After the oil crisis of the 1970s, Japan embraced atomic power with a vengeance. Since then, the ties between the government and the nuclear industry have become so intertwined that public safety is at threat. Inspections are too lax, and anyone who criticizes the status quo can find themselves out of a job.
It was a Friday morning, and Yukio Yamaguchi had left his gray cardigan at home and was wearing his good, dark-brown suit instead. He had boarded the Shinkansen, Japan's high-speed train, to travel to Kashiwazaki-Kariwa on the west coast, home to the world's largest nuclear power plant.
The reserved physicist with horn-rimmed glasses and a gray goatee is an anti-nuclear activist with the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center. He was on his way to attend the meeting of a commission that addresses earthquake safety for power plants. This meeting, together with TEPCO, the operator of the Kashiwazaki plant, was being held to discuss the subject of earthquake and tsunami safety.
It was the morning of March 11, 2011.
Shortly after 1 p.m., Yamaguchi sat down in his usual seat, the second from the left in the first row, in a wood-paneled conference room at the Niigata Prefecture administration building. But what good was it to warn people about the dangerous tidal waves? "It was the same as always," says Yamaguchi. "One man against a dozen TEPCO people. And they said that everything was in perfect order." Until 2:46 p.m., that is, when TEPCO's "perfect order" was destroyed.
The building suddenly started shaking. It was an earthquake, and everyone ran outside. The meeting was interrupted for 15 minutes, but then it was reconvened. A TEPCO spokesman pointed out, once again, how well the Kashiwazaki plant was protected against earthquakes and tsunamis.
No one in the room suspected that in those very minutes, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) farther to the east, a wave more than 14 meters (46 feet) high was rolling toward the six-meter protective wall at TEPCO's second-largest nuclear complex.
The meeting in Niigata ended at about 4 p.m. Just as Yamaguchi was checking into a local business hotel (the bullet train had stopped running, because of the earthquake), TEPCO was notifying the government that it had lost control over the reactors at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Making a Farce of Safety Claims
Time and again, the new realities have revealed the nuclear lobby's safety slogans to be a farce. Apparently the earthquake alone caused the first tubes to crack. The fuel rods melted down into redhot clumps of uranium, eating holes into the floor of the reactor pressure vessel in Unit 1 at an early juncture. And not even the risk of steam explosions has been averted.
TEPCO's and the Japanese government's reassurances have proven to be meaningless. Tens of thousands of people have had to leave their homes, possibly for good. Even the mountain village of Iitate, almost 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the disaster site, has begun to be evacuated.
For a full two months, TEPCO management tried to reassure the public and denied all responsibility, even during its ineffectual attempts to get the damaged reactors under control. It wasn't until last Friday that TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu and Vice President Sakae Muto finally announced their resignations -- a decision that was driven mainly by the company's massive quarterly loss of €10.7 / $ 15.20 billion ($15.1 billion).
The choice of Toshio Nishizawa, another top executive at TEPCO, to replace Shimizu will hardly change the company's inept crisis management strategy. The crisis team will continue to meet on the second floor of the TEPCO headquarters building in Tokyo, in a large conference room with pieces of paper taped to the inside of the windows. The top executives sit around a semicircular table. There is Muto, head of TEPCO's nuclear division until now, who used to chair the meetings, with Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata sitting to his left. Katsumata usually makes an appearance at 9 a.m. and returns between 6 and 7 p.m. Shimizu was rarely seen at the meetings recently, says another executive.
There are several smaller, round tables scattered around the conference table. Teams of outside experts, including specialists from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and France's Areva nuclear power company, as well as Japanese scientists, sit at these tables. Everyone stares at a large video screen showing dedicated lines to all of TEPCO's power plants, including Kashiwazaki.
At the moment, however, they are usually looking at the bottom left corner of the screen, where there is an image of Masao Yoshida, 56, the head of the plant, who is reporting from the earthquake-proof room at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. "Yoshida often has trouble getting his message across," says one of the meeting participants. "The people at the site have to make an effort to convey how serious the situation really is."
Too Big to Fail
It isn't even entirely clear who is actually responsible for crisis management. A few weeks ago, when SPIEGEL asked a TEPCO spokesman who was running the crisis team, he replied: "Prime Minister (Naoto) Kan." When a member of the Japanese parliament asked the government the same question, it replied: "Primarily TEPCO." Meanwhile, the country's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) announced: "We all support TEPCO in a unified manner in its management of the crisis." One of the government's contributions to this support is financial -- Tokyo is spending the astronomical sum of €43 / $ 61.08 billion to protect TEPCO from ruin. The axiom "too big to fail," which guaranteed the survival of the major European and American banks during the financial crisis, is also proving to be applicable to Japan's largest electric utility.
TEPCO, the world's fourth-largest power company, employs more than 52,000 people and most recently posted annual revenues of about €35 / $ 49.72 billion. Before World War II, the government nationalized all electric utilities and merged them into regional monopolies. The resulting 10 companies are now private, but they have retained their regional dominance.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has consistently treated the electric utilities as tools with which to execute its industrial policy. In return, the utilities enjoy guaranteed profits. Some 45 million people in the Tokyo region get their electricity from TEPCO. The company is ubiquitous. It pays for research and sponsors many news programs. It even built a giant electricity museum in the center of Tokyo's popular Shibuya shopping district.
The Fukushima disaster destroyed much more than a power plant. It has destabilized the entire system on which the Japanese nuclear industry is based.
In Japan, the term "The Atomic Village" refers to an isolated elite that has formed around the country's nuclear complex. Its residents include TEPCO's nuclear divisions and the corresponding departments at the METI. Scientists, politicians and journalists are also members of this exclusive nuclear club.
Activist Yamaguchi has repeatedly run up against the secure walls surrounding this Atomic Village. "They all feel connected," he says. "They all studied at the top university in Tokyo, and after that they worked here at TEPCO or at the agency that's supposed to regulate TEPCO."
A Threat to Japan's Democracy
Both the nuclear industry and its government regulators are also closely intertwined with the political sphere. TEPCO's management is among the key campaign donors to the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Meanwhile, the union that represents workers in the electricity industry supports Prime Minister Kan's Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). So far neither of the two parties has taken a position critical of the nuclear industry.
It's as if Austrian writer Robert Jungk's horrific vision of the "nuclear state" had become reality. In his book "The Nuclear State," once required reading for Germany's protest generation, Jungk describes how a high-risk technology can erode a democracy, even without a nuclear disaster. Many of the protesters who faced water cannons, batons and concertina wire during demonstrations in the 1970s and 1980s at German sites like the Brokdorf nuclear power plant near Hamburg, already felt as if they were living in the dreaded surveillance state.
Germany was ultimately spared Jungk's vision, but in Japan it has proven to be prophetic. In a consensus-based society, the nuclear industry, electric utilities, political parties and scientists have created a sacrosanct refuge for themselves that has become a threat to Japan's democracy.
It is clear that wheeling and dealing in the Atomic Village played a role in the Fukushima disaster. According to TEPCO's calculations, the maximum possible height of a tsunami in Fukushima was 5.7 meters. The company acted on the authority of a committee made up of members of Japan's engineering society. But a majority of the commission's 35 members had once worked for electric utilities or think tanks funded by the utilities.
'The Japanese Public Is Partly Responsible'
Even many media organizations, as recipients of generous payments for the electricity industry, are part of the cartel. "The Japanese public is partly responsible for the disaster in Fukushima," says activist Yukio Yamaguchi. Nature triggered the catastrophe, but Japan itself created the conditions that allowed it to happen, he says.
Ironically, hardly any country on earth is more poorly suited for high-risk nuclear technology than earthquake-plagued Japan. A folk legend describes the islands as being perched on the back of a giant fish in the ocean, a fish that is constantly trembling and twitching -- not a good basis for operating the world's third-largest collection of nuclear reactors. Only the United States and France have more nuclear plants.
Nevertheless, until disaster struck Japan continued to forge ambitious expansion plans. To reach its goal of producing half of all the electricity it consumes with nuclear energy by 2030, the country had planned to build a double-digit number of new reactors.
The oil shock of the 1970s came as a wakeup call for Japan, a rising industrial nation at the time. It prompted the government to define the development of a strong nuclear industry as a national goal. Since then, Japanese politicians have inextricably linked the country's rise to prominence and prosperity with nuclear energy.
Buoyed by the prospect of being largely independent of imports of fuel for energy production, Japanese politicians even decided to establish a plutonium industry. Fast breeder reactors, which produce more fuel than they consume, seemed too tempting to pass up.
'Brainwashed'
While most of the world's nuclear nations were abandoning this risky and expensive option (Germany turned its fast breeder reactor in Kalkar near the Dutch border into the most expensive amusement park of all time), Japan inaugurated its Monju breeder reactor and, in 1993, laid the foundation for a reprocessing plant in Rokkasho on the northern tip of the main island, Honshu. At an estimated cost to date of more than €14 / $ 19.89 billion, the facility is one of the most expensive industrial plants in the world, and yet it has never been in full-fledged operation.
"Our country was literally brainwashed," says Taro Kono, a member of the lower house of the Japanese Diet for the conservative LDP. "Atomic energy is a cult in Japan."
Kono, 48, comes from one of Japan's major political dynasties. He has been a member of the parliament for almost 15 years and is notorious for his independent views. He is one of the few members of his parliamentary group to have dared to question Japan's nuclear policy. As a member of parliament who has one of the best election results in Japan, Kono feels even more emboldened to express his opinion. "This is the only reason I can afford to criticize the nuclear industry in the first place," he says with a smile.
"Now TEPCO is saying that the tsunami was much bigger than expected," says Kono. "But what were they expecting?" This, he says, was the conclusion reached by a commission dominated by the power companies, which included almost no earthquake or tsunami experts. "It determined how big the tsunami should be," Kono says. "That's why the electric utilities are the ones who are mainly responsible. It's as simple as that." But for Kono, finding allies is difficult in a country where any criticism of the nuclear industry can end the careers of scientists, journalists and politicians.
Scientists Keep Quiet
TEPCO's influence even extends into scientific laboratories. Many scientists, especially at the University of Tokyo, are partial to TEPCO. The company contributes millions to the university and supports many associations, think tanks and commissions. This form of public relations has been useful to the company until now.
Not a single scientist or engineer at the University of Tokyo has ever been known to have spoken critically about TEPCO, even after the accident in Fukushima. "If you are a critic of nuclear power, you are not promoted, you don't even become a professor, and you are certainly not appointed to key commissions," says Kono.
At times, doubts are indeed voiced about the system of crony commissions. Five years ago, for example, seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi resigned from the committee that had been tasked with revising the safety regulations for Japanese nuclear power plants. Of the 19 committee members, 11 were also members of committees within the Japanese electricity lobby. Ishibashi criticized the decision-making process on the committee for being "unscientific." "If we do not fundamentally improve our technical standards for nuclear power plants, Japan could experience a nuclear catastrophe after an earthquake," he warned at the time.
But it is difficult to get through to the Japanese public with such warnings, given the millions upon millions of euros TEPCO spends on media and public relations each year. Its image cultivation campaign even includes the sponsorship of news programs, including Tokyo station TBS's "News 23," Fuji's "Mezamashi TV" and TV Asahi's "Hodo Station." In TEPCO's world, everyone gets a piece of a very large nuclear pie.
Keeping the Media Sweet
The company also has a habit of placating journalists with luxury trips. For example, on the day the tsunami inundated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, TEPCO Chairman Katsumata was keeping journalists company in a nice new hotel in China -- on an "educational trip."
"We have built the structure in such a way that everyone has an interest in supporting nuclear power," says Kono. Stricter inspectors, critical reporters and obstreperous citizens would only get in the way.
There has been no lack of alarm signals, but they have never produced any consequences. The biggest scandal to date came to light through a disgruntled employee. In 1989, Kei Sugaoka, a US engineer with Japanese roots, inspected Reactor 1 at the now-stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant. He worked for General Electric (GE), the plant's manufacturer.
Sugaoka was startled to find cracks in the steam dryer, "pretty sizeable ones," as he recalls today. It later occurred to him that the device had been installed incorrectly -- by a 180-degree rotation. He notified his superiors. Then his team waited a few days for further instructions, while receiving their full pay.
Safety Revelations
When the men were called back to the power plant, their higher-ups had apparently agreed on the next steps. Sugaoka says that his supervisor at GE told him to edit the inspection video and remove the sections in which the cracks were visible. "And that was what my team did," says the engineer, "while two men from TEPCO looked on."
Nevertheless, he felt uneasy about the whole thing. After returning home, he wrote down what had happened and kept the documents. After being fired from GE in 1998, Sugaoka was determined to bring the affair to light. On June 28, 2000, he wrote a letter to Japan's nuclear safety agency NISA, describing what had happened. He wrote three or four similar letters after that.
Sugaoka's revelations shook the country. It soon became clear that TEPCO had systematically falsified safety reports. The company's president and four other senior executives had to resign over the affair, and the government temporarily shut down 17 reactors.
About that time, it was also revealed that several Japanese TEPCO employees had reported safety concerns to the regulatory agency. It, in turn, promptly disclosed the whistleblowers' identities to TEPCO, as a NISA spokesman confirmed.
Gentleman Whistleblower
The scandal had no long-term consequences in Japan. In Fukushima, however, it brought Eisaku Sato into the arena. Sato, the former governor of Fukushima Prefecture, is a distinguished, silver-haired gentleman. He loves antiques and golf, and he opposes nuclear energy.
After discovering how carelessly NISA had treated the complaints from inside the Atomic Village, he decided to get involved. From 2002 to 2006, 21 insiders contacted Sato directly, and members of his staff met secretly with the whistleblowers. After recording and documenting the complaints, they forwarded them to NISA.
Whenever nothing happened for a period of time after the complaints had been submitted, Sato's staff members made more inquiries. "No one was keeping tabs on TEPCO," says Sato, who is wearing dark-blue sports jacket with a pocket square. "Fukushima Prefecture took on the job that NISA really ought to be doing. The main problem wasn't TEPCO at all, but NISA. They simply didn't pass on the complaints."
The ministries, regulatory agencies and power companies are so closely intertwined that conflicts of interest are virtually built into the system. One of the objectives of the powerful industry ministry, METI, is to promote the nuclear industry. Another goal is to export Japanese nuclear technology to emerging economies. The problem, however, is that NISA, the agency that is supposed to monitor the nuclear industry, comes under the authority of the nuclear-friendly METI.
The Power of Amakudari
Not surprisingly, the controls are lax, reports nuclear engineer Tetsunari Iida. He once designed the Japanese version of the CASTOR containers that are used to transport highly radioactive nuclear waste in Europe. To this day, he remembers how shocked he was as a novice in the industry. "I was just a 20-year-old boy, but what I did was simply rubber-stamped," says Iida.
Even 20 years ago, Iida experienced how nuclear power plant workers would signal to each other when an inspector was approaching. A worker would quickly wipe off a leaking heat exchanger to make it look perfectly in order, and would then disappear. The inspector noticed what was going on but ignored it. "Our inspections are a complete sham," says Iida.
The close-knit relationship between the industry and regulators is so legendary that it even has a name: "amakudari," or "descended from the sky," which refers to the practice of government officials, after serving out their terms at a ministry, directly switching to lucrative positions with the electricity giants.
One of the vice-president positions at TEPCO has been reserved for an amakudari official for decades. A man named Takeo Ishihara was once a deputy state secretary, in a position titled "coordinator of nuclear policy." After TEPCO hired him in 1962, he became a managing director and then a vice-president.
In 1980, a state secretary at the Energy Ministry switched to TEPCO, where he performed the same duties. Other senior officials followed in 1990 and 1999. In April, a member of parliament with the Communist Party asked the government whether these industry jobs were "reserved slots." A spokesman said: "You could call it that."
Arrogance Meets Incompetence
In terms of the hands-on work at the plants, most workers are temporary workers and day laborers working for subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. But even the highly qualified specialists are often not employed by TEPCO, but by manufacturers like Hitachi and Toshiba, or even directly by General Electric in the United States.
These experts know all too well how little the TEPCO managers know about their own reactors. "The people at TEPCO," says Tsuneyasu Satoh, who worked as a subcontractor in Fukushima for many years, "are bureaucrats who stop by once in a while to tell us what to do."
TEPCO's engineers display a combination of arrogance and incompetence. When Sugaoka went public with the scandal over falsified safety reports, the company conducted an internal analysis and even admitted to significant deficiencies. According to the analysis, TEPCO engineers were "overly self-confident with regard to their nuclear expertise." For this reason, the analysis continued, they did not report problems to the government, "as long as they believed that safety was assured."
However, neither TEPCO nor NISA drew any conclusions from these insights. Even the scandal did nothing to stop the operating license for the extremely old Reactor 1 at Fukushima Daiichi being extended for another 10 years. Even worse, the regular intervals at which power plants are inspected can now be extended from 13 to 16 months.
"That's the consequence of the entire scandal for TEPCO," Aileen Mioko Smith, an anti-nuclear activist with the nongovernmental organization Green Action Japan, says derisively, "new standards and ultimately fewer inspections."
'No Commento'
When the TEPCO spokesman is asked whether the company has ever implemented a proposal by the anti-nuclear activists, he says: "I don't understand the question."
Even after the disaster, the company still tried to throw sand in the eyes of journalists. Reporters with the television stations and major newspapers have been camped out on the ground floor of the TEPCO headquarters building for the last 10 weeks. In press conferences, they are usually presented with a jumble of supposedly precise raw data. But what are reporters supposed to do with hundreds of pieces of data without any context at all, particularly as they often turn out to be incorrect soon afterwards?
TEPCO officials like to talk about the data but prefer to avoid the subject of responsibility. Whether it's amakudari, political contributions or funding for scientific research, a TEPCO spokesman has a similar response to questions on all of these issues: "No commento."
Fired After Reporting on Fukushima
Takashi Uesugi, a television journalist, is one of those reporting on how sensitively the electricity giant reacts when unflattering information manages to get out. He is a popular television and radio host in Japan, and his programs are both political and entertaining. Uesugi is normally an affable 43-year-old who likes to play golf. Until the Fukushima accident, he had little to do with nuclear power.
But he has always taken issue with his counterparts at the major newspapers, who he sees as little more than the PR agents of the ministers they report about. After the disaster in Fukushima, Uesugi also camped out in the TEPCO lobby, because he wanted to know what was happening in the reactor.
On March 15, at 1 p.m., Uesugi was conducting a live broadcast on the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS). He said that radioactivity was apparently escaping from Reactor 3 and that this was being reported abroad. "It was an obvious thing to report," he says. After the broadcast, however, his boss came to him and told him he was fired, says Uesugi. He hasn't worked for TBS since then. A spokesman for the TBS programming department says that the station had already decided earlier to sever its working relationship with Uesugi, and that there was no pressure from TEPCO.
Uesugi doesn't believe these claims, particularly as he also experienced problems soon afterwards on another TV program. The electric utility association ended its sponsorship of "Asahi Newstar" after Uesugi had invited a critic of nuclear power to appear as a guest on his program. The station claims that it had already planned to end the electric utility sponsorship. A TEPCO spokesman characterizes as "inconceivable" the notion that TEPCO would try to pressure a journalist like Uesugi.
Intimidated
Meanwhile, the Japanese government has begun asking Internet providers to remove "false reports" about Fukushima from the web, arguing that the population should not be troubled unnecessarily. "This is worse than in Egypt and China," says Uesugi. According to the government request, all reports that "harm the public order and morale" should be removed.
Nuclear critic Robert Jungk devoted an entire chapter to the industry's treatment of its adversaries. The chapter is titled: "The Intimidated."
In Japan, the insiders who talked about the abuses at TEPCO were intimidated, as were journalists who reported on these abuses, like Takashi Uesugi.
There are some indications that Eisaku Sato, the distinguished former governor of Fukushima Prefecture, was also a victim of intimidation. Sato attempted to oppose the power of the atom. He had aligned himself with the governors of other prefectures with nuclear plants, and he tried to establish an axis critical of nuclear power.
Sato, a relatively minor local politician, invited experts from all over the world to formulate a new Japanese energy policy. He was perhaps the most influential Japanese critic of the nuclear industry -- until his political career ended abruptly in 2006, when he was arrested on charges of corruption. He and his brother were accused of having collected an inflated price for a piece of property from a construction company that had worked for the prefecture.
'Same People as Always'
A court found Sato guilty, and although an appeals court in Tokyo later reduced the sentence, it did not overturn the guilty verdict. He has now taken his case to the Japanese Supreme Court, where he hopes to be declared innocent.
A former Tokyo prosecutor says that Sato's brother did not make any profit at all with the sale of the property. Besides, the public prosecutor assigned to the case at the time has since been sentenced to 18 months in prison for planting false evidence on a high-ranking government official he had investigated in another case.
But who, if not critics like Sato, can hold people responsible for the disaster? At least the statement made by Prime Minister Kan last Wednesday offers a hopeful outlook. He announced a new plan to decartelize the regulatory agencies, break up the regional monopolies of the Japanese electric utilities and rethink the country's energy policy "from the bottom up."
Aileen Mioko Smith, the activist with Green Action Japan, doesn't have much faith in such promises. She already dreads what she expects will be Japan's usual handling of such disasters. "A commission will be formed to examine the accident, and it will consist of exactly the same people as always."
By Cordelia Meyer. Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Japan's Nuclear Cartel Atomic Industry Too Close to Government for Comfort
Poisoned Fields The Painful Evacuation of a Japanese Village
Poisoned Fields The Painful Evacuation of a Japanese Village By Cordula Meyer
Contamination levels in the Japanese mountain village of Iitate are higher than in some parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Its evacuation has been a painful process for residents -- and many are more afraid of resettlement than they are of radiation.
Why on earth didn't she notice anything? It's a question that preoccupies Mieko Okubo. Why didn't she see the signs?
If she had only been more attentive, perhaps Fumio, her father-in-law, would still be alive today. He would be sitting with her at the table, gazing out at his rice fields through the open terrace door, just as he had done for years.
"Do we have to leave Iitate?" Fumio asked on April 11, when Japan's NHK television network reported that their village was probably going to be evacuated.
"If they say so on TV," she had replied off-handedly.
"Do we really have to go?" Fumio had asked again, and his daughter-in-law had thought nothing of it.
Mieko Okubo has short black hair and thin, petite hands. The ashtray in front of her is filled with at least a dozen cigarette butts, long and thin. "How on earth could I have failed to recognize how important that question was to him?" she wonders today.
She blames herself for not having noticed the little things: how he would sit there all day long, all hunched over and not bolt upright the way he usually did; that she didn't stop short when he didn't touch his chicken or mixed vegetables at dinner; and that she didn't react when he stopped responding to her questions.
'Why Does a 102-Year-Old Have to Suffer?'
The next morning Mieko got up at 5 a.m. to make breakfast, as usual. When she hadn't heard anything from her father-in-law by 8 a.m., she called out: "Breakfast is ready."
Then she opened the door to his room. She saw the tatami mat on the floor, laid out elaborately as if it were a special day. Then she saw her father-in-law. Fumio Okubo had hanged himself in his room. He was 102.
Okubo had spent his entire life in Iitate. The woman he had married at 17 died 80 years later. He made his first trip to the capital Tokyo, 250 kilometers (156 miles) away with a senior citizens' group. What would have been gained by evacuating such an old man?
Shortly after his death, Mieko Okubo cursed TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the company that killed her father-in-law. Now she weeps quietly, and asks: "Why does even a 102-year-old man have to suffer?"
In the days following the explosions inside the Fukushima reactors, the wind carried radiation clouds in a northwesterly direction, all the way into the mountains surrounding Iitate, about 40 kilometers away from the plant. The people working in the fields at the time knew nothing about the dangers in the sky. No one had warned them.
Later on, the authorities measured radiation levels of up to 45 microsievert per hour in Iitate. This is several times the level that led to the evacuation of Chernobyl. No expert today questions the decision to evacuate the village.
Lost Sense of Security
Iitate is surrounded by forests of fir and Japanese cedar, the mountains rise up to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). In the summer, hikers pitch their tents alongside the clear waters of a mountain lake. For generations, the people in the region have worked hard to wrest a living from the land. For the farmers and craftsmen of Iitate, the loss cannot be measured in microsievert. The residents of Iitate are losing their home, and a sense of security that they will never regain.
In an overcrowded room on the ground floor of the town hall, a team headed by disaster relief manager Shuichi Sato is trying to organize the moves of local residents. "On April 22, the government in Tokyo announced that the people of Iitate were to evacuate within a month. But they said nothing about how this is supposed to work," Sato complains.
He and his team members spend much of their time searching for apartments. Before the Fukushima disaster, there were just under 7,000 people living in Iitate; there are now about 3,000 left. And because the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, in addition to residents of other parts of the restricted zone have already received emergency housing, there are almost no apartments available anymore in the entire region.
Pregnant women and families with small children were evacuated on a Sunday two weeks ago, followed by families with children in middle school. Sato hopes that all families with children will soon have left. The remaining residents are expected to have left their houses by the end of June. Sato, who lacks the legal clout to force them to leave, says: "We're hoping they cooperate."
From One Meeting to the Next
A police line dangles in front of the entrances to the schools. The community center is closed. The only supermarket in town is still open, although some of the shelves are empty. A few construction workers are widening part of a village street, though soon it will no longer be used. A real estate broker's price sign is still posted in front of a newly built gray single-family home: 8 million yen (€70,000 / $ 99,437.10 , or $100,000).
"These people were born here. It's their home," says Sato. "And we can't even say when they'll be able to return." He is wearing light-colored overalls and ID cards attached to blue strings dangle from his neck. He rushes from one meeting to the next, and yet he makes time to attend the farewell ceremonies being held throughout the village.
Prior to the disaster, Iitate had faced the same fate as many Japanese villages: Its youth had left for the cities, leaving the old people behind. In response, the town organized neighborhood festivals, developed the local beef into a nationally recognized brand and created more jobs for young people.
Iitate was recently admitted to an association of Japan's most beautiful villages. The town's motto is "Madei," or "Being Mindful," and its symbol shows two hands carrying a heart. Local residents don't lock their doors at night.
Now the nuclear crisis has cut deep creases into the friendly face of Iitate's mayor, Norio Kanno. His hair is disheveled and his overalls are covered with oil. When Kanno is asked to name his most difficult decision since the crisis began, he says: "Every day since then has been the most difficult one. After all, I'm responsible for everyone in the village."
Deciding to Stay
As mayor, Kanno has worked hard to convince young people to stay in Iitate. Now he is furious with the government in Tokyo. "They say: As long as people are protected from the radiation, have a roof over their heads and enough food to eat, everything is just great." But the people in Iitate feel connected, he says, to their houses and to the village they call home. "TEPCO is responsible for their loss," says the mayor.
The Japanese government is apparently anxious to prevent such anger from reaching public ears. During the interview, an employee from the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) suddenly appears. Kanno falls silent in the middle of a sentence, and then he is led away by the man from METI.
But METI cannot silence everyone in Iitate. Kayoko and Hideyoshi Hasegawa, for example, earned their living as dairy farmers. The meadows glisten in the fog at half past five in the morning, as Hideyoshi rolls hay into a large ball, places it on a wheelbarrow and distributes it to his 24 cows. The animals are emaciated, now that they haven't been fed concentrated feed for a while.
Hideyoshi's wife carefully washes each cow's udder with a fresh rag and hot water, and then she attaches the milking machine. When the cows have been milked, she simply opens the tap and allows the fresh milk to flow into the drain. "The cows use their own bodies to produce this milk," she says, with tears in her eyes. "And then we throw everything away."
With toxic radiation lurking in the barn and on their pastures, the Hasegawas are not permitted to sell the milk. Now they hope that they will at least be able to find someone to slaughter their cows. "Then someone will kill them for us. Killing and burying them ourselves would be too much for us," says Kayoko.
Little Reason to Hope
One of their daughters found a two-room apartment for the couple in the city of Fukushima. Hideyoshi Hasegawa plans to visit the farm once a week to look after things. He hopes that the family will be able to return after two years, although he has little reason to hope. The cesium 137 on the farm's fields has a half-life of 30 years.
Hideyoshi Hasegawa's father planted a bonsai garden on the family farm, complete with a pond for koi carp. The 84-year-old climbs onto a folding ladder to prune the next tree. "I won't leave this place," he says, "not even if they threaten to kill me."
He intends to follow the lead of the 107 residents of the Iitate retirement home. The mayor managed to secure permission for them to stay. He argued that the elderly hardly ever go outside, that they are well protected from the radiation inside the building and that forcibly removing them from their accustomed surroundings would sicken them immediately. The nurses and workers at the home plan to commute to what will become a ghost town. For anyone else who chooses to stay, the driver of a milk truck will continue to bring the bare necessities to the village once a week.
The retirement home was built in accordance with "Madei," at a cost of more than €20 / $ 28.41 million. It is heated with wood pellets, which is supposedly good for the environment and the future.
Twenty-nine-year-old Yukie Niigawa saw a future for her children in Iitate. She is holding her infant, Kurumi, on her arm. The girl was born on March 17, six days after the earthquake. Niigawa is still here with her four children because she is still recovering from the delivery. Brightly colored children's Crocs are lined up next to Niigawa's Hello Kitty sandals at the entrance to her apartment.
Losing a Home
The radiation level is even high in her living room: two microsievert per hour, higher than in many parts of the restricted zone. The needle on the Geiger counter quickly rises to eight microsievert outside. Niigawa only lets her children go outside for an hour a day now -- and only with boots, hats and breathing masks. She is a single mother.
After searching online, Niigawa found a small house for her family in the city of Fukushima. The government will pay the radiation refugee's rent.
But what will she do there? Until now, Niigawa made a living by leasing the family's rice fields to local farmers. Some paid in yen while others paid in rice. But nowadays, when the single mother has put her children to bed at night, she often lies awake and wonders how she will feed her children. She has already packed one box with the children's birth certificates and their photo album. It also contains the wooden plaque commemorating her own father, who died in January. "We don't know if we'll ever return," she says.
Twenty years after Chernobyl, the United Nations published a comprehensive report on the health of those resettled from the restricted zone there. According to the report, the people were traumatized by the loss of their homes and the fear of radiation damage. Believing that they are doomed to die, many drink and smoke excessively.
Workers with the aid organization Heart Rescue are taking a break in the parking lot at the town hall, wearing white protective overalls and breathing masks. Worried about the people who are staying behind in the evacuation zone alone, they roam the empty villages and question everyone they can find. They ask them about anxiety, crying fits, alcohol and thoughts of suicide.
Iitate Is Waiting
Many people exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome, says Bansho Miura. "Especially the young farmers. They don't know where they'll go from here." Some, he says, had converted their farms to organic farming, but now they will probably never sell organic products again.
Mieko Okubo, the woman who lost her father-in-law, is just trying to keep going. She tries to fight back remorse. More cigarette butts have accumulated in the ashtray. She had wanted to quit smoking, she says. "Now I'll probably never do it," she adds.
Her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last October. When the tsunami arrived, she was visiting him in a hospital on the coast. She saw the wave coming, and she says that there are no words to describe what she saw next.
After that, her husband was transferred to the hospital in Niigata, a four-drive from Iitate. As a result, she doesn't visit him as often as before.
Every time she walks into the hospital now, she flicks a switch inside her head. Her husband knows nothing about the evacuation of his village and the death of his father. She doesn't want to make his last days even worse.
Instead, she talks about things that no longer exist. Her husband still believes that Iitate is waiting for him.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Contamination levels in the Japanese mountain village of Iitate are higher than in some parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Its evacuation has been a painful process for residents -- and many are more afraid of resettlement than they are of radiation.
Why on earth didn't she notice anything? It's a question that preoccupies Mieko Okubo. Why didn't she see the signs?
If she had only been more attentive, perhaps Fumio, her father-in-law, would still be alive today. He would be sitting with her at the table, gazing out at his rice fields through the open terrace door, just as he had done for years.
"Do we have to leave Iitate?" Fumio asked on April 11, when Japan's NHK television network reported that their village was probably going to be evacuated.
"If they say so on TV," she had replied off-handedly.
"Do we really have to go?" Fumio had asked again, and his daughter-in-law had thought nothing of it.
Mieko Okubo has short black hair and thin, petite hands. The ashtray in front of her is filled with at least a dozen cigarette butts, long and thin. "How on earth could I have failed to recognize how important that question was to him?" she wonders today.
She blames herself for not having noticed the little things: how he would sit there all day long, all hunched over and not bolt upright the way he usually did; that she didn't stop short when he didn't touch his chicken or mixed vegetables at dinner; and that she didn't react when he stopped responding to her questions.
'Why Does a 102-Year-Old Have to Suffer?'
The next morning Mieko got up at 5 a.m. to make breakfast, as usual. When she hadn't heard anything from her father-in-law by 8 a.m., she called out: "Breakfast is ready."
Then she opened the door to his room. She saw the tatami mat on the floor, laid out elaborately as if it were a special day. Then she saw her father-in-law. Fumio Okubo had hanged himself in his room. He was 102.
Okubo had spent his entire life in Iitate. The woman he had married at 17 died 80 years later. He made his first trip to the capital Tokyo, 250 kilometers (156 miles) away with a senior citizens' group. What would have been gained by evacuating such an old man?
Shortly after his death, Mieko Okubo cursed TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the company that killed her father-in-law. Now she weeps quietly, and asks: "Why does even a 102-year-old man have to suffer?"
In the days following the explosions inside the Fukushima reactors, the wind carried radiation clouds in a northwesterly direction, all the way into the mountains surrounding Iitate, about 40 kilometers away from the plant. The people working in the fields at the time knew nothing about the dangers in the sky. No one had warned them.
Later on, the authorities measured radiation levels of up to 45 microsievert per hour in Iitate. This is several times the level that led to the evacuation of Chernobyl. No expert today questions the decision to evacuate the village.
Lost Sense of Security
Iitate is surrounded by forests of fir and Japanese cedar, the mountains rise up to 1,000 meters (3,280 feet). In the summer, hikers pitch their tents alongside the clear waters of a mountain lake. For generations, the people in the region have worked hard to wrest a living from the land. For the farmers and craftsmen of Iitate, the loss cannot be measured in microsievert. The residents of Iitate are losing their home, and a sense of security that they will never regain.
In an overcrowded room on the ground floor of the town hall, a team headed by disaster relief manager Shuichi Sato is trying to organize the moves of local residents. "On April 22, the government in Tokyo announced that the people of Iitate were to evacuate within a month. But they said nothing about how this is supposed to work," Sato complains.
He and his team members spend much of their time searching for apartments. Before the Fukushima disaster, there were just under 7,000 people living in Iitate; there are now about 3,000 left. And because the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, in addition to residents of other parts of the restricted zone have already received emergency housing, there are almost no apartments available anymore in the entire region.
Pregnant women and families with small children were evacuated on a Sunday two weeks ago, followed by families with children in middle school. Sato hopes that all families with children will soon have left. The remaining residents are expected to have left their houses by the end of June. Sato, who lacks the legal clout to force them to leave, says: "We're hoping they cooperate."
From One Meeting to the Next
A police line dangles in front of the entrances to the schools. The community center is closed. The only supermarket in town is still open, although some of the shelves are empty. A few construction workers are widening part of a village street, though soon it will no longer be used. A real estate broker's price sign is still posted in front of a newly built gray single-family home: 8 million yen (€70,000 / $ 99,437.10 , or $100,000).
"These people were born here. It's their home," says Sato. "And we can't even say when they'll be able to return." He is wearing light-colored overalls and ID cards attached to blue strings dangle from his neck. He rushes from one meeting to the next, and yet he makes time to attend the farewell ceremonies being held throughout the village.
Prior to the disaster, Iitate had faced the same fate as many Japanese villages: Its youth had left for the cities, leaving the old people behind. In response, the town organized neighborhood festivals, developed the local beef into a nationally recognized brand and created more jobs for young people.
Iitate was recently admitted to an association of Japan's most beautiful villages. The town's motto is "Madei," or "Being Mindful," and its symbol shows two hands carrying a heart. Local residents don't lock their doors at night.
Now the nuclear crisis has cut deep creases into the friendly face of Iitate's mayor, Norio Kanno. His hair is disheveled and his overalls are covered with oil. When Kanno is asked to name his most difficult decision since the crisis began, he says: "Every day since then has been the most difficult one. After all, I'm responsible for everyone in the village."
Deciding to Stay
As mayor, Kanno has worked hard to convince young people to stay in Iitate. Now he is furious with the government in Tokyo. "They say: As long as people are protected from the radiation, have a roof over their heads and enough food to eat, everything is just great." But the people in Iitate feel connected, he says, to their houses and to the village they call home. "TEPCO is responsible for their loss," says the mayor.
The Japanese government is apparently anxious to prevent such anger from reaching public ears. During the interview, an employee from the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) suddenly appears. Kanno falls silent in the middle of a sentence, and then he is led away by the man from METI.
But METI cannot silence everyone in Iitate. Kayoko and Hideyoshi Hasegawa, for example, earned their living as dairy farmers. The meadows glisten in the fog at half past five in the morning, as Hideyoshi rolls hay into a large ball, places it on a wheelbarrow and distributes it to his 24 cows. The animals are emaciated, now that they haven't been fed concentrated feed for a while.
Hideyoshi's wife carefully washes each cow's udder with a fresh rag and hot water, and then she attaches the milking machine. When the cows have been milked, she simply opens the tap and allows the fresh milk to flow into the drain. "The cows use their own bodies to produce this milk," she says, with tears in her eyes. "And then we throw everything away."
With toxic radiation lurking in the barn and on their pastures, the Hasegawas are not permitted to sell the milk. Now they hope that they will at least be able to find someone to slaughter their cows. "Then someone will kill them for us. Killing and burying them ourselves would be too much for us," says Kayoko.
Little Reason to Hope
One of their daughters found a two-room apartment for the couple in the city of Fukushima. Hideyoshi Hasegawa plans to visit the farm once a week to look after things. He hopes that the family will be able to return after two years, although he has little reason to hope. The cesium 137 on the farm's fields has a half-life of 30 years.
Hideyoshi Hasegawa's father planted a bonsai garden on the family farm, complete with a pond for koi carp. The 84-year-old climbs onto a folding ladder to prune the next tree. "I won't leave this place," he says, "not even if they threaten to kill me."
He intends to follow the lead of the 107 residents of the Iitate retirement home. The mayor managed to secure permission for them to stay. He argued that the elderly hardly ever go outside, that they are well protected from the radiation inside the building and that forcibly removing them from their accustomed surroundings would sicken them immediately. The nurses and workers at the home plan to commute to what will become a ghost town. For anyone else who chooses to stay, the driver of a milk truck will continue to bring the bare necessities to the village once a week.
The retirement home was built in accordance with "Madei," at a cost of more than €20 / $ 28.41 million. It is heated with wood pellets, which is supposedly good for the environment and the future.
Twenty-nine-year-old Yukie Niigawa saw a future for her children in Iitate. She is holding her infant, Kurumi, on her arm. The girl was born on March 17, six days after the earthquake. Niigawa is still here with her four children because she is still recovering from the delivery. Brightly colored children's Crocs are lined up next to Niigawa's Hello Kitty sandals at the entrance to her apartment.
Losing a Home
The radiation level is even high in her living room: two microsievert per hour, higher than in many parts of the restricted zone. The needle on the Geiger counter quickly rises to eight microsievert outside. Niigawa only lets her children go outside for an hour a day now -- and only with boots, hats and breathing masks. She is a single mother.
After searching online, Niigawa found a small house for her family in the city of Fukushima. The government will pay the radiation refugee's rent.
But what will she do there? Until now, Niigawa made a living by leasing the family's rice fields to local farmers. Some paid in yen while others paid in rice. But nowadays, when the single mother has put her children to bed at night, she often lies awake and wonders how she will feed her children. She has already packed one box with the children's birth certificates and their photo album. It also contains the wooden plaque commemorating her own father, who died in January. "We don't know if we'll ever return," she says.
Twenty years after Chernobyl, the United Nations published a comprehensive report on the health of those resettled from the restricted zone there. According to the report, the people were traumatized by the loss of their homes and the fear of radiation damage. Believing that they are doomed to die, many drink and smoke excessively.
Workers with the aid organization Heart Rescue are taking a break in the parking lot at the town hall, wearing white protective overalls and breathing masks. Worried about the people who are staying behind in the evacuation zone alone, they roam the empty villages and question everyone they can find. They ask them about anxiety, crying fits, alcohol and thoughts of suicide.
Iitate Is Waiting
Many people exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome, says Bansho Miura. "Especially the young farmers. They don't know where they'll go from here." Some, he says, had converted their farms to organic farming, but now they will probably never sell organic products again.
Mieko Okubo, the woman who lost her father-in-law, is just trying to keep going. She tries to fight back remorse. More cigarette butts have accumulated in the ashtray. She had wanted to quit smoking, she says. "Now I'll probably never do it," she adds.
Her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last October. When the tsunami arrived, she was visiting him in a hospital on the coast. She saw the wave coming, and she says that there are no words to describe what she saw next.
After that, her husband was transferred to the hospital in Niigata, a four-drive from Iitate. As a result, she doesn't visit him as often as before.
Every time she walks into the hospital now, she flicks a switch inside her head. Her husband knows nothing about the evacuation of his village and the death of his father. She doesn't want to make his last days even worse.
Instead, she talks about things that no longer exist. Her husband still believes that Iitate is waiting for him.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
why radiation is a health hazard
http://peaceandhealthblog.com/2011/03/25/ruff-radiation-health/
Just in case you missed it, here’s why radiation is a health hazard
March 25, 2011
tags: health, Japan nuclear crisis, nuclear energy, radiation
by IPPNW
by Tilman Ruff
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and complicating nuclear crisis throw into sharp focus concerns about exposure to ionising radiation. What is it, how is it harmful, how much is too much? Inside a nuclear reactor, the radioactivity is increased about a million times as some of the uranium or plutonium is converted to a cocktail of hundreds of different radioactive elements.
There are many different pathways through which people can be exposed to radiation: inhalation of gases or particles in the air, deposits in soil or water, ingestion of food, water or dust. Some radioisotopes mimic normal chemical elements in living systems and therefore make their way up the food chain and onto our plates.
Ionising radiation
Radiation is called “ionising” when it has sufficient energy to knock the electrons off atoms to produce ions (atoms which have a net positive or negative electrical charge).
Ionising radiation damages large complex molecules either directly or by creating highly reactive chemicals inside cells.
The biological potency of ionising radiation is not related to the amount of energy it contains so much as that this energy is packaged in a form which can reach and damage complex molecules – particularly the DNA that is our genetic blueprint, that is passed on to form each new generation.
A lethal dose of radiation may contain as little energy as the heat in a cup of coffee. Our senses cannot warn us about ionising radiation – it cannot be seen or touched or felt or tasted or smelt.
Levels of exposure
Some effects of radiation only occur above certain thresholds.
In the short term, high levels of radiation exposure can cause acute radiation sickness. In the longer term there is an increased risk of cataracts, birth defects, sterility and hair loss.
High doses of radiation can kill cells – this is the reason targeted radiation is used in the treatment of some cancers.
Acute radiation exposure at doses over 100 milliSieverts (mSv), and particularly over 1000 mSv, has most impact on our rapidly dividing cells. These are the blood-forming cells of the bone marrow, lining of the gut, and ovaries and testis. The symptoms of acute radiation sickness therefore include vomiting and diarrhea, bleeding, and reduced ability to fight infection.
The major long-term effect of ionising radiation exposure is an increased risk of a wide variety of cancers. There is no “safe” level of radiation below which there is no increase in cancer risk. The earliest to appear, after around three to five years, are leukemia and thyroid cancer. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster, for instance, has resulted in an epidemic of thyroid cancer with 6,500 children affected so far.
Other cancers begin increasing after 10 years – lung, breast, colon, ovary, bladder and many others. Excess rates of cancer in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors continue to rise.
Sources of exposure
All of us are exposed to ionising radiation all the time – from the stars, from the earth and rocks, from common equipment and appliances. The global average estimated human exposure is 2.4 mSv per year.
The biggest natural source is radon gas produced from radium, part of the decay chain of uranium, which is widely distributed in the Earth’s crust. After smoking, radon is the second most important cause of lung cancer worldwide.
The bulk of ongoing exposures of human origin are from medical X-rays, and there is considerable concern about the rapidly rising medical radiation exposures, particularly from the growing number of CT scans being performed. CT scans involve radiation doses of between 3 and 11 mSv.
Exposure to ionising radiation from all sources should be kept as low as is feasible.
In Australia and most countries, it is recommended that 1 mSv per person per year be the maximum permissible exposure from non-medical sources for the general population; and 20 mSv per year the annual permissible limit for nuclear industry workers. In Japan the maximum permissible dose for the emergency nuclear workers in Fukushima has been increased to 250 mSv.
Health harms
The most authoritative current estimates of the health effects of low dose ionising radiation are contained in the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation VII report from the US National Academy of Sciences (BEIR VII).
This report reflects the substantial weight of scientific evidence that there is no exposure to ionising radiation that is risk-free. The greater the exposure, the greater the risk.
BEIR VII estimates that each 1 mSv of radiation is associated with an increased risk of solid cancer (cancers other than leukemia) of about 1 in 10,000; an increased risk of leukemia of about 1 in 100,000; and a 1 in 17,500 increased risk of cancer death.
But while radiation protection standards are typically based on adult males, it is important to note that not everyone faces the same level of risk. For infants (under 1 year of age) the radiation-related cancer risk is 3 to 4 times higher than for adults; and female infants are twice as susceptible as male infants.
Females face a lower risk of leukemia, but a 50% greater risk of developing a more common solid tumour, so their overall risk of cancer related to radiation exposure is 40% greater than for males. Fetuses in the womb are the most radiation-sensitive of all.
Over time, estimates of the health risks associated with radiation exposure have inexorably risen.
Some of these risks are probably still under-estimated, particularly the impact of internal contamination, such as from plutonium particles lodging in the lung. Internal contamination may not be picked up by external devices designed to detect gamma radiation alone, such as the hand-held radiation monitors now being widely used to screen people in Japan.
In Germany, a recent national study showed that normal operation of nuclear power plants in Germany is associated with a more than doubling of the leukemia risk for under five year olds living within 5 km of a nuclear plant, and increased risk was seen to more than 50 km away. This was much higher than expected.
The longevity of some radioactive minerals is almost incomprehensible. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,400 years. It will take almost a quarter of a million years for it to decay to less than one thousandth of the starting level. So the same particle inhaled into someone’s lung could go on to increase cancer risk for other individuals over successive generations.
Dr. Ruff is Associate Professor, Disease Prevention & Health Promotion Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. He is IPPNW’s regional vice president for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and is Chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). This article was originally published in The Conversation, an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector in Australia.
Just in case you missed it, here’s why radiation is a health hazard
March 25, 2011
tags: health, Japan nuclear crisis, nuclear energy, radiation
by IPPNW
by Tilman Ruff
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and complicating nuclear crisis throw into sharp focus concerns about exposure to ionising radiation. What is it, how is it harmful, how much is too much? Inside a nuclear reactor, the radioactivity is increased about a million times as some of the uranium or plutonium is converted to a cocktail of hundreds of different radioactive elements.
There are many different pathways through which people can be exposed to radiation: inhalation of gases or particles in the air, deposits in soil or water, ingestion of food, water or dust. Some radioisotopes mimic normal chemical elements in living systems and therefore make their way up the food chain and onto our plates.
Ionising radiation
Radiation is called “ionising” when it has sufficient energy to knock the electrons off atoms to produce ions (atoms which have a net positive or negative electrical charge).
Ionising radiation damages large complex molecules either directly or by creating highly reactive chemicals inside cells.
The biological potency of ionising radiation is not related to the amount of energy it contains so much as that this energy is packaged in a form which can reach and damage complex molecules – particularly the DNA that is our genetic blueprint, that is passed on to form each new generation.
A lethal dose of radiation may contain as little energy as the heat in a cup of coffee. Our senses cannot warn us about ionising radiation – it cannot be seen or touched or felt or tasted or smelt.
Levels of exposure
Some effects of radiation only occur above certain thresholds.
In the short term, high levels of radiation exposure can cause acute radiation sickness. In the longer term there is an increased risk of cataracts, birth defects, sterility and hair loss.
High doses of radiation can kill cells – this is the reason targeted radiation is used in the treatment of some cancers.
Acute radiation exposure at doses over 100 milliSieverts (mSv), and particularly over 1000 mSv, has most impact on our rapidly dividing cells. These are the blood-forming cells of the bone marrow, lining of the gut, and ovaries and testis. The symptoms of acute radiation sickness therefore include vomiting and diarrhea, bleeding, and reduced ability to fight infection.
The major long-term effect of ionising radiation exposure is an increased risk of a wide variety of cancers. There is no “safe” level of radiation below which there is no increase in cancer risk. The earliest to appear, after around three to five years, are leukemia and thyroid cancer. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster, for instance, has resulted in an epidemic of thyroid cancer with 6,500 children affected so far.
Other cancers begin increasing after 10 years – lung, breast, colon, ovary, bladder and many others. Excess rates of cancer in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors continue to rise.
Sources of exposure
All of us are exposed to ionising radiation all the time – from the stars, from the earth and rocks, from common equipment and appliances. The global average estimated human exposure is 2.4 mSv per year.
The biggest natural source is radon gas produced from radium, part of the decay chain of uranium, which is widely distributed in the Earth’s crust. After smoking, radon is the second most important cause of lung cancer worldwide.
The bulk of ongoing exposures of human origin are from medical X-rays, and there is considerable concern about the rapidly rising medical radiation exposures, particularly from the growing number of CT scans being performed. CT scans involve radiation doses of between 3 and 11 mSv.
Exposure to ionising radiation from all sources should be kept as low as is feasible.
In Australia and most countries, it is recommended that 1 mSv per person per year be the maximum permissible exposure from non-medical sources for the general population; and 20 mSv per year the annual permissible limit for nuclear industry workers. In Japan the maximum permissible dose for the emergency nuclear workers in Fukushima has been increased to 250 mSv.
Health harms
The most authoritative current estimates of the health effects of low dose ionising radiation are contained in the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation VII report from the US National Academy of Sciences (BEIR VII).
This report reflects the substantial weight of scientific evidence that there is no exposure to ionising radiation that is risk-free. The greater the exposure, the greater the risk.
BEIR VII estimates that each 1 mSv of radiation is associated with an increased risk of solid cancer (cancers other than leukemia) of about 1 in 10,000; an increased risk of leukemia of about 1 in 100,000; and a 1 in 17,500 increased risk of cancer death.
But while radiation protection standards are typically based on adult males, it is important to note that not everyone faces the same level of risk. For infants (under 1 year of age) the radiation-related cancer risk is 3 to 4 times higher than for adults; and female infants are twice as susceptible as male infants.
Females face a lower risk of leukemia, but a 50% greater risk of developing a more common solid tumour, so their overall risk of cancer related to radiation exposure is 40% greater than for males. Fetuses in the womb are the most radiation-sensitive of all.
Over time, estimates of the health risks associated with radiation exposure have inexorably risen.
Some of these risks are probably still under-estimated, particularly the impact of internal contamination, such as from plutonium particles lodging in the lung. Internal contamination may not be picked up by external devices designed to detect gamma radiation alone, such as the hand-held radiation monitors now being widely used to screen people in Japan.
In Germany, a recent national study showed that normal operation of nuclear power plants in Germany is associated with a more than doubling of the leukemia risk for under five year olds living within 5 km of a nuclear plant, and increased risk was seen to more than 50 km away. This was much higher than expected.
The longevity of some radioactive minerals is almost incomprehensible. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,400 years. It will take almost a quarter of a million years for it to decay to less than one thousandth of the starting level. So the same particle inhaled into someone’s lung could go on to increase cancer risk for other individuals over successive generations.
Dr. Ruff is Associate Professor, Disease Prevention & Health Promotion Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. He is IPPNW’s regional vice president for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and is Chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). This article was originally published in The Conversation, an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector in Australia.
Government Shill Yamashita: 'People Are Suffering from Radiophobia'
Studying the Fukushima Aftermath
'People Are Suffering from Radiophobia'
REUTERS
Japanese scientist Shunichi Yamashita is a leading expert on the effects of nuclear radiation. In a SPIEGEL interview, he discusses his work in communicating the potential dangers of exposure to residents living near the Fukushima nuclear plant. The professor says many suffer from severe radiation anxiety.
How dangerous are low doses of exposure to radioactivity to humans? This question is heatedly debated within the scientific community. But it is not an easy time to convey details of that debate to the people in Japan living near the Fukushima nuclear plant who have now been exposed to the dangers of radiation.
Radiation-protection specialist Shunichi Yamashita, 59, has made significant contributions to what is known about the effects of radioactive radiation. He has studied the survivors of the World War II atomic bombing of Nagasaki as well as the consequences of the 1986 reactor accident at Chernobyl, which he has visited nearly 100 times as part of a Japanese scientific envoy. He is currently researching the effects of the Fukushima catastrophe -- though his efforts are meeting with much resistance from local residents.
SPIEGEL interviewed Yamashita about the expected effects of exposure in Fukushima and his plans to conduct one of the largest scientific studies even undertaken in the region. As part of the study, he hopes to examine the health effects of the nuclear disaster on some 2 million people.
SPIEGEL: The government of the Fukushima prefecture has invited you to inform people in the affected region about radiation risks. Right at the beginning, you said: "The effects of radiation do not come to people who are happy and laughing, they come to people who are weak-spirited." What did you mean by that?
Yamashita: That was on March 20 during the first meeting. I was really shocked. The people were so serious, nobody laughed at all.
SPIEGEL: These people's villages and home towns are contaminated. Nobody knows about the invisible dangers. What did you expect?
Yamashita: The mood of the people was really depressed. From animal experiments with rats we clearly know that animals who are very susceptible to stress will be more affected by radiation. Stress is not good at all for people who are subjected to radiation. Besides, mental-state stress also supresses the immune system and therefore may promote some cancer and non-cancer diseases. That is why I told people that they also have to relax.
SPIEGEL: And to help people relax, you also said that doses of 100 millisievert per year would be fine? This is normally the limit for nuclear power plant workers in emergency conditions.
Yamashita: I did not say that 100 millisievert is fine and no reason to worry. I just said that below that threshold we cannot prove a higher risk for cancer. That is the evidence from research in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl.
SPIEGEL: But you didn't understand that your reassurances would make people even more angry and frightened?
Yamashita: I think it really contributed to the confusion that the Japanese government decided to set the standard for yearly maximal dose at 20 millisievert. The International Commission on Radiological Protection suggests a limit between 20 and 100 millisievert in a situation with a nuclear emergency. Which threshold you pick is a political decision. You must weigh the risks and benefits, because any evacuation will also have risks. The Japanese government chose the most careful radiological approach. That made people more confused and insecure.
SPIEGEL: Your comments have made you a controversial figure. A Japanese journalist wants to sue you. Anti-nuclear activists ...
Yamashita: ... they are not scientists, they are not doctors, they are not radiation specialists. They do not know the international standards, which researchers worked on very hard. It makes me sad that people believe gossip, magazines and even Twitter.
SPIEGEL: Why should the people trust experts who have been telling them for decades that nuclear power plants are 100-percent safe?
Yamashita: I was surprised when I arrived in Fukushima that nobody was prepared for such a disaster. I used to advise China and states of the former Soviet Union on radiation protection. Now we have a tremendous accident in my own country and are not prepared. People in Fukushima did not even know that there are 11 reactors in their region. The medical faculty of the University of Fukushima didn't have a single specialist in radioprotection medicine.
SPIEGEL: Would you address the people affected by the accident in a different manner today?
Yamashita: In a situation where people had no understanding of radioactivity at all, I wanted to be very clear. I have now changed my communications approach from black-and-white to gray scale.
SPIEGEL: People want clear answers. Where is it safe? And where is it not?
Yamashita: We don't have those answers. When people ask me: "Are doses below 100 millisievert 100 percent safe?" Then I have to answer as a scientist: "I don't know."
SPIEGEL: From previous studies we have learned that if 100 people are exposed to levels of 100 millisievert, statistically speaking, one person will get cancer because of the radiation. Is it possible to project the level of danger of lower doses?
Yamashita: That could be. The problem is that to estimate the risk for disease we use the so-called linear-nonthreshold dose-response model, which assumes that even a small additional radiation dose would cause a small increase in cancer incidence in an exposed population. Such an increase is theoretically measurable, but with the doses below 100 millisievert it is statistically insignificant and thus cannot be considered as an argument in support of excessive risk. Also, with a tumor we do not know what caused it. Radiation does not leave a diagnosable signature. From radiation biology we also know that smaller doses can damage human DNA. But the human body can effectively repair those injuries within a short time; this is a natural intrinsic protective mechanism. That is what I am trying to tell the people.
SPIEGEL: And what should people do with this kind of information?
Yamashita: With low radiation doses the people have to decide for themselves whether to stay or to leave. Nobody can make that decision for them. They have to weigh the risks and benefits: Moving can mean a loss of jobs and having to change schools for the children. These factors cause stress. On the other hand, this family might be able to avoid the risk of cancer, even if it is only minimal.
SPIEGEL: That families affected by the nuclear accident are being forced to make any such decision is a terrible burden.
Yamashita: Yes. Therefore Tepco and the Japanese government should support people in their decisions. They should support those who want to stay as well as those who think even more than one millisievert is too high.
SPIEGEL: What kind of health risk from the radiation will the people around the plant in Fukushima have to face?
Yamashita: I do not think there will be any direct effect of the radiation for the population. The doses are too small.
SPIEGEL: So you don't think there will be any cases of cancer or cancer deaths?
Yamashita: Based on the data, we have to assume that. Of course, the situation is different for the workers in the plant.
SPIEGEL: Now you are already talking about something you actually intend to research. You plan to monitor the health condition of the residents of Fukushima for the next 30 years.
Yamashita: In the current situation, it is very difficult for us to be accepted by the local residents. We have to make the best medical care possible for these people the first priority.
SPIEGEL: Do you think adopting a more understanding tone than you have up until now would help you to gain acceptance?
Yamashita: Because of the accident, Tepco and the Japanese government have lost the trust of the people in Fukushima completely. The people are suffering, not only because of the earthquake and the tsunami, but also from severe radiation anxiety, real radiophobia. Therefore we have to lower the anxiety (and) give them some emotional support. And, later, we can open the discussion about epidemiological studies. Without the support of the local people, we cannot do anything. In this situation it doesn't even help that I am the expert from Nagasaki and Chernobyl. This is why I moved to Fukushima.
SPIEGEL: Who do you want to examine in your study?
Yamashita: There are three groups. The workers, the children and the general population. The workers are exposed to high-dose radiation. We surely need to monitor them to follow the effects concerning cancer and other diseases. The general population would be divided into two groups: One that was exposed to relatively low radiation and one that was exposed to relatively high radiation. The Fukushima government health office is just finishing a pilot study with which they have questioned 26,000 people.
SPIEGEL: But the people don't know how much radiation they were exposed to.
Yamashita: That is what we have to find out. We ask where the people were on March 11 at what time and then we ask those questions for every day in March. We also ask what people ate the first two weeks after the accident, what material their house or apartment is built out of. We want to connect these data with information of the distribution of the radioactive cloud and calculate the dose after the fact.
SPIEGEL: How many people should participate?
Yamashita: All 2 million residents of Fukushima prefecture. It is a big task and would set a science record. The government just decided about compensation payments for people affected by the nuclear accident. Through such applications we want to try to contact also those who moved outside of Fukushima.
SPIEGEL: What about the children?
Yamashita: We want to test the thyroids of all children under 18, altogeher 360,000 children, with ultrasound. After exposure to radiation it takes about five years until thyroid cancer first develops. We know that from Chernobyl.
SPIEGEL: Are you also researching the mental effects of the disaster?
Yamashita: Of course. We know from Chernobyl that the psychological consequences are enormous. Life expectancy of the evacuees dropped from 65 to 58 years -- not because of cancer, but because of depression, alcoholism and suicide. Relocation is not easy, the stress is very big. We must not only track those problems, but also treat them. Otherwise people will feel they are just guinea pigs in our research.
Interview conducted by Cordula Meyer
'People Are Suffering from Radiophobia'
REUTERS
Japanese scientist Shunichi Yamashita is a leading expert on the effects of nuclear radiation. In a SPIEGEL interview, he discusses his work in communicating the potential dangers of exposure to residents living near the Fukushima nuclear plant. The professor says many suffer from severe radiation anxiety.
How dangerous are low doses of exposure to radioactivity to humans? This question is heatedly debated within the scientific community. But it is not an easy time to convey details of that debate to the people in Japan living near the Fukushima nuclear plant who have now been exposed to the dangers of radiation.
Radiation-protection specialist Shunichi Yamashita, 59, has made significant contributions to what is known about the effects of radioactive radiation. He has studied the survivors of the World War II atomic bombing of Nagasaki as well as the consequences of the 1986 reactor accident at Chernobyl, which he has visited nearly 100 times as part of a Japanese scientific envoy. He is currently researching the effects of the Fukushima catastrophe -- though his efforts are meeting with much resistance from local residents.
SPIEGEL interviewed Yamashita about the expected effects of exposure in Fukushima and his plans to conduct one of the largest scientific studies even undertaken in the region. As part of the study, he hopes to examine the health effects of the nuclear disaster on some 2 million people.
SPIEGEL: The government of the Fukushima prefecture has invited you to inform people in the affected region about radiation risks. Right at the beginning, you said: "The effects of radiation do not come to people who are happy and laughing, they come to people who are weak-spirited." What did you mean by that?
Yamashita: That was on March 20 during the first meeting. I was really shocked. The people were so serious, nobody laughed at all.
SPIEGEL: These people's villages and home towns are contaminated. Nobody knows about the invisible dangers. What did you expect?
Yamashita: The mood of the people was really depressed. From animal experiments with rats we clearly know that animals who are very susceptible to stress will be more affected by radiation. Stress is not good at all for people who are subjected to radiation. Besides, mental-state stress also supresses the immune system and therefore may promote some cancer and non-cancer diseases. That is why I told people that they also have to relax.
SPIEGEL: And to help people relax, you also said that doses of 100 millisievert per year would be fine? This is normally the limit for nuclear power plant workers in emergency conditions.
Yamashita: I did not say that 100 millisievert is fine and no reason to worry. I just said that below that threshold we cannot prove a higher risk for cancer. That is the evidence from research in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl.
SPIEGEL: But you didn't understand that your reassurances would make people even more angry and frightened?
Yamashita: I think it really contributed to the confusion that the Japanese government decided to set the standard for yearly maximal dose at 20 millisievert. The International Commission on Radiological Protection suggests a limit between 20 and 100 millisievert in a situation with a nuclear emergency. Which threshold you pick is a political decision. You must weigh the risks and benefits, because any evacuation will also have risks. The Japanese government chose the most careful radiological approach. That made people more confused and insecure.
SPIEGEL: Your comments have made you a controversial figure. A Japanese journalist wants to sue you. Anti-nuclear activists ...
Yamashita: ... they are not scientists, they are not doctors, they are not radiation specialists. They do not know the international standards, which researchers worked on very hard. It makes me sad that people believe gossip, magazines and even Twitter.
SPIEGEL: Why should the people trust experts who have been telling them for decades that nuclear power plants are 100-percent safe?
Yamashita: I was surprised when I arrived in Fukushima that nobody was prepared for such a disaster. I used to advise China and states of the former Soviet Union on radiation protection. Now we have a tremendous accident in my own country and are not prepared. People in Fukushima did not even know that there are 11 reactors in their region. The medical faculty of the University of Fukushima didn't have a single specialist in radioprotection medicine.
SPIEGEL: Would you address the people affected by the accident in a different manner today?
Yamashita: In a situation where people had no understanding of radioactivity at all, I wanted to be very clear. I have now changed my communications approach from black-and-white to gray scale.
SPIEGEL: People want clear answers. Where is it safe? And where is it not?
Yamashita: We don't have those answers. When people ask me: "Are doses below 100 millisievert 100 percent safe?" Then I have to answer as a scientist: "I don't know."
SPIEGEL: From previous studies we have learned that if 100 people are exposed to levels of 100 millisievert, statistically speaking, one person will get cancer because of the radiation. Is it possible to project the level of danger of lower doses?
Yamashita: That could be. The problem is that to estimate the risk for disease we use the so-called linear-nonthreshold dose-response model, which assumes that even a small additional radiation dose would cause a small increase in cancer incidence in an exposed population. Such an increase is theoretically measurable, but with the doses below 100 millisievert it is statistically insignificant and thus cannot be considered as an argument in support of excessive risk. Also, with a tumor we do not know what caused it. Radiation does not leave a diagnosable signature. From radiation biology we also know that smaller doses can damage human DNA. But the human body can effectively repair those injuries within a short time; this is a natural intrinsic protective mechanism. That is what I am trying to tell the people.
SPIEGEL: And what should people do with this kind of information?
Yamashita: With low radiation doses the people have to decide for themselves whether to stay or to leave. Nobody can make that decision for them. They have to weigh the risks and benefits: Moving can mean a loss of jobs and having to change schools for the children. These factors cause stress. On the other hand, this family might be able to avoid the risk of cancer, even if it is only minimal.
SPIEGEL: That families affected by the nuclear accident are being forced to make any such decision is a terrible burden.
Yamashita: Yes. Therefore Tepco and the Japanese government should support people in their decisions. They should support those who want to stay as well as those who think even more than one millisievert is too high.
SPIEGEL: What kind of health risk from the radiation will the people around the plant in Fukushima have to face?
Yamashita: I do not think there will be any direct effect of the radiation for the population. The doses are too small.
SPIEGEL: So you don't think there will be any cases of cancer or cancer deaths?
Yamashita: Based on the data, we have to assume that. Of course, the situation is different for the workers in the plant.
SPIEGEL: Now you are already talking about something you actually intend to research. You plan to monitor the health condition of the residents of Fukushima for the next 30 years.
Yamashita: In the current situation, it is very difficult for us to be accepted by the local residents. We have to make the best medical care possible for these people the first priority.
SPIEGEL: Do you think adopting a more understanding tone than you have up until now would help you to gain acceptance?
Yamashita: Because of the accident, Tepco and the Japanese government have lost the trust of the people in Fukushima completely. The people are suffering, not only because of the earthquake and the tsunami, but also from severe radiation anxiety, real radiophobia. Therefore we have to lower the anxiety (and) give them some emotional support. And, later, we can open the discussion about epidemiological studies. Without the support of the local people, we cannot do anything. In this situation it doesn't even help that I am the expert from Nagasaki and Chernobyl. This is why I moved to Fukushima.
SPIEGEL: Who do you want to examine in your study?
Yamashita: There are three groups. The workers, the children and the general population. The workers are exposed to high-dose radiation. We surely need to monitor them to follow the effects concerning cancer and other diseases. The general population would be divided into two groups: One that was exposed to relatively low radiation and one that was exposed to relatively high radiation. The Fukushima government health office is just finishing a pilot study with which they have questioned 26,000 people.
SPIEGEL: But the people don't know how much radiation they were exposed to.
Yamashita: That is what we have to find out. We ask where the people were on March 11 at what time and then we ask those questions for every day in March. We also ask what people ate the first two weeks after the accident, what material their house or apartment is built out of. We want to connect these data with information of the distribution of the radioactive cloud and calculate the dose after the fact.
SPIEGEL: How many people should participate?
Yamashita: All 2 million residents of Fukushima prefecture. It is a big task and would set a science record. The government just decided about compensation payments for people affected by the nuclear accident. Through such applications we want to try to contact also those who moved outside of Fukushima.
SPIEGEL: What about the children?
Yamashita: We want to test the thyroids of all children under 18, altogeher 360,000 children, with ultrasound. After exposure to radiation it takes about five years until thyroid cancer first develops. We know that from Chernobyl.
SPIEGEL: Are you also researching the mental effects of the disaster?
Yamashita: Of course. We know from Chernobyl that the psychological consequences are enormous. Life expectancy of the evacuees dropped from 65 to 58 years -- not because of cancer, but because of depression, alcoholism and suicide. Relocation is not easy, the stress is very big. We must not only track those problems, but also treat them. Otherwise people will feel they are just guinea pigs in our research.
Interview conducted by Cordula Meyer
The human element
The human element
By Hugh Gusterson | 1 September 2011
The discussions about the safety of nuclear reactors in the new post-Fukushima world have focused on technical questions: Is it possible to make reactors earthquake-proof? What is the best way to ensure that spent fuel remains safe? What is the optimal design for coolant systems? Can reactors be made "inherently safe"?
Sometimes these discussions make it sound as though the reactors operate all by themselves -- both when they run smoothly or during an accident. But that is to omit the human element. Nuclear reactors are operated by fallible human beings, and at least two meltdowns have been caused by poor human decisions: the 1961 meltdown of an experimental military reactor in Idaho, which killed three operators when one of them withdrew a control rod six times as far as he was supposed to (carrying out a high-tech murder-suicide over a love triangle, according to some accounts), and the Chernobyl accident, which was caused by an ill-conceived experiment conducted outside approved protocols.
So, if nuclear safety is a matter of human behavior as well as sound technical infrastructure, we should look to the social sciences in addition to engineering to improve reactor safety. After all, the machines don't run themselves. The social sciences have five lessons for us here:
The blind spot. In what we might call the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome, human cognition is such that, in the absence of a disaster, individuals often filter out accumulating indications of safety problems that look like obvious red flags in retrospect -- just as frogs do not jump out of a pot of water on a stove as long as the temperature goes up slowly. Diane Vaughan's award-winning book on the Challenger disaster demonstrates a clear pattern in earlier space shuttle launches of O-ring performance degrading in proportion to declining launch temperatures -- the problem that would ultimately kill Challenger's ill-fated crew. Some shuttle engineers had become concerned about this, but the organizational complex responsible for the space shuttle could not bring this problem into full cognitive focus as long as the missions were successful. Operational success created a blinding glow that made this safety issue hard to see.
The whistle-blower's dilemma. The space shuttle program provides another example of human fallibility, explored in William Langewische's account of the Columbia space shuttle accident: Large, technical organizations tend to be unfriendly to employees who harp on safety issues. The NASA engineers who warned senior management -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the Columbia shuttle was endangered by the foam it lost on takeoff were treated as pests. (The same is true of Roger Boisjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineer who was ostracized and punished for having warned correctly that the Challenger shuttle was likely to explode if launched at low temperature.) Large technical organizations prioritize meeting deadlines and fulfilling production targets, and their internal reward structures tend to reflect these priorities. This is especially true if the organizations operate in a market environment where revenue streams are at stake. In such organizations, bonuses tend not to go to those who cause the organization to miss targets and deadlines or spend extra money to prevent accidents that may seem hypothetical. It is not the safety engineers, after all, who become CEOs. Those with safety concerns report that they often censor themselves unless they are deeply convinced of the urgency of their cause. Indeed, there is -- sadly -- substantial literature on the various forms of mistreatment of engineers who do come forward with such concerns.
The politics of oversight. Regulatory apparatuses tend to degrade over time -- especially in political systems such as America's, which tend to facilitate the corporate capture of government functions. Thanks to the leverage afforded by campaign donations and the revolving door between public and private employment, industries have become extremely skillful at inserting their former employees, future employees, and other allies into the very regulatory agencies that oversee them. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism on the Securities and Exchange Commission in the latest issue of Rolling Stone shows how this can reduce a regulatory agency to an empty husk. Whether it's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Food and Drug Administration, the story is the same: Government agencies that started off as aggressive watchdogs have become absorbed over time by those over whom they have titular oversight. Americans recently saw the dire consequences of this trend in the banking meltdown of 2008.
Overwhelmed by speed and complexity. As Charles Perrow argues in his influential book Normal Accidents, which was inspired by the Three Mile Island accident, human operators function well in environments of routinized normality; but, when highly complex technical systems function in unpredicted ways -- especially if the jagged interactions between subsystems unfold very rapidly -- then the human capacity for cognitive processing is quickly overwhelmed. In other words, if a reactor is veering toward an accident caused by the failure of a single system in a way that operators have been trained to handle, then they are likely to retain control. But, if the accident-in-the-making involves unforeseen combinations of failures unfolding quickly and requires improvised responses rather than routinized ones, the outcome is far less hopeful.
The wild card. Finally, human nature being what it is, there are always the wild cards: people who kill romantic rivals via nuclear meltdown, freelance experimenters, terrorists, operators who should never have made it through personnel screening, operators who are drunk on the job, operators whose performance has declined through laziness, depression, boredom, or any host of reasons.
Many of these factors came together to produce the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. As Gregory Button demonstrates in his book, Disaster Culture, the US Minerals Management Service had slackened its oversight of offshore drilling as many former regulators went on to work for the oil industry; in the absence of a major blowout, incipient safety problems remained unseen; those who did warn against cutting corners were marginalized; and the accident unfolded with such speed and ferocity that those aboard the rig were quickly overwhelmed.
The bottom line: Nuclear safety is threatened by human as well as technical malfunctions, and the risk of disaster can only be attenuated through attention to the principles of social engineering as well as nuclear engineering. While human behavior can always overflow the bounds of our plans for its containment, there are measures that can at least lower the risk of a nuclear disaster caused by human factors: First, the nuclear industry needs to do more to both protect and reward whistle-blowers; and, second, the industry needs regulators with a genuine desire to exercise oversight -- rather than people hoping to increase their income by later going to work for the very companies that they were regulating. Unfortunately, this goes against the ethos of the contemporary United States, where the trend-lines are going in the wrong direction.
By Hugh Gusterson | 1 September 2011
The discussions about the safety of nuclear reactors in the new post-Fukushima world have focused on technical questions: Is it possible to make reactors earthquake-proof? What is the best way to ensure that spent fuel remains safe? What is the optimal design for coolant systems? Can reactors be made "inherently safe"?
Sometimes these discussions make it sound as though the reactors operate all by themselves -- both when they run smoothly or during an accident. But that is to omit the human element. Nuclear reactors are operated by fallible human beings, and at least two meltdowns have been caused by poor human decisions: the 1961 meltdown of an experimental military reactor in Idaho, which killed three operators when one of them withdrew a control rod six times as far as he was supposed to (carrying out a high-tech murder-suicide over a love triangle, according to some accounts), and the Chernobyl accident, which was caused by an ill-conceived experiment conducted outside approved protocols.
So, if nuclear safety is a matter of human behavior as well as sound technical infrastructure, we should look to the social sciences in addition to engineering to improve reactor safety. After all, the machines don't run themselves. The social sciences have five lessons for us here:
The blind spot. In what we might call the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome, human cognition is such that, in the absence of a disaster, individuals often filter out accumulating indications of safety problems that look like obvious red flags in retrospect -- just as frogs do not jump out of a pot of water on a stove as long as the temperature goes up slowly. Diane Vaughan's award-winning book on the Challenger disaster demonstrates a clear pattern in earlier space shuttle launches of O-ring performance degrading in proportion to declining launch temperatures -- the problem that would ultimately kill Challenger's ill-fated crew. Some shuttle engineers had become concerned about this, but the organizational complex responsible for the space shuttle could not bring this problem into full cognitive focus as long as the missions were successful. Operational success created a blinding glow that made this safety issue hard to see.
The whistle-blower's dilemma. The space shuttle program provides another example of human fallibility, explored in William Langewische's account of the Columbia space shuttle accident: Large, technical organizations tend to be unfriendly to employees who harp on safety issues. The NASA engineers who warned senior management -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the Columbia shuttle was endangered by the foam it lost on takeoff were treated as pests. (The same is true of Roger Boisjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineer who was ostracized and punished for having warned correctly that the Challenger shuttle was likely to explode if launched at low temperature.) Large technical organizations prioritize meeting deadlines and fulfilling production targets, and their internal reward structures tend to reflect these priorities. This is especially true if the organizations operate in a market environment where revenue streams are at stake. In such organizations, bonuses tend not to go to those who cause the organization to miss targets and deadlines or spend extra money to prevent accidents that may seem hypothetical. It is not the safety engineers, after all, who become CEOs. Those with safety concerns report that they often censor themselves unless they are deeply convinced of the urgency of their cause. Indeed, there is -- sadly -- substantial literature on the various forms of mistreatment of engineers who do come forward with such concerns.
The politics of oversight. Regulatory apparatuses tend to degrade over time -- especially in political systems such as America's, which tend to facilitate the corporate capture of government functions. Thanks to the leverage afforded by campaign donations and the revolving door between public and private employment, industries have become extremely skillful at inserting their former employees, future employees, and other allies into the very regulatory agencies that oversee them. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism on the Securities and Exchange Commission in the latest issue of Rolling Stone shows how this can reduce a regulatory agency to an empty husk. Whether it's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the Food and Drug Administration, the story is the same: Government agencies that started off as aggressive watchdogs have become absorbed over time by those over whom they have titular oversight. Americans recently saw the dire consequences of this trend in the banking meltdown of 2008.
Overwhelmed by speed and complexity. As Charles Perrow argues in his influential book Normal Accidents, which was inspired by the Three Mile Island accident, human operators function well in environments of routinized normality; but, when highly complex technical systems function in unpredicted ways -- especially if the jagged interactions between subsystems unfold very rapidly -- then the human capacity for cognitive processing is quickly overwhelmed. In other words, if a reactor is veering toward an accident caused by the failure of a single system in a way that operators have been trained to handle, then they are likely to retain control. But, if the accident-in-the-making involves unforeseen combinations of failures unfolding quickly and requires improvised responses rather than routinized ones, the outcome is far less hopeful.
The wild card. Finally, human nature being what it is, there are always the wild cards: people who kill romantic rivals via nuclear meltdown, freelance experimenters, terrorists, operators who should never have made it through personnel screening, operators who are drunk on the job, operators whose performance has declined through laziness, depression, boredom, or any host of reasons.
Many of these factors came together to produce the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. As Gregory Button demonstrates in his book, Disaster Culture, the US Minerals Management Service had slackened its oversight of offshore drilling as many former regulators went on to work for the oil industry; in the absence of a major blowout, incipient safety problems remained unseen; those who did warn against cutting corners were marginalized; and the accident unfolded with such speed and ferocity that those aboard the rig were quickly overwhelmed.
The bottom line: Nuclear safety is threatened by human as well as technical malfunctions, and the risk of disaster can only be attenuated through attention to the principles of social engineering as well as nuclear engineering. While human behavior can always overflow the bounds of our plans for its containment, there are measures that can at least lower the risk of a nuclear disaster caused by human factors: First, the nuclear industry needs to do more to both protect and reward whistle-blowers; and, second, the industry needs regulators with a genuine desire to exercise oversight -- rather than people hoping to increase their income by later going to work for the very companies that they were regulating. Unfortunately, this goes against the ethos of the contemporary United States, where the trend-lines are going in the wrong direction.
Gov't officials' role in manipulating nuclear symposiums confirmed
Gov't officials' role in manipulating nuclear symposiums confirmed
The symposium on a "pluthermal" project at the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant is held in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, on Aug. 26, 2007. (Mainichi)
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Central government officials were involved in attempts to manipulate how public opinion on nuclear power is presented at government-sponsored symposiums, a third-party panel investigating the matter said Tuesday.
According to an interim report submitted by the panel to the industry ministry the same day, officials of the government's nuclear safety agency asked utility firms to encourage people related to the utilities to attend nuclear power symposiums several years ago and to voice opinions supportive of nuclear plants.
The three "pluthermal" nuclear project symposiums were held by Kyushu Electric Power Co. in October 2005 on its Genkai power plant, Shikoku Electric Power Co. in June 2006 on its Ikata plant and Chubu Electric Power Co. in August 2007 on its Hamaoka plant.
Pluthermal power generation uses plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel, which contains plutonium extracted from spent fuel, in existing reactors and is an important pillar of Japan's nuclear program.
"It's very regrettable that the government's involvement in the pluthermal symposiums linked to the Genkai, Ikata and Hamaoka nuclear power plants was confirmed," Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Banri Kaieda said in a statement.
Panel head Takashi Oizumi, a lawyer who once headed the Osaka High Public Prosecutors Office, said at a press conference that government officials' involvement is also suspected in five more cases related to similar events held by Kyushu Electric and Tohoku Electric Power Co., and that the panel will investigate the matter further.
The panel consisting of four legal experts aims to compile its final report by the end of September.
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency chief Hiroyuki Fukano offered an apology for the agency officials' involvement at a press conference, saying, "I apologize to the citizens and those concerned."
"Essentially, (the agency) should have a culture in which officials act rightly and fairly, but it was not the case," he said.
The report said a Shikoku Electric official in charge of the symposium in question produced a memo saying that a nuclear safety agency official told the utility employee that the key to the symposium's success was securing enough attendees and suppressing the views of people opposed to nuclear power projects.
The panel was set up earlier this month by the industry ministry, which has the agency under its wing, to investigate allegations that the agency asked utilities to dress up public symposiums on atomic energy to make local communities appear supportive of nuclear power plants.
The allegations emerged following the revelation of a scandal in which senior officials of Kyushu Electric Power Co. tried to manipulate public opinion on its Genkai nuclear plant in its favor in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident.
State-sponsored symposiums on nuclear power have been held across the country to enable local leaders to consider the operations of nuclear power plants in their jurisdictions.
(Mainichi Japan) August 31, 2011
The symposium on a "pluthermal" project at the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant is held in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, on Aug. 26, 2007. (Mainichi)
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- Central government officials were involved in attempts to manipulate how public opinion on nuclear power is presented at government-sponsored symposiums, a third-party panel investigating the matter said Tuesday.
According to an interim report submitted by the panel to the industry ministry the same day, officials of the government's nuclear safety agency asked utility firms to encourage people related to the utilities to attend nuclear power symposiums several years ago and to voice opinions supportive of nuclear plants.
The three "pluthermal" nuclear project symposiums were held by Kyushu Electric Power Co. in October 2005 on its Genkai power plant, Shikoku Electric Power Co. in June 2006 on its Ikata plant and Chubu Electric Power Co. in August 2007 on its Hamaoka plant.
Pluthermal power generation uses plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel, which contains plutonium extracted from spent fuel, in existing reactors and is an important pillar of Japan's nuclear program.
"It's very regrettable that the government's involvement in the pluthermal symposiums linked to the Genkai, Ikata and Hamaoka nuclear power plants was confirmed," Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Banri Kaieda said in a statement.
Panel head Takashi Oizumi, a lawyer who once headed the Osaka High Public Prosecutors Office, said at a press conference that government officials' involvement is also suspected in five more cases related to similar events held by Kyushu Electric and Tohoku Electric Power Co., and that the panel will investigate the matter further.
The panel consisting of four legal experts aims to compile its final report by the end of September.
Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency chief Hiroyuki Fukano offered an apology for the agency officials' involvement at a press conference, saying, "I apologize to the citizens and those concerned."
"Essentially, (the agency) should have a culture in which officials act rightly and fairly, but it was not the case," he said.
The report said a Shikoku Electric official in charge of the symposium in question produced a memo saying that a nuclear safety agency official told the utility employee that the key to the symposium's success was securing enough attendees and suppressing the views of people opposed to nuclear power projects.
The panel was set up earlier this month by the industry ministry, which has the agency under its wing, to investigate allegations that the agency asked utilities to dress up public symposiums on atomic energy to make local communities appear supportive of nuclear power plants.
The allegations emerged following the revelation of a scandal in which senior officials of Kyushu Electric Power Co. tried to manipulate public opinion on its Genkai nuclear plant in its favor in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident.
State-sponsored symposiums on nuclear power have been held across the country to enable local leaders to consider the operations of nuclear power plants in their jurisdictions.
(Mainichi Japan) August 31, 2011
Saturday, September 03, 2011
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