Behind Japan’s escalating nuclear crisis sits a scandal-ridden energy industry in a comfy relationship with government regulators often willing to overlook safety lapses.
Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalogue of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all.
In one case, workers hand-mixed uranium in stainless steel buckets, instead of processing by machine, so the fuel could be reused, exposing hundreds of workers to radiation. Two later died.
“Everything is a secret,” said Kei Sugaoka, a former nuclear power plant engineer in Japan. “There’s not enough transparency in the industry.”
Sugaoka worked at the same utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant where workers are racing to prevent a full meltdown following Friday’s 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami.
In 1989, Sugaoka received an order that horrified him: Edit out footage showing cracks in plant steam pipes in video being submitted to regulators. Sugaoka alerted his superiors in the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), but nothing happened. He decided to go public in 2000.
Three TEPCO executives lost their jobs.
The legacy of scandals and cover-ups over Japan’s half-century reliance on nuclear power has strained its credibility with the public. That mistrust has been renewed this past week with the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. No evidence has emerged of officials hiding information in this catastrophe. However, the vagueness and scarcity of details offered by the government and TEPCO — and news that seems to grow worse each day — are fueling public anger and frustration.
“I can’t believe them,” said Taketo Kuga, a cab driver in Tokyo, where low levels of radiation were observed on Tuesday, despite being 220km away from the faulty plant.
Kuga has been busy lately driving to airports and train stations people eager to get out and flee southward. It unsettles him that the information about radiation is all over the Internet, hours before officials make their announcements.
“I don’t feel safe,” he said.
TEPCO official Takeshi Makigami says experts are doing their utmost to get the reactors under control.
“We are doing all that is possible,” he told reporters.
Worried that over-dependence on imported oil could undermine Japan’s humming economy, the government threw its support into nuclear power, and the industry boomed in profile and influence. The country has 54 nuclear plants, which provide 30 percent of the nation’s energy needs, is building two more and studying proposals for 12 more plants.
Before Friday’s earthquake and tsunami that triggered the Fukushima crisis and sent the economy reeling, Japan’s 11 utility companies, many of them nuclear plant operators, were worth US$139 billion on the stock market.
TEPCO — the utility that supplies power for Japan’s capital and biggest city — accounted for nearly a third of that market capitalization, though its shares have been battered since the disasters, falling 65 percent over the past week to ¥759 on Thursday. Last month, it got a boost from the government, which renewed authorization for TEPCO to operate Fukushima Dai-ichi’s 40-year-old Unit 1 reactor for another 10 years.
With such strong government support and a culture that ordinarily frowns upon dissent, regulators tend not to push for rigorous safety, said Amory Lovins, an expert on energy policy and founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute.
“You add all that up and it’s a recipe for people to cut corners in operation and regulation,” Lovins said.
Competence and transparency issues aside, some say it’s just too dangerous to build nuclear plants in an earthquake-prone nation like Japan, where land can liquefy during a major temblor.
“You’re building on a heap of tofu,” said Philip White of Tokyo-based Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, a group of scientists and activists who have opposed nuclear power since 1975.
“There is absolutely no reason to trust them,” he said of those that run Japan’s nuclear power plants.
Japan is haunted by memories of past nuclear accidents.
‧ In 1999, fuel-reprocessing workers were reported to be using stainless steel buckets to hand-mix uranium in flagrant violation of safety standards at the Tokaimura plant. Two workers later died in what was the deadliest accident in the Japanese industry’s history.
‧ At least 37 workers were exposed to low doses of radiation at a 1997 fire and explosion at a nuclear reprocessing plant operated in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo. The operator, Donen, later acknowledged it had initially suppressed information about the fire.
‧ Hundreds of people were exposed to radiation and thousands evacuated in the more serious 1999 Tokaimura accident involving JCO Co. The government assigned the accident a level 4 rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale ranging from 1 to 7, with 7 being most serious.
‧ In 2007, a powerful earthquake ripped into Japan’s northwest coast, killing at least eight people and causing malfunctions at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, including radioactive water spills, burst pipes and fires. Radiation did not leak from the facility.
TEPCO has safety violations that stretch back decades. In 1978, control rods at one Fukushima reactor dislodged, but the accident was not reported because utilities were not required to do so. In 2006, TEPCO reported a negligible amount of radioactive steam seeped from the Fukushima plant and blew beyond the compound.
Now with the public on edge over safety, Tatsumi Tanaka, head of Risk Hedge and a crisis management expert, believes the government would find it difficult to approve new plants in the immediate future. Tanaka says that officials have also bungled the latest crisis, failing to set up a special crisis team and appoint credible outside experts.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers