Japan's Unending Nuclear Nightmare
Feb 2, 2012 1:27:39 GMT -5
Post by PrisonerOfHope on Feb 2, 2012 1:27:39 GMT -5
Thursday, February 2, 2012
OP-ED
Japan's unending nuclear nightmare
Praful Bidwai
It's generally assumed that highly developed Japan would handle a catastrophic accident far more competently than callous, hierarchical, and class-polarised societies with a poor infrastructure and safety culture like India or Bangladesh.
Japan was also expected to do better than backward Ukraine, which suffered the world's previous nuclear core meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 -- especially as regards large-scale evacuation given Japan's experience with earthquakes and tsunamis.
Alas, Japan has abjectly failed to provide relief to those affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Needless to say, India or Bangladesh would have done infinitely worse.
A majority of the victims of the three Fukushima reactor meltdowns continue to be exposed to high levels of radiation from atmospheric fallout and contaminated food and water. The radiation "exclusion zone" only covers a 20-km radius. But radiation levels are high 60 or even 200 km away.
Radiation meters show high gamma radiation readings such as 20 microsieverts an hour. Within roughly 40 days, these would deliver a dose equalling the maximum annual limit set by the Japanese government. This limit is itself 20 times higher than the internationally prevalent annual norm of 1 millisievert (mSv)! People's radiation exposure hasn't been systematically estimated or monitored by the government or plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco).
Had the authorities followed the Chernobyl norm for triggering evacuation (5 mSv), they would have had to evacuate five times more people and impose restrictions on food grown in an area 30 times the size of Fukushima's evacuation zone. Japan's public health response was thus worse than poor Ukraine's despite its greater technological sophistication and financial capacity.
What explains this is the inability of government and industry to act in nuclear crises, mutual collusion between them, and suppression of critical safety-related information. An official committee's report released three weeks ago shows that bumbling nuclear industry executives and confused government officials mishandled the crisis from the beginning. The 507-page interim report found that tsunami risks were grossly underestimated.
Tepco workers weren't trained to handle emergencies like the station blackout caused by the tsunami, leading to the overheating of reactor cores and their meltdown. They had no manual to follow and didn't communicate properly even among themselves.
Cooling of the reactors was delayed because of the mishandling of an emergency cooling system. Workers assumed it was working, despite signs that it had failed. A better response might have reduced radiation leaks and averted hydrogen explosions at Reactors 1, 3 and 4, which sent out huge radiation plumes. The radiation load wasn't even measured.
Regulatory agencies failed to impose tough safety standards on Tepco, which was too slow to gather information on radiation and relay it.
The report documents Tepco's misjudgment of the reactors' operational situation, its poor handling of water injection, and its failure to prevent damage magnification. It also exposes the government's inadequate responses as regards initial radiation monitoring, emergency evacuation, and failure to provide truthful information to the public.
Japan's Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency failed to correct these errors. The government didn't make the extent of radiation spread and doses public. Many people were wrongly moved from low-radiation areas to high-radiation ones! The government lied through its teeth. It knew within a day that there had been a meltdown, yet didn't disclose that for weeks.
Media reports have just revealed that the Japanese government suppressed a worst-case scenario for the crisis soon after it began and kept it under wraps until December. After the document was shown to a select group of senior officials in late March, the government decided to quietly bury it. "The content was so shocking that we decided to treat it as if it didn't exist," a senior official is quoted as saying.
The document forecast that in a worst-case scenario, the reactors would release massive quantities of radioactivity for about a year. The projection was based on the premise that a hydrogen explosion would tear through the first reactor's containment vessel, forcing station workers to evacuate because of lethal radiation levels.
In that event, 40 million residents within a radius of 170 km of the station would be forced to evacuate. Those living within a radius of between 170 and 250 km, including Tokyo, could choose to evacuate voluntarily.
Logically, this scenario may already have materialised. After all, hydrogen explosions ripped through not one, but three, Fukushima reactors. Many people expect yet more disclosures from an independent bipartisan inquiry commission just set up by Parliament, with the power to summon witnesses.
This culture of covering up and inadequate cleanup efforts have left the Japanese people exposed to unconscionable health risks. The mainstream media played a pernicious role in the cover-up, led by its dependence on Japan's power-supply industry, its biggest advertiser. Tepco's advertising budget alone is roughly half what a global corporation like Toyota spends annually.
The Japanese people, I discovered, feel betrayed by their traditionally paternalistic state, which is not taking responsibility for the terrible effects of its policy to promote nuclear power. Lakhs continue to suffer as their generations-old occupations, including agriculture and dairy farming, become unviable.
People are resorting to community radiation monitoring, self-protection, and organic food cooperatives, to cope with the crisis. But the crisis has had one positive effect. All but five of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors lie closed -- and the country is none the worse for it.
At a two-day global conference in Yokohama, which I attended with 11,500 others, speakers emphasised the imperative of phasing out nuclear power. It's far too dirty, too expensive, too centralised, too bound-up with secrecy and deception, and above all, too dangerous. They also underscored the rising relevance and economic viability of low-carbon renewable energy.
Fukushima's tragedy can only be redeemed if the world -- including South Asia -- abolishes nuclear power, and promotes new energy systems and smart grids based on safe, environmentally benign, renewables which are relevant to people's needs, not the nuclear industry's greed.
www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=220791
OP-ED
Japan's unending nuclear nightmare
Praful Bidwai
It's generally assumed that highly developed Japan would handle a catastrophic accident far more competently than callous, hierarchical, and class-polarised societies with a poor infrastructure and safety culture like India or Bangladesh.
Japan was also expected to do better than backward Ukraine, which suffered the world's previous nuclear core meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 -- especially as regards large-scale evacuation given Japan's experience with earthquakes and tsunamis.
Alas, Japan has abjectly failed to provide relief to those affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Needless to say, India or Bangladesh would have done infinitely worse.
A majority of the victims of the three Fukushima reactor meltdowns continue to be exposed to high levels of radiation from atmospheric fallout and contaminated food and water. The radiation "exclusion zone" only covers a 20-km radius. But radiation levels are high 60 or even 200 km away.
Radiation meters show high gamma radiation readings such as 20 microsieverts an hour. Within roughly 40 days, these would deliver a dose equalling the maximum annual limit set by the Japanese government. This limit is itself 20 times higher than the internationally prevalent annual norm of 1 millisievert (mSv)! People's radiation exposure hasn't been systematically estimated or monitored by the government or plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco).
Had the authorities followed the Chernobyl norm for triggering evacuation (5 mSv), they would have had to evacuate five times more people and impose restrictions on food grown in an area 30 times the size of Fukushima's evacuation zone. Japan's public health response was thus worse than poor Ukraine's despite its greater technological sophistication and financial capacity.
What explains this is the inability of government and industry to act in nuclear crises, mutual collusion between them, and suppression of critical safety-related information. An official committee's report released three weeks ago shows that bumbling nuclear industry executives and confused government officials mishandled the crisis from the beginning. The 507-page interim report found that tsunami risks were grossly underestimated.
Tepco workers weren't trained to handle emergencies like the station blackout caused by the tsunami, leading to the overheating of reactor cores and their meltdown. They had no manual to follow and didn't communicate properly even among themselves.
Cooling of the reactors was delayed because of the mishandling of an emergency cooling system. Workers assumed it was working, despite signs that it had failed. A better response might have reduced radiation leaks and averted hydrogen explosions at Reactors 1, 3 and 4, which sent out huge radiation plumes. The radiation load wasn't even measured.
Regulatory agencies failed to impose tough safety standards on Tepco, which was too slow to gather information on radiation and relay it.
The report documents Tepco's misjudgment of the reactors' operational situation, its poor handling of water injection, and its failure to prevent damage magnification. It also exposes the government's inadequate responses as regards initial radiation monitoring, emergency evacuation, and failure to provide truthful information to the public.
Japan's Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency failed to correct these errors. The government didn't make the extent of radiation spread and doses public. Many people were wrongly moved from low-radiation areas to high-radiation ones! The government lied through its teeth. It knew within a day that there had been a meltdown, yet didn't disclose that for weeks.
Media reports have just revealed that the Japanese government suppressed a worst-case scenario for the crisis soon after it began and kept it under wraps until December. After the document was shown to a select group of senior officials in late March, the government decided to quietly bury it. "The content was so shocking that we decided to treat it as if it didn't exist," a senior official is quoted as saying.
The document forecast that in a worst-case scenario, the reactors would release massive quantities of radioactivity for about a year. The projection was based on the premise that a hydrogen explosion would tear through the first reactor's containment vessel, forcing station workers to evacuate because of lethal radiation levels.
In that event, 40 million residents within a radius of 170 km of the station would be forced to evacuate. Those living within a radius of between 170 and 250 km, including Tokyo, could choose to evacuate voluntarily.
Logically, this scenario may already have materialised. After all, hydrogen explosions ripped through not one, but three, Fukushima reactors. Many people expect yet more disclosures from an independent bipartisan inquiry commission just set up by Parliament, with the power to summon witnesses.
This culture of covering up and inadequate cleanup efforts have left the Japanese people exposed to unconscionable health risks. The mainstream media played a pernicious role in the cover-up, led by its dependence on Japan's power-supply industry, its biggest advertiser. Tepco's advertising budget alone is roughly half what a global corporation like Toyota spends annually.
The Japanese people, I discovered, feel betrayed by their traditionally paternalistic state, which is not taking responsibility for the terrible effects of its policy to promote nuclear power. Lakhs continue to suffer as their generations-old occupations, including agriculture and dairy farming, become unviable.
People are resorting to community radiation monitoring, self-protection, and organic food cooperatives, to cope with the crisis. But the crisis has had one positive effect. All but five of Japan's 54 nuclear reactors lie closed -- and the country is none the worse for it.
At a two-day global conference in Yokohama, which I attended with 11,500 others, speakers emphasised the imperative of phasing out nuclear power. It's far too dirty, too expensive, too centralised, too bound-up with secrecy and deception, and above all, too dangerous. They also underscored the rising relevance and economic viability of low-carbon renewable energy.
Fukushima's tragedy can only be redeemed if the world -- including South Asia -- abolishes nuclear power, and promotes new energy systems and smart grids based on safe, environmentally benign, renewables which are relevant to people's needs, not the nuclear industry's greed.
www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=220791
