Japan Weighed Evacuating
Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis
Fukushima Nuclear Plant
EMF Computer Protection
Magnetic Field Detector
By Martin Fackler
February 27, 2012
TOKYO
— In the darkest moments of last year’s nuclear accident,
Japanese leaders did not know the actual extent of damage at
the plant and secretly considered the possibility of
evacuating Tokyo, even as they tried to play down the risks
in public, an independent investigation into the accident
disclosed on Monday.
The investigation by the Rebuild
Japan Initiative Foundation, a new private policy
organization, offers one of the most vivid accounts yet of
how Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear
crisis than the one that engulfed the Fukushima Daiichi
Nuclear Power Plant. A team of 30 university professors,
lawyers and journalists spent more than six months on the
inquiry into Japan’s response to the triple meltdown at the
plant, which followed a powerful
earthquake and tsunami on
March 11 that shut down the plant’s cooling systems.
The team interviewed more than 300 people, including top
nuclear regulators and government officials, as well as the
prime minister during the crisis, Naoto
Kan. They were granted extraordinary access, in
part because of a strong public demand for greater
accountability and because the organization’s founder,
Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor in chief of the daily
newspaper Asahi Shimbun, is one of Japan’s most respected
public intellectuals.
An advance copy of the report describes how Japan’s
response was hindered at times by a debilitating
breakdown in trust between
the major actors: Mr. Kan; the Tokyo headquarters of the
plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, known as Tepco; and
the manager at the stricken plant. The conflicts produced
confused flows of sometimes contradictory information in the
early days of the crisis, the report said.
It describes frantic phone calls by the manager, Masao
Yoshida, to top officials in the Kan government arguing that
he could get the plant under control if he could keep his
staff in place, while at the same time ignoring orders from
Tepco’s headquarters not to use sea water to cool the
overheating reactors. By contrast, Mr. Funabashi said in an
interview, Tepco’s president, Masataka Shimizu, was making
competing calls to the prime minister’s office saying that
the company should evacuate all of its staff, a step that
could have been catastrophic.
The 400-page report, due to be released later this week,
also describes a darkening mood at the prime minister’s
residence as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the
plant on March 14 and 15. It says Mr. Kan and other
officials began discussing a worst-case outcome if workers
at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated. This 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.
The report quotes the chief cabinet secretary at the time,
Yukio Edano, as having warned that such a “demonic chain
reaction” of plant meltdowns could result in the evacuation
of Tokyo, 150 miles to the south.
“We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,”
Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear
plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude
that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”
The report also describes the panic within the Kan
administration at the prospect of large radiation releases
from the more than 10,000 spent fuel rods that were stored
in relatively unprotected pools near the damaged reactors.
The report says it was not until five days after the
earthquake that a Japanese military helicopter was finally
able to confirm that the pool deemed at highest risk, near
the No. 4 reactor, was still safely filled with water.
“We barely avoided the worst-case scenario, though the
public didn’t know it at the time,” Mr. Funabashi, the
foundation founder, said.
Mr. Funabashi blamed the Kan administration’s fear of
setting off a panic for its decision to understate the true
dangers of the accident. He said the Japanese government hid
its most alarming assessments not just from its own public
but also from allies like the United States. Mr. Funabashi
said the investigation revealed “how precarious the
U.S.-Japan relationship was” in the early days of the
crisis, until the two nations began daily informational
meetings at the prime minister’s residence on March 22.
The report seems to confirm the suspicions of nuclear
experts in the United States — inside and outside the
government — that the Japanese government was not being
forthcoming about the full dangers posed by the stricken
Fukushima plant. But it also shows that the United States
government occasionally overreacted and inflated the risks,
such as when American officials mistakenly warned that the
spent fuel rods in the pool near unit No. 4 were exposed to
the air and vulnerable to melting down and releasing huge
amounts of radiation.
Still, Mr. Funabashi said, it was the Japanese government’s
failure to warn its people of the dangers and the widespread
distrust it bred in the government that spurred him to
undertake an independent investigation. Such outside
investigations have been rare in Japan, where the public has
tended to accept official versions of events.
He said his group’s findings conflicted with those of the
government’s own investigation into the accident, which were
released in an interim
report in December. A big difference involved one
of the most crucial moments of the nuclear crisis, when the
prime minister, Mr. Kan, marched into Tepco’s headquarters
early on the morning of March 15 upon hearing that the
company wanted to withdraw its employees from the wrecked
nuclear plant.
The government’s investigation sided with Tepco by saying
that Mr. Kan, a former social activist who often clashed
with Japan’s establishment, had simply misunderstood the
company, which wanted to withdraw only a portion of its
staff. Mr. Funabashi said his foundation’s investigators had
interviewed most of the people involved — except executives
at Tepco, which refused to cooperate — and found that the
company had in fact said it wanted a total pullout.
He credited Mr. Kan with
making the right decision in forcing Tepco not to abandon
the plant.
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