Fukushima

Impacts and Implications

D. Elliott

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349445639, 9781137274328
• eBook ISBN: 9781137274335
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 led Japan, and many other countries, to change their energy policies. David Elliott reviews the disaster and its global implications, asking whether, despite continued backing by some governments, the growing opposition to nuclear power means the end of the global nuclear renaissance.

1

Introduction: The Nuclear Back-Story

Abstract: Nuclear power emerged after the Second World War and was adopted by many industrialised countries. From the 1980s onwards its development faltered, following some major accidents, the rise of public opposition and the advent of more competitive energy options, with some countries phasing out their nuclear programmes. However, in the 2000s, with concerns about climate change and energy security growing, it was beginning to recover. This book explores whether the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan will halt this nuclear renaissance.

Keywords: nuclear decline; nuclear renaissance

Elliott, David. Fukushima: Impacts and Implications. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137274335.

Guided by electronics, powered by atomic energy, geared to the smooth effortless workings of automation, the magic carpet of our free economy heads for undreamed of destinations.

Address to the American National Union of Manufactures (Rose, 1967)

1.1Nuclear power: early ups and downs

Civil nuclear power emerged from the Second World War nuclear weapons programme in the US and then in the UK, France and the USSR, which led, in the 1960s, to major civil reactor developments in the US, Europe and the Soviet Union (on reactor types, see Section A.2 of the appendix to this book). In the 1970s the technology spread, with, for example, Japan, India and China developing civil nuclear programmes, supported by the US, the Soviet Union, or in some cases Canada, France or the UK. The US was energetic in promoting this technology under the ‘atoms for peace’ banner, but some saw this as part of an attempt to consolidate or expand its technological, political and economic hegemony – as, for example, in its support for nuclear projects in the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos. Some other developing countries also took up the nuclear option, notably South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and South Korea.

However, in 1979 there was a major nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant in the US, and this, along with the poor economics of nuclear compared with other energy options, led to a halt in new nuclear developments in the US. And then, following the even larger nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986, many (but not all) European countries backed off from nuclear, some of them introducing phase-out policies.

The reversal in the fortunes of nuclear power at this stage has often been linked, in the popular media particularly, primarily to these accidents, but the reality is more complex. Nuclear technology is expensive. Despite claims that it would get cheaper, the economics of nuclear power has always been an issue. Typically, although the net fuel costs were lower, the capital cost of nuclear plants was at this stage running at around three times that of fossil-fuelled plants, and it continued to rise as safety requirements grew after the major accidents. In parallel, natural gas emerged as a cheap fossil option, used in low-cost combined cycle gas turbines. So the decline of nuclear in the late 20th century might be seen as due to a combination of the inherent high costs, the extra cost of more safety systems and the advent of lower-cost fossil alternatives.

It might be added that public opposition to nuclear power also played a role: nuclear programmes were resisted strongly by environmental groups around the world from the 1970s onwards, with major 200,000-strong demonstrations in Europe (in Germany and Spain particularly) and in the US. The spate of major accidents consolidated this opposition, and public opinion polls suggested that opposition remained high (typically running at 70–80%) right up to the end of the century. For example, in the UK, opinion polls showed that around 75% of people were opposed to nuclear power after the Chernobyl accident. Interestingly, this opposition did not fade away. Instead it increased. By 1991, 78% of respondents to a Gallup poll either wanted ‘no more nuclear plants’ or for the use of nuclear power to be halted (SHE, 1994).

The impact of this opposition can be overstated: few projects were actually halted, although some may have been delayed. But other things being equal, few governments would be willing to court unpopularity by promoting nuclear power too strongly.

1.2The nuclear renaissance

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, with climate change a growing issue, views began to change. Massive media coverage of climate issues meant that the public was increasingly concerned about the impacts of global warming, and nuclear was regularly portrayed as a way forward, with much talk of a nuclear renaissance (Nuttall, 2005). For a new generation, Chernobyl was perhaps seen as long ago and far away. This process of reassessment was no doubt helped by what some might see as an attempt to rewrite history, with reports emerging that suggested that the death rate resulting from Chernobyl was in fact much lower than had been thought earlier.

The interpretation of the epidemiological data from Chernobyl exposures remains controversial. A ‘10 years after’ UN review suggested that around 2,500 of the 200,000 ‘liquidators’ who were brought in to clean up the Chernobyl plant might develop cancers, as might a further 2,500 people from the immediate area. Initial studies reported about 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident. However, most of the thyroid cancers were not fatal as they were treatable by thyroid removal, albeit with a substantially reduced quality of life (UNSCEAR, 2000).

So although there were impacts, the final death rate would, it was claimed, be low, and some reports began to emphasise the speculative nature of the longer-term death estimates. Certainly there are problems of attribution, given that, for example, it can take decades for most types of solid cancer to appear and it may be hard to prove that these and other illness are directly linked to Chernobyl. While recognising that there were cases of cancer, in 2002 a UN report claimed that some of the post-Chernobyl health effects might have had psychosomatic causes or have been due to the stress resulting from over-zealous relocation of people out of the contaminated area (UNDP/UNICEF, 2002).

A 2006 report from the Chernobyl Study Group, convened by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization, and involving representatives from the governments of the impacted countries, was somewhat less sure. While accepting that stress was an issue, their international expert group predicted that among the 600,000 persons who received the more significant exposures (liquidators working in 1986–1987, evacuees and residents of the most ‘contaminated’ areas), about 4,000 extra fatal cancers might occur. Among the 5 million persons residing in less contaminated areas with lower doses, an additional 5,000 cancer deaths were predicted, although this number was said to be more speculative (IAEA, 2006). The debate continued.

Meanwhile, the nuclear industry tried to revive its market position, stressing that nuclear was a low-carbon energy source. By the late 2000s something of a global nuclear renaissance was said to be emerging, led by China and India. In addition, in the early 2010s, some EU countries were reversing their opposition to nuclear, Russia was expanding its programme and the US was looking to a new programme. Keen to expand the market further, some nuclear technology vendors also looked to South America, where Chile and Venezuela had expressed interest (Russia offering to help Venezuela), and to the Middle East, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Jordon also expressed interest, and Qatar and Kuwait announced nuclear plans. Iran, of course, already had a nuclear programme, as did Israel, although the issue of civil–military links had led to major political conflicts.

Although most environmental groups around the world had opposed nuclear power strongly over the years, and continued to do so in the 2000s, in the early 2010s the nuclear lobby was encouraged by the fact that a handful of environmentalists changed sides and backed nuclear as a way to respond to climate change (WNN, 2009).

In parallel, with renewable energy making relatively large gains across the world, the anti-nuclear view was increasingly based not so much on concerns about accidents and leaks as on economics and strategic issues. For example, it was argued that investment in nuclear would detract from the development of renewable energy and energy efficiency, which were claimed to be much more effective ways to respond to climate change (Elliott, 2010). But the safety, risk and heath issues came back onto the agenda with a vengeance in March 2011, with the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

This book surveys the impacts of this major accident on the future of energy policies around the world. Does it herald the end of the nuclear renaissance, or will the prospects for nuclear power recover, as they did, to some extent, after Chernobyl?

2

Fukushima: The Immediate Impacts

Abstract: The major accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex in March 2011 was initiated by a very large earthquake and tsunami, which destroyed the reactor cooling systems and led to massive explosions and the release of radioactive materials. As this chapter describes, a mass evacuation was begun while the plant operators struggled to get the reactors under control. There were fears concerning radioactive contamination of food and water from the fallout, with the impacts of the disaster, in terms of public and governmental reactions, not being limited to Japan, as is explored in subsequent chapters.

Keywords: Fukushima accident; radioactive contamination; reactor damage; TEPCO

Elliott, David. Fukushima: Impacts and Implications. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137274335.

The situation on the site was far beyond the originally estimated accident management conditions, and as a result, the expansion of the accident could not be prevented under the framework of the prepared safety measures.

Fukushima plant operator (TEPCO, 2012)

2.1The Fukushima accident

On 11 March 2011 a Richter scale 9 earthquake occurred, with its epicentre 100 km off the northeast coast of Japan. It was followed by a giant tsunami. The quake and tsunami caused a massive amount of damage and resulted in considerable loss of life. They also disabled or destroyed key parts of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) coastal-sited Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex, which used US-designed boiling water reactors (BWRs).

Crucially, swamped by the 13–14 m tsunami, diesel backup generators were flooded and failed. Given that the main grid-power to the site had also failed, these generators should have been a key backup, providing electricity to run cooling pumps. Emergency batteries soon ran out of power. Although all the reactors had been shut down as soon as the quake hit, a large amount of decay heat was still being released and, as pumping failed, temperatures began to rise. It is now known that some of the reactor fuel cores melted and burnt through the inner containment.

Desperate attempts were made to provide alternative power for pumping, using seawater at one stage. But operations were hampered by the radiation from the damaged plant. As core temperatures rose, it seems that the zirconium alloy fuel cladding reacted with cooling water to produce hydrogen gas, which, reaching a critical point, led to major explosions, blasting apart the reactor outer buildings, first at Reactor 1, about five hours after the tsunami, and then, later, at Reactor 3. There was also an explosion at Reactor 4. Although the fuel melted, it remained within the structure, but the explosions scattered radioactive debris into the air, and around the site. There were also problems with some of the used fuel stores on the site: they too lost crucial cooling, and some contained relatively fresh spent fuel with high levels of activity and heat output. There were 3,400 tonnes of used fuel in seven storage pools, in addition to the 877 tonnes of fuel in the reactors.

Images of the disaster, as it unfolded, were captured and relayed worldwide by the media, with footage of the spectacular explosions being run on news loops continuously. The media also covered the evacuation process that was instigated. Eventually around 150,000 people were moved out of the area, many of them being subjected to monitoring to see whether they had been contaminated by fallout. This led to some harrowing images of children being scanned for radiation. Fortunately, it seems that levels of exposure were low, and it was hoped that the administration of iodide tablets would prevent the thyroid cancer risks that faced children at Chernobyl. However, there was increasing concern among displaced residents, outside the 20 km exclusion zone, that not enough accurate and up-to-date information was being provided by the authorities and, in the days and weeks after the accident, these concerns began to spread across the country.

So far the only deaths that have been recorded were due to the explosions and other incidents on site, put by one commentator as 7 among the first responders and plant operators, plus 14 elderly people who died during the evacuation process (Sovacool, 2011). None of these deaths were due to radiation exposure. But, inevitably, fears remain about longer-term effects.

The Japanese Health and Labour Ministry reported that nearly 100 workers at the Fukushima Daiichi site had exceeded the legal limits for radiation doses by June 2011 (see Section A.3 for details of the safety levels involved).

A report to the American Nuclear Society in June 2011 suggested that across Japan cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures could not be ruled out, and might be of the order of 100 cases (Caracappa, 2011). Unfortunately, as we shall see, scientific opinion on the risk of radiation exposure is strongly divided, and that figure might prove to be an underestimate.

It is clear that this was a very serious accident. While it could have been much worse, in that there were no catastrophic releases of radioactive material from the reactors as had happened at Chernobyl, even so, for many people what Fukushima brought home was the overwhelming scale and implications of what could happen, if not this time, then the next.

An emergency evacuation plan was produced for Tokyo and other cites within 250 km of Fukushima, although it was kept secret to avoid panic in some of the world’s most crowded urban areas (McNeill, 2011a). Japan’s then Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, said that at one point, in his mind, he had simulated a worst-case evacuation scenario that included the 35 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area. That would have been impossible to organize quickly, but ultimately could have been necessary if the reactor cores had exploded. Then, depending on the prevailing wind, the city could have been uninhabitable for decades. In addition, he said, ‘not only would we lose up to half of our land, but spread radiation to the rest of the world. Our existence as a sovereign nation was at stake’ (Sekiguchi, 2012).

Fortunately the worst was avoided. But, for most people, what actually happened was still bad enough. The minute-by-minute timeline of events as they unfolded at Fukushima, as provided by the operating company (TEPCO, 2012), makes for worrying read...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• 1  Introduction: The Nuclear Back-Story
• 2  Fukushima: The Immediate Impacts
• 3  Reactions in Japan and across Asia
• 4  Reactions in Continental Europe
• 5  Reactions in the UK
• 6  Reactions in the US and the Rest of the World
• 7  Analysis: Political, Economic and Technological Issues
• 8  Reactions to Fukushima: Contestation and Trust
• 9  Conclusions: The Lessons of Fukushima
• Appendix: Nuclear Technology and Its Heath Impacts
• Credits and Afterword
• References
• Index