Safety second, body last
Taken from “Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr - emphasis mine
Faked documentaries and government misinformation do succeed to some extent in quelling people’s misgivings about their country, but unfortunately some pretty scary skeletons hidden in Japan’s bureaucratic closets. At a sinister agency called Donen, the hiding of information becomes downright terrifying. Donen, a Japanese acronym for the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, manages Japan’s nuclear-power program.
At Monju, the fast-breeder nuclear reactor near Tsuruga, which suffered a major leak of liquid sodium from its cooling system in 1995, Donen officials first stated that the leakage was “minimal.” It later turned out to be more than three tons, the largest accident of its type in the world. But they could easily remedy the trouble by hiding the evidence: Donen staff edited film taken at the scene, releasing only an innocuous five minutes’ worth and cutting fifteen minutes that showed serious damage, including the thermometer on the leaking pipes and icicle-like extrusions of sodium.
Donen’s attitude to the public at the time of the Monju scandal says much about officials who take for granted that they can always hide behind a wall of denial. The day after the accident, the chairman of the Tsuruga city council went to visit the Monju plant - and Donen officials simply shut the door in his face. Kishimoto Konosuke, the chairman of Tsuruga’s Atomic and Thermal Energy Committee, said, “Donen was more concerned with concealing the accident than with explaining to us what was happening. That shows what they think of us.”
Still, there was widespread public anger and concern over Monju (which remained shut down for the rest of the decade), yet the same scenario repeated itself in March 1997, this time when drums filled with nuclear waste caught fire and exploded at a plant at Tokai City north of Tokyo, releasing high levels of radioactivity into the environment. In May 1994, newspapers had revealed that seventy kilograms of plutonium dust and waste had gathered in pipes and conveyors of the Tokai plant; Donen had known of the missing plutonium (enough to build as many as twenty nuclear bombs) but did nothing about it until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded an accounting. To this day, Donen claims to have no idea where the plutonium is clustered or how to remove it. “We know that the plutonium is there,” an official said. “It’s just held up in the system.”
Given that several nuclear bombs’ worth of plutonium was lost somewhere inside the Tokai plant, there was great public concern over the Tokai fire. Yet Donen’s initial report was a shambles, in some places saying, “Radioactive material was released,” and in others, “No radioactive material was released”; claiming that workers had reconfirmed in the morning that the fire was under control, though they had not (managers had pressured the workers to change their stories); misstating the amount of leaked radioactive material, which turned out to be larger than reported by a factor of twenty. Incredibly, on the day of the explosion, sixty-four people, including science and engineering students and foreign trainees, toured the complex, even visiting one building only a hundred meters from the site of the fire - and nobody ever informed them of the accident.
Workers checked the state of the blaze by looking in the window - they used no other monitoring devices and did not check again. A team of three people, including an untrained local fireman, entered the building with no protection and proceeded to seal it up - with duct tape. Dozens of other workers were sent into or near the site, unprotected by masks, and inhaled radioactive fumes. So unconcerned were Donen officials that seven maintenance employees played golf on the day of the fire - and went back to play another round the day after.
…
Nor is it only government agencies that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head on September 30th, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan’s worst nuclear accident ever - the world’s worst since Chernobyl - resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of the critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai’s nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO’s managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.
Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them - and they were consequently all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found that could handle the victims, even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities. There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert per year, and from this officials realized for the first time that a fission reaction was still going on! Many other measurements weren’t made until as many as five days later. Rescue workers were not warned to wear protective suits and national authorities had no disaster plan to cope with the emergency. “Oh no, a serious accident can’t happen here,” a top Japanese nuclear official declared some hours after the fission reaction at Tokai had taken place.
The level of sheer fiction in Japan’s nuclear industry can be gauged from the story of how Donen misused most of its budget for renovation work between 1993 and 1997. The problem lay in 2,000 drums of low-level radioactive waste stored at Tokai, which began rusting in pits filled with rainwater. Records show that the problem dated to the 1970s, but only in 1993 did Donen begin to take action, asking for money to remove the drums from the pits and to build sheds for temporary storage. So far so good. Four years and 1 billion yen later, Donen still had not taken the drums out of the pits or built sheds. Nobody knows where the money went - semipublic agencies like Donen are not required to make their budgets public - but the suspicion was that Donen secretly spent it doing patchwork waterproofing in the pits to hide evidence of radioactive leakage. There I no problem, the agency said. One official remarked, “The water level has not dropped, so radioactive material is not leaking outside.”
Donen went on to request more money for 1998, stating that the renovation was going smoothly, and asking for 71 million yen to remove the sheds it had never built. It even attached drawings to show how it was reinforcing the inner walls of the storage pits. The Donen official in charge of technology to protect the environment from radioactive waste said, “It’s true that the storage pits will eventually be reinforced. So I thought it would be all right if details of the project were different from what we had stated in our request for budgetary approval.”
When Donen gets money from the government to remove sheds it never built and shore up the walls of pits it never drained, we are definitely moving into the territory of Escher and Kafka. A final surreal touch is provided by an animated video produced by Donen to show children that plutonium isn’t as dangerous as activists say. “A small character named Pu (the chemical symbol of plutonium), gives his friend a glass of plutonium water and says it’s safe to drink. His friend, duly impressed, drinks no less than six cups of the substance before declaring, “I feel refreshed!” “.
Faked documentaries and government misinformation do succeed to some extent in quelling people’s misgivings about their country, but unfortunately some pretty scary skeletons hidden in Japan’s bureaucratic closets. At a sinister agency called Donen, the hiding of information becomes downright terrifying. Donen, a Japanese acronym for the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, manages Japan’s nuclear-power program.
At Monju, the fast-breeder nuclear reactor near Tsuruga, which suffered a major leak of liquid sodium from its cooling system in 1995, Donen officials first stated that the leakage was “minimal.” It later turned out to be more than three tons, the largest accident of its type in the world. But they could easily remedy the trouble by hiding the evidence: Donen staff edited film taken at the scene, releasing only an innocuous five minutes’ worth and cutting fifteen minutes that showed serious damage, including the thermometer on the leaking pipes and icicle-like extrusions of sodium.
Donen’s attitude to the public at the time of the Monju scandal says much about officials who take for granted that they can always hide behind a wall of denial. The day after the accident, the chairman of the Tsuruga city council went to visit the Monju plant - and Donen officials simply shut the door in his face. Kishimoto Konosuke, the chairman of Tsuruga’s Atomic and Thermal Energy Committee, said, “Donen was more concerned with concealing the accident than with explaining to us what was happening. That shows what they think of us.”
Still, there was widespread public anger and concern over Monju (which remained shut down for the rest of the decade), yet the same scenario repeated itself in March 1997, this time when drums filled with nuclear waste caught fire and exploded at a plant at Tokai City north of Tokyo, releasing high levels of radioactivity into the environment. In May 1994, newspapers had revealed that seventy kilograms of plutonium dust and waste had gathered in pipes and conveyors of the Tokai plant; Donen had known of the missing plutonium (enough to build as many as twenty nuclear bombs) but did nothing about it until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demanded an accounting. To this day, Donen claims to have no idea where the plutonium is clustered or how to remove it. “We know that the plutonium is there,” an official said. “It’s just held up in the system.”
Given that several nuclear bombs’ worth of plutonium was lost somewhere inside the Tokai plant, there was great public concern over the Tokai fire. Yet Donen’s initial report was a shambles, in some places saying, “Radioactive material was released,” and in others, “No radioactive material was released”; claiming that workers had reconfirmed in the morning that the fire was under control, though they had not (managers had pressured the workers to change their stories); misstating the amount of leaked radioactive material, which turned out to be larger than reported by a factor of twenty. Incredibly, on the day of the explosion, sixty-four people, including science and engineering students and foreign trainees, toured the complex, even visiting one building only a hundred meters from the site of the fire - and nobody ever informed them of the accident.
Workers checked the state of the blaze by looking in the window - they used no other monitoring devices and did not check again. A team of three people, including an untrained local fireman, entered the building with no protection and proceeded to seal it up - with duct tape. Dozens of other workers were sent into or near the site, unprotected by masks, and inhaled radioactive fumes. So unconcerned were Donen officials that seven maintenance employees played golf on the day of the fire - and went back to play another round the day after.
…
Nor is it only government agencies that are falling behind in nuclear safety. The same problems beset private industry. The troubles at the Tokai plant came to a head on September 30th, 1999, when employees at a fuel-processing plant managed by JCO, a private contractor, dumped so much uranium into a settling basin that it reached critical mass and exploded into uncontrolled nuclear fission. It was Japan’s worst nuclear accident ever - the world’s worst since Chernobyl - resulting in the sequestration of tens of thousands of people living in the area near the plant. The explosion was a tragedy for forty-nine workers who were exposed to radiation (three of the critically) but at the same time a comedy of errors, misinformation and mistakes. It turned out that Tokai’s nuclear plant had not repaired its safety equipment for more than seventeen years. The workers used a secret manual prepared by JCO’s managers that bypassed safety regulations in several critical areas: essentially, material that workers should have disposed of via dissolution cylinders and pumps was carried out manually with a bucket.
Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them - and they were consequently all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found that could handle the victims, even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities. There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert per year, and from this officials realized for the first time that a fission reaction was still going on! Many other measurements weren’t made until as many as five days later. Rescue workers were not warned to wear protective suits and national authorities had no disaster plan to cope with the emergency. “Oh no, a serious accident can’t happen here,” a top Japanese nuclear official declared some hours after the fission reaction at Tokai had taken place.
The level of sheer fiction in Japan’s nuclear industry can be gauged from the story of how Donen misused most of its budget for renovation work between 1993 and 1997. The problem lay in 2,000 drums of low-level radioactive waste stored at Tokai, which began rusting in pits filled with rainwater. Records show that the problem dated to the 1970s, but only in 1993 did Donen begin to take action, asking for money to remove the drums from the pits and to build sheds for temporary storage. So far so good. Four years and 1 billion yen later, Donen still had not taken the drums out of the pits or built sheds. Nobody knows where the money went - semipublic agencies like Donen are not required to make their budgets public - but the suspicion was that Donen secretly spent it doing patchwork waterproofing in the pits to hide evidence of radioactive leakage. There I no problem, the agency said. One official remarked, “The water level has not dropped, so radioactive material is not leaking outside.”
Donen went on to request more money for 1998, stating that the renovation was going smoothly, and asking for 71 million yen to remove the sheds it had never built. It even attached drawings to show how it was reinforcing the inner walls of the storage pits. The Donen official in charge of technology to protect the environment from radioactive waste said, “It’s true that the storage pits will eventually be reinforced. So I thought it would be all right if details of the project were different from what we had stated in our request for budgetary approval.”
When Donen gets money from the government to remove sheds it never built and shore up the walls of pits it never drained, we are definitely moving into the territory of Escher and Kafka. A final surreal touch is provided by an animated video produced by Donen to show children that plutonium isn’t as dangerous as activists say. “A small character named Pu (the chemical symbol of plutonium), gives his friend a glass of plutonium water and says it’s safe to drink. His friend, duly impressed, drinks no less than six cups of the substance before declaring, “I feel refreshed!” “.