Foreign Policy In Focus

(Pictured: Bill Murray and friend attempting to escape from Fukushima.)

Remember that 1993 film in which the Bill Murray repeats the same day over and over again? The Japanese nuclear crisis has also become déjà vu ad nauseum (please excuse mixed romance languages). Fukushima news reports today aren't appreciably different from those shortly after the earthquake and tsunami. On May 18 the New York Times reported (note two words emphasized):

Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan’s nuclear crisis, military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on spent fuel rods at the country’s stricken nuclear power station late Thursday after earlier efforts to cool the rods failed, Japanese officials said. . . .Earlier Thursday Japanese military forces tried to dump seawater from a helicopter on Reactor No. 3, making four passes and dropping a total of about 8,000 gallons as a plume of white smoke billowed. . . . Video of the effort appeared to show most of the water missing the reactor and the Japanese military later said the measure had little effect on reducing the temperature in the pool where the spent rods are stored. . . . The developments came as the authorities reached for ever more desperate and unconventional methods to cool damaged reactors, deploying helicopters and water cannons in a race to prevent perilous overheating in the spent rods of the No. 3 reactor.

Unconventional, maybe, but no longer new. In fact, it's a reprise of what was attempted when the cooling problem emerged shortly after the earthquake and tsunami. From the BBC on March 17:

Thursday's attempt to use helicopters to dump seawater on to the Fukushima power station is almost certainly unprecedented in more than half a century of nuclear power operations around the world. Long-range video footage indicates why it is not a more widely-used technique: it does not appear to work. Water cannon -- tried, with similar results -- seemed a similarly desperate measure.

Desperate in March, it must be a deeper shade of desperate now, which would seem to be indicated by this, from the May 18 Times article.

The decision to focus on the No. 3 reactor appeared to suggest that Japanese officials believe it is a greater threat, since it is the only one at the site loaded with a mixed fuel known as mox, for mixed oxide, which includes reclaimed plutonium [and which] would produce  a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site.  . . . In the worst case, experts say, workers could be forced to vacate the plant altogether, and the fuel rods in reactors and spent fuel pools would be left to melt down, leading to much larger releases of radioactive materials.

In early April, Australian TV news is even more discouraging.

. . . One expert says the radiation leaks will be ongoing and it could take 50 to 100 years before the nuclear fuel rods have completely cooled and been removed. "As the water leaks out, you keep on pouring water in, so this leak will go on for ever," said Dr John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation. . . . "The final thing is that the reactors will have to be closed and the fuel removed, and that is 50 to 100 years away.

Meanwhile, from the May 18 Times story:

The United States’ top nuclear official followed up his bleak appraisal of the grave situation at the plant the day before with a caution that it would “take some time, possibly weeks,” to resolve.

Looks like we can look forward to yet more sequels of Japan's Groundhog Day.

Way to stay unruffled, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). The headline at NHK's website yesterday reads "TEPCO to review cooling operation." Sounds sober enough -- until you find out why it plans to conduct that review.

Tokyo Electric Power Company will have to review its plan for stabilizing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility after a large amount of radioactive water was found in the basement of one of its reactor buildings.

The utility says it discovered an estimated 3,000 tons of contaminated water in the basement of the damaged Number 1 reactor building.

It "discovered"? How does that go overlooked? Never mind: how the water wound up in the basement is light years more frightening.

TEPCO says fuel rods in the Number 1 reactor melted down and created a hole in the bottom of the pressure vessel. It says the containment vessel also appears to be damaged and highly radioactive water has leaked into the basement of the building.

As if that's not bad enough, Agence France Presse reported:

Ruling-party lawmaker Goshi Hosono, special aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, said. . . . reactor three has not cooled down as hoped earlier, saying it was more of a worry to him than reactor one.

Perhaps as a consequence (from the same article)

Japan on Sunday started the first evacuations of homes outside a government exclusion zone. . . . Some 4,000 residents of Iidate-mura village as well as 1,100 people in Kawamata-cho town . . .  began the phased relocations. . . . Although Iidate-mura and Kawamata-cho are 30 kilometres (20 miles) away from the plant, they have consistently received high amounts of radioactive materials due to wind patterns.

All at huge cost to the state, of course. But, surprisingly, of all the institutions to come out of this without taking a financial bath, you'd think the last is insurance. But, for those who may be unaware of it, when it comes to insuring nuclear-power plants, insurance companies keep their exposure to a minimum. Juergen Batz reports for the Associated Press.

Japan's Fukushima disaster, which will leave taxpayers there with a massive bill, brings to the fore one of the [nuclear-energy] industry's key weaknesses -- that nuclear power is a viable source for cheap energy only if it goes uninsured. The cost of a worst-case nuclear accident at a plant in Germany, for example, has been estimated to total as much as $11 trillion, while the mandatory reactor insurance is only 3.7 billion. . . . "Around the globe, nuclear risks -- be it damages to power plants or the liability risks resulting from radiation accidents -- are covered by the state. The private insurance industry is barely liable," said Torsten Jeworrek, a board member at Munich Re, one of the world's biggest reinsurance companies. . . . In financial terms, nuclear incidents can be so devastating that the cost of full insurance would be so high as to make nuclear energy more expensive than fossil fuels.

In fact

Tepco had no disaster insurance.

Despite Fukushima, many, including those to whom it's vastly less catastrophic for the environment than coal, remain unmoved in their advocacy for nuclear energy. But, the environmental effects of Fukushima aside, purely in financial terms, the world can scarcely afford more than one of these accidents every, say, ten years.

When we think of nuclear terrorism, we think of a nuclear bomb smuggled into an American city. Or, perhaps, a plane crashing into a nuclear reactor. But nuclear terrorism suddenly got a whole lot easier than planning either of those scenarios. Suddenly, it's as easy as emptying a pool of water. At Japanese news site Asahi, Fumihiko Yoshida reports about spent-fuel-rod pools like those that overheated in Fukushima for lack of cooling water.

"If pools were damaged by a terrorist attack and water was lost, the scenario would be the same as what occurred at the Fukushima plant," said [Allison Macfarlane, associate professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University].

Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists explains how such damage might occur.

. . . a possible cyber attack . . . could instantly kill a regional grid that provides electricity to nuclear power plants and on-site backup electrical systems, resulting in a Fukushima-type disaster.

In other words, instead of setting off a bomb or targeting a reactor directly, terrorists could cause a Fukushima-type disaster by instead targeting the functioning of spent-fuel-rod pools. At least one world leader is taking this to heart. Yoshida again.

Several days after the crisis began on March 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the expanding threat of a nuclear catastrophe in Japan had changed his thinking on the safety of nuclear power.

"It certainly caused me to reconsider the projects of building civil nuclear power plants" in Israel, he said. [Physicist and one-time White House national security advisor Frank] Von Hippel's interpretation of this comment is that considering the instability in the Middle East today, Netanyahu's new position reflects, at least to some extent, security concerns about the potential use of nuclear power plants as "radioactive bombs" if they are targeted for attack.

Not only are the damaged reactors at Fukushima leaking radiation, they're discharging ideas how to turn nuclear reactors into terrorist weapons.

In both Japan and the United States, nuclear power is just another industry in which officials shuttle back and forth between it and jobs with regulatory and other government agencies. In his Rolling Stone article, America's Nuclear Nightmare, Jeff Goodell explains.

Over the past decade, the nuclear industry has contributed more than $4.6 million to members of Congress — and last year alone, it spent $1.7 million on federal lobbying. Given the generous flow of nuclear money, the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] is essentially rigged to operate in the industry's favor.

Goodell turned to IPS's own Robert Alvarez for some insight on such officials.

"They are vetted by the industry," [he said.] "It's the typical revolving-door story — many are coming in or out of jobs with the nuclear power industry. You don't get a lot of skeptics appointed to this job."

For example:

Jeffrey Merrifield, a former NRC commissioner who left the agency in 2007, is a case in point. When Merrifield was ready to exit public service, he simply called up the CEO of Exelon, the country's largest nuclear operator, and asked him for a job recommendation. Given his friends in high places, he wound up taking a top job at the Shaw Group, a construction firm that builds nuclear reactors.

Merrifield returned the favor.

During the Fukushima disaster, Merrifield appeared on Fox News, as well as in videos for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying group. In one video . . . Merrifield reassures viewers that the meltdown in Japan is no big deal. "We should continue to move forward with building those new plants," he says, "because it's the right thing for our nation and it's the right thing for our future."

Meanwhile in Japan, report Norimitsu Onishi and Ken Belson for the New York Times

Though it is charged with oversight, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is part of the Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry, the bureaucracy charged with promoting the use of nuclear power. Over a long career, officials are often transferred repeatedly between oversight and promotion divisions, blurring the lines between supporting and policing the industry.

Influential bureaucrats tend to side with the nuclear industry — and the promotion of it — because of a practice known as amakudari, or descent from heaven [which] allows senior bureaucrats, usually in their 50s, to land cushy jobs at the companies they once oversaw. . . . generations of high-ranking officials from the ministry have landed senior positions at the country's 10 utilities since Japan's first nuclear plants were designed in the 1960s.

A prominent example is Tokio Kano, a former vice president at Tepco who was elected to Parliament.

. . . on the strength of Mr. Kano's leadership, Japan adopted a national basic energy plan calling for the growth of nuclear energy as a way to achieve greater energy independence and to reduce Japan’s emission of greenhouses gases. The plan and subsequent versions mentioned only in broad terms the importance of safety at the nation's nuclear plants despite the 2002 disclosure of cover-ups at Fukushima Daiichi and a 1999 accident at a plant northeast of Tokyo in which high levels of radiation were spewed into the air. . . . In a move that has raised eyebrows even in a world of cross-fertilizing interests, he has returned to Tepco as an adviser. . . . In an interview at a Tepco office here, accompanied by a company spokesman, Mr. Kano said he had served in Parliament out of "conviction."

Now for the money quote:

"It's disgusting to be thought of as a politician who was a company errand boy just because I was supported by a power company and the business community," Mr. Kano said.

It's even more disgusting when workers trying to keep spent fuel rods from overheating become ill with radiation sickness. 

Americans who favor it claim that nuclear energy makes us less dependent on Middle-Eastern oil with its attendant price spikes (those that aren't a product of speculation, that is). But nuclear-energy plants don't do much to ease the national debt. As Jeff Goodell reports in his Rolling Stone piece America's Nuclear Nightmare (emphasis added)

Since the Manhattan Project was created to develop the atomic bomb back in the 1940s, the dream of a nuclear future has been fueled almost entirely by Big Government. America's current fleet of reactors exists only because Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act in 1957, limiting the liability of nuclear plant operators in case of disaster. And even with taxpayers assuming most of the risk, Wall Street still won't finance nuclear reactors without direct federal assistance, in part because construction costs are so high (up to $20 billion per plant) and in part because nukes are the only energy investment that can be rendered worthless in a matter of hours. "In a free market, where real risks and costs are accounted for, nuclear power doesn't exist," says Amory Lovins, a leading energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Nuclear plants "are a creation of government policy and intervention."

Goodell also points out that without such taxpayer supports as the $54 billion President Obama included in his 2012 budget "in federal loan guarantees for [them] no new reactors would ever be built."

In other words, nuclear energy is just another industry that wouldn't exist were it not for the kindness of the government. In fact, it's not that different from a New Deal WPA project. Of course, once they're up and running, writes Goodell, nuclear-power plants are "cheap to operate, meaning the longer they run, the more profitable they become." In other words, the public helps build nuclear power plants and assumes the risk while the industry reaps the profits. Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, banks.