How Close Did Japan Really
Get To A Widespread Nuclear Disaster?
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
EMF Computer Protection
Magnetic Field Detector
March 1, 2012
With an eye to the first
anniversary of the tsunami that killed 20,000 people and
caused a partial meltdown at the Fukushima power plant in
Japan, a recently formed nongovernmental organization called
Rebuild Japan released a report earlier this week on the
nuclear incident to alarming media coverage.
"Japan Weighed Evacuating
Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis," screamed the New York Times
headline, above an article by Martin Fackler that claimed,
"Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear crisis
than the one that engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear
Power Plant."
The larger crisis was a
worst-case scenario imagined by Japanese government
officials dealing with the situation. If workers at the
Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated, Fackler writes, some
worried "[t]his would have allowed the plant to spiral out
of control, releasing
even larger amounts of radioactive material into the
atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other
nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns."
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Fackler quotes former
newspaper editor and founder of Rebuild Japan Yoichi
Funabashi as saying, "We barely avoided the worst-case
scenario, though the public didn’t know it at the time."
To say that Japan "barely
avoided" what another top official called a "demonic chain
reaction" of plant meltdowns and the evacuation of Tokyo is
to make an extraordinary claim. One shudders at the thought
of the hardship, suffering, and accidents that would almost
certainly have resulted from any attempt to evacuate a
metropolitan area of 30 million people. The Rebuild Japan
report has not yet been released to the public, but there is
reason to doubt that Japan was anywhere close to executing
this nightmare contingency plan.
The same day the New York
Times published its story, PBS broadcast a Frontline
documentary about the Fukushima meltdown that invites a
somewhat different interpretation. In an interview conducted
for that program, then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan suggests
that the fear of cascading plant failures was nothing more
than panicked speculation among some of his advisers. "I
asked many associates to make forecasts," Kan explained to
PBS, "and one such forecast was a worst-case scenario. But
that scenario was just something that was possible, it
didn’t mean that it seemed likely to happen."
The authors of the Rebuild
Japan report also spoke with Kan, along with about 300
others. According to the Times, these interviews turned up
evidence that the Tokyo Electric Power Company was looking
to abandon the teetering power plant, a plan that would have
significantly worsened the crisis.
But was this ever really
going to happen? Kan told PBS that his Cabinet members had
said Tepco "wanted to withdraw," but adds that the company's
CEO "would not say clearly [to Kan] that they wanted to
withdraw, or that they wouldn’t withdraw." The producer of
the Frontline documentary, Dan Edge, said in an interview
posted to the PBS website that the Fukushima workers he
interviewed said they were told on the evening of March 14
that there would be a complete evacuation, but then told the
next morning that there would not be.
All this suggests there was
significant confusion and indecision, and there is no
question that what happened at Fukushima demands critical
investigation and accountability. Whether or not Tepco
mismanaged Fukushima after the tsunami hit, there is
evidence that company officials had delayed upgrading the
plant ahead of time and ignored the risk of a tsunami large
enough to breech the seawall.
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The Rebuild Japan report
seems, on its face, to have been produced by a highly
credible team of "30 university professors, lawyers and
journalists." But even a seemingly legitimate study deserves
a skeptical eye. Yet Fackler and the Times chose not to
quote a single independent expert on nuclear energy besides
Rebuild Japan's Funabashi. It should have been a red flag
that Rebuild Japan gave its report to journalists a full
week before releasing it to the public, which prevented
outside experts from evaluating its claims. Another hint
that the report merited a contrary opinion was the fact that
it excluded any account from Tepco executives, who refused
to be interviewed by Rebuild Japan investigators.
There's no question that the
findings from the Rebuild Japan study merited coverage, but
the Times might have shown more awareness of the fallacy of
the worst-case scenario. "In any field of endeavor," wrote
physicist Bernard Cohen in his classic 1990 study, The
Nuclear Energy Option, "it is easy to concoct a possible
accident scenario that is worse than anything that has been
previously proposed." Cohen goes on to spin a scenario of a
gasoline spill resulting in out-of-control fires, a disease
epidemic, and, eventually, nuclear war.
Cohen concludes his
fantastical thought experiment by saying, "I have frequently
been told that the probability doesn't matter—the very fact
that such an accident is possible makes nuclear power
unacceptable. According to that way of thinking, we have
shown that the use of gasoline is not acceptable, and almost
any human activity can similarly be shown to be
unacceptable. If probability didn't matter, we would all die
tomorrow from any one of thousands of dangers we live with
constantly."
It was perfectly reasonable for the Japanese authorities to
have imagined and considered the very worst possible course
of events in the aftermath of Fukushima meltdown. But it's a
mistake to oversell the risks of such a scenario in
hindsight. Yes, things could have turned out much worse—just
as they could have turned out much better. As the Times and
the rest of the news media cover the anniversary of the
tsunami, they would do well to keep Cohen's warning in mind.
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