What has happened to Japan's radioactive cars?

In order to assure consumers, a local used car dealer in my hometown  in Japan tests all cars before purchase, then posts the radiation level found on each car. Of course,
cars above natural background level are not sold in Japan. They get sent elsewhere.

(see also the updates at the bottom of this page)

When the nuclear reactors in Fukushima exploded in 2011, approximately 8,000 square kilometers were heavily contaminated with fallout and residents were forced to evacuate, probably for the rest of their lives. This news has been widely reported, but another aspect of the contamination received almost no coverage. It took a while for authorities to lock down the evacuation zones, and in those first few weeks there appeared to be no awareness of the need to control the movement of contaminated property out of the zone. People's clothes and belongings, even their cash, were likely covered in radioactive dust, but the objects of most obvious concern should have been vehicles.

Because the government failed to quickly control the movement of vehicles and guarantee fair compensation to owners, people stuck with a "hot car" had to choose between taking a total loss on an expensive and essential personal asset, or selling it as soon as possible before the market woke up to the risk and valued these cars at zero. Within a few months there were reports of radioactive cars showing up in used car lots far from Fukushima. It seems to have not occurred to any journalists writing about this problem that TEPCO and the Japanese government had a moral obligation to compensate car owners whose vehicles were ruined by radiation. People wring their hands about what can be done to stop these sales, but they fail to see that the only question is whether the guilty parties, and/or insurance companies, are going to offer the fair value that these vehicles had on March 10, 2011.

Dealers recognized that there was going to be a lot of trouble from shifting radioactive cars around domestically, so they also turned to the export market. There were reports of hundreds of Japanese used cars being turned away at ports in Russia and Australia. Then the Japanese government cracked down, as much as they could (always reactive rather than proactive – a day late and a dollar short), so more radioactive cars started showing up at domestic dealers. But dealers and consumers got wise and bought dosimeters to make sure that they didn't get stuck with a worthless car. Still, unscrupulous exporters had enough control over some ports to get some cars out, and they turned to countries that were least likely to be checking. In the fall of 2012 reports came out of African nations telling of radioactive Japanese imports showing up there. Apparently, they are not all as easy to fool as the Japanese exporters believed. Some countries, lacking the instruments to check every used car imported from Japan, have entirely banned them. African policy specialist and journalist, Chika Ezeanya, reported from Nigeria:

“Cars having up to twenty times the permissible level of radiation have found their way to African countries where several governments are clueless or unconcerned about such health risks. Governments of Kenya and Tanzania however, are among the few African countries, who, unable to afford the high cost of testing all incoming vehicles, have expressly banned the importation of cars from Japan into their markets. The Kenyan government went as far as destroying some cars after it hired independent firms to test for radiation levels.” 

Sadly, this is just one more example of how Japan deliberately and/or neglectfully blunders through international soft diplomacy and tarnishes its own image. It is incredible that Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Honda and Suzuki don’t care more about what radioactive car exports could do to their brands. If they cared, they would pressure the government to assert control over used car exports. Whether it’s a First World, valuable market or a Third World nation that buys mostly used cars, these struggling Japanese brands cannot afford to be complacent.

Furthermore, it’s bad enough that Japan has bungled territorial disputes with Russia, South Korea and China, thereby shooting its own economy in the foot, but they keep digging themselves deeper. They have tarnished their image in Africa at a time when they need all the friends they can get. In addition, as I write this, fishermen in Taiji, Japan are corralling hundreds of dolphins into a cove in order to carry out the traditional slaughter and sale of mercury-tainted meat. This tradition makes a good pair along with the annual whale hunt in the Antarctic seas. Whatever the rights and wrongs are, the rest of the world has lost its taste for this slaughter that isn't even economically rational. The meat is mercury-laden, with a market value that doesn't cover the cost of the hunt. The continuation of these quaint traditions has severely set back Japan’s international image and its efforts at soft power diplomacy.

    Overall, Japan gives the impression to the outside world that it just doesn't care what the outside world thinks. It is oblivious or indifferent the consequences that arise, and it seems to even lack an ability to anticipate them or the feelings they will arouse in others. Apologies have been mouthed, but the impacts on other nations seem to be an afterthought. National policy seems to be blind to the mental and emotional life of people in neighboring countries.

Updates:

July 2014:

Jay Ramey. "Radioactive cars from Japan keep turning up in Central Asia." Autoweek. July 11, 2014. 
This report states that persistent exporters are finding ways to get through strict controls at major ports. Radioactive used cars are now coming to market in Central Asia through minor road border crossings. A director of the Disease Prevention Department in Bishkek, Kyrgisztan said the cars can't be sent back, so they might turn them into scrap. I'm not sure how they think that is a solution because scrapping means recycling the material into other consumer goods.
If the Japanese car industry were being managed intelligently, the major manufacturers would have long ago set up a buy-back program for radioactive cars, just as they can afford to do with recalls on other defective products. It would save their brand reputation overseas. It's shameful that they so badly disregarded the safety of consumers in the the developing world and underestimated their ability to detect radioactive cars.

January 2014:

Livern Barett. “Radiation Alert - Harmful Elements Detected At Ports In Shipments From Japan.” The Gleaner, Jamaica, January 10, 2014.

“It could be that there is a weakness in the inspection process…”

More than 130 radioactive cars from Japan seized by Russia in 2013.

September 2013:

Russia's Far East Beset with Toxic Japanese Cars

Chinese Customs Seize Radioactive Scrap Metal from Japan

ABOUT COMMENTS: AUTO DEALERS, PLEASE DO NOT POST COMMENTS WHICH ARE REALLY ADVERTISEMENTS FOR YOUR DEALERSHIPS. EVEN IF THE COMMENTS INCLUDE REMARKS RELEVANT TO THIS TOPIC, THOSE WHICH INCLUDE PROMOTIONS OF YOUR CARS WILL NOT BE POSTED.

Backyard Trash

  The residents of Watari District in Fukushima City had their property showered with radioactive fallout after the explosions at Fukushima Daiichi NPP. If there had been just a few such victims in this disaster, it would have been clear that the nuclear industry, and the government that was ultimately responsible for nuclear safety, would have owed these people large financial settlements for the value of their property, their emotional hardship, their present and future lost income, and the full cost of relocating elsewhere. But there are a million victims at least, and TEPCO and the government barely have the cash to maintain their operations. Fair compensation will never come.

Instead, these residents now have insult added to injury. The contaminated soil that they have cleaned up on their own properties has nowhere to go. They have been told they cannot bury it (for the good reason of not contaminating groundwater), and since the government has no plans to remove it, they have to just cover it with vinyl and leave it on their own property. It seems the guilty parties have decided that they can wait a couple decades to see this problem resolve itself at no cost to themselves. They can just wait until these residents die or leave at their own expense.

A photo from The Mainichi showing radioactive soil
that residents have to store on their own
properties.

One might think that these affected residents need to stop being so meek and organize a proper American-style class action lawsuit. After all, there have been a lot of victories in American courts with big law firms working on contingency and gaining million and billion dollar settlements. Films like Erin Brokovich and The Insider show how this was done, but there is a big difference in the case of Japan’s nuclear catastrophe. Legal victories in America have been won against large corporations that had the means to settle and get back to business. The Erin Brokovich story tells of the suit against Pacific Gas and Electric Company over hexavalent chromium contamination. They settled for $333 million and carried on with their business. The story told by The Insider concluded with all fifty state governments suing Big Tobacco for medical costs. They won $249 billion, then the tobacco industry, realizing its heyday in the West was over, just moved and got busy making money in the emerging Asian market for nicotine.

These cases illustrated that it was possible to sue wealthy corporations, especially if you had governments on your side, as was the case with lawsuit against the tobacco industry. But even in America, famous for being such a great place for lawyers and litigation, it’s not so easy to sue the government. Lawyers are reluctant to take on cases that challenge national defense and energy policies. The record shows that there has been more success in suing corporations. To get compensation from the government, it has usually been necessary to go through the political process and win such victories as the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. This was achieved in 1990, too late for most victims. It was forty-eight years after workers, soldiers and citizens began to be exposed to radiation in The Manhattan Project, and later in the buildup of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

Thus the victims of the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe cannot be blamed for their unwillingness to fight. The weakness of the legal system and the power of corporations in Japan are just parts of the problem they are up against. This tragedy shows that it is almost impossible to sue a government for past mistakes in national policy. Nonetheless, there is a movement to force public prosecutors to indict several individuals in TEPCO management for criminal negligence resulting in death and injury. Yet with or without convictions, the record of nuclear accidents shows that no society has the will or the ability to pay the costs of such a nuclear disaster, and this is one of the best arguments for shutting down the nuclear industry before another accident happens. And who really believes, pro-nukes included, that another accident will not happen within a decade or two?

Srsly?

Did anyone, from nuclear professionals to lay persons, ever really think this was a good way to do radiation decontamination? The power washing just aerosolizes the contaminants, moving them off a surface to contaminate the surroundings, as well as the person doing the work. The contaminants are not collected or isolated from the ecosystem at all. They are just moved from one place to another, where they will be moved again by wind and rain. (Photo from The Mainichi.)

A year ago I wrote a few posts about the decontamination efforts being carried out in Fukushima Prefecture. Like many observers, I concluded that the work was a pathetic waste of money that would come to nothing, a cruel joke giving false hope to the residents who would never get the compensation they deserve to enable them to start life over elsewhere. Yet who could know for sure at that early date? I did have moments of doubt when I thought “who am I, a mere amateur, to pass judgment on these radiation experts and elite-educated officials?” Maybe they know what they are doing.

A year later we can see that they did perhaps indeed know what they were doing, if the plan was to give false hope to the residents and real hope to officials that the residents would just disappear as soon as possible. Otherwise, the evidence shows now that decontamination was an utter failure.

A report in The Mainichi this week tells the story from the perspective of some Fukushima residents who live just outside the exclusion zone. Residents of 470 homes in one town were treated to a thorough decontamination effort paid for by Fukushima Municipal Government. Radiation levels fell significantly, but a year later they are back higher than ever. One spot in a gutter went from 9 to 2 microsieverts per hour before and after decontamination, but presently the same spot is 10.3 microsieverts per hour. 200 kilometers away near my home in Narita, the highest such hot spot in a gutter that I can find is 0.7, which is still well above the pre-2011 level of 0.05 microsieverts per hour.

The report goes on to say:

The Fukushima Municipal Government asked the Ministry of the Environment to conduct the second round of decontamination in spring this year, but there has been no reply so far. An official of the Fukushima Municipal Government said, "Because it is so costly, they may be waiting for the radiation levels to go down naturally without conducting decontamination." Meanwhile, an official of the Ministry of the Environment said, "We can't deny the possibility of soil re-deposition, but we are considering whether it is necessary to carry out decontamination on an individual basis."

Understatement is an important part of life in Japan. Statements are made in such a way that there is an assumption that the interlocutor will infer the intended meaning. In this case, we can assume that “waiting for radiation levels to go down naturally” is a way of saying that the government has abandoned residents and left them to face the future consequences of this poisoning on their own.

This week Greenpeace also released a report on the dismal situation in Fukushima. It highlights more concerns regarding the hapless efforts at decontamination:

1.     Some heavily populated areas exposed to 13 times the legal limit.

2.     Some parks and school facilities in Fukushima city, home to 285,000 people, radiation levels were above three microsieverts per hour (exposing anyone who stayed in such a place to 26 millsieverts per year – well above the 1 ~ 5 considered safe for nuclear industry workers).

3.     Official monitoring posts placed by the government systematically underestimate the radiation levels.

4.     Some machines at official monitoring posts are shielded from radiation by structures around them.

5.     Official monitoring stations are placed in areas the authorities have decontaminated. Thirty meters away levels are much higher.

6.     Decontamination efforts are seriously delayed and many hot spots that were repeatedly identified by Greenpeace are still there.

7.     There are still many hot spots around playground equipment.

8.     Attempts to clean up were misguided.

9.     It is very unlikely that the whole area will be freed of radiation risks within the next few years.

10. Government continues to downplay radiation risks and give false hope to residents of returning home.

Fame, Infamy, Impunity

Two news stories from The Los Angeles Times of October 4, 1995 tell us much about what we know and remember, what we never knew or what we forget, if we did ever vaguely know. The crimes are similar in that they are both tales of impunity, power, and privilege and money triumphing over victims and over the bureaucracies that were supposed to uphold the law.

The difference is that the news story that we all know is a crime with two victims and a celebrity defendant. (Los Angeles had 1,000 murders in 1992 and 297 in 2011, and many of these cases go unreported, or unsolved, or without convictions.) The other crime had thousands of victims over three decades, and it was perpetrated by doctors and government agencies that were bound to uphold such standards as the Nuremberg Code and the Hippocratic Oath. 

Two News Items from The Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1995
Front Page News	Back Page News
Simpson Not Guilty - Drama Ends 474 Days After Arrest The ex-football star expresses gratitude and returns to his Brentwood estate where friends and family celebrate. Relatives of the victims react with pain and grim silence to the jurors' decision.	Clinton Apologizes for Radiation Tests, Experiments. Cabinet will study compensation for some victims and their families. About 4,000 secret studies through 1974 were disclosed.

Journalist Eileen Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting of America’s radiation experiments, and wrote about it further in her 1999 book The Plutonium Files. Toward the end of her account she describes the long struggle to make the Department of Energy acknowledge the crimes of the past and move forward on questions of compensating victims and prosecuting the guilty parties. Hazel O’Leary had been appointed Energy Secretary, and she had been determined since her first days on the job to make the government account fully for its past deeds. But she met resistance at every step. Even the specially appointed advisory committee could not come to any firm conclusions about responsibility and compensation in its final report. It was only because of President Clinton that the government made an apology and offered compensation to a limited number of victims. He decided to bypass the equivocations of the committee and at least firmly state that the experiments had been inexcusable “not only by today’s standards but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted.”

Welsome wrote, “Clinton swept away all the conditions and spontaneously offered an apology to all of the people who had been used in the radiation experiments. The government leaders responsible for the experiments were no longer alive to apologize to the people and communities whose lives were ‘darkened by the shadow of the atom.’” (p. 470) Few of the victims received compensation, and the perpetrators went unpunished because they were deceased, aged, or impossible to convict for other reasons. Nonetheless, it was a remarkable acknowledgment that no other nuclear power has come close to disclosing about its own secrets, and it is a piece of history that should be remembered more often than the tale of the football star and the mismatched glove.

Source:

Eileen Welsome. The Plutonium Files. Dell Publishing. 1999.

The Plutonium Files

Life is short and the Art long; 
the occasion fleeting,
experience fallacious,
and judgment difficult.

-Hippocrates

One of the more disturbing things about the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe is the news that unit three contained MOX fuel and that the explosion of this reactor must have released a large volume of plutonium that circled the globe. One naturally wonders about the hazards, but this leads into the quagmire of all the varied interpretations of what happened to all life forms on earth with the advent of the nuclear age. To learn anything, one has to go back to the lessons learned from the era of atmospheric weapons testing that lasted from 1945 until the ratification of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. France and China didn’t sign it and continued atmospheric testing until 1974 and 1980, respectively, but the worst was over by the time America and the USSR agreed that their mad game had to stop.

Plutonium Boy - The kids' nuclear mascot created by the Japanese nuclear
industry's PR machine. MIA since March 2011.

It is impossible to know how badly fallout has affected living things, but Arjun Makhijani (President, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland) uses the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cancer risk coefficients to estimate that between 200,000 to 500,000 cancer cases have been caused by global fallout. He adds, however,

No sound global estimate of cancer incidence is possible because no study comparable to the 1997 U.S. National Cancer Institute study has been carried out on a global scale. Indeed, even the thyroid cancer risk in Canada due to testing in Nevada has not been evaluated, although it is apparent from the National Cancer Institute study as well as the similar dietary patterns between Canada and the United States that people in several parts of Canada would have been significantly affected.

Makhijani highlights the significance of the nuclear secrets that are still well kept. America subjected hundreds of thousands of its own citizens to nuclear experiments and dangers, but the truth did eventually come out in the 1990s. Makhijani reminds readers,

… hundreds of thousands of people have been similarly affected in other nuclear-weapon states. The main difference between them and the United States has been that the United States has been more open and hence has, under public pressure, acknowledged a wider scope and depth of harm, although that task is still far from done. India has strict secrecy laws surrounding its nuclear weapons activities, much like France and the United Kingdom. The least is known about China, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.

An excellent way to learn what America, and probably other nuclear states, did to its own citizens in the pursuit of nuclear weapons is to read Eileen Welsome’s The Plutonium Files. Several reviews and summaries can be found on Amazon, so rather than repeat this work, I cite one of them here:

A review on Amazon.com attributed to The Inside Flap:

In a Massachusetts school, seventy-three disabled children were spoon fed radioactive isotopes along with their morning oatmeal....In an upstate New York hospital, an eighteen-year-old woman, believing she was being treated for a pituitary disorder, was injected with plutonium by Manhattan Project doctors....At a Tennessee prenatal clinic, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails"--in truth, drinks containing radioactive iron--as part of their prenatal treatment....

In 1945, the seismic power of atomic energy was already well known to researchers, but the effects of radiation on human beings were not. Fearful that plutonium would cause a cancer epidemic among workers, Manhattan Project doctors embarked on a human experiment that was as chilling as it was closely guarded: the systematic injection of unsuspecting Americans with radioactive plutonium. In this shocking exposé, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome reveals the unspeakable scientific trials that reduced thousands of American men, women, and even children to nameless specimens with silvery radioactive metal circulating in their veins. Spanning the 1930s to the 1990s, filled with hundreds of newly declassified documents and firsthand interviews, The Plutonium Files traces the behind-the-scenes story of an extraordinary fifty-year cover-up. It illuminates a shadowy chapter in this country's history and gives eloquent voice to the men and women who paid for our atomic energy discoveries with their health--and sometimes their lives.

That summary says enough, but below I mention a few memorable aspects of the book.

If the world had never got a chance to see the declassified documents, we might have had a sense that something icky was going on if we came across government studies with titles like this (cited in The Plutonium Files):

K. Scott and J.G. Hamilton. A Comparison of the Metabolism of Plutonium (Pu-238) in Man and the Rat. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and Technical Information. Oak Ridge, Tennessee. 1946.

In other cases, single words appearing in the cited documents highlight how much the doctors involved subtly dehumanized their patients. They were often insistent on moving beyond animal testing and knowing how plutonium affects “the human” as opposed to “the beagle.” One document described the desired type of patient as the desired type of “material” that should preferably be “moribund.” It is notable that these doctors were not just going along with the acceptable norms of their time. The Nazi war crimes trials were current events, and government agencies had adopted ethics codes for research. The plutonium researchers knew they were acting against professional ethics. One of the doctors wrote of the need to keep “dogooders” out of the way. So this history does not illustrate how much we have progressed. It illustrates how much people anytime, anywhere can regress.

In one instance, Eileen Welsome failed to comment on another bit of language, this time on the irony of the name Hanford Jang, one of the unwitting experimental subjects who was injected with radioactive americium. He was a teenage Chinese immigrant suffering from bone cancer, and patients like him were chosen because they were both still physiologically normal in many ways but sure to die in a short time anyway. Chinese parents immigrating to the West often choose to anglicize their children’s names with posh sounding names like “Bentley.”  The name “Hanford,” likewise, does have a noble ring to it, but in this case, Hanford’s poison was likely made at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State.

The most bizarre segment of the book describes the work of a Dr. Carl Heller who spent several years doing research on male prisoners in Oregon. All of the government sponsored radiation experimenters wanted to find the “holy grail” of radiation research, which was to discover a biological dosimeter – a biological marker that would determine how much radiation an individual had been exposed to. After subjecting testicles of “the human” to various forms of radiation (internal, gamma, x-ray and even neutrons), Dr. Heller confidently announced to colleagues that he could tell from a biopsied testicle exactly how much radiation a man had been exposed to. His peers seemed to agree that he had found the holy grail, but there were, admittedly, practical obstacles to scaling this painful biopsy up to the kind of testing that would be needed on the nuclear battlefield or after a nuclear emergency. And there was no biological dosimeter, alas, for “the human female” or “the human fetus.”

Finally, this slice of nuclear history must strike everyone as personally relevant. We all have to wonder about the effects of chemicals and radiation on our families. These days, many people note that people around them are dying at an age younger than the age their parents and grandparents died. My father was treated for acne in the 1940s with x-rays. He was wearing full dentures before his 40th birthday, and had several skin lesions removed from his face in later years. It seems that this treatment, like the plutonium injections and total body irradiation described by Welsome, was another radiological experiment of the era done by eager doctors whose pet research interests blinded them to the fact the risks were real and the benefits unlikely.
   My three siblings and I were born between 1957 and 1968, so I wonder about how much fallout got into my parents and us by the time they had their children. I was born with a heart murmur that still throws off cardiograms and makes me jump through extra hoops to get life insurance, but that is a small thing to complain about. Besides, I was the lucky one conceived and born during the testing moratorium that lasted from late 1958 to September 1961. In any case, every generation born since WWII has been affected by the radiological and chemical pollution of the modern age. Welsome makes this point in a segment of her book about the US military pilots who were ordered to fly through mushroom clouds and gather samples of fallout:

The cloud samplers continued to swoop in and out of the mushroom clouds until 1962. Like the ground troops, many of the pilots developed cancer or other diseases that they feel were caused by their radiation exposure. Langdon Harrison, who contracted prostate and bladder cancer, believes wholeheartedly that he received more than the 8.5 roentgens [.085 Sieverts] listed on his official reports. He said often he was ordered to circle in the dirty-looking clouds for up to fifteen minutes while trying to fill his tanks with radioactive gases. All the while he watched as the numbers on his radiation monitors climbed.

Harrison said he would never have volunteered for the sampling missions he had had been informed of the risks. “The whole thing was fraught with peril and danger and they knew it was, and this I resent quite readily,” he told one interviewer. “There isn’t anybody in the United States who isn’t a downwinder, either. When we followed the clouds, we went all over the United States from east to west and covering a broad spectrum of Mexico and Canada. Where are you going to draw the line? Everyone is a downwinder. It circles the earth, round and round, what comes around goes around.” (p. 284)

Sources:

D.E.H Cleveland and A.H. Pirie. "The Treatment of Chronic Acne by X-Ray." Canadian Medical Association Journal. November 1938 November; 39(5): 499–500. 

Lawrence E. Lamb. "X-Ray No Acne Cure." The Victoria Advocate. Victoria, Texas. June 9, 1977.

Arjun Makhijani, A Readiness to Harm: The Health Effects of Nuclear Weapons Complexes, Arms Control Association, August 29, 2008.

 

S. Preston-Martin, "Prior X-ray Therapy for Acne Related to Tumors of the Parotid Gland," Archives of Dermatology, July 1989;125(7):921-4.

Steven Simon, André Bouville, and Charles Land, “Prior Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks.” American Scientist, January-February 2006, Volume 94, Number 1. Page 48.DOI: 10.1511/2006.1.48.

Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (Dell Publishing, 1999). Update: this book used to be available as an ebook on Amazon.com, but this is no longer the case. The book is out of print and used hard copies for sale on Amazon (as of 2021/12/23) are priced at $110 to $764, so the book is very much in demand, but someone does not want digital copies of it to be available.

Pressure and Containment

The title Pressure and Containment applies to two physical elements of nuclear reactor design, but it also applies to another essential aspect of the nuclear industry: its need to contain the abstract, ever-increasing, problematic pressure of accumulating information that threatens to leak out. Over the past year I have speculated about what people in the global nuclear industry must be thinking of the Fukushima catastrophe. The IEAE, professional organizations and government agencies form tight ranks and carefully control the message that gets out to the public. Official meetings and conferences are closed to the mass media, and most staff are barred from speaking publicly. 

From the outside it looks like it is all diplomatic language and soothing words of mutual respect, support and encouragement, but now one has to wonder why more anger and resentment would not break through the normally calm surface. After all, TEPCO and the Japanese nuclear village have done tremendous financial harm to the nuclear industry, which may have entered its period of decline. Nuclear engineers who belong to organizations with excellent safety records have good reason to be angry, and to breathe a sigh of relief when they hear talk of a phase out of nuclear power in Japan. They have to admit, as readily as many anti-nuke people, that Japan is just too seismically risky for nuclear power and it has a record of incorrigibly flawed management of nuclear safety. Even from the perspective of pro-nuclear advocates, it would be better if Japan got out of the game and left it to organizations that have a better record of handling the dangers.

It is difficult for an outsider to find evidence of such discord within the nuclear profession, but one good place to look is in the industry trade magazines. Volume 53, Issue 35 of Nucleonics Week (August 2012) contained a report on the Convention on Nuclear Safety meeting that was held in Vienna in late August. The report described a description of a rare and welcome undiplomatic debate occurring among nuclear professionals. One could argue that the information in such trade journals should be available to the public, and it is, in fact, but it comes with the least expensive payment option being an annual subscription of US$2,695 (basic web and email). I came across this article via forwarded email, and I’m posting it here with the defense that it is fair use because of its import to public policy debate within democratic societies.

The article discusses primarily comments by Rosenergoatom deputy director general Vladimir Asmolov. He pointed out that the extraordinary meeting of CNS parties was supposed to focus on why Fukushima happened, not on the known details of what happened. He openly criticized a presentation by Shinichi Kuroki, deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency as being too focused on what is already established knowledge. Nucleonics Week reported that Asmolov claimed Kuroki’s report, “shed little light on why Fukushima owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. had failed to apply IAEA safety principles like sufficient redundance [sic - redundancy] in safety trains and why regulators had not enforced stricter norms.”

Asmolov explained further, “weaknesses in the Japanese system had been identified by several missions from the IAEA and the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), over the past years, but the Japanese did not act on them.” Asmolov cited “criticism about the regulatory agency being within the industry ministry, the lack of technical competence in NISA, and failure by TEPCO to make key safety-related backfits even after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.

It was Asmolov’s assessment that TEPCO could have protected the Fukushima Daiichi plant if it had applied knowledge that was available before the accident. Putting it mildly, Asmolov said that TEPCO was “isolated from scientific support.” 

I think a dispossessed farmer in Fukushima would express these criticisms with much more anger and rage, but by the standards of nuclear industry peer pressure, Asmolov might have delivered a shocking effrontery when he said there was nothing new in the report by Kuroki, “whom he criticized for giving numbers with too great precision - for example, measurement of water levels in the spent fuel pool of Fukushima I-4 - but sidestepping an analysis of the mindset that allowed regulatory approval of extended operation for the oldest Fukushima unit without new safety requirements.”

Asmolov is also president of The World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) and a member of the International Nuclear Safety Group (INSAG), the Russian nuclear utility's chief technical expert and a professor at Moscow Technical University. It would be interesting to know what he has to say about other shocking lapses such as the South Korean utility that, in the post-Fukushima world, covered up - until it was caught - a twelve-minute station blackout at the Gori 1 Nuclear Power Plant in Busan on February 9, 2012. For that matter, in how many other countries are operators failing to apply IAEA safety principles, and where else are regulators failing to enforce measures against known low probability-high impact events? Who else is "isolated from scientific support"?

source article:

CNS meeting not focused on key Fukushima issues: Asmolov
Staff
991 words
30 August 2012
Nucleonics Week
NUC
ISSN: 0048-105X, Volume 53, Issue 35
English
(c) 2012 McGraw-Hill, Inc.

The world nuclear safety community lost an opportunity to focus on the most important lessons from the Fukushima accident at a meeting in Vienna this week, Rosenergoatom deputy director general Vladimir Asmolov said as the meeting of parties to the Convention on Nuclear Safety entered its third day August 29.

Asmolov said that the "extraordinary" meeting of CNS parties was supposed to shed light not primarily on what happened at Fukushima in March 2011 - which has been presented in many other forums over the past months - but why it happened, so that lessons could be drawn for the global nuclear safety regime.

But a presentation about Fukushima at the opening session August 27 by Shinichi Kuroki, deputy director general of Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, shed little light on why Fukushima owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. had failed to apply IAEA safety principles like sufficient redundance in safety trains and why regulators had not enforced stricter norms, Asmolov said.

Asmolov said that the weaknesses in the Japanese system had been identified by several missions from the IAEA and the World Association of Nuclear Operators WANO, over the past years, but the Japanese did not act on them. He cited criticism about the regulatory agency being within the industry ministry, the lack of technical competence in NISA, and failure by Tepco to make key safety-related backfits even after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents.

Asmolov is president of WANO and a member of the International Nuclear Safety Group, Insag. He is also the Russian nuclear utility's chief technical expert and a professor at Moscow Technical University.

Asmolov said that if Tepco had properly assessed the consequences of a total loss of power, as happened on March 11, 2011, it would have realized that "the design [of the Fukushima units] is not good."

"The knowledge exists" about how to protect a plant in such circumstances, he said, but the Japanese operator was "isolated from scientific support."

Asmolov said there was nothing new in the report by Kuroki, whom he criticized for giving numbers with too great precision - for example, measurement of water levels in the spent fuel pool of Fukushima I-4 - but sidestepping an analysis of the mindset that allowed regulatory approval of extended operation for the oldest Fukushima unit without new safety requirements.

Kuroki's presentation did cover investigations of the cause of the accident, the taking of immediate safety measures at Fukushima and other reactor sites, and considerations of further steps, such as seismic safety re-evaluation for all sites. He outlined the action plan of nuclear utilities, designed to obtain approval for restart of units that were shut for inspections after the accident. Only two of 50 units in Japan have been allowed to restart so far.

Kuroki said that the Japanese government "needs to reconstruct [the] nuclear safety organization and regulation rapidly, so as to prevent [a] severe accident" and recover public trust in regulators and operators, which he said was "completely lost" because of Fukushima. Nominations of five people as Nuclear Regulatory Agency commissioners are in the approval process in the Diet, Japan's parliament.

Fukushima led to a nuclear regulatory reform act that creates a nuclear regulatory commission independent of the industry ministry and integrates NISA and other government offices dealing with radiation protection into the staff of the new NRA.

Kuroki said issues like improving safety culture, as well as new post-Fukushima regulations covering 30 safety issues identified after Fukushima, will be addressed by the new agency once it is functioning.

But Kuroki offered little information to the 600-plus participants in the Vienna meeting about nuclear safety philosophy and the international safety regime going forward, Asmolov said. He contrasted that with the recent expert report done for the Japanese Diet which drew some key conclusions about safety culture and accountability in Japan's nuclear community.

Asmolov said that discussions in a working group during the CNS meeting on international cooperation, which he chaired, had shown that "all the reasons [for Fukushima] were clear before the accident, but the [safety] convention and other mechanisms [like peer review missions]" could not prevent the accident.

He said Russia was seeking agreement from the CNS parties to establish a special high-level group to work out a "common proposal" for the global nuclear safety regime, evaluating where the nuclear community went wrong and how it can use "experience and knowledge" to improve the "fundamentals" of nuclear safety, like adequate design.

Asmolov said he sought agreement on "internationally coordinated research and development" to tackle "weak points" of reactor safety like hydrogen risks in containment or molten core interaction with water. A "common network" should also be established to link the results of all peer review missions and safety services - for example between the IAEA and WANO - and set "coordinated objectives" for those missions, he said.

The IAEA and WANO announced earlier this year an agreement to work more closely together.

Separately, Tero Varjoranta, director general of the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Institute, said in an interview in Vienna August 29 that experts looking at design issues during the CNS meeting had agreed on areas that need to be addressed in light of Fukushima.

He said there is agreement on measures needed, but that different countries have different timelines to implement them.
He gave no specific examples; the contents of the report from the working group on design issues, which Varjoranta chaired, are confidential.

But Varjoranta, who also chairs the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group, said he had delivered two messages to the group. First, he said, one should "never waste an opportunity" to learn lessons. But second, one should take the time needed to understand precisely what changes are needed rather than rush to make backfits without sufficient analysis.

"Haste makes waste," the Finnish regulator said.

Nuclear Power Risks and the Optimism Bias

Psychology professor Tali Shalot writes in The Optimism Bias that 80% of humanity has an irrational positive bias toward themselves and their families. It is likely to be an adaptation that helped us survive because she finds that this bias increases the probability that we will obtain our goals. In contrast, a bias toward pessimism is associated with depression.

Most people rate themselves as above average in several traits such as driving ability, appearance, intelligence, likability and, of course, modesty. They think their own children are above average in many ways as well. Newlyweds know that 40% of marriages end in divorce, but they think that theirs will not. People have these biases toward themselves even if they are pessimistic about other people or society in general. Life would grind to a halt without this bias. This optimism bias is advantageous in maintaining emotional resilience and obtaining goals, but there are definitely situations, especially for people with heavy responsibilities in leading nations or managing dangerous technology, in which this bias can be disastrous. Evolution did not prepare us to be nuclear plant managers, so our built-in cognitive wiring for risk assessment is unreliable and must in many circumstances be over-ruled by the power of reason.

The Japanese nuclear industry and its regulators were definitely blinded by complacency, fear of career setbacks, fear of financial losses, and optimism bias in the years leading up to the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe. Everyone knew that recent information about seismic and tsunami risks required a reassessment of the original assumptions about the safety of nuclear plants, but decisions about the necessary upgrades were put off in the hopeful belief that the problems would be solved before disaster struck. They erroneously thought that it probably wouldn't happen in the near future, but a rational study of the probabilities reveals the counter-intuitive finding that the farther you look into the future, the lower the probability of an event occurring.

In The Better Angels of our Nature, (p.202-203) Steven Pinker discusses the inability 1,000 research subjects to correctly understand the probability of an event happening in the future. In the problem discussed, the probability of lightning striking a home is given as once a month. People can understand that the probability of lightning striking the home tomorrow is 0.03 (1/30 days of the month). However, when subjects were asked to state the probability of lightning striking 2, 3 or 4 days into the future, most people said the probability was the same or higher. They were unable to see that there was a decreasing likelihood of many days passing without a lightning strike. The probability goes down the farther you consider into the future. The lowest probability is that 29 days will pass without a lightning strike and lightning will hit on the 30th day from now. Of course, when you wake up tomorrow it is a new “today,” so the calculation resets, but from the perspective of today, tomorrow is the day with the highest probability of a lightning strike. 
The probabilities are perhaps easier to understand with the last day of the month as the reference point for the present. If 29 days have passed without a lightning strike, the likelihood of a lightning strike today is 100%.These insights should tell safety engineers that the time to act on mitigating a risk is right now. The greatest error is to kick the can down the road on the assumption that it probably won’t happen anytime soon. Other common mistakes are to think that the risk assessment is flawed and to hope that new research done with favorable methodology will provide a reason for inaction and not spending money on the problem.

The optimism bias messes with our estimations of probability and makes us think highly unlikely bad things won’t happen, but think highly unlikely good things will happen. If every year there is a 1/1,000 chance that a mega-tsunami will destroy the cooling system of a nuclear power plant, the operator concludes that there is no urgency because it probably won’t happen this year. On the other hand, if the workers at the power plant see advertisements that the state lottery jackpot is getting very large, they will buy more lottery tickets than usual. They know that millions of people are doing the same thing, more tickets are being sold, and the probability of winning is becoming exceedingly small, but they buy tickets anyway. These are two low-probability, high-impact scenarios, but the irrational decisions about them differ because the impact of the former is unfavorable and the impact of the latter is favorable.

Finally, from a certain perspective, probabilities are meaningless numbers. Gamblers don’t care about the odds stacked against them as long as they might win the next round. When risk increases by factors of 10, at what point does the risk become unacceptable? Whether the probability is 1/100, 1/1,000 or 1/10,000, the impact of the unwanted event may be nasty enough to render the difference meaningless. Regardless of the probabilities of the event occurring, the only thing that matters is that it can happen tomorrow.

So now think about the present and future risk to nuclear power plants, based on lessons learned from the Fukushima catastrophe. A whistleblower at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently spoke to journalists regarding his concerns about the Oconee Nuclear Power Plant in South Carolina being destroyed by a dam failure:

"The probability of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is hundreds of times greater than a 51-foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi. And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man-made 'tsunami' resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will - with absolute certainty - result in the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment structures. Although it is not a given that Jocassee Dam will fail in the next 20 years, it is a given that if it does fail, the three reactor plants will melt down and release their radionuclides into the environment."

In hindsight we can all say that TEPCO or Japanese regulators should have shut down Fukushima Daiichi and built better seawalls and backup power systems, but if the probability of dam failure in South Carolina is higher than the tsunami risk was at Fukushima, it follows that the correct foresight regarding the Oconee plant is that it should be shut down immediately until the risk can be eliminated. The dam could fail tomorrow. The same conclusion could be made about the risk posed by earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes at many other nuclear plants. The nuclear industry has spoken a lot about lessons learned from the Fukushima nightmare, but if another catastrophe occurs because of a risk ignored, the public will conclude that nothing was learned.

Further reading:

Environment News Service 23 Nuclear Power Plants at High Risk of Tsunami. September 24, 2012

Prognosticating the Cost of Energy in 2030

Business leaders in Japan argue that abandoning nuclear power could lead to corporations moving overseas. 

Another nuclear disaster could lead to 120,000,000 Japanese citizens wanting to do the same.

Rokkasho Nuclear Fuel Facility, Aomori Prefecture, Japan

The Democratic Party of Japan has announced that it will commit to a phase out of nuclear power by the year 2030, but they announced the next day that construction can resume on two new plants that could be permitted to run until 2050. The two announcements were contradictory, and anti-nuclear activists suspect a cynical ploy to win the next election. The majority of the public wants to be nuclear free, so the political prize up for grabs is obvious. After the election, and as time goes on, the policy could shift in any direction. Nonetheless, the nuclear industry and other business groups are taking the announcement seriously, just in case Prime Minister Noda might really be serious about what he is pledging. The battle to frighten and confuse the public has begun.

The Mainichi reports business groups saying that if Japan abandons nuclear power by 2030, the average monthly energy bill for multi-person households would swell to 32,243 yen, compared with 16,900 yen in 2010 - as if anyone could know how much a liter of gasoline or a kilogram of enriched uranium will be worth, in Japanese currency, eighteen years from now! Are they really that stupid, or do they just think the general public is that stupid?

For the record, I live in a “multi-person” household of five people, and our average monthly bill is about 9,200 yen, and that includes heat, air conditioning, hot water and cooking. With a solar panel on the roof, we sell back to TEPCO about 1/3 of the amount we consume. We conserve a lot, seldom use the air conditioning, and get by without suffering too much. Japanese electricity consumers have a lot of room to make future gains in efficiency and benefit from new energy technologies. One reason the figure of 16,900 yen is so high is that so many Japanese families live in un-insulated, poorly-made homes that devalue as fast as cars. A rational energy policy would also be a rational housing policy.

Who can predict what will happen to currency by 2030?

The more dubious claim is in the threat of businesses to relocate. Japan is in steep demographic decline and deindustrialization has been happening for a long time, and these trends were sure to continue with or without a nuclear disaster and a shift away from nuclear energy. Energy consumption will decline regardless of energy policy. Japan has been doing massive deficit spending for a long time, and when it is done borrowing money from domestic savers, it will have to borrow on the international market, at which time the world’s third largest economy could become the next Greece. It is extremely disingenuous for these business groups to cry that the sky is falling now just because the country will have to gradually replace the source of 30% of its electricity. These protestations are more likely to be rooted in the fear of losses within the nuclear industry. Furthermore, businesses that make the threat to relocate easily forget that any place they might go to can be struck with its own costly problems. Honda, for example, built a big operation in Bangkok only to see it submerged in the great flood of 2011, and Panasonic is presently seeing a plant in China attacked by a mob protesting Japan's claim to the Senkaku Islands.

Another false argument that has arisen is in the cries of foul over the Rokkasho nuclear waste facility in Aomori Prefecture. Decades ago the prefectural government agreed to host a nuclear waste reprocessing facility there with the understanding that the Rokkasho site would not be for permanent storage. Waste would come in, be reprocessed into MOX fuel (a blend of plutonium and uranium) and then be sent out as fuel for nuclear reactors. The domestic technology for reprocessing never worked, so fuel had to be shipped to Britain and France for reprocessing then reimported. The entire plan was a miserable failure even before the Fukushima meltdowns, but now that the nuclear phase out has been announced, the governor of the prefecture feels betrayed. Aomori’s irrational protest consists of telling the rest of Japan that it must continue with nuclear energy because Aomori doesn’t want to store the waste product of nuclear energy. It’s good for you but bad for us. However, safety may be the least of their concerns. Kazuaki Nagata in the Japan Times reports, "These areas stand to lose huge government subsidies if the fuel cycle spigot is turned off." 
One can sympathize, but only to the extent one sympathizes with a young woman who got pregnant before her fiancé skipped town. Aomori was warned about the false promise of nuclear waste storage and reprocessing. The dangers were known. Activists tried to stop it, but local and prefectural politicians were seduced by the false promises of national politicians and corporations. It is too late to complain about this situation now. Aomori’s problem just underlines how critical it is for Japan to completely stop creating more nuclear waste. Temporary storage is full and extremely dangerous, and there is no long-term solution.

They hate to say, "I told you so."

Further argument about the costs of continuing with nuclear energy appears in the list below. It borrows some phrasing and arguments from the organization Don’t Nuke the Climate, while I’ve added extra commentary to some of the points.

1. In order to prevent the worst effects of climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Industrialized countries, the main producers of greenhouse gas emissions, must reduce their emissions by 40% by 2020. It takes about a decade to build one single reactor, so the nuclear option is definitely no answer to the urgency of the fight against climate change. Nuclear energy only amounts to 2.4% of global energy use. It is a very marginal energy, and even the practically impossible goal of doubling capacity would make little difference while increasing environmental hazards and imposing costs that could be spent on better projects.

2. Reactor meltdowns have devastating economic and health impacts. No private insurers want to cover this risk. Ultimately, governments must compensate for damages, but full justice for the people affected could be enough to bankrupt a nation.

3. Private nuclear operators benefit from enormous public subsidies, direct and indirect, without which they could not commission a nuclear reactor. Nuclear projects cannot be privately financed. Future costs and liabilities are too uncertain for private capital, so all new construction requires massive state support, such as the federal loan guarantees promised for the nuclear plant under construction in Georgia, USA.

4. 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions are produced by sectors of the economy which don’t depend on electricity. The nuclear option is therefore irrelevant for those sectors. Some nuclear advocates say that nuclear could play a role in replacing gasoline if it were used to create hydrogen fuel or power electric vehicles. Yet it is unlikely that uranium supplies could increase enough, and nuclear generating capacity expand enough, to make a significant difference in reducing consumption of fossil fuels.

5. Nuclear energy is not necessary to reduce greenhouse emissions. Increased energy efficiency and investment in certain types of renewable energies can reduce greenhouse emissions. A solution is at hand for the intermittency (energy storage) problem.

6. Nuclear energy has a carbon footprint. Power plants are often shut down for maintenance and repair – sometimes for very long periods while their safety is under review. Southern California Edison is presently billing its customers $54 million per month for the cost of maintaining the idled San Onofre Plant. During down time, energy is used to cool reactors and spent fuel pools. When a plant is decommissioned, more energy has to be expended in a process that lasts many years. Carbon fuels are burned in mining uranium and transporting it. Enriching uranium requires large energy inputs, many of them used for heat dissipation. The cooling machinery releases CFC gasses (permitted by the Montreal Protocol!) which have a large global warming impact. As time goes on, the quality of available uranium ore decreases, requiring more energy inputs to extract the same energy output of the better ores of yesteryear.

7. Since 1974, the OECD countries have officially committed 55% of their energy research budgets to nuclear energy, i.e. 250 billion dollars. One has to wonder if the world would be better off if more of this money had been spent on developing energy alternatives.

8. The future costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants and managing radioactive waste will reach hundreds of billions of dollars. It is dubious to claim that abandoning nuclear energy will lead to more expensive energy in the future. No one can predict the cost of energy ten or twenty years from now because there are too many uncertainties regarding climate change, technological developments, shifting economic fortunes of countries, political upheaval and the occurrence of high risk, low probability events (like the earthquake–tsunami-meltdown of 2011/03/11) which can suddenly negate all assumptions.

9. There is little assurance to be taken from the thirty-five year record of major nuclear power plant accidents. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima were horrible, but one might be tempted to say that the world carried on anyway. However, these three disasters could have been much worse if things had gone a little differently. They are better looked at as warning shots over the bow that we should be reacting to. Many reactors in the U.S. don’t have the good containment dome that saved TMI from being much worse than it was. A second, much worse explosion at Chernobyl was averted in the early days of the crisis. That explosion could have left Western Europe uninhabitable. 80% of Fukushima fallout blew out over the ocean only because the wind was blowing to the northeast. If the spent fuel fire at reactor 4 had not been controlled, Tokyo would be uninhabited today. There is no reason to take comfort from the way these accidents turned out. As bad as they were, none of them was the worst accident that is possible.

10. All assessments of nuclear energy’s appropriate role in the energy mix would be cancelled by a major accident in the US or Western Europe. In these countries, there are stronger democratic, legal and media institutions, and the public would just not have as much tolerance for the official contempt for victims that occurred in Fukushima and Chernobyl. And the hazards are real. A risk engineer from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently told a journalist, “The probability of Jocassee Dam [upstream from the Oconee NPP in South Carolina] catastrophically failing is hundreds of times greater than a 51 foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi. And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man-made 'tsunami' resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will - with absolute certainty - result in the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment structures.”

11. The hotter the weather, the more unsafe it becomes to operate power plants: 1/4 of French nuclear reactors had to be shut down in 2003 because of the summer heat wave.

12. As climate changes, droughts and flooding become more frequent. Yet the production of nuclear energy requires 25,000 times more water per kWh than wind or solar energy. Coal, gas and oil generators require cooling also, and, of course, hydroelectric facilities are dependent on a stable flow of water. Climate change brings heightened risks to many forms of electricity generation.

13. It’s too late to speak of a solution to the nuclear waste storage problem. The waste has been created and there is nowhere to put it. Radioactive waste remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no solution to prevent radioactive substances from leaking into the environment. All we can do now is stop adding to the pile and find the least bad way to handle what exists.

14. More reactors mean more equipment and more nuclear material spreading across the world.

15. The real solutions to fight climate change exist: energy efficiency, energy saving, increase in renewable energies…fighting deforestation, transition towards sustainable farming, economic re-localization, etc… This may not seem like a desirable “solution” because it will mean living with less and recognizing that the laws of physics impose their own rules on economic growth. Neither science nor religion promised us air conditioning.

For the opposing point of view, read the arguments of an Indy race car driver who has been bought and paid for by French nuclear giant Areva. The industry’s prospects look grim if this is what it has to resort to in order to find the next generation of nuclear engineers.

More background on Japan's stalled nuclear fuel recycling dreams:
Kazuaki Nagata. "Vicious nuclear fuel cycle proving difficult to break." The Japan Times. September 18, 2012.

Stephen Hesse. Japan's Nuclear Phase Out: Is it all Smoke and Mirrors? The Japan Times. September 23, 2012.