We are safe from nuclear disaster
Thierry Xerri, the nuclear counsellor at the French Embassy in Tokyo who addressed the Delphi Network a couple of weeks ago, argues that we are fundamentally safe from a nuclear disaster in Japan. By that, he covers the full spectrum of nuclear restarts, reactor safety, the current state of Fukushima, and radiation from contaminated food.
Intuitively, we always knew there is some truth to this despite the deeply ingrained fear we all have of nuclear technology. After all, never on the planet has there been the simultaneous meltdown of 3 nuclear reactor cores yet not a single person died. These were genuine meltdowns, too with the fuel rods melting at 5000 degrees celsius through the massive steel vessels and eating their way through part of the eight metre concrete slabs placed underneath.
Xerri’s point is not that the governance in the nuclear industry was adequate it clearly was not. But even in a very old reactor coming to the end of its life, with a giant tsunami and human error thrown in - in other words, the worst of worst case scenarios the technology was stable enough to prevent a single fatality. The litany of failures in the wake of the disaster show that only badluck played a role. It cannot be argued that good fortune in any way flattered the situation. Everything that could go wrong really did go wrong.
Regarding the important article by Kyle Cleveland at Temple University on a radiation cloud avoiding Tokyo purely through luck, Xerri was equally unshakeable. “The worst combination is an airborne cloud of radioactive debris and rain, because the rain pulls the radioactive particles to the ground. But even here, you can stay safe by staying inside your home and using a mask. Even if you decided to leave, you can take your time over the course of a few days or even one week the radiation dose will not be harmful, especially if decontamination is started immediately”.
Far more dangerous than the radiation would have been a panic involving 40 million people trying to get out of Tokyo at short notice hence, the government’s decision to lean on the side of understatement regarding the radiation risk was the correct and rational one.
If we take a quick historical detour and look at the Great Kanto Quake of 1923, we can see the dangers of panic are not to be underestimated. Far from revealing stoicism, discipline and orderliness, citizens were swept up by rumours, and ended up butchering thousands of Korean guest workers. The prime minister himself, on a tour of Tokyo, was stopped and threatened by an armed vigilante group.
We also discussed one notorious feature of Fukushima, namely the spent fuel pool of unit 4. Unit 4 was the only reactor which did not melt down as it was under maintenance. However, there was great concern over the spent fuel pool, which Western observers were sure had lost its protective water content. Spent fuel pods take longer to heat up without cooling agents, but there are so many of them, they actually have more radioactive content than the reactor itself. Tepco always insisted the pool was full and amazingly, they later turned out to be right.
The 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in the Ukraine, Xerri said, shows the role of human error, faulty design, and the lack of a safety culture. Moscow ‘experts’ arrived on site and in an effort to find out a weakness in the reactor’s systems, tested the startup procedure in a highly dangerous manner and deliberately disabled the shutdown mechanism. As was predicted by the local staff (who were overruled by the Moscow experts), an explosion occurred, blowing off a huge concrete cap over the reactor and unleashing the largest radioactive leak in history. The fuel rods’ flammable covers and other graphite parts triggered fires which raged for for several hours. Interestingly, no rules had been broken, showing that the right rules had not been devised and articulated. 30 people (including some heroic firemen) died from acute radiation sickness within a couple of weeks.
Yet even here, the United Nations concluded that there was no subsequent longterm health crisis, apart from thyroid cancer. This kind of cancer is easily cured if caught in time.
Amazingly, today Chernobyl has become a tourist attraction and people are returning to live there.
There were also three explosions inside the three buildings housing the 20cmthick steel containment vessels (holding the nuclear cores) at Fukushima. They occurred because hydrogen was released as a byproduct of the overheated cladding on fuel rods. At Chernobyl the nuclear core itself exploded, unprotected by a containment vessel, and spewed radioactive debris out into the atmosphere. Hence, the radioactive leakage at Fukushima was on a much smaller scale than in the Ukraine.
Although the nuclear industry was indeed unprepared for the tsunami, so was the whole of Japan, as the death of 20,000 people shows. TEPCO, the plant operator, relied on the word of tsunami experts, who concurred in their irresponsible findings.
Xerri says the complacent attitude of the nuclear industry was conditioned because they had overpromised on safety issues, and they did not want to jeopardize the confidence in nuclear energy that they had created at enormous expense over the past several decades.
He says he is concerned now that the chemicals industry has not learned from 3/11. One of the biggest threats to Tokyo in a quake would be the huge petrochemical plants circling the bay/harbour. It is conceivable that the ships in the harbour could be set on fire, preventing evacuation by water.
As for the water pouring through Fukushima into the sea, Xerri said that the heavier and more dangerous radioactive particles fall close to the coast line. After a long pause, he conceded that he would not eat shellfish, in response to a question by David Daniels, the GM of Follie Folli. But he said that Fukushima seafood is tested stringently.
Xerri said something surprising regarding Tepco, namely that it initially spent too much time protecting itself from liabilities. This is something that foreign companies are frequently accused of doing, so this was an ironic finding, I thought. However, he thinks the hostility levelled against them is exaggerated. On the whole, he thinks the nuclear industry and the regulators have learned a great many lessons.
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