Nearly 20,000 people were killed or missing in this disaster. It also destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and released radioactive material over a wide area. The accident caused large-scale evacuations, major economic losses and the eventual shutdown of all nuclear power plants in Japan. A decade later, the nuclear industry has yet to completely address the safety concerns that Fukushima has denounced.
We are scholars specializing in engineering and medicine and public policy, and have advised our respective governments on the safety of nuclear energy. Kiyoshi Kurokawa chaired an independent national committee, known as the NAIIC, set up by the Japanese state to investigate the root causes of the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Najmedin Meshkati served as a member and technical advisor to a committee appointed by the US National Academy of Sciences to learn lessons from this event to make US nuclear power plants safer and safer.
Those reviews and many others concluded that Fukushima was a man-made accident caused by natural hazards that could and should have been avoided. Experts generally agreed that the root causes were lax regulatory oversight in Japan and an ineffective safety culture at the utility company that operated the plant.
These problems are far from unique to Japan. As long as commercial nuclear power plants operate around the world, we believe it is critical that all nations learn from what happened in Fukushima and continue to redouble nuclear safety.
Not anticipating and planning
The 2011 disaster left the Fukushima plant a devastating one-two punch. First, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake turned off the electricity in another location. Then the tsunami breached the plant’s protective seawall and engulfed parts of the site.
Floods made monitoring, control and cooling functions impossible in multiple units of the six-reactor complex. Despite heroic efforts by factory workers, three reactors suffered severe damage to their radioactive cores and three reactor buildings were damaged by hydrogen explosions.
Off-site discharges of radioactive material contaminated land in Fukushima and several neighboring prefectures. About 165,000 people left the area, and the Japanese government established an exclusion zone around the factory that stretched 311 square miles in its largest phase.
For the first time in the history of constitutional democratic Japan, the Japanese parliament passed a law establishing an independent national commission to investigate the root causes of this disaster. In its report, the commission concluded that Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission had never been independent from industry, nor from the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which promotes nuclear energy.
Factory operator Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, had a history of disregard for safety. The company had recently published an error-prone assessment of tsunami hazards in Fukushima that significantly underestimated the risks.
Nuclear energy generates about 10% of the world’s electricity (TWh = terawatt hour). There are about 50 new factories under construction, but many operational factories are aging. World Nuclear Association / CC BY-ND
Events at the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant, 63 miles from Fukushima, told a contrasting story. Owned and operated by the Tohoku Electric Power Company, Onogawa was closer to the earthquake’s epicenter and was hit by an even bigger tsunami. The three working reactors were of the same type and vintage as those in Fukushima, and under the same weak regulatory oversight.
But Onogawa closed safely and was remarkably undamaged. In our opinion, this was because the Tohoku utility had a deep-rooted, proactive safety culture. The company learned of earthquakes and tsunamis elsewhere – including a major disaster in Chile in 2010 – and continuously improved its countermeasures, while TEPCO overlooked and ignored these warnings.
Establishing regulations and safety culture
When a regulated industry manages to coax, control, or manipulate agencies that oversee it, making them weak and inferior, the result is known as regulatory capture. As the NAIIC report concluded, Fukushima was a textbook example. Japanese regulators “did not monitor or supervise nuclear safety … They avoided their direct responsibilities by allowing operators to enforce rules on a voluntary basis,” the report said.
Effective regulation is necessary for nuclear safety. Utilities also need to create internal safety cultures – a set of characteristics and attitudes that make safety issues a top priority. For an industry, safety culture functions like the human body’s immune system, protecting it from pathogens and warding off disease.
A factory that fosters a positive safety culture encourages employees to ask questions and take a rigorous and prudent approach to all aspects of their work. It also promotes open communication between line personnel and management. But TEPCO’s culture reflected a Japanese mindset that emphasizes hierarchy and resignation and discourages questioning.
There is ample evidence that human factors such as operator errors and poor safety culture played a critical role in all three major accidents that occurred at nuclear power plants: Three Mile Island in the US in 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 Unless nuclear nations do better on both counts, this list is likely to grow.
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Global Nuclear Safety Rating: Incomplete
Today, there are some 440 nuclear reactors in operation worldwide, with about 50 under construction in countries such as China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
Many proponents argue that in the face of the threat of climate change and the increasing need for carbon-free baseload power generation, nuclear power should play a role in the world’s future energy mix. Others argue for the abolition of nuclear energy. But that may not be feasible in the near future.
In our view, the most pressing priority is the development of tough, system-oriented nuclear safety standards, strong safety cultures and much closer cooperation between countries and their independent regulators. We see worrying evidence in the US that independent nuclear regulations are eroding, and that nuclear utilities are resisting pressures to learn and delay the adoption of internationally accepted safety practices, such as adding filters to prevent radioactive release from reactor containment buildings with the same characteristics as Fukushima. Daiichi.
The most crucial lesson we see is the need to counter nuclear nationalism and isolationism. Ensuring close cooperation between countries developing nuclear projects is essential today as the forces of populism, nationalism and anti-globalism spread.
We also believe that the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose mission is to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear energy, should urge its member states to strike a balance between national sovereignty and international responsibility when it comes to exploiting nuclear reactors on their territory. As Chernobyl and Fukushima taught the world, the radiation does not stop at national borders.
Author Najmedin Meshkati holds an earthquake rail in a Fukushima Daiichi control room while visiting the site in 2012. Najmedin Meshkati / CC BY-ND
To begin with, the Persian Gulf states should put aside political bickering and recognize that with the start of a nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates and others planned in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, they have a common interest in nuclear safety and collective emergency aid. The entire region is vulnerable to radiation and water pollution from nuclear accidents anywhere in the Gulf.
We believe the world is at the same time as it was in 1989, when Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. made the following perceptive argument:
Ten years ago, Three Mile Island was the spark that lit the stake for a once promising energy source. With the nuclear industry asking the nation for a second look at the context of global warming, it is reasonable to see how its advocates respond to enhanced security surveillance. That will be the benchmark for determining whether nuclear power becomes a phoenix or an extinct species. “
Kiyoshi Kurokawa is one Professor Emeritus, University of Tokyo.
Najmedin Meshkati is one Professor of Engineering and International Relations, University of Southern California.
Disclosure Statement: Kiyoshi Kurokawa, MD, MACP, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo and Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo. He chaired the National Diet of Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, which published its official report in July 2012. The English translation of his book Regulatory Capture: Will Japan Change? expected to be released in 2021.
Najmedin Meshkati, Ph.D., CPE, is a professor of civil / environmental, industrial and systems engineering and international relations at the University of Southern California (USC). He teaches and researches the safety of technological systems and has visited many nuclear power plants around the world, including Chernobyl (1997), Mihama (1999) and Fukushima Daiichi and Daini (2012). He was a member and technical advisor to the US National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council Committee on Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety and Security of US Nuclear Plants.
Reposted with permission from The Conversation.
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