Japan’s nuclear safety agency places the scale of gravity of the Fukushima plant incident at five while France and the International Atomic Energy Agency and the US place it at six. The Chernobyl 1986 disaster was put at seven the highest.
The Pentagon is sending 450 radiological and disaster specialists to the site.
Most modern Japanese nuclear power plants hit by the earthquake and tsunami shut off as scheduled but their cooling systems and back-ups worked OK and they are now generating power again.
Managers’ decisions at the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) mismanaged the damaged reactors at the Fukuyima Plant. “Every step TEPCO has taken has been a day late and a dollar short” said the former vice-chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan. Some of the top managers at TEPCO were trained at the Australian National University.
The release of information from TEPCO is even further behind. It is a secretive nuclear behemoth that has been caught out in numerous violations back to the 1980s.
Its response since the earthquake and tsunami has been plagued by mistakes confusion secrecy and an apparent paucity of ideas about how to manage the unfolding crisis in its reactors. It did not even tell Japan’s Prime Minister. TEPCO has been unable or unwilling to provide answers to basic questions about what is being done to prevent a full-scale nuclear meltdown. Analysts believe TEPCO has made several crucial mistakes this week that are believed to have contributed significantly to the spewing of radiation from the plant and the prospects of a total meltdown.
The incident reveals TEPCO’s lack of crisis-management ability. They have no crisis-management because they were never ready for a crisis. TEPCO is not telling the whole truth. They are not in the habit of telling everything they know. The whole environment of the nuclear village is the source of trouble: TEPCO management and engineers bureaucrats and pro-nuclear commentators clump together and at times of failure and stress they hide the truth. They tell each other we should not cause panic by giving out unconfirmed information to the people. Nuclear power companies everywhere are insular defensive engineering-dominated organisations.
In 2002 TEPCO was caught out in a widespread structural safety and reporting falsification scandal. In July 2007 a magnitude 6.8 quake triggered a serious fire at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plan where management’s reaction was to cover up.
There is a common ‘internal-loop problem’: they promote the same people all the way up the line they’re digging the same hole deeper their pool of ideas and options becomes ever smaller.
TEPCO routinely employs a pool of deeply unqualified day labourers who according to the Nuclear Control Institute barely have a grasp of the basics of dealing with nuclear materials.
The paucity of clear information from TEPCO this week forced the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency to fly to Japan to monitor the situation firsthand. TEPCO’s attempts to play down the significance of the crisis were quickly debunked.
With fresh dramas unfolding daily a desperate TEPCO was forced to resort to basics sending helicopters to waterbomb the reactors and fire tucks to help pump sea water into them.
The head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Congress he believed the situation was more serious than Japan had publicly acknowledge and that radiation levels were now extremely high.
With each passing day nuclear experts are becoming more red-faced as their strident predictions early this week that the crisis would amount to nothing are being proved wrong.
Serious health risks have already been posed for 180 workers and have raised concerns about the longer-term impact on those who live in the vicinity. Experts who predicted early this week there would be no serious radiation fallout are now consulting maps to determine where the winds will blow radiation.
The US China and Germany have ordered reviews of the safety of their nuclear plants. Obama has directed the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review the safety of the US’s 104 operating nuclear power plants and said: Our nuclear power plants have undergone exhaustive study and have been declared safe for any number of extreme contingencies. But when we see a crisis like the one in Japan we have a responsibility to learn from this event and to draw from those lessons to ensure the safety and security of our people.
Most analysts believe a full meltdown would result in the molten core melting the steel container through its floor and releasing giant and deadly levels of radiation into the air. Where the radiation travels would depend on the wind and weather. John Beddington British chief scientist said: “In the reasonable worst-case scenario of a full meltdown you get an explosion and radioactive material would be released up to a height of about 500m. That would be serious only for the area 30km around the nuclear plant and would not be a problem even if the wind and rain combined to dump the radioactive material on greater Tokyo. When Chernobyl had a massive fire at the graphite core material was going up to 30000 feet (about 10000m). It was lasting not for the odd hour or so but lasted months. In the case of Chernobyl the exclusion zone was about 30km.”