Learning from a Disaster

Improving Nuclear Safety and Security after Fukushima

Scott D. Sagan, Edward D. Blandford

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804797368
• Edition: 1

This book—the culmination of a truly collaborative international and highly interdisciplinary effort—brings together Japanese and American political scientists, nuclear engineers, historians, and physicists to examine the Fukushima accident from a new and broad perspective.

It explains the complex interactions between nuclear safety risks (the causes and consequences of accidents) and nuclear security risks (the causes and consequences of sabotage or terrorist attacks), exposing the possible vulnerabilities all countries may have if they fail to learn from this accident.

The book further analyzes the lessons of Fukushima in comparative perspective, focusing on the politics of safety and emergency preparedness. It first compares the different policies and procedures adopted by various nuclear facilities in Japan and then discusses the lessons learned—and not learned—after major nuclear accidents and incidents in other countries in the past. The book's editors conclude that learning lessons across nations has proven to be very difficult, and they propose new policies to improve global learning after nuclear accidents or attacks.

PART I: The Fukushima Accident

Introduction: Learning from a Man-made Disaster

Scott D. Sagan

Numerous official governmental and independent commissions have published inquiries into the causes and consequences of the March 11, 2011, accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, and many serious independent scholarly analyses have also appeared.¹ This collection of essays, however, is highly unusual and therefore especially valuable in four different ways. First, unlike most reports on Fukushima, which offer single perspectives on the causes of the accident and then provide consensus opinions about what lessons should be learned, the authors of these chapters present diverse perspectives on both the technical and the organizational failures that led to the accident and its tragic consequences and then provide insights into what lessons the Japanese government and nuclear industry and foreign governments and industries have actually learned and not learned. Their explicit focus on governmental and organizational learning successes and failures opens up a new window for studying the long-term consequences of a serious nuclear accident.

Second, virtually all studies of the Fukushima disaster have focused on the lessons to be learned regarding nuclear safety, which is defined as the prevention of nuclear accidents. That focus is perfectly understandable, of course, because of the nature of the Fukushima disaster. The authors of this book, however, recognize that although the Fukushima accident was the result of the combined effects of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the subsequent massive tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, it could just as well have been caused, in theory, by an external terrorist attack or an insider act of malicious sabotage, which are security problems, not safety problems.² This volume therefore includes analyses of both the nuclear safety and nuclear security lessons that have been learned, or in many cases have not been learned, since the accident.

Third, the authors of this collection represent an unusually diverse and interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners. The authors are diverse both in terms of nationality (Japanese and American) and in terms of past and current affiliations (universities, national laboratories, and government agencies). The volume has also benefited from the highly interdisciplinary nature of the collaborating authors, with political scientists, nuclear engineers, historians, and physicists working together and commenting on each other’s draft book chapters.

Fourth, many previous studies of the Fukushima accident were written either by traditional critics of nuclear energy or advocates of nuclear power. Not surprisingly, the books and articles by the first group generally stress that the Fukushima accident could have been much worse than it was in terms of lives lost and costs to the Japanese and international economy had specific close-call decisions not been made by nuclear operators and government bureaucrats. These critical studies also generally emphasize the role of good fortune over good planning, and thus pessimists see the fact that the Fukushima accident did not produce massive fatalities in Japan as a “homage to plain dumb luck.”³ Also not surprisingly, the studies written by traditional advocates of nuclear energy have tended to emphasize the resilience of Japanese society during the emergency and the fact that no individuals were killed immediately by the nuclear accident (estimated long-term health effects are still disputed), compared with the many who died immediately by the earthquake and the tsunami in northern Japan. If a nuclear reactor complex can survive this magnitude of natural disaster, optimists argue, then we should be reassured about the future.

Such mixed opinions about the appropriate lessons to be drawn from “near misses” or “close calls” are common, indeed perhaps inevitable, after such events. As James March, Lee Sproull, and Michal Tamuz have noted in a similar context:

Every time a pilot avoids a collision, the event provides evidence both for the threat and for its irrelevance. It is not clear whether the learning should emphasize how close the organization came to disaster, thus the reality of danger in the guise of safety, or the fact that disaster was avoided, thus the reality of safety in the guise of danger.⁴

The appropriate perspective on Fukushima must, however, include a basic awareness that the disaster could have easily, very easily, been much worse in terms of loss of life and economic damage to Japan and even surrounding countries. And yet we must also acknowledge the presence of some robustness in the accident mitigation system and astute decisions made by both leaders in Tokyo and especially by plant officials and workers in Fukushima. The authors of this volume recognize both sides of the accident’s history and offer a balanced perspective reinforced by the diversity of opinion within the group. In contrast to contributors to most reports, the authors of this volume range from strong advocates, to agnostics, to skeptics about the role nuclear power should play in producing energy today and into the future. We hope the range of opinion on this central issue among the various authors adds to the interest and objectivity of the volume as a whole.

A NATURAL OR MAN-MADE DISASTER?

Although the proximate cause of the Fukushima accident was clearly a mixture of natural phenomena—the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan—the authors in this volume see the accident not as a natural disaster but rather as a man-made disaster, in five different but related ways. First, as the report of the Independent Investigation Commission has recognized, the potential for a tsunami as large as the one on March 11 that breached the 10-meter-high seawall outside Fukushima was understood by many officials and regulators in Japan prior to the accident, but their recommendations to build stronger protection against such a possibility were ignored by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which owned and operated the plant.⁵ Second, again as recognized by some official reports, common traits in Japanese culture played a significant role in permitting unsafe conditions to be overlooked in the name of social unity and group cooperation. As Kiyoshi Kurokawa, chairman of the Japanese Diet’s Independent Investigation Commission, wrote in the commission’s report on the accident:

What must be admitted—very painfully—is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.” . . . Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to “sticking with the program”; our groupism, and our insularity.⁶

Third, a number of our authors analyze the causes and consequences of what the Independent Investigation Commission called “the myth of absolute safety”: the widespread public belief that Japanese nuclear plants were so well designed and operated that a serious accident was impossible, a belief that was strongly promoted by the nuclear industry and government in an effort to encourage public willingness to permit the construction and continued operation of nuclear power reactors in their local communities. Such a myth discouraged national and local officials from conducting realistic planning and emergency exercises, leading to multiple failures when the real emergency occurred in March 2011. Fourth, Toshihiro Higuchi compellingly identifies another way in which Fukushima was a man-made disaster in his chapter in this volume: Japanese officials dangerously adjusted the estimates of acceptable radiological exposure dosages before the accident to restore public trust. This policy, Higuchi argues, was not intended to create undue risk for Japanese citizens, but nonetheless produced emergency evacuation rules that unnecessarily exposed local men, women, and children to dangerous levels of radioactivity after the accident. Fifth, and finally, Kaoru Naito and Kazuto Suzuki discuss Japan’s failure to learn lessons that were relevant for improving safety and security from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, DC. After the 9/11 attacks, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reviewed the relevant design, defense, and mitigation strategies in case terrorists attacked or sabotaged a nuclear reactor and developed new rules that all US nuclear operators were forced to adopt to reduce such risks. Although senior officials within Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency were informed of the implementation of improved nuclear safety and security measures in the United States, they chose not to adopt similar rules for the Japanese nuclear operators and power plants.

VICARIOUS LEARNING

Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, is said to have remarked that “only a fool learns from his mistakes; wise men learn from other people’s mistakes.” This observation holds in the context of promoting nuclear safety and security. It will be important, going forward, that the appropriate lessons from the Fukushima accident be internationally understood and that organizational learning not be confined to Japan. This process is difficult, however, not only because government structures, regulatory systems, safety cultures, and reactor designs may vary across countries, but also because of a common tendency, which was seen in Japan after the Three Mile Island accident and the 9/11 attacks in the United States, to assume that failures occurring in other countries are unlikely to be repeated in one’s own.

This volume is therefore designed to encourage improved vicarious learning, learning from the mistakes of others, not just one’s own. After an initial chapter by Kenji Kushida outlines the progression of events before, during, and following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, the volume presents a series of chapters about what went right and what went wrong in designing the safety and security systems for Japanese nuclear plants and in implementing appropriate measures during crises and after accidents. Gregory Wyss starts with a chapter analyzing how stakeholders set standards for risk acceptance, so-called design-basis criteria, by which nuclear facilities are designed, constructed, and operated. These criteria address possible procedural accidents, failed parts, natural disasters, or threats such as insider or terrorist attacks. Wyss is highly critical of the procedures used to produce the design-basis criteria for the Fukushima nuclear plant and outlines a set of improvements in the design and testing process that could improve nuclear safety and security in the future. Kaoru Naito then reviews the record of Japanese domestic institutions and international organizations that are responsible for promoting nuclear security and ensuring the safe transport of nuclear material. He finds that there were rapid improvements in security procedures after Fukushima in areas like access control, but that progress in other areas—notably the creation of a system for trustworthiness checks for workers in nuclear facilities—was not approved until October 2015 and, as of this writing, has not yet been implemented. In addition, steps remain to better integrate approaches to enhance nuclear safety and security. Nobumasa Akiyama follows with a chapter reviewing the many failures in nuclear emergency planning and response that were exposed during the Fukushima accident and its aftermath. Akiyama usefully focuses attention on both the failures of advance planning, caused by the “myth of absolute safety,” and the mismatch during the crisis between the micromanagement leadership style of Prime Minister Naoto Kan and the weaknesses of information gathering and communication between the government, TEPCO, and the Fukushima plant.

The next chapters examine the complexity of creating and maintaining strong domestic and international learning processes around nuclear issues. Toshihiro Higuchi analyzes the failures in Japan to learn from international best practices regarding how to measure safety in radioactivity levels. His detailed chapter demonstrates how easily the Japanese government fell into the trap of what organization theorists call “goal displacement,” whereby the measure chosen to represent “safe” levels of exposure became a goal for operators to achieve in its own right, encouraging them to ignore local conditions that might impact the actual level of safety of exposure during and after an accident like the one that occurred at Fukushima. Kazuto Suzuki’s chapter on transnational organizational learning rounds out this part of the book. Suzuki focuses on why the Japanese government and nuclear industry too often ignored the best practices and lessons learned by the United States, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and industrial peer review organizations, before the Fukushima accident. His review of reforms proposed and implemented in Japan after the accident is decidedly pessimistic. He argues that the myth of absolute safety has not gone away and that there is a continuing misguided tendency for non-TEPCO operators to resist substantial investments in improved safety and security systems, since their plants did not suffer as much damage as the Fukushima plant after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Finally, Learning from a Disaster concludes with two chapters examining international nuclear safety and security in a broader comparative manner. The chapter by Phillip Lipscy, Kenji Kushida, and Trevor Incerti studies whether Japan’s nuclear ind...