Fukushima at 4: New choices mired in old priorities

The boiling water reactors (BWRs) that failed so catastrophically at Fukushima Daiichi were designed and sold by General Electric in the 1960s; the general contractor on the project was Ebasco, a US engineering company that, back then, was still tied to GE. General Electric had bet heavily on nuclear and worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (the precursor to the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) to promote civilian nuclear plants at home and abroad. According to nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education, a nuclear watchdog group, GE told U.S. regulators in 1965 that without quick approval of multiple BWR projects, the giant energy conglomerate would go out of business.

It was under instruction from GE and Ebasco that the rocky bluffs where Daiichi would be built were actually shaved by 10 meters to bring the power plant closer to the sea, the water source for the reactors’ cooling systems. But it was under Japanese government supervision that serious and repeated warnings about the environmental and technological threats to Fukushima were ignored for another generation.

Failures at Daiichi were completely predictable, observed David Lochbaum, the director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Experts and engineers proposed many upgrades over many years, but recommendations were not heeded. “The only surprising thing about Fukushima,” said Lochbaum at a 2013 conference on the effects of the disaster, “is that no steps were taken.”

That surprise should probably cross the Pacific. Twenty-one U.S. reactors, still officially in operation, mirror the design of the Fukushima BWRs, and many stand where they could be subject to earthquakes or tsunamis. Even without those seismic events, some U.S. plants are still at risk of Fukushima-like catastrophic flooding.

Prior to the start of the current Japanese crisis, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission learned that the Oconee Nuclear Plant in Seneca, South Carolina — with its three early-1970s model pressurized water reactors — was at risk of a major flood from a dam failure upstream. In the event of a dam breach — an event the NRC deems more likely than the odds that were given for the 2011 tsunami — the flood at Oconee would trigger failures at all three reactors.

In the summer of 2014, the NRC deemed Oconee worthy of greater scrutiny, but that was because of cracks in a key safety system, not because of the flood threat. On that wetter matter, beyond burying their report, the Commission has taken no action — not before Fukushima, not since.

Instead, across the U.S., the Daiichi-style GE reactors and dozens of their antiquated cousins continue to nominally operate, many well-past their projected lifespans, most without any post-Fukushima upgrades. The NRC commissioned a report on “lessons learned” from the Japanese crisis, and it was delivered in a matter of months, but the process of turning any of the report’s recommendations into mandatory rules has been slow-walked to near-death status.

Meanwhile, federal loan guarantees and consumer rate hikes continue to prop up the energy policy choices of a half-century earlier.

Still, as vexing as that might be to some, the notion that Japan’s government would again choose the nuclear option is even harder to reconcile with the very measurable facts on the very contaminated ground.

Four years after the quake and tsunami, half of the tens of thousands still displaced are displaced because of radioactive contamination. Miles of northern Japanese countryside are piled with giant plastic bags of irradiated material, with plans for even a temporary repository still only in the negotiation phase. And on the site of the crippled nuclear facility, water still needs to be circulated over the melted cores and fuel storage tanks in the damaged reactors. Hundreds of tons of that water, which contains a laundry list of toxic isotopes like cesium 134, cesium 137, strontium 90, plutonium 239, iodine 131 and tritium, leaks every day into the nearby sea, while hundreds of tons more is pumped into hastily constructed 1,000-ton storage tanks [PDF], which now stretch for miles in several directions away from the plant.

There is now roughly half a million metric tons of radioactive water stored in tanks around Fukushima.

The decommissioning and cleanup of the reactors themselves will take a generation. Parts of northwestern Japan will likely be dangerous for human habitation past the lifespan of any of the tsunami’s survivors.

Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe noted the irony of Abe’s pro-nuclear stance after the joint appearance of the PM and Merkel, and called on Japan to follow Germany’s lead. “It was very symbolic,” Oe told the Associated Press, “Japanese politicians are not trying to change the situation but only keeping the status quo even after this massive nuclear accident, and even if we all know that yet another accident would simply wipe out Japan's future."

And even without the next human-made nuclear “accident,” the plight of the Japanese in the region is more than symbolic. With many of the displaced facing an end to their disaster stipends this month, with only a tiny fraction of new housing built for the internal refugees, and with the government asking residents to live with radiation standards twenty times higher than what was considered an acceptable risk before the start of the crisis, many Japanese wonder about Abe’s priorities.

As former TVA chief Freeman likes to point out, every investment in a nuclear power plant — just like those for coal or gas — is a 20-, 40- or 60-year commitment to a dirty, dangerous and outdated technology. In the U.S., every pledge of a subsidy or a loan guarantee to one, sets off a round of lobbying for like treatment by the others. In Japan, billions will be needed just to clean up the current mess, and billions more should be spent to help rebuild the lives disrupted by it. And in both countries, money spent backfilling past mistakes is money that could have been invested in a safer, more sustainable future.

There are many new choices facing Japan and the planet because of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but that one was just as true on March 10, 2011 as it is today.