Foreign Policy In Focus

Paranoia on the part of Japan's power utility Tepco may have helped make the crisis worse. Phred Dvorak reports for the Wall Street Journal.

The operator of Japan's stricken nuclear plant let pressure in one reactor climb far beyond the level the facility was designed to withstand. . . . Japanese nuclear-power companies are so leery of releasing radiation into the atmosphere that their rules call for waiting much longer . . . before venting the potentially dangerous steam that builds up as reactors overheat.

File this under Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face. On March 12

. . . an emergency was brewing inside the plant's No. 1 reactor. By around 2:30 a.m., the pressure inside the vessel that forms a protective bulb around the reactor's core reached twice the level it was designed to withstand. . . . About an hour later, the reactor building itself exploded—a blast that Japanese and U.S. regulators have since said spread highly radioactive debris beyond the plant. . . . Experts in the U.S. and Japan believe the venting delay may have helped create conditions that led to the blast. 

Hind sight is 50/50, but how might it have better handled? 

U.S. protocols on handling accidents at similar reactors call for venting before pressure exceeds the design level. The same protocol is followed by plant operators using similar types of reactors in Korea and Taiwan, industry experts in those countries say. The U.S. approach . . . accepts the radiation released as part of venting as the price of possibly preventing a larger release.

One last cliché, if you can stand it: penny wise, pound foolish.

New radiation leaks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant spurred Japanese nuclear regulators to raise the level of how great an accident it is from five to seven ("major"). Since that's  the highest on the International Atomic Energy Agency's scale, it's now on a par with Chernobyl.

Of course, Fukushima has emitted only a tenth of the radiation as Chernobyl, according to the Associated Press. In other words, if Fukushima is 7.0, Chernobyl was 7.999. But, AP writes of the Fukushima radiation leaks, "they eventually could exceed Chernobyl's emissions if the crisis continues."

This came hot on the heels of news that five communities had been added to the 12-mile suggested evacuation radius. In addition, citizens were urged to keep the ill, pregnant, and very young outside an 18-mile radius. In fact, reports the Japan Times, the Fukushima radius "will soon be turned into a legally binding off-limits zone," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano. "Officials suggested Sunday that they will now be able to force anyone out of the evacuation zone who refuses to leave." A commentator on PBS, whose name I failed to catch, suggested that Japan may use eminent domain with the residents relocated and somehow provided housing elsewhere.

Meanwhile, at ABC News, Stephen Brozak and Henry Bassman, executives at WBB Securities, wrote about the consequences of Fukushima for the world, business and otherwise. They point out that the enlarged 18 miles-plus evacuation radius is "the same distance as the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in Ukraine." But less radiation than Chernobyl aside, in other respects, the implications are as or more serious.

 . . . Japan is neither as large or as sparsely populated as Ukraine. Close to 73 percent of Japan is unsuitable for agricultural, industrial, or residential use.

Presumably, the authors mean that was already true before the disaster. Though it's difficult to understand why since three-quarters of Japan certainly isn't park land. Nevertheless, Brozak and Bass write:

The Japanese government and Japanese investors comprise the second largest holders of U.S. Treasuries, at $885 billion. The Bank of Japan also is reported to hold $493 billion in its reserve balance to avert credit problems. Some financial observers have speculated that the earthquake and tsunami may force Japan's government and investors to liquidate much of the U.S. debt they hold.

In other words, Japan may call in what the United States owes it. While the United States is staggering from that roundhouse right, neither will the rest of the world be immune from the economic ripple effects of Fukushima.

Farmers have been forced to destroy crops and dispose of dairy products. Because of continuing contamination of seawater, the healthfulness of seafood from the Pacific Ocean is in question. Japan is already a net food importer. In response to a continuing shortage of Japanese home-grown food, the Japanese government may encourage importation of even more foreign food, which is likely to increase the price of food in a nation where food is already an extremely expensive commodity. Worldwide, increased competition for food is likely to affect prices, causing some people in marginal economies to go hungry.

No matter how desperate we are for energy, it's difficult to understand how people can still proselytize for a form of it in which one accident can cause waves at home and elsewhere as powerful as, well, a tsunami. 

At Pro Publica, in an article titled Even In Worst Case, Japan's Nuclear Disaster Will Have Limited Reach Abrahm Lustgarten

. . . spoke with seven top nuclear engineers and scientists to at least establish some boundaries for the disaster’s potential health and environmental impacts. The rough consensus: The long-term and most severe effects from radiation at the plant, where four of six reactors are in crisis and hundreds of tons of spent fuel is a risk, will be largely contained to the area around the plant, affect a relatively limited population and will likely not spread outside Japan.

So what, as Reuters reports, if the

. . . unprecedented multiple crisis will cost the world's third largest economy nearly $200 billion and require Japan's biggest reconstruction push since post-World War II. 

Uncovered by insurance because it was an act of God (however Old Testament)? No problem.

The highly specialized German Nuclear Reactor Insurance Association (DKVG) partially insured Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant to the tune of tens of millions of euros. But the Cologne-based insurer won't be paying anything.

"We do have a stake in the risks in Japan, generally speaking. But the property insurance and liability insurance policies exclude damages from earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions," DKVG chief executive Dirk Harbrücker told Deutsche Welle.

Never mind that when it comes to building new reactors, the Independent reports that "some estimates suggest extra safety will add at least another 10 per cent."

The case will be made that the Fukushima reactors, despite how old they were, survived both an earthquake and tsunami with attendant explosions, fires, and loss of water to spent fuel rods with minimal (by some standards, anyway) leakage of radiation into the atmosphere. Fukushima could turn into the gift that keeps on giving for nuclear energy advocates.

Except for one small stumbling block: because neither Fukushima's nor any other reactors have been attacked by terrorists, it remains to be seen how one would stand up to subversion from within, assault by ground troops, or a plane loaded with explosives crashing into it.

How quickly we forget. Overlooked, however momentarily, as we follow news of Fukushima, is the other threat that nuclear energy poses besides releasing radiaoactive material in the air or a complete meltdown. A terrorist attack on a nuclear facility, of course. Back in 2003, at the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote:

An attack on a nuclear power plant would seem to fulfill, almost perfectly, Al Qaeda's objective of using America's technology against it. In his State of the Union Message last year, President Bush announced that United States forces searching Afghan caves had indeed found diagrams of American reactors. Around the same time, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, acting on information provided by the F.B.I., warned of a plot to crash a commercial aircraft into a plant. According to the N.R.C., the identity of the plant was not known; a captured Al Qaeda operative had told the F.B.I. that the specific target was to be chosen by a "team on the ground." 

As potential targets go, Indian Point [nuclear energy plant] seems almost too obvious. It is situated on the Hudson River, in Buchanan, New York, some twenty miles north of the Bronx and thirty-five miles from midtown Manhattan. . . . More than twenty million people live within fifty miles of the plant. A 1982 analysis by a congressional subcommittee estimated that, under worst-case conditions, a catastrophe at one of the Indian Point reactors could result in fifty thousand fatalities and more than a hundred thousand radiation injuries. The same study calculated the cost of such an accident at roughly three hundred billion dollars. By an uncomfortable coincidence, American Airlines Flight 11, just minutes before it slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, flew almost directly over Indian Point's twin reactor domes. Apparently, the Hudson River was the landmark that the hijackers used to navigate by.

Adding insult to injury, the Indian Point reactors also have some of the worst safety records of any in the United States. As one who lives ten miles down river from Indian Point -- which, with maddening irony, occupies one of the sweetest spots on the Hudson -- I'm aware that whenever those dual threats fail to cast a pall, however subconscious, over everyday life, I'm in some serious denial.

Worse Nuclear Disaster Unfolding in China Than Japan. Say what? At the Guardian, the eminent and often courageous British environmental reporter George Monbiot writes:

The nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan is bad enough; the nuclear disaster unfolding in China could be even worse. "What disaster?", you may ask. The decision taken today by the Chinese government to suspend approval of new atomic power plants. If this suspension were to become permanent, the power those plants would have produced is likely to be replaced by burning coal. While nuclear causes calamities when it goes wrong, coal causes calamities when it goes right, and coal goes right a lot more often than nuclear goes wrong. The only safe coal-fired plant is one which has broken down past the point of repair.

He would have us bear in mind:

I despise and fear the nuclear industry as much as any other green: all experience hath shown that, in most countries, the companies running it are a corner-cutting bunch of scumbags, whose business originated as a by-product of nuclear weapons manufacture.

But if coal's

combustion is not curtailed, it could kill millions of times more people than nuclear power plants have done so far.

It's tough for those opposed to nuclear energy to gain traction when the likes of George Monbiot aren't wholeheartedly behind you. But if you read the rest of his column you'll see that his reasoning, as usual, is impeccable. I think many opposed to nuclear energy might be like me -- willing to concede Monbiot's point, but constitutionally incapable of voicing support for nuclear energy, even only as a stopgap measure. We gag over the words.

If Monbiot is right, nuclear energy may just be the all-time lesserest of two evils.