CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Relentless Nightmare of Fukushima, 15 Years On

IAEA experts depart Unit 4 of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on 17 April 2013 as part of a mission to review Japan’s plans to decommission the facility. Photo Credit: Greg Webb / IAEA

Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and we have just seen the start of a new war in the Middle East over one more nation supposedly trying to acquire them. While we consider the dangers of such weapons and their capacity to cause massive destruction, we often overlook the risks associated with what still passes for “peaceful” nuclear power. With that in mind, let me revisit a moment when that reality should have become far clearer.

I had crawled into bed on March 10, 2011, opened my phone, and scrolled through my Instagram feed. The app was still fairly new then, and I was only following a dozen or so accounts, several from Japan. One amateur photographer there had posted photos minutes earlier of a fractured sidewalk and a toppled bookshelf. A massive earthquake had just rattled Tokyo.

A news article confirmed that a magnitude 7.9 quake had indeed struck 80 miles off the coast of Japan. Later, it was upgraded to 9.0, 1,000 times more powerful in terms of energy released. Holy shit, I thought. That’s huge! Worried, I emailed my old college friend Ichiro, who lived in Tokyo, to make sure his family was safe. A short while later, he replied that they were fine, but that a massive tsunami had indeed flooded the Tohoku region north of Tokyo. Many were dead.

“It’s horrible. It’s chaos,” he wrote me.

By the time Ichiro’s message arrived, distressing images of the tsunami were already circulating online and the death toll was rising fast, though the floodwaters were by then receding. As I watched heartbreaking videos of screaming onlookers, capsized boats, floating debris, and cars submerged like toys in a bathtub, another tragedy was unfolding that few, even inside the Japanese government, were aware of. A nuclear plant in Fukushima, operated by TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company), had been swamped by the tremendous flooding and lost all power.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, built by General Electric (GE) in the mid-1960s, was designed to withstand natural disasters, but its creators never foresaw an earthquake like that. When the plant’s sensors detected the quake, its reactors automatically shut down. That emergency shutdown (or scram) halted its fission process, triggering backup power to keep cold seawater flowing through the reactors and spent-fuel containers to prevent overheating. Things at Fukushima were going according to plan until that massive tsunami battered the plant, washing away transmission towers and damaging electrical systems. There were backup generators in the basement, but those, too, had been inundated by waves of seawater, and an already bad situation was about to get far worse.

A power outage at a nuclear power plant is known as a “station blackout.” As you might imagine, it’s one of the worst scenarios any nuclear facility could possibly experience. If all electricity is lost, that means water is no longer being pumped into the reactor’s scalding-hot core to cool it down. And if that core isn’t constantly being cooled, one thing is certain: disaster will ensue. The fission process itself may be complicated, but that’s basic physics. To make matters worse, there were three operating reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Luckily, three others had already been shut down for maintenance. If power wasn’t restored in short order, that would mean that all three of Fukushima’s reactors were in very big trouble.

We would later learn that no one — not at TEPCO, GE, or among Japanese regulators — had ever considered the possibility that all the reactors might lose electricity at once. They had only drawn up plans for one reactor to go down, in which case the others could keep the plant running. But all of them offline, and every generator out of commission? There was no precedent or playbook for that.

The nuclear industry has a reasonably polite name for a disaster like the one that was rocking Fukushima. They refer to it as a “beyond design-basis accident” because no single nuclear plant design can account for every possible problem it might encounter in its lifetime. The fact that there’s a term for this should make you anxious.

Meltdowns and Fallout

Over........

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