Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi

Richard Hindmarsh, Richard Hindmarsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135910969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi is a timely and groundbreaking account of the disturbing landscape of the Fukushima Daiichinuclear meltdown amidst an earthquake and tsunami on Japan'snortheast coastline on March 11, 2011. It provides riveting insights into the social and political landscape of nuclear power development in Japan, which significantly contributed to the disaster; the flawed disaster management options taken; and the political, technical, and social reactions as the accident unfolded. In doing so, it critically reflects on the implications for managing future nuclear disasters, for effective and responsible regulation and good governance of controversial science and technology, or technoscience, and forthe future of nuclear power itself, both in Japan and internationally.

Informed by a leading cast of international scholars in science, technology and society studies, the book is at the forefront of discussing the Fukushima Daiichidisaster at the intersection of social, environmental and energy security and good governance when such issues dominate global agendas for sustainable futures. Its powerful critique of the risksand hazards of nuclear energy alongside poor disaster management is an important counterbalance to the plans for nuclear build as central to sustainable energy in the face of climate change, increasing extreme weather events and environmental problems, and diminishing fossil fuel, peak oil, and rising electricity costs.

Adding significantly to the consideration and debate of these critical issues, the book will interest academics, policy-makers, energy pundits, public interest organizations, citizens and students engaged variously with Fukushima itself, disaster management, political science, environmental/energy policy and risk, public health, sociology, public participation, civil society activism, new media, sustainability, and technology governance.

1

Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi

Introducing the Terrain

Richard Hindmarsh

The tragic effects and implications of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster—which many refer to as Fukushima—will continue to reverberate over the coming years and decades. The implications assume a new regional and global scope that build on but go beyond those of prior nuclear meltdowns at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). As such, they renew and reinvigorate past memories and impacts of trauma, terror, stigmatization and survival, and create new ones in time and space for Japan, its immediate region and globally. Social, political and environmental issues and implications build on prior ones of nuclear power plant safety and siting, radiation pollution and health, and global energy use and choices. These are found in contexts of risk, hazard and trust; disaster management; and science, technology, environment and good governance—as informed by principles of openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence (Commission of the European Communities 2001); and new ones of climate change mitigation and adaptation, escalating global environmental problems and associated ‘clean’ energy choices and sustainability transitions.

In this terrain, the interest and purpose of this book— Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi —is to investigate the social, political and environmental reasons for and issues and implications of the disaster in the public interest, in contribution to knowledge, and in the broader umbrella of social and environmental responsibility and justice to the victims of the disaster and to future generations; more broadly, to the long-term sustainability of interrelated social, technological and environmental systems. In this case, as mediated, negotiated or threatened by the nature of nuclear power as a ‘megatechnology’, as what occurred at Fukushima Daiichi well demonstrates. In certain circumstances, megatechnologies feature uncertain and unpredictable and multiple complex interactions and consequences that cannot be adequately tested in laboratories or by way of computer simulations beforehand (Beck 1995: 20). ‘Rather, their unanticipated consequences can only be discovered after they are implemented’ (Unger 2001: 282).

In investigating the background and lead-up to the disaster and its immediate aftermath, Nuclear Disaster at Fukushima Daiichi is positioned at the forefront of undoubtedly a long interrogation of 3/11 (as the disaster is also referred to); just as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have long been interrogated and will continue to be so, despite the attempts of the global nuclear industry to overcome the ‘Chernobyl syndrome’ (Schneider et al. 2011. That is the more difficult to achieve also, when the Guardian (“Nuclear Power Plant Accidents” 2011), in reporting Fukushima, pointed up ‘33 serious incidents and accidents at nuclear power stations since the first recorded one in 1952 at Chalk River in Ontario, Canada’.

As such, and in being published only two years after the disaster, this book provides an important early benchmark for ongoing reflection, social and policy learning and change with regard to the failures and hazards of nuclear power in Japan and globally. It critically reflects on and constructively addresses the crisis as one of the most important events of the 21st century—for example, as an important turning point for reconsidering energy options for a world increasingly facing a future of limited energy options; of how to better deal with megatechnological risk, hazard and disaster; and of the need for energy security to be well located in good governance and long-term social and environmental sustainability.

The complexity of these posed issues and contexts, together with the broad and ongoing impact of the disaster, is well addressed by the book's multi-author cast from Japan, countries in the immediate region and more distant ones. Such a cast can best answer the inquiries of a worldwide community grappling to understand why and how the disaster occurred and what can be done in relation to its implications. The interest and concern of the global community was shown in 73,700,000 Google hits in little more than four months in the disaster's aftermath for the search term ‘Fukushima’ (Friedman 2012: 55).

A key implication posed by the nuclear disaster, which frames the analysis of this book, is to understand and interpret it as one caused by an unusual combination of social and natural factors. This combination reflects broader studies of technological disasters (e.g. Gramling and Krogman 1997), which would situate Fukushima Daiichi at the conjunction of a chronic technological disaster and a natural disaster, where the latter was not in play at Three Mile Island or at Chernobyl. A chronic technological disaster according to Gramling and Krogman (1997: 42) is

predicated on mitigated, or not, by deliberate human decisions and resulting policies or lack thereof and are defined by the interplay of the various stakeholders involved. For a chronic technological disaster to occur, decisions had to be made to allow the potentially dangerous activity to go forth, or at a minimum not to oppose it. Once the initial decisions are made, additional decisions must follow concerning what safeguards, if any, should be put into effect to prevent the potential from being realized. Additional polices, or lack thereof, determine what response is possible in the event of an incident, and to a large extent what the impact of the precipitating incidents) will be on ecosystems, human populations and communities. Other decisions and policies determine to what extent the impacts can be mitigated and to what extent communities can recover from these effects.

Such interplay reinforces the ‘perspective that chronic technological disasters should be approached from a process rather than event perspective…’ (Gramling and Krogman 1997: 42). Examples given of such disasters include Love Canal (the New York urban toxic waste disaster in the mid-1970s), Chernobyl (1986) and the Exxon Valdez Alaskan oil spill (1989). These disasters all demonstrated loss of control ‘over an activity that was believed to be controllable’. Other features of a chronic technological disaster include long-term and chronic levels of stress as a general outcome of significant alteration of the relationship between a community and its built, modified and biophysical environments; social disruptions to families’ future expectations; and loss in belief of institutional legitimacy (Gramling and Krogman 1997: 42–44, 50). Such processes and features characterize the Fukushima Daiichi disaster as the contributors to this book have well found. We can then posit the Fukushima Daiichi disaster represents a new type of major nuclear disaster, which is found at the intersection of a chronic technological disaster and a natural disaster.

The natural at Fukushima represented a magnitude 9.0 reverse fault megathrust earthquake—the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake or Great East Japan Earthquake—occurring some 100 kilometers off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku. It was the biggest earthquake ever to affect Japan. It triggered huge tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 40 meters (130 feet). The tsunami hit the east coast of Japan including the Fukushima Prefecture and swept away entire towns, many residential areas and fishing ports, and severely damaged and destroyed industrial and commercial zones (Matanle 2011: 823). The double natural disasters resulted in more than 15,000 deaths.

The tsunami also ‘breached the protective walls at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant located in Okuma and Futaba Towns, and knocked out the mains electricity supply and backup generators that [supplied] the six reactors’ cooling systems’ (Matanle 2011: 825–826). This breach of the power plant's defenses, in turn, directly contributed to the meltdowns and explosions of reactors 1, 2 and 3, and severe damage to reactor 4 and containment systems, which led to ‘the uncontrolled leak of radioactive materials beyond the vicinity of the plant’ (Matanle 2011: 826). Subsequently, the ‘leak’ became so pervasive that it was rated a level 7 ‘major accident’ on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), as was Chernobyl. This level, the highest on the scale, describes an event involving a ‘major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures’ (IAEA 2011).

In turn, the chronic at Fukushima represented many human actions evident in being causative of what happened. Perhaps most visible were the immediate actions and responses of the Japanese Government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which ran the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, to lose control of, or make worse, the immediate situation, both inside and outside the crumbling plant after the tsunami impact. More invisible was an enveloping background terrain of sociopolitical endeavors involving policies, practices and actions, or lack thereof, which over decades laid the policy fabric for the disaster to occur or, again, to make it worse than it otherwise might have been.

Within the overall context of nuclear power advanced by Japan as a key energy option for the full electrification of Japan's post–World War II reconstruction and development, a key contributing factor to the disaster that the contributors of this book identify was so-called ‘agency capture’: ‘where regulatory agencies for a variety of reasons come to hold the perspective of the industry or interests that they are established to regulate’ (Gramling and Krogman 1997: 45). Subsequently, this contributed—as reinforced by the findings of this book—to the safety of nuclear power being compromised to progress it as rapidly and as unhampered as possible. Thereafter, highly misleading public representations of the safety of the aging fleet of Japan's nuclear power plants were made to retain public support and trust despite weak regulatory and flawed siting policies; flawed power plant design and regulatory assessment to withstand worst case scenarios of earthquakes and tsunamis; and a lack of transparency and accountability in decision making, including lack of public participation about hazardous technological development and siting, made more notable by highly unstable seismic conditions of siting in Japan. Overall, the chronic technological disaster of Fukushima was informed by a strategic and far-reaching ‘sociopolitical terrain’ to advance nuclear power development it seems at all costs. It is within such a terrain that the disaster appears most situated or determined, rather than a natural ‘landscape’, which instead appears complementary.

In this book a ‘cartographic’ approach has been adopted to map out this sociopolitical terrain including the impacts, issues and implications the disaster informed. In some ways, this cartographic approach follows the approach of French sociologist of science and anthropologist Bruno Latour (1987) called science in action, which involves following scientists and engineers through society to best understand the practice of what they do in an integrated sense. Thus, in this book, through the diverse but coherent perspectives of its contributors, the integrated result is what I refer to as a policy in action determination of why and how the Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred and the implications of that, which then provides insights of how to address the social causes of the disaster. However, of course, we cannot claim to include everything, such is the complexity of the policy in action terrain and of the actual disaster itself (see also Nakamura and Kikuchi 2011). Instead, key areas involved and impacted on are identified and addressed to provide a revealing social and sometimes technical (e.g. Falk, and Pritchard, in this book) account of the disaster at an early stage of critical reflection on it.

Regarding the sociopolitical, for example, pronuclear policy and industry interests in action are mapped over time to reveal a deployment of a discursive suite of maneuvers, practices and political technologies aiming to negate, marginalize or overcome the concerns, opposition or resistance of others to nuclear power and its development and ongoing expansion in Japan (following, e.g. Andrée 2002, Foucault 1990, Hindess 1982: 498, Hindmarsh 2008: 12–13). The deployment of these actions, as indicated earlier, involved a number of practices aimed at nuclear power development, safety, regulation, siting and civic involvement (e.g. Funabashi and Kitazawa 2012, Nakamura and Kikuchi 2011, Moe 2012). One clear example of a highly questionable or weak regulatory action, also reinforcing the notion of agency capture, was with regard to Fukushima Daiichi as an aging plant near the end of its lifespan with out-of-date safety systems, which Moe (2012: 270) called ‘regulatory fraud’ in again referring to ‘collusion between the [nuclear power or electricity] utilities and the regulator…’.

However, before elaborating more on this policy-in-action terrain in a brief overview of the chapters, a snapshot is provided of this terrain and the social, political and environmental impacts and implications of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, as an unfolding cataclysmic event (see also Jasanoff 1994), to better set the scene. Second, the specific objectives of the book—as informed by this terrain and broader global developments concerning nuclear power—are given. Third, a summary is given of the field of investigative inquiry of science, technology and society (STS) studies, which informs the contributors’ analysis in addressing the objectives as they see fit. Finally, an overview of the key areas or themes of the disaster as identified and addressed by the book's contributors is given.

FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI AS AN UNFOLDING CATACLYSMIC EVENT: A SNAPSHOT

With ‘the uncontrolled leak of radioactive materials beyond the vicinity of the plant’ following the Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdowns and damage to protective buildings (Matanle 2011: 826), a core health issue of trauma about nuclear energy confronted the Japanese people. Harmon (2012: 1) made the succinct point: ‘The prospect of invisible radioactive material contaminating the air and ground [was] terrifying—especially for a country that experienced two nuclear bomb attacks in 1945’. Undoubtedly, this had some impact postdisaster on a clear majority of Japanese citizens reversing earlier positions of support for nuclear power to one of a gradual phase-out. This position has not lessened since the disaster as developments and ongoing revelations continue to shock the Japanese people and the global community.

For example, standard radiation dose limits for Japanese citizens were increased soon after the disaster, apparently to stymie evacuation from some places that were relatively, but not immediately, close to the accident site. Suggestions as to why that occurred include the financial cost would be too great to evacuate so many, as well as the social chaos caused by such upheaval. This includes places still considered by many authorities worldwide to be too close to Fukushima Daiichi—like Fukushima City, a city of some 300,000 people about 70 kilometers (45 miles) away—as the investigative documentary Fukushima, Never Again focused upon (also McCurry 2011, Normile 2011). Perhaps also with the discovery that radiation-contaminated beef was found dispersed and eaten widely in Japan post-disaster; as well as more than 40% of fish caught close to the Fukushima Pr...