Nuclear Crisis in Japan--and Here

What shall we learn from the failure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in Japan? Until the power of nature made itself felt, things were pretty well controlled by powerful people. As I read this account in the New York Times for May 16, it struck me that earthquakes are hard to predict, but the dominance of the powerful…that’s not so hard to predict.

Hindsight is notoriously unforgiving, certainly, but I don’t have in mind blaming the people who made these costly decisions or even praising the people who warned of the dangers. What strikes me in this account is the banal predictability of it all.

In the U. S., the oil crisis of the early 1970s causes long lines at gas stations and short tempers nearly everywhere. In Japan, it was much more dire. As a result, in 1976, Japan committed to nuclear power as the power of the future. Nuclear power looked pretty good compared to oil, but, as Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and now professor emeritus at Kobe University, said, “The Japanese archipelago is a place where you shouldn’t build nuclear plants,” Oil in unattractive as a fuel because Japan doesn’t have any. Nuclear is unattractive as a fuel because Japan is an earthquake zone. It’s a dilemma.

There was an earthquake near Kobe in 1995 and residents, fearing for their safety, began organizing protests again the operators, Chubu Electric. It’s not easy to protest a strategy that seems to have no alternative. Yasue Ashihara, a protester at another plant, said she believed the company is understating the danger to her city, but that “she has at times felt ostracized from this tightly bound community, with relatives frowning upon her drawing attention to herself.”

In 2007, a district court ruled against the plaintiffs, finding no problems with the safety assessments and measures at Hamaoka. The court appeared to rely greatly on the testimony of Haruki Madarame, a University of Tokyo professor and promoter of nuclear energy, who said it was unlikely that two generators would fail at the same time and, more ominously, that the concerns of the plaintiffs would “make it impossible ever to build anything.”

The protesters were successful in only two cases, both of which were overturned by a higher court. In one of the two cases, residents near the Shika nuclear plant in Ishikawa sued to shut down a new reactor there in 1999. They argued that the reactor, built near a fault line, had been designed according to outdated quake-resistance standards. The court sided with the power company, arguing that the plant had been built according to the new safety standards, adopted in 2006.

And they did meet those standards. The standards had been set by a government panel composed of many experts with ties to nuclear operators. The standards essentially left it to the operators to make sure their plants met the new standards.

It isn’t all that easy for judges either, says Kenichi Ido, the chief judge at the district court at the time. “I think it can’t be denied that a psychology favoring the safer path comes into play,” Mr. Ido said. This would be the “safer path” for the judges, please note: “Judges are less likely to invite criticism by siding and erring with the government than by sympathizing and erring with a small group of experts.”

There is a good deal of incentive for the companies to underestimate or, sometimes, simply to deny the existence of the kinds of risks fault lines represent. In the case of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the utility that also operates Fukushima Daiichi, did not disclose the existence of an active fault line until an earthquake forced it to. In 1979, residents sued the government to try overturn its decision granting Tepco a license to build a plant there. The Tokyo High Court ruled against the plaintiffs, concluding that no such fault line existed.

“This is ridiculous,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at the Research Reactor Institute at Kyoto University. “If anything, Fukushima shows us how unforeseen disasters keep happening. There are still too many things about earthquakes that we don’t understand.”
Until March 11, Mr. Koide had been relegated to the fringes as someone whose ideas were considered just too out of step with the mainstream. Today, he has become an accepted voice of conscience in a nation re-examining its nuclear program.

Yasue Ashihara and Hiroaki Koide are shunned as showboats or as being “out of step with the mainstream.” They bring actions in court, but the operators defend themselves by underestimating and then denying and then, finally, admitting the risks. The admitting part most often occurs after the disaster has occurred. The judges take “the path of safety” by agreeing with the operators and the government, rather than the residents.

When new estimates of the power of the fault lines are presented, new estimates of the robust construction of the power plants are presented. The standards are devised presuming the good faith of the operators, but the operator’s interest in their own success inclines them to cut corners and run risks.

Then a disaster occurs and the protesters are shown to have been right; the operators are shown to have been wrong. Now what? Japan still doesn’t have any oil. The archipelago is still a bad place to build nuclear plants. The government planners still make plans so that it will not be “impossible to build anything ever.” The operators still overestimate the stability of plant construction and underestimate the extent and power of the faults.

Which of these conditions is going to change in Japan? Do we really think any of them are different in the U. S.? Which ones? Will the residents be less vigilant? The government less permissive? The operators more forthcoming? The judges more daring?

I don’t think so.




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