar with the use of chlorine, mustard gas, and phosgene during WWI. They defined chemical weapons as they were perceived in WWI, as devices designed with only one purpose: to immediately incapacitate a military force or civilian population with a harmful chemical. Now we know that the collateral chemical effects of other weapons might be much more harmful long after the battle is over, but these were never considered until new weapons were developed and new hazards were better understood. The world’s moral outrage remains limited to this small list of narrowly-defined chemical weapons that have been seldom used since WWI, but used often enough to make all the major powers hypocrites on the issue.

It would be good if we could add a few more items to the list of banned chemical weapons, but unfortunately the list would be written by the five members of the UN Security Council who are all very attached to their arsenals. It is relatively simple to ban weapons that are only chemical in their nature and purposes, especially if they present an unmanageable threat to the armies that would use them. However, nations are much less likely to give up valuable weapons that merely have chemical side-effects that usually appear long after the battle and can’t then be definitively traced to a cause.

Thus it is that if we were to eliminate all weapons with chemical effects, we might almost succeed in eliminating war. Every lead bullet that is fired releases a puff of lead vapor that does some measurable harm to the shooter and the victim. Every bomb throws up a cloud of dangerous gasses and particles. Defoliants are not designed to kill soldiers immediately on the battlefield. They just cause cancer and birth defects in people who come in contact with them later. When news headlines say “US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah” (depleted uranium for armor penetration, phosphorous for lighting up the battle field), it’s true, but legally the US is off the hook according to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, if they can define their targets as military and not civilian. In any case, it doesn't matter because no one can successfully prosecute the US military, even when they clearly do break the Geneva Convention.
   An article in The Atlantic covered State Department veteran William Polk's assessment of the present Syria dilemma which is accompanied by a history of the use of chemical weapons and the international agreements covering them. His assessment of the situation also includes the important mention of the five-year drought and crop failure that preceded the Syrian civil war:

After the war, the British, strongly urged by Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, used combinations of mustard gas, chlorine and other gases against tribesmen in Iraq in the 1920s. As he said, “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” In the same spirit, the Spaniards used gas against the Moroccan Rif Berbers in the late 1920s; the Italians used it against Ethiopians in the 1930s; and the Japanese used it against the Chinese in the 1940s… More recently in 1962, I was told by the then chief of the CIA's Middle Eastern covert action office, James Critichfield that the Egyptians had used lethal concentrations of tear gas in their campaign against royalist guerrillas in Yemen… Just revealed documents show that the Reagan administration knew of the Iraqi use in the Iraq-Iran war of the same poison gas (Sarin) as was used a few days ago in Syria and Tabun (also a nerve gas)… Finally, Israel is believed to have used poison gas in Lebanon and certainly used white phosphorus in Gaza in 2008... I cite this history not to justify the use of gas – I agree with Secretary Kerry that use of gas is a “moral obscenity” -- but to show that its use is by no means uncommon. It is stockpiled by most states in huge quantities and is constantly being produced in special factories almost everywhere despite having been legally banned since the Geneva Protocol of June 17, 1925… Use, production and storage of such weapons was again banned in the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (to which Syria is not a party). But nearly all the signatories to that convention reserved the right  legally to use such weapons if the weapons had been used against them (i.e. no first strike). The Convention, unfortunately, contains no provision banning the use of weapons, as Saddam certainly did and as Assad is accused of doing, in civil war.

Finally, the greatest weapons of all could also be re-construed as chemical and thus become even more repugnant to the global community. UN agreements like to define everything into categories, so nuclear bombs are defined as explosives and radiological hazards, but not as chemical weapons. Nonetheless, every radioactive isotope released in nuclear weapons tests also has toxic chemical properties, and nuclear explosions also release large amounts of stable isotopes that have toxic chemical effects. Our moral outrage over chemical weapons should lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Which brings this discussion back to Israel. Syria has its present chemical stockpiles because it wanted a way to deter nuclear attack by Israel. These chemicals may or may not have been used by Syrian government forces recently, but their very existence is what has caused the present showdown. Everyone knows Israel has nuclear weapons, but Israel refuses to drop its policy of ambiguity which is to neither confirm nor deny their existence. It might be too late, now that various nations have tried to eliminate the Syrian deterrent by dismantling Syria through a proxy war, but a better solution might have been for the global community to have insisted long ago on Israel’s nuclear disarmament. Considering the potential for a large global conflict to start in this region, this would be the place to start on the long road toward total global nuclear disarmament.

Sources:

Brogan, Benedict. "Syria Asserts its Rights to Chemical Weapons." The Telegraph, January 7, 2004.
Fallows, James. “Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk.” The Atlantic, September 2, 2013.
"Footage of Chemical Attack in Syria is a Fraud." Russia Today, September 6, 2013. 
Gold, Hadas. “N.Y. Times scraps AIPAC from Syria story.” Politico, September 3, 2013.

Gladstone, R., Lehren, A.W. and Sanger, D.E. “With the World Watching, Syria Amassed Nerve Gas.” The New York Times, September 7, 2013.

Popham, Peter. “US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah.” The Independent, November 8, 2005.
Air Power Options for Syria. Rand Corporation, Center for Middle East Public Policy, 2013.