MARCH 12, 2011: “THIS MAY GET REALLY UGLY …” - Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster (2015)

Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster (2015)

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MARCH 12, 2011: “THIS MAY GET REALLY UGLY …”

At 9:46 a.m. on March 11 local time, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission officially entered what it calls Monitoring Mode, a heightened state of readiness to respond when a nuclear incident is unfolding. It had been exactly nine hours since the earthquake tremors were first detected at Fukushima Daiichi.

NRC personnel with a wide range of expertise assembled in the agency’s Operations Center, a low-ceilinged room crowded with desks and computer monitors. The NRC is currently housed in three modern mid- and high-rise office buildings in Rockville, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. The headquarters complex is often simply called White Flint, after a nearby Metro stop.

Overnight, news media had begun carrying stories about the natural disaster in Japan, where local time was fourteen hours ahead of Washington. Now, details about mounting problems at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors vied with accounts about the devastation from the earthquake and tsunami. The NRC staff was scrambling to learn more.

Earlier that morning, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had issued a tsunami warning for the U.S. Pacific coast, triggering concern about a possible threat to the Diablo Canyon Power Station in California and other coastal nuclear facilities. (When the wave did arrive at about 8:30 a.m. local time, it amounted to a surge no larger than the normal tides; U.S. nuclear operations were not affected.) The information available from Japan at that time, however, convinced NRC officials that the disaster there had now risen far beyond any West Coast consequences. Responsibility shifted from the NRC’s western regional office to headquarters. Ultimately more than four hundred staff members at White Flint and around the country would be drawn in.

The Operations Center at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) headquarters outside Washington, D.C. More than four hundred NRC staff members nationwide were involved in analyzing the accident at Fukushima Daiichi… .

The Operations Center at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) headquarters outside Washington, D.C. More than four hundred NRC staff members nationwide were involved in analyzing the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Details were arriving from a variety of sources; most of the news was secondhand. Japan’s Asahi Shimbun was reporting that a state of emergency had been declared and evacuations were planned. CNN reported that radiation levels were increasing. On the other hand, Reuters quoted the World Nuclear Association in London, an industry trade group, as stating that the situation in Japan was “under control.”

Among NRC staff members across the agency, e-mails were flying furiously as they combed the Web and TV networks for information, sharing their finds with each other and struggling to put the sometimes conflicting pieces together. Soon, however, those pieces appeared to add up to an ominous accident, as their e-mails reveal:

9:21 a.m.: “We are safe and lucky this time.”

9:42 a.m.: “[M]y understanding is that this is a Station Blackout and if they don’t get some kind of power back it’s only a matter of time before core damage. This is a really big deal.”

More details were shared—and analyzed from a distance of nearly seven thousand miles. Within minutes of the early morning press briefings in Tokyo announcing plans to vent radiation, the implications of that decision were obvious at White Flint.

3:07 p.m.: “This may get really ugly in the next few days.”

Even as they struggled to comprehend the toll on human lives and property of the natural catastrophe that had struck Japan, the men and women of the NRC knew that the disaster unfolding inside the reactors half a world away had implications for White Flint. The fate of Fukushima Daiichi could dramatically affect the commission’s own future, which is closely tied to the fortunes of the nuclear industry.

Among the messages crisscrossing the NRC as the crisis deepened was one that put this concern in a nutshell:

“Is this safety bad or economics bad?” asked an e-mail sent to Brian Wagner of the NRC’s Office of New Reactors.

“Both,” Wagner replied.

Like many regulatory agencies, the NRC occupies uneasy ground between the need to guard public safety and the pressure from the industry it regulates to get off its back. When push comes to shove in that balancing act, the nuclear industry knows it can count on a sympathetic hearing in Congress; with millions of customers, the nation’s nuclear utilities are an influential lobbying group.

Over the years since its establishment in 1974, the NRC has been accused by many critics of favoring the industry’s point of view when it comes to adopting higher safety standards. To the critics, when the question was “safety” versus “economics,” it seemed that economics often won. The NRC’s supporters responded that nuclear power generation was already so safe that tighter requirements were rarely worth their cost to industry.

The crisis now beginning in Japan plainly had the potential to undercut the safety argument. What the NRC staffers could not yet know was how clearly Fukushima Daiichi would demonstrate the dangers that arise when regulators become too close to the industry they oversee.

Japan is not the United States; the relationships between government and business in the two nations are as different as other aspects of their cultures. But the history of nuclear power in Japan, and the incestuous practices that fostered it, do provide dramatic evidence that giving the nuclear industry the benefit of the doubt can lead to unimaginably dire consequences.

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At the moment an NRC staffer speculated things “may get really ugly,” it was 5:07 a.m. March 12 in Japan. Inside the Seismic Isolation Building at Fukushima Daiichi, Masao Yoshida was struggling to figure out how to vent the Unit 1 reactor. Prime Minister Kan, frustrated with a lack of information, was about to head to the plant himself. And thousands of Japanese embarked on the first of what would be a torturous series of migrations as they evacuated from a two-mile radius around the plant.

This wasn’t the first time Japanese citizens had had to flee a runaway nuclear accident. Nor was it the first time they had had reason to question the response of nuclear authorities.

In September 1999, inside a nondescript industrial building in Tokaimura, a village about seventy miles northeast of Tokyo, three employees of the JCO Company were preparing a small batch of 18.8-percent-enriched uranium fuel—containing a far higher concentration of uranium-235 than the typical fuel used in power reactors—for use in an experimental fast neutron reactor. The workers were untrained in handling material of this enrichment level and were preparing the fuel in stainless steel buckets. In a hurry, they poured the solution into a tank, bypassing safety controls. The mixture went critical, initiating a self-sustaining chain reaction that cycled on and off for hours, periodically emitting high levels of gamma and neutron radiation. The industrial building provided little radiation shielding because under normal conditions there was no need for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With expert views ranging from faith that earthquakes could be predicted with certainty to disbelief that they could be predicted at all, confusion reigned in the field of seismic risk. Apparently even state-of-the-art science was unable to shed much light on the question of “how safe is safe enough” when it came to building nuclear power plants in Japan.

The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 stalled nuclear development in many places. Japan wasn’t one of them. There, construction continued full throttle. During the five years after Chernobyl, Japan added five new reactors, with several more under construction.

A map of Japan showing the location of its nuclear facilities …

A map of Japan showing the location of its nuclear facilities. International Nuclear Safety Center, U.S. Department of Energy

The accident at Three Mile Island Unit 2 resulted from a series of equipment malfunctions, design flaws, and operator errors. Eventually about half of the fuel core melted. Nearly 150,000 people fled their homes. In the end, radiation releases from the reactor were small, but the accident symbolized to the world that nuclear power was not the safe form of energy generation its backers claimed.

Seven years after the accident at Three Mile Island, engineers at the Soviet-designed Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine were conducting a safety test on the Unit 4 reactor. After a sudden power surge, operators attempted an emergency shutdown, but power spiked instead, rupturing the reactor core and setting off a series of explosions. The graphite used to moderate fission in the core ignited, sending a massive plume of radiation over large areas of the Soviet Union and Europe. Ultimately, more than 350,000 people evacuated and resettled; a large area around the plant has been declared uninhabitable.

The Japanese government and news media portrayed Chernobyl as a man-made disaster caused by poorly trained operators and the structural defects of old, Soviet-built, Soviet-maintained equipment. The message was clear: such an event could not happen in Japan. But during the country’s own nuclear disaster in 2011, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun noted, in understated fashion: “[T]his assessment was optimistic.” “We have to recognize,” the newspaper declared in an editorial in April, “that there is no perfect technology”—a difficult admission in a country that prided itself on sophisticated engineering and exacting standards.

From the beginning of the era of nuclear power, the Japanese public had been repeatedly assured by government regulators, plant owners, and the media that it was inherently safe. Eventually, this view was generally accepted, despite the periodic eruption of scandals revealing shortcomings in the competence and integrity of those in charge of nuclear power production.

Headlines scattered over the decades built a disturbing picture. Reactor owners falsified reports. Regulators failed to scrutinize safety claims. Nuclear boosters dominated safety panels. Rules were buried for years in endless committee reviews. “Independent” experts were financially beholden to the nuclear industry for jobs or research funding. “Public” meetings were padded with industry shills posing as ordinary citizens. Between 2005 and 2009, as local officials sponsored a series of meetings to gauge constituents’ views on nuclear power development in their communities, NISA encouraged the operators of five nuclear plants to send employees to the sessions, posing as members of the public, to sing the praises of nuclear technology.

The utilities and regulators used the same tactic in the summer of 2011 as local governments debated allowing the restart of reactors shut down after the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Utility employees were encouraged to send anonymous e-mails supporting a restart or to show up at meetings and deliver the message in person. When the collusion was revealed, public opinion turned hostile.

Through it all, the nuclear industry in Japan remained largely unchallenged, insulated by official reassurances that the nation’s elaborate oversight system was functioning and the industry’s overall performance was beyond reproach, despite a few bad apples.

Challenge was unlikely to come from within the government. Nuclear energy in Japan has been described as “national policy run by the private sector.” Regulators and the regulated cohabit peacefully in a “nuclear village” whose mission is to promote nuclear power. When it comes to who is watching over whom, the lines often are blurred. A regulator today can become a utility employee tomorrow and vice versa.

It’s known as a “revolving door” in the United States. In Japan, moving from a public to a private sector job is called amakudari, “descent from heaven.”1 Bureaucrats know that when they are ready to retire, often at an early age, a comfortable job could be waiting in the industry they once regulated. There’s little incentive to rock the boat.

Shortly after the Fukushima accident, Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun reported that thirteen former officials of government agencies that regulate energy companies were currently working for TEPCO or other power firms.

Another practice, known as amaagari, “ascent to heaven,” spins the revolving door in the opposite direction. Here, the nuclear industry sends retired nuclear utility officials to government agencies overseeing the nuclear industry. Again, ferreting out safety problems is not a high priority.

The ties between government and industry go beyond sharing personnel. Japan’s Asahi Shimbun reported in early 2012 that twenty-two of eighty-four members of the Nuclear Safety Commission and two of its five commissioners had received a total of about $1.1 million in donations from the nuclear industry over a five-year period ending in fiscal 2010. One-third of the NSC members on committees overseeing nuclear operations had received such donations. Prior to becoming chairman of the NSC in 2010, Haruki Madarame, then a professor at the University of Tokyo, had received about $49,000. Critics of nuclear power rarely were on the receiving end of such largesse. The “nuclear village” looked after its own.

On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake struck off the western coast of Sumatra, triggering a devastating tsunami across the Indian Ocean that killed more than 286,000 people in fourteen countries. The quake, like the one that struck Fukushima seven years later, was a subduction earthquake. And, like the 2011 quake, it caught seismologists by surprise. When the earthquake hit, a subcommittee of the NSC was in the midst of a long overdue review of Japan’s seismic standards for nuclear plants. The review, initiated after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, had been inching along for eleven years.

A major issue before the subcommittee was how to determine the maximum earthquake plants had to be able to withstand. The old standard required that every plant be able to survive a nearby magnitude 6.5 earthquake, which in Japan was fairly common. The new standard would replace that generic criterion with limits tailored to the seismic risks at each plant site. The utilities were concerned that the revised standard could effectively increase the earthquake magnitude their plants would have to withstand and require them to make costly seismic retrofits.

When the new guidelines were ultimately approved in September 2006, critics called them too vague. Among the opponents was Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a subcommittee member, who said the guidelines were full of loopholes. Angry at the subcommittee’s unwillingness to consider more rigorous standards, he resigned.

As Japan’s largest utility, TEPCO reaped enormous benefits from the blurred lines between government and industry. The company’s operating record raised plenty of warning signs about the dangers of such incestuous practices, however. And they were apparent well before March 2011.

In 2000, Kei Sugaoka, a nuclear inspector working for GE at Fukushima Daiichi, noticed a crack in a reactor’s steam dryer, which extracts excess moisture to prevent harm to the turbine. TEPCO directed Sugaoka to cover up the evidence. Eventually, Sugaoka notified government regulators of the problem. They ordered TEPCO to handle the matter on its own. Sugaoka was fired.

While TEPCO was ostensibly dealing with the matter, Fukushima Daiichi continued to operate. Then, in late summer 2002, the company admitted it had been falsifying safety records for years, covering up evidence of cracks in thirteen reactor core shrouds at all three of its plants. The shrouds are stainless steel cylinders that hold fuel assemblies in place and help direct the flow of cooling water. At a press conference announcing the cover-up, government regulators declared that public safety was not threatened. They had reached that determination not from their own inspections, but from TEPCO’s assurances.

When the cover-up became public, TEPCO’s chairman and president resigned. The new chairman declared the falsification of records “the gravest crisis since the company was established.” Despite the scandal, both former executives were retained as advisors to TEPCO. Theirs weren’t the last heads to roll at the company.

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In January 2007, TEPCO admitted to more falsified records, involving a total of about two hundred incidents dating back many years. (A newspaper headline the next day read: “Not Again!”) It was a year of catharsis for Japan’s nuclear industry. Six other utilities revealed their own unreported safety problems. NISA had directed the utilities to own up to any such issues, hoping to head off public opposition to new reactor construction. Whether the outpouring of misdeeds helped or hurt NISA’s cause is not clear.

Among the incidents TEPCO divulged were problems at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactors on Japan’s west coast. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the world’s largest nuclear generating station, capable of producing 8,212 megawatts of electricity, nearly double Fukushima Daiichi’s output of 4,696 megawatts. In one instance, during a routine government inspection at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, operators discovered that a component of the emergency core cooling system wasn’t working. Workers made adjustments in the control room to make it appear the pump was functioning.

According to TEPCO’s explanation, the utility wasn’t the problem; the rules were. “[F]alsification occurred because passing the inspections became the objective,” the company told the government. TEPCO admitted only to handling data “inappropriately,” not to lying to inspectors. For example, the utility failed to report that control rods came loose more than once in the reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi, in one instance triggering a criticality accident that lasted seven and a half hours. Technically, TEPCO acted legitimately. Reporting the criticality mishap, for instance, was not required under Japan’s safety rules at the time.

YES, THE PAPERWORK MATTERS—A LOT

Fudging figures, doctoring reports, and creative accounting may seem minor, though deplorable, offenses. But they are not minor. When it comes to nuclear plant safety, the value of accurate, complete, and reliable paperwork cannot be underestimated.

In the United States, NRC inspectors audit only about 5 percent of the activities at nuclear plants, according to senior managers at the commission. Most of these audits involve reviewing the records of tests and inspections performed by plant workers. The NRC inspectors themselves witness only a very small fraction of actual tests and inspections. If safety inspectors could not trust a plant’s paperwork, they would have to personally observe many more activities than they do now to gain confidence that their assessment of the plant’s safety was a reflection of reality. To put this another way: when workers feel free to prepare fictional accounts of tests and inspections, nuclear safety assurances begin morphing from nonfiction to fiction as well.

Then came the earthquake that damaged Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. It occurred on the morning of July 16, 2007, with a rupture along the fault that a court had ruled in 2005 didn’t exist. The plant had been built to withstand a smaller quake; this one, with a magnitude of 6.8, created ground motion two and a half times greater than that plant had been designed for. The episode raised questions about TEPCO’s response to such crises that would prove all too relevant in 2011.

When the quake struck, three of the seven reactors were at full power; a fourth was in the process of starting up. The rest were out of service for refueling and maintenance. All four operating reactors automatically shut down. A fire broke out in an electrical transformer. Because it was a national holiday, the plant was shorthanded. Emergency response crews were difficult to assemble. The quake had damaged the plant’s own fire extinguishing system. City firefighters were pulled away from local emergencies and sent to the plant; their arrival was delayed by an hour because of quake damage.

At the time, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticized TEPCO for being too slow in reporting problems at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. “Nuclear power can only operate with the public’s trust,” he told reporters. The International Atomic Energy Agency sent inspectors to the shaken plant and concluded that the damage was “less than expected.” The agency did, however, recommend a reevaluation of the seismic situation at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, especially the existence of active faults beneath the site. Later in 2007, TEPCO reported a fourteen-mile-long (twenty-three kilometers) active fault in the seabed eleven miles from Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. The company said it had known about the fault since 2003, but did not report its findings then because TEPCO staff didn’t believe the fault would produce an earthquake large enough to threaten the reactors.

Immediately after the 2007 earthquake, the utility took all seven of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactors out of service to check for damage and upgrade their seismic resistance.2 Without 20 percent of its generating capacity, TEPCO posted its first loss in twenty-eight years, totaling $1.44 billion. Its stock value dropped 30 percent.

To bolster confidence in the wake of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa debacle, a new TEPCO president was named in 2008. Masataka Shimizu took over, replacing Tsunehisa Katsumata, who became chairman. The front office shuffle was getting almost routine: Katsumata had taken the top job in the wake of the 2002 falsification scandal; now Shimizu, a forty-year veteran of the company, stepped in. Both men had spent their entire careers at TEPCO. Shimizu made cost cutting a high priority, and within two years had returned TEPCO to the black, exceeding his target of $615 million in cuts. His secret? Reducing the frequency of inspections.

Direct structural damage is not the only danger that earthquakes can pose to Japan’s coastal nuclear plants. They can also cause devastating tsunamis, as became obvious in March 2011. Yet predicting tsunamis is a similarly inexact science. Given the uncertainties, developing standards for tsunami protection posed another conundrum for regulators and plant owners.

On tsunami protection, TEPCO took its cue from government, and Tokyo seemed in no hurry. The lengthy safety review that led to the 2006 earthquake guidelines did not address tsunamis. Proposed tsunami guidelines were moving through their own separate review process at a pace almost as slow as the tempo at which the quake standards had progressed. The nuclear industry also had a strong presence in these deliberations.

Just as the science of seismology had evolved in the years since Japan’s first nuclear plants were built, tsunami research, a newer field, was gaining ground rapidly. And Japan also provided an ideal laboratory: the Sanriku Coast alone had experienced four destructive tsunamis in a little more than a century, including the 1896 quake and wave that had a run-up height of nearly 125 feet.

Those tsunamis had struck to the north of Fukushima Daiichi. When construction began on the reactors in the late 1960s, engineers dismissed the likelihood that the plant location might be vulnerable. Based on the worst historical tsunami on record at the Fukushima site—resulting from a 1960 earthquake in Chile—the reactors were designed to withstand a tsunami with a maximum height of about ten feet (3.1 meters). TEPCO was so confident of this data point that the company actually lowered the height of the bluff where the plant was to be built by more than eighty feet (twenty-five meters). That made it easier to deliver heavy equipment to the site and to pump cooling water into the reactors. The company also said the excavation would enhance earthquake protection by placing the reactors on bedrock—albeit bedrock far below the natural elevation.

So confident was TEPCO that in 2001 it submitted to NISA a single-page tsunami plan that ruled out the possibility of a large tsunami hitting the plant and causing damage. The company provided no data to support its conclusions, and NISA apparently asked for none. “This is all we saw,” a NISA official told the Associated Press, which located the TEPCO document a decade after it was submitted. “We did not look into the validity of the content.”

NISA lacked authority to question the accuracy of TEPCO’s presented data in any event, because tsunami plans from utilities were voluntary at this stage. TEPCO provided its information in advance of new tsunami guidelines being developed by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers. That group called for protective measures to be based not only on historical tsunami data, but also on wave heights calculated by numerical models, taking uncertainties into account. In the one-page plan for Fukushima Daiichi, TEPCO provided its projection using this method: a wave no higher than nineteen feet (5.8 meters), generated by a magnitude 8.0 quake modeled after one that had occurred in 1938. Accordingly, the utility made some modifications, including raising the motors of the seawater intake pumps. (In 2009, TEPCO further refined the calculations and raised its estimate of the maximum tsunami height to about twenty feet.)

The prevailing wisdom, based on the historical record, was that earthquakes larger than magnitude 8.0 would not occur in the offshore trench near Fukushima, although they had occurred further north off the Sanriku Coast. However, in 2002, the Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion said it was possible that earthquakes similar to the 1896 Meiji Sanriku earthquake, which had an estimated magnitude of 8.3, could occur anywhere along the trench as far south as the Bousou peninsula, well below Fukushima Prefecture.

TEPCO paid no attention to that prediction until 2008, when experts warned that the utility’s tsunami assessments could have underestimated the potential size of earthquakes off the Fukushima coast. As a result, TEPCO conducted a calculation assuming that an earthquake comparable to Meiji Sanriku occurred in that area. Based on this model, the utility now predicted a tsunami up to thirty-four feet (10.2 meters) high near the plant’s seawater intake pumps. A wave that large could sweep inland and reach a run-up height of more than fifty-one feet (15.7 meters) around Units 1 through 4 at Fukushima Daiichi. But TEPCO did not consider these results realistic, maintaining that the undersea faults in the area were not the type capable of causing large tsunami-generating earthquakes.

Reaching even further back in seismic time, however, one potential counterexample stood out: the 869 A.D. Jogan earthquake and tsunami. The exact origin of the earthquake, believed to have been a magnitude 8.6, was unknown, but scientists had found evidence of geologic deposits from the tsunami well inland in areas not that far north of Fukushima Daiichi. Could such a devastating earthquake occur close to Fukushima after all? Concerned, TEPCO ran another calculation assuming an earthquake as large as Jogan and found it might produce a tsunami as high as thirty feet. The utility then surveyed tsunami deposits around Fukushima Prefecture and located some just north of the Daiichi site, but it found their patterns to be inconsistent with its model. TEPCO’s conclusion: further research was needed.

A tugboat that was swept inland by the March 11 tsunami and left to rest in the devastated town of Ofunato, north of Sendai …

A tugboat that was swept inland by the March 11 tsunami and left to rest in the devastated town of Ofunato, north of Sendai. Similar scenes of destruction could be found along the battered coastline of northeastern Japan. U.S. Navy

TEPCO managers discussed the new wave projections internally and considered countermeasures. But ultimately the company did not see a need to prepare for what it still regarded as a highly improbable event. It didn’t move its backup diesel generators out of the turbine building basements. Nor did it enhance protection by constructing a large seawall. Although the Sanriku Coast ranks as one of the most “engineered” in the world—with tsunami barriers stretching for miles—TEPCO management feared that a tall barricade in front of a nuclear plant would send the wrong message to the public. “Building embankments as tsunami countermeasures may end up sacrificing nearby villages for the sake of protecting nuclear power stations,” according to a TEPCO document. “It may not be socially acceptable.”

NISA conducted hearings on earthquake and tsunami hazards at nuclear plants in June 2009. The panel examining Fukushima Daiichi didn’t include a tsunami expert. Earthquakes were regarded as a more probable threat, and that’s what the committee focused on. But when the panel’s findings were presented, a respected seismologist warned NISA that a tsunami at the plant could be as devastating as an earthquake. When he asked why the 869 A.D. Jogan earthquake, which sent water more than two miles inland, was not incorporated into the panel’s assessment, a TEPCO official dismissed it as a “historic” event not relevant to the deliberations. Although NISA promised to follow up on the issue, at the next meeting Fukushima Daiichi’s existing preparations were deemed sufficient. Without pressure from regulators, TEPCO continued to investigate the Jogan issue on a slow track. TEPCO did eventually get around to reporting new tsunami damage assessments to NISA—on March 7, 2011.

Four days later, at the U.S. NRC, the prediction that things could get “really ugly” at Fukushima Daiichi was coming true. Inside the Operations Center at White Flint, experts watched the crisis develop with growing alarm—and frustration at the lack of information or the ability to respond. The NRC’s early offer of engineering assistance to Japan had been met with silence, and the NRC staff, like ordinary members of the public, had access to nothing but spotty and confusing media reports. “This is not our event,” NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko warned his impatient team.

But that didn’t preclude the agency’s experts from parsing every detail trickling out of Japan. In the early hours of March 12, Daniel Dorman, a deputy director working in the Operations Center, called Jaczko at home to alert him to the explosion at Unit 1. Dorman and his colleagues were watching it replayed on a television screen.

“It’s an initial short duration pulse,” Dorman told his boss, “like an explosion, followed by a large cloud, and then there is some subsequent footage showing what appears to be the frames of the building that—the upper walls around the—what would be the metal framework above the refueling level, it’s been opened up to the I beams.” He continued, “We’re still working off of what we got on the media. But it is a very disturbing image.”

Dorman wasn’t alone in his concern.

At 5:12 a.m. Washington time, the NRC’s Robert Hardies e-mailed his colleague Matthew Mitchell: “My dog woke me up to go out. I turned on CNN. They had breaking video they could not explain. To me it looked like a containment building disappearing in an explosive cloud. WTF.”