Monday, March 6, 2017

TEPCO President Naomi Hirose Agrees TEPCO has Displayed "insufficient humility and displayed arrogance."


Fukushima Daiichi looked pretty bad yesterday. I thought perhaps it was raining because of the degree of pixilation on the webcams but it was not:











Fukushima is an unmitigated catastrophe.

Is TEPCO going to cause another Fukushima disaster?

TEPCO was just ordered to re-submit documents required by Japan's nuclear regulatory agency, the NRA, to assess safety of reactor restarts at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant.

TEPCO first submitted the required documents for approval 3 years ago. However, it seems that TEPCO had failed to provide some critical information about a key building at the plant's inability to withstand "even half of the assumed strongest seismic shaking":
TEPCO told it must re-submit papers to pass NRA screeningTHE ASAHI SHIMBUN March 1, 2017 at 18:40 JST http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201703010074.html

The nation's nuclear watchdog, incensed at more blundering by Tokyo Electric Power Co., ordered it to re-submit documents for the restart of two reactors at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant after checking them again for accuracy.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority also summoned TEPCO's president to its office and gave him a dressing-down for failing to reveal information that could have compromised safety at the plant.
In my published work on the Fukushima disaster I have documented many instances where TEPCO has been found guilty by government authorities of FRAUD pertaining to safety conditions at its nuclear power plants.

From Fukushima and the Privatization of Risk Chapter 2 (Palgrave, 2013)

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was Tepco’s first nuclear plant.[i] The earliest reactors at the plant were built in the 1960s by Ebasco, an American general contractor that no longer exists. Reactors 1 through 5 at the site were based on General Electric designs.

Kiyoshi Kishi, a former Tepco executive heading Tepco’s nuclear plant engineering, was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal about the lack of tsunami precautions at the plant. Kishi was quoted as stating that at the time the plant was built, a threat posed by a large tsunami at the site was considered ‘impossible.’[ii]

Later, some precautions were taken to protect the plant against a tsunami with a height of 18.8 feet. The tsunami that hit the plant on 11 March was over twice that height. Tepco engineers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal also reported that the venting systems in reactors one through five were very inefficient.

Flooding of the generators and the poor ventilations systems are cited as the causes of the meltdowns and explosions at the Daiichi units 1 through 4. The four reactors at the Fukushima Daini complex and building 6 at the Daiichi complex used General Electric’s Mark II system and were purportedly tailored more specifically to meet Japan’s earthquake and tsunami risks.[iii] These reactor buildings were reported in this article as having shut down safely, although contradictory evidence exists about their safe shutdown that will be discussed presently.[iv]

Japan’s lax safety record is not the sole explanation for the Fukushima disaster. Two engineers at General Electric resigned in 1975 after concluding that the nuclear reactor designs for the Mark I reactors (built at Fukushima) were fundamentally flawed and dangerous.[v] Boiling water reactors operate with intense pressure and the engineers felt that the design specifications were insufficient for handling pressures that would result from a loss of cooling accident.

One of the engineers, Dale G. Bridenbaugh, explained the GE engineers’ concerns in a recent interview with ABC: ‘The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant . . . The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release.’

That being said, it is notable that Tepco’s nuclear plants have been plagued with scandals. In March of 1997 a small explosion and radiation release occurred at the Dōnen nuclear reprocessing plant. In 1999, the Jōyō fast-breeder uranium-reprocessing reactor at Tokai-mura (Ibaraki Prefecture) had an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction that killed two employees and released radioactive emissions.[vi] Reforms ensued.

The Japanese Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) was established in 2001 in response to central government reforms. At that time, a ‘Roundtable Committee on Fast Breeder Reactors was set up’ to create new policies. The recommendation was to maintain the program, but to adopt a more pragmatic approach that regarded the program as an option, as opposed to an ultimate goal.[vii]

Reforms during the early 2000s unearthed problems at commercial power plants in Japan. In 2002, Tepco’s president, vice president, and chairman stepped down after the utility acknowledged that it failed to report accurately cracks at its nuclear reactors in the 1980s and 1990s.[viii]

Tepco was suspected of falsifying twenty-nine cases of safety repair records. The Japanese NISA claimed that up to eight reactors could be operating with unfixed cracks, ‘though the cracks don't pose an immediate threat.’ In 2006, Tepco was found to have falsified coolant water temperatures at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 1985 and 1988.[ix]

The falsified records were used during a 2005 inspection. In the wake of these scandals, Tepco revealed that an uncontrolled chain reaction had occurred in unit 3 at Fukushima Daiichi when fuel rods fell into the reactor.[x] Tepco also acknowledged that it had falsified records of safety tests on unit 1’s containment vessel that occurred in 1991 -1992.[xi] In 2010, unit 2 reactor stopped automatically after problems with a generator resulted in a steep drop in the water level inside the reactor by about 1.8 meters.

Problems continued. In July 2007, Tepco's Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata prefecture was damaged in a magnitude 6.8 earthquake.[xii] Tepco claimed no radiation was released, but later admitted radiation that had occurred and that radioactive water and spilled into the Sea of Japan.[xiii] However, as with other countries experiencing nuclear contamination accidents, these incidences did not deter Japanese utilities or architects of nuclear power.

Japan’s nuclear utilities and engineering companies are powerfully entrenched in Japan’s economic and political spheres.[xiv] Indeed, despite domestic problems, Japan’s government hopes to promote its nuclear industry abroad.

For example in August of 2011, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry visited Vietnam in order to promote sales of nuclear plants, anticipating that Japan will be contracted to build that nation’s second nuclear plant. In June of 2012, Hitachi announced that it plans to double its nuclear power sales and post-Fukushima disaster work.[xv]

Japan’s December 2012 election ushered in a majority from the conservative LDP party, resulting in a more pro-nuclear and militant group of legislators. Shinzo Abe, the new prime minister, in immediately called for re-starting nuclear reactors and Japan’s nuclear reprocessing idled after the March 2011 earthquake.[xvi] Japan’s new Nuclear Regulation Authority, which assumed office 19 September 2012, backed re-starts, although insisting on extensive geological and safety inspections. Nuclear energy was prioritized over the myriad economic and social risks caused by the Fukushima disaster.


REFERENCES

[i] N. Shirouzu and C. Dawson (1 July 2011) ‘Design Flaw Fueled Nuclear Disaster’, The Wall Street Journal, A1, A12.

[ii] Shirouzu and Dawson. Design Flaw

[iii] Shirouzu and Dawson. Design Flaw p. A12.

[iv] However, a status report issued by the IAEA on May 5, 2011, by Deputy Director General and Head of Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, Denis Flory, reported that as of April 21st, the exclusion zone around Fukushima Daini plant was reduced from 10 to kilometers. It is not clear why an exclusion zone around Daini was maintained through April if the reactors there all shutdown safely.

[v] ‘Fukushima: Mark 1 Nuclear Reactor Design Caused GE Scientist To Quit In Protest’ (15 March 2011), ABC the Blotter, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fukushima-mark-nuclear-reactor-design-caused-ge-scientist/story?id=13141287, date accessed 7 April 2011.

[vi] Shirouzu and Tudor ‘Crisis Revives’

[vii] Suzuki ‘Japan’s Plutonium Breeder Reactor and its Fuel Cycle’, 56.

[viii] ‘Heavy fallout from Japan nuclear scandal’ (2 September 2002), CNN, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/BUSINESS/asia/09/02/japan.tepco/index.html, date accessed 9 June 2012.

[ix] ‘Japan's Nuclear Power Operator Has Checkered Past’ (12 March 2011), Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/12/us-japan-nuclear-operator-idUSTRE72B1B420110312, date accessed 19 April 2011.

[x] N. Shirouzu and R. Smith (16 March 2011) ‘Plant's Design, Safety Record Are Under Scrutiny’, The Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704396504576204461929992144.html, date accessed 16 March 2011.

[xi] N. Shirouzu and A. Tudor (15 March 2011) ‘Crisis Revives Doubts on Regulation’, The Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703363904576200533746195522.html, date accessed 15 March 2011.

[xii] ‘New Japanese Nuclear Power Reactors Delayed’ (26 March 2008), World Nuclear News, http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-New_Japanese_nuclear_power_reactors_delayed-260308.html, date accessed 15 July 2012.

[xiii] Shirouzu and Tudor ‘Crisis Revives’

[xiv] See S. Carpenter (2012) Japan’s Nuclear Crisis: The Routes to Responsibility (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave), pp. 1-223.

[xv] ‘Hitachi Says Nuclear Power Sales to Double’ (15 June 2012), Japan Today, http://www.japantoday.com/category/business/view/hitachi-says-nuclear-power-sales-to-double, date accessed 15 June 2012.

[xvi] ‘Optimism Rises in ‘Nuclear Village’ After LDP's Victory’ (19 December 2012), The Asahi Shimbun, http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201212190048, date accessed 19 December 2012.



 





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