Obsession with a safety myth
The Japan Times
house editorial
July 26, 2012

The government-commissioned panel charged with investigating the nuclear crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co's Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant submitted its final report to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda on Monday. The report made clear that obsessed with the myth of nuclear safety, both Tepco and the regulators lacked capabilities, organizational setups and mental preparedness to cope with a massive accident.

"Because the government and the power utilities, including Tepco, were biased by the safety myth, thinking they would never ever face such a serious accident, they were unable to realize that such a crisis could occur in reality. This appears to be the fundamental problem," said the Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant of Tokyo Electric Power Co.

A big question is whether the government and the power industry have really liberated themselves from the myth and have a humble attitude needed in handling nuclear technology. The decision by the government and Kansai Electric Power Co. to restart the Nos. 3 and 4 reactors at Kepco's Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture appears to point to the contrary....

 

What Is the United States Government Waiting for?
by Akio Matsumura on his blog
June 11, 2012

We continue to post the opinions of many international scientists on the potential global catastrophe that would result from the collapse of Reactor 4 at Fukushima Dai-ichi. The message now is simple and clear—Japan’s government will not act; it is the United States who must step forward—yet no action has been taken.

I was amazed when I heard that one million Japanese had read our article that introduces Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata’s courageous appeal at the public hearing of the House of Councilors of Japan and Robert Alvarez’s famous figure that there is 85 times greater Cesium-137 at Fukushima than at Chernobyl accident. People from 176 nations have visited our blog and Ambassador Murata and Robert Alvarez have been quoted in online and print media in many of them. Despite this global attention, the Japanese government seems to be further from taking action to deal with the growing dangers of Fukushima Dai-ichi. In April I flew to Japan to meet with government and opposition party leaders to convey how dangerous the situation is. Ambassador Murata and I met with Mr. Fujimura, Chief Cabinet Secretary, who assured us he would convey our message to Prime Minister Noda before his departure for Washington to meet with President Obama on April 30. It was to our great disappointment that the idea of an independent assessment team and international technical support for the disaster were not mentioned publicly. I was also astonished to hear that many Japanese political leaders were not aware of the potential global catastrophe because they were not told anything about it by TEPCO. I find it difficult to understand their mindset. Why would the Japanese political leaders think it appropriate to depend on one source (with an obvious and inherent conflict of interest) to judge what issues have resulted from the Fukushima accident and who is most appropriate to handle it? As a result of this myopia, Japan’s leadership lacks a clear picture of the situation and has little idea where it is steering its country and people.

Let me clarify briefly why Fukushima Dai-ichi remains an enormous danger for which no scientists can recommend a solution at the moment...

Minister Hosono also said at the press meeting that Reactor 4 could stand a Magnitude-6 earthquake. I don’t understand why he said this. We are warning that Japanese geologists predict that a 90% probability M-7 earthquake will be hitting Japan within three years.

Is he preparing his excuse that a M-7 earthquake was beyond his assumption?

Does the government of Japan think that the public is stupid enough to believe in such a performance? If they are so brazen, it’s probably because they know the Japanese media will cover what they wish to be covered. If we were talking about business as usual, I could ignore this as political theater, but we are talking about a global catastrophe that mankind has never experienced...

Fukushima Reactor Global Security Issue: Japanese Former Diplomat
PanOrient News
June 7, 2012

Tokyo— (PanOrient News) The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Number 4 reactor presents a security problem for the entire world, Mitsuhei Murata, Japan's former ambassador to Switzerland said.

Fukushima Daiichi plants are "not under control at all... and the situation with nuclear reactors in Japan is like vehicles being driven without a license," Mr. Murata told a news conference at the foreign correspondents' club of Japan on June 5.

Four nuclear plants in Fukushima Daiichi were damaged by last year’s great earthquake and tsunami. Recently, people have expressed concerns about Unit 4’s spent fuel pool which stores more than 1500 rods. The unit would be too fragile to withstand an M7-class earthquake.

The Japanese government also thinks that the Unit 4 problem is critical, and are planning to move many of the rods from the pool in 2013...

 

Robert Alvarez served as a senior policy adviser to the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, so he is not attacking NPR politically...  he knows what he is talking about... he wrote a recent report called Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools in the U.S.: Reducing the Deadly Risks of Storage (available as a PDF download) and this is how he begins the report—

As Japan's nuclear crisis continues, this report details the nature and extent of radioactive spent fuel stored at nuclear reactors across the United States and how it can be made less hazardous.

U.S. reactors have generated about 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, of which 75 percent is stored in pools, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data. Spent fuel rods give off about 1 million rems (10,00Sv) of radiation per hour at a distance of one foot — enough radiation to kill people in a matter of seconds. There are more than 30 million such rods in U.S. spent fuel pools. No other nation has generated this much radioactivity from either nuclear power or nuclear weapons production.

Nearly 40 percent of the radioactivity in U.S. spent fuel is cesium-137 (4.5 billion curies) — roughly 20 times more than released from all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. U.S. spent pools hold about 15-30 times more cesium-137 than the Chernobyl accident released. For instance, the pool at the Vermont Yankee reactor, a BWR Mark I, currently holds nearly three times the amount of spent fuel stored at Dai-Ichi's crippled Unit 4 reactor. The Vermont Yankee reactor also holds about seven percent more radioactivity than the combined total in the pools at the four troubled reactors at the Fukushima site...

So what are we going to do with 30 million of those rods here in the USA? Why did Obama give a green light to two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle? (The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy has been very concerned about the controversial $8.3 billion nuclear loan guarantee offered for Southern Company's proposed new reactors at Plant Vogtle that President Obama announced in February 2010...)

Where are the French storing all their spent rods, and what would happen if they were exposed in a disaster? Etc. etc. etc...

I see a world of questions about all sorts of energy problems, with no easy answers, and I think globally journalists are dropping the ball about this, which practically guarantees more disasters "too big to fail"... and I like NPR...