Fallout from Fukushima

By Richard Broinowski

On a calm afternoon in March 2011, a force-nine earthquake jolted the Pacific Ocean seabed east of Japan. Forty minutes later, a tsunami 21 metres high crashed onto the coast of Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures. Towns collapsed, villages were destroyed, and 16,000 people were swept away. The earthquake and tsunami also resulted in another terrifying calamity — explosions and meltdowns at a nuclear plant near the city of Fukushima.

Fallout from Fukushima tells the story of Japan’s worst nuclear disaster, and the attempts to suppress, downplay, and obscure its consequences. Former diplomat Richard Broinowski travelled into the irradiated zone to speak to those affected and to find out why authorities delayed warning the public about the severity of the radiation. Combining interviews, research, and analysis, he reveals the extent of the disaster’s consequences: the ruinous compensation claims faced by electricity supplier TEPCO; the complete shutdown of Japan’s nuclear reactors; and the psychological impact on those who, unable to return to their farms and villages, may become permanent nuclear refugees.

In this illuminating and persuasive account, Broinowski puts this nuclear tragedy in context, tracing the path back through Tokyo, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Examining what the disaster will mean for the international nuclear industry, he explores why some countries are abandoning nuclear power, while others — including Australia, through its export of uranium — continue to put their faith in this dangerous technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Sep 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781921942938

Richard Broinowski

Richard Broinowski is a former ambassador to Vietnam, Korea, Mexico, the Central American republics and Cuba. He also He is currently Adjunct Professor Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. He is the author of A WITNESS TO HISTORY and FACT OR FISSION: THE TRUTH ABOUT AUSTRALIA’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS. He lives in Paddington, Sydney, with his wife, Alison, who is a former diplomat, academic and author. They have two children: documentary filmmaker Anna , and Adam, who works in avant-garde theatre. Richard’s sister is physician, author, activist and speaker Helen Caldicott.

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Scribe Publications

FALLOUT FROM FUKUSHIMA

Richard Broinowski is a former Australian diplomat. He was Australian ambassador to Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico, the Central American republics, and Cuba. He became general manager of Radio Australia in 1990 and, on his retirement in 1997, became an adjunct professor, first at the University of Canberra and then at the University of Sydney. Richard and his wife, Alison, live in Sydney. This is his fourth book.

To my grandchildren, Ava and Myshka.

May they and their descendants grow up in a nuclear-free world.

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

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First published by Scribe 2012

Copyright © Richard Broinowski 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Maps drawn by Bruce Godden

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Broinowski, Richard.

Fallout from Fukushima.

9781921942938 (e-book.)

1. Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Japan, 2011. 2. Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan, 2011. 3. Nuclear power plants–Accidents–Japan–Fukushima-ken. 4. Nuclear reactor accidents–Japan–Fukushima-ken. 5. Nuclear energy–Japan–Safety measures. 6. Nuclear power plants–Risk assessment–Japan. 7. Nuclear energy–Government policy–Japan. 8. Radioactive pollution–Japan–Fukushima-ken. 9. Tsunami damage–Japan–Fukushima-ken. 10. Japan–Politics and government–21st century. 11. Tōhoku Region (Japan)–Social conditions–21st century.

363.17990952117

www.scribepublications.com.au

Contents

Prefectures of North-Eastern Japan

Key Locations around Fukushima Dai-ichi

Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor Building

Introduction

1 Meltdown

2 Those on the Ground

3 Into the Irradiated Zone

4 The Dangers of Radiation

5 The Cost of Disaster

6 From Hiroshima to Fukushima

7 Nuclear Nations

8 Nuclear Aspirationals

9 Australia’s Nuclear Trade

10 The Future of Nuclear Energy in Japan

Appendix Radiation, Nuclear Technology, and Safety

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgements

In the misty realms — out past Fog Facts — there are things that Must Be So But Can’t Be Stated. They have happened as understandings, as nods and winks. If at some point they had to be made explicit, none of the parties will say that such agreements occurred because they are, by nature, covert and are frequently crimes, and must be protected by silence.

— Larry Beinhart, The Librarian

Introduction

IN OCTOBER 2010, President Barack Obama hosted a conference in Washington, DC of leaders in the international nuclear community. The conference was a reaction to the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001. It focused mainly on nuclear terrorism: how to protect civil nuclear reactors from airborne or ground attacks by terrorists, and how to safeguard nuclear materials from being stolen by terrorists for use in nuclear weapons or dirty bombs.

By March 2012, the world’s nuclear worries had changed. Another international nuclear-safety conference was held in Seoul, South Korea. It continued to focus on safeguarding nuclear materials from terrorists, but the subtext was about the nuclear catastrophe a year earlier at Fukushima in Japan. The stakeholders who were in Washington reappeared in Seoul — representatives of governments, reactor manufacturers, nuclear regulators, mining interests, electricity utilities, United Nations bodies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, and, at the margins, public interest groups, a small percentage of which were anti-nuclear. ‘Sous sherpas’ in Helsinki and New Delhi had been preparing for the Seoul conference for months, massaging eight key points into a draft communiqué. According to conference publicists, the goal was now to formulate responsibilities, commitments, and procedures to safeguard reactors from accidents as well as terrorists. These measures had to be politically acceptable to state leaders, as well as being consistent with national and international regulations.

‘Political acceptability’ was partly achieved by the exclusion from these preparations and from the conference itself of any serious attempt to examine whether nuclear power was simply too dangerous to continue to generate electricity. With 21 nuclear-power reactors of its own providing 40 per cent of the country’s electricity, five more reactors under construction, and a competitive nuclear-export industry, South Korea was hardly likely to contemplate such a question. Indeed, the motive of the organisers was to reinforce the message that nuclear power was already safe, and becoming safer as new generations of reactors came online. They sought, in effect, to perpetuate nuclear business as usual.

This book takes a different and more sceptical approach towards nuclear technology. It describes in detail what occurred at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex when an earthquake and tidal wave struck the Tōhoku coast in north-east Honshu on 11 March 2011. It rebuts the contention of pro-nuclear advocates that the reactors were able to withstand major earthquakes, only to be undone by a completely unforeseen tsunami. It examines the lives of many people that were forever changed by the disaster, and the devastating long-term effects of radiation on the countryside. It analyses the broader political and economic effects of the reactor meltdowns in Japan, and how, for the first time in postwar history, the Japanese people are becoming significantly resistant to government and big business telling them that nuclear power is good for them. What it does not and cannot do is accurately predict the number of deaths that will occur from radiation at Fukushima. A disingenuous assertion of the nuclear industry is that, as at Windscale or Three Mile Island, no deaths occurred as a result of radiation at Fukushima. But they did and they will, only not yet, because radiation-induced cancers usually take a long time to develop.

This book also traces the history of research into ionising radiation, beginning with Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s discovery of radium — little realising that the element was destroying cells in her body. It shows how, even when such knowledge was available, nuclear scientists and government officials frequently denied the capacity of ionising radiation to maim and kill and cause cancer and genetic mutations — denials which surrounded the first atomic-bomb test at Alamogordo in New Mexico in 1945, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the same year, the hydrogen-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in 1954, British tests at Emu Field and Maralinga in central Australia in the 1950s, and the United States atom- and hydrogen-bomb factory at Hanford in Washington state from 1948 to the 1960s. In the wake of nuclear accidents at Kyshtym and Windscale in 1957, Three Mile Island in 1979, and Chernobyl in 1986, the denials continued. Authorities are now doing their best to downplay the carcinogenic and mutagenic effects of radiation leaks into the Japanese countryside from the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011.

The book looks, as well, at the international ramifications of Fukushima — how some countries, such as Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Kuwait, and Indonesia, are turning away from nuclear power, and towards renewable energy as a future sustainable source of base-load electricity; how others, such as South Korea, Russia, Belarus, Britain, France, India, China, and Vietnam, remain committed to nuclear technology and the expansion of their nuclear-power-generating reactor fleets, although some of them are growing cautious in the face of increasing public concern.

The book describes a peculiarly schizophrenic attitude in Australia towards uranium and nuclear technology — how, because of popular opposition, governments of both persuasions refuse to consider nuclear-power reactors in Australia, but strongly support the mining industry in its determination to export as much uranium as possible, including to Japan, our second-largest customer; how our uranium is surrounded by what are claimed to be, but are not, watertight safeguards to prevent it ending up in nuclear weapons; how we are supposedly concerned about nuclear proliferation and the environmental impact of the nuclear-fuel cycle while refusing to consider the possibility of establishing an international spent-fuel repository in Australia; how we take a carefully selective attitude towards countries aspiring to develop a nuclear capability, some of which we regard as beyond the pale even when they are adherents to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while we are perfectly willing to sell uranium to others which are not; how, as in so many areas of foreign affairs, we sedulously follow United States policies on deciding who we trust and who we do not.

The book concludes with a prediction: as a result of the many nuclear accidents in Japan leading up to the catastrophic events at Fukushima Dai-ichi, the nuclear industry there will not long survive. In May 2012, the last of Japan’s 54 reactors was shut down. Some of those offline are being recommissioned and brought back into the grid — a process begun with two units at Oi in Fukui prefecture, owned by the Kansai Electric Power Company — in response to Japan’s demand for electricity. But this is happening in the face of strong reservations by communities and local governments, which willingly limit their own consumption of electricity. Japan survived the summer of 2011 without major blackouts or too much discomfort, even though all but 11 of its reactors were at that stage offline. As you read this, Japan will have survived a summer with even fewer reactors online; there are a growing number of informed Japanese who wish to live without any at all.

A second prediction is that, as it turns away from nuclear energy, Japan will become a world leader in renewable-energy technologies such as photovoltaics, wind, ocean current, pumped hydro, geothermal, and electricity storage. In view of the enormous political power that the Japanese nuclear ‘village’ continues to wield over a weak government and an indecisive opposition, this is a problematic prediction to make. But the Japanese have a genius for intelligent innovation and quick adaptation, and a tradition of austerity in need.

Chapter One

Meltdown

JAPAN’S NARROW ISLAND chain lies along an active geological fault line where two of the earth’s tectonic plates collide. The circum-Pacific seismic belt, called the ‘Ring of Fire’, is highly prone to earthquakes. Particularly vulnerable is Japan’s eastern seaboard, which slopes down into a very deep trench dominated by two currents, Kuroshio and Oyashio. The Oyashio Current flows south from Okhotsk and the Kuril Islands, past Hokkaido, and along Japan’s eastern flank. Cold and rich in marine life, it has for centuries supplied the Japanese people with food.

Tōhoku, the north-eastern region of Honshu, is a quiet part of Japan, less familiar to foreign visitors than are the megacities of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe. Its mountains and forests are rugged and beautiful, dotted with resorts positioned around hot springs and ski slopes. Its climate is hot and humid in summer, bitterly cold in winter. Short, fast-flowing rivers pour out of the steep gorges to reach the sea along an irregular coastline. The narrow and heavily indented flatlands of Miyagi and Fukushima, two of the region’s six prefectures, face eastwards towards the Pacific Ocean, and are carpeted in a geometric pattern of rice paddies and orchards. Tōhoku’s rice wine is savoured by connoisseurs. Its high-grade beef is claimed to be better than that from Kobe, and comes from animals with individual certificates of pedigree. Its poultry, fish, and miso (bean paste) are prized by Japanese tourists as omiyage — souvenir gifts from places to which they have travelled. Its peaches, apples, pears, cherries, plums, apricots, chestnuts, persimmons, and grapes are renowned as the most luscious in Japan. The prefecture of Fukushima provides the markets of Sendai and the Tokyo-Yokohama region with 20 per cent of their rice and almost as much of their fruit and vegetables. Or at least it did until the day that soon came to be called ‘Japan’s 3/11’.

Friday 11 March 2011 was calm in Tōhoku, slightly overcast and bitterly cold, for spring had not yet arrived. People went about their routine business: some working in sake breweries and food-processing factories; some in small- and medium-scale industrial plants producing semiconductors, optics, and car parts; some in factories making traditional lacquerware, pottery, and textiles; others shopping for the evening meal or engaged in household chores. As the afternoon sun slid towards the mountain rim to the west, primary-school children began filing in neat lines out of their classrooms, to wait for their mothers, to go to their juku cram-schools, or to catch afternoon buses home.

Without warning, at 2.46 p.m., a massive earthquake jolted the Pacific Ocean seabed 66 kilometres east of Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture. For more than ten minutes, tall buildings swayed like bamboo. Severe shocks were felt as far away as Tokyo and the west coast of Honshu. Long inured against panic, and unaware that this was an unprecedented force-nine earthquake — a dai jishin — most people in the region waited out the tremors with a combination of apprehension and stoicism.

According to recordings at the Space Science Institute of the National Central University in Taiwan, the earthquake was so powerful that it rattled the ionosphere 350 kilometres above the planet, disrupted navigational signals above its epicentre, and caused a disk-shaped wave seven minutes after the event. The only other earthquake known to have done this was the magnitude 9.3 Sumatran earthquake of December 2004.

Within 40 minutes of the new earthquake, an event occurred for which Tōhoku residents were less prepared. The earthquake had generated two massive oceanic upheavals which merged into a single gigantic swell, a ‘double tsunami’, that travelled west towards the Japanese coast at around 10 kilometres per minute — about the speed of a passenger jet when cruising. Packing an estimated 10 billion tonnes of water, the tsunami slowed to 4 kilometres per minute as it reached shallow water, and crashed as an immense wall of black water onto the coastline of Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures. A team of researchers, headed by University of Tokyo professor Shinji Sato, and the Fukushima prefectural government later concluded that the height of the wave had been 21.1 metres when it struck the Kobama district of Tomioka, just south of the Fukushima reactors. It varied in height at other coastal points — 16.5 metres at Futaba, 15.5 metres at Namie, and 12.2 metres at Minamisōma and Okuma. At all points, protective concrete walls were swept aside by its momentum as if they were doorstops. A Japanese television crew in the area managed to film fishing boats being rammed under bridges, rice paddies flooding, and long rows of vegetable-growing vinyl hothouses buried under liquid mud. The footage was broadcast over and over to appalled Japanese and international viewers.

Soon to follow were accounts of the horrendous human damage as entire towns and factories were flattened, villages washed away, and cars, buses, ferries, and trains engulfed in seawater, mud, and detritus. The tsunami acted like a battering ram, gathering weight and bulk from the thousands of buildings, motor vehicles, and boats that it carried before it. Its impetus took it several kilometres inland, further than any reasonable prediction would have suggested. Thousands of men, women, and children were carried inland, to be crushed against buildings and cliffs, or swept back out to sea to drown in the wave’s reflux. By the end of March, 15,413 were counted as dead, and 8069 missing. Further deaths occurred among the tens of thousands of refugees, many of them old, most dying of hypothermia in the bitterly cold weather as they battled to survive in darkened schoolrooms and other temporary shelters, cut off from food and warmth.

To make things worse, the people then had to cope with a third calamity, the malfunction of a nuclear-power complex on the coast slightly south-east of Fukushima city.

Owned and run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), what was then a smartly painted pale-blue and white facility is known as Fukushima Dai-ichi (Fukushima Number One). Built on the flat, seaside site of a Pacific War Japanese air base, it comprises six reactors and associated equipment in a sprawling complex of around four hectares. The oldest reactor, Unit One, is a General Electric–designed Mark I boiling-water reactor (BWR) of 439 megawatts (MW), operating since its construction in 1971. Units Two, Three, and Four are 760 MW BWRs, operating since 1974. Five and Six are larger capacity BWRs again, brought online after completion towards the end of the 1970s. General Electric designed all of the units, and built units One, Two, and Six. Toshiba built units Three and Five, and Hitachi built Unit Four. According to GE’s website prior to the accident, all reactors met the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requirements for safe operation during and after an earthquake for the area where they were sited.

The Fukushima reactors are almost identical in design and age to many General Electric BWRs operating in the United States. In their centre is a pear-shaped steel containment building, or drywell, with a reactor pressure vessel suspended in its neck. Each vessel is an upright steel cylinder of about 7 metres in diameter and 21 metres in height, containing an average load of around 95 tonnes of nuclear fuel, comprising at least 25,000 3.6-metre-long zirconium fuel rods packed with pellets of slightly enriched uranium (3 per cent uranium-235). At the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex, Unit One is the smallest of the reactors, with about 70 tonnes of fuel-core load; Unit Six is the largest, with a 132-tonne fuel core. Before the accident, each core was cooled by a main feed line of fresh water, which circulated through the uranium rods in the vessel, heated, and exited as steam via a closed-loop primary circuit. The steam expanded to drive a high-pressure steam turbine, which was linked to an electricity generator. After passing through the turbine, the exhausted steam circulated to the wetwell, a giant doughnut-shaped seawater-cooled condensation chamber beneath the containment building, before being pumped once more as water back into the reactor vessel, where the process was repeated.

A peculiar feature of the General Electric–designed BWRs is the position of the pool of water, which holds spent fuel rods as they are rotated out of the reactor core when their thermal efficiency has been lost. In earlier GE BWRs, this pool sits high above and to one side of the reactor vessel, in a very exposed position. The designers placed it there for convenience, to allow gantries easy access to deposit their dangerous load of hot, spent fuel drawn from the adjacent open mouth of the reactor vessel. The reactor vessel, drywell containment, wetwell condensation chamber, and spent-fuel storage pool are all enclosed in a heavy concrete reactor building. On top sits a fully instrumented service floor in a lighter steel structure manned by plant operators.

Before the earthquake, units One, Two, and Three of the Dai-ichi plant were running, but units Four, Five, and Six were in cold shutdown for servicing. The fuel load of reactor four had been transferred to the water-filled spent-fuel storage pool located at the higher level of its reactor building. Time lines matter here if one is to chart the rising tide of chaos.

The earthquake at first seemed to have left the three operating reactors undamaged, as they were continually cooled by pumps powered by the regional grid. Suddenly, however, the power grid failed. A procedure known as SCRAM (see Appendix) was immediately initiated: neutron-absorbing control rods were rapidly inserted into the cores by electric motors, to halt the fission process and stop power generation. Simultaneously, emergency diesel generators, located on ground level behind the reactors, kicked in to pump fresh cooling water into the reactors. These actions kept things under control for another hour. At 3.41 p.m., however, the 21-metre-high tsunami generated by the earthquake rose out of the Pacific and struck the complex, flooding the generators. Only one battery-powered generator remained operational, but it did not have sufficient power to drive the cooling pumps, and all but one of three emergency core-cooling systems failed. A core isolation pump continued to operate, but it malfunctioned as the core temperature rose.

The situation deteriorated rapidly. As operators rushed around the control rooms in the hot, chaotic darkness, desperately trying to read instruments and decide what to do, heat from the fuel rods continued to produce steam in the reactors, which discharged into the condensation chamber beneath the reactor vessels. As heat and pressure rose, the water-coolant level in the reactors fell. The tops of the fuel rods in the reactor cores became exposed to the air. Temperature of the cladding around