Maybe the most interesting part of the day was our visit to the Tsumori Elementary school in Mashiki Town. We stopped there because amidst severe damage to homes in that area, the school remained remarkably intact, even though it was built before the new 1981 seismic code. The school principal, Satoh Kosuke, and his staff were busy cleaning the school, which, of course, was really messed up inside.
We were the first people to stop at the school, including government officials or earthquake experts, and the first people to help them understand the earthquake damage to the school and to answer questions, in general, about what was safe and what was not.
In our opinion, the implications for the USA, and other countries, are grave. For example, there are similarities about what could happen from a rupture of the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco East Bay area. As one team member said, “There was way too much damage in modest homes which look like mine, in neighborhoods which look like mine, and near a fault just like the one near me.”
It was not only old buildings which were damaged. There seems to have been a unique combination of strong ground motion and geotechnique effects, such as liquefaction and landslides. One team member remarked that after 120 earthquake investigations, this was the most residential damage that he had ever seen.
The faulting was much too complicated, much to sophisticated, and treacherous. It seems that all the geologists have been outsmarted. We strongly feel the limitations of our profession … but we must proceed to gain even better understanding.
Once again, Mother Nature, using earthquakes, has fooled the best scientific professionals with her power and variability.
We have put together an earthquake investigation team of international experts to visit Kyushu starting the evening of 4/17. The team is made up of some of the same experts who did the IAEA Mission to Onagawa investigation after the 3.11 Great Tohoku Earthquake.
If you would like more information, please contact me directly.
As I write this article, I am watching the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 on television. The Sendai staff is now removing the control rods in the reactor of Unit 1.
This will make it the first Japanese reactor to resume operation following the shutdown of the country’s entire fleet after the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Kyushu Electric Power, the operator of the Sendai plant, said the 890MW pressurized water reactor will begin generating electricity on Aug. 14. Power output from Sendai 1 will be gradually increased, and it is expected to return to normal operation in early September.
Safe restart of nuclear plants in Japan is one of the primary concerns of the Japanese government and the business-industrial community. The new regulator, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, has stated that “we will be tireless in our efforts to improve our regulatory measures so that Japan’s nuclear regulation standards will be among the world’s highest.” The Japan Nuclear Safety Institute has been created and focuses on building safety cultures at the plants and operating companies. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has worked with the Federation of Electric Power Companies to create the Nuclear Risk Research Center, led by George Apostolakis, former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Questions remain
The new regulations are a challenge to the operating companies, involving new analyses and, in many cases, costly retrofits. I have been involved in fire safety analyses and earthquake fault analyses at over 10 nuclear power units in Japan to support restart. We have found the operating staffs and headquarter personnel deeply concerned with safety and doing the right thing. They are doing an excellent job to correct the weak points of the plants, both in engineering and organizationally.
These same activities are being performed at nuclear plants all over the world under names such as “stress tests” or “FLEX” programs. But questions remain: “Are the nuclear plants safe? Will these programs protect us from the next unexpected event?” This remains to be seen.
Let me step back to 2011 and 2012. I spoke at several nuclear safety meetings and conferences in the Asia-Pacific region. I found many people had a barely hidden attitude of superiority that the accident happened in Japan; it was a kind of schadenfreude — deriving pleasure from the misfortune of Japan’s nuclear industry. Many had the attitude of “it can’t happen here.”
This kind of attitude is dangerous for three reasons.
First, it leads directly to overconfidence, then to neglect, and finally to failures. The real fact of the matter is that an accident of this magnitude could happen at any nuclear plant. It has been said that Fukushima was an accident “made in Japan.” But this is not exactly so. For other countries to dismiss the accident as peculiarly Japanese is to miss the point: All mature, complex systems are prey to unexpected events. Chances are the next major nuclear accident will not involve tsunami.
This leads to the second reason: Unexpected events come in many different forms. They can come from ill-advised actions, such as at Chernobyl; or from lack of knowledge of what to do, as at Three-Mile Island; or near misses, such as at Blayais in France and Fort Calhoun in the U.S. because of floods. Or the near miss at the Maanshan plant in Taiwan, when a station blackout was caused by salt-bearing seasonal sea smog. An extra emergency diesel generator worked at the last minute and saved the plant.
Last, attitudes of superiority and overconfidence lead to an unquestioning belief in our own analyses. Just last week at a meeting discussing Generation III reactors, I was told that the core damage accident frequency at an APR1000 reactor was 1.0e-9 per year. This means a core damage accident was expected once every 100 million years. One hundred million years is a long time.
Prepare for the unexpected
Earthquakes and the fires that result pose the greatest danger to nuclear plants, but earthquakes cannot be predicted. Earth is 4.6 billion years old, but we have only about 100 years of instrumental seismicity data. The present state of seismological science does not allow us to reliably differentiate the risk level in particular, focused geographic areas.
Nuclear safety cannot be measured by an absence of accidents, which is largely dependent on luck, but is the result of constant, active identification of hazards and their elimination. Near misses are not testimonials to safe practices.
To be prepared for unexpected events, we must constantly challenge our analyses, question assumptions, change assumptions, and understand the uncertainty.
As the first nuclear reactor in Japan resumes operation following the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Woody reflects on the dangers of measuring safety and success merely on the absence of accidents.
The new regulations are a challenge to the operating companies, involving new analyses and, in many cases, costly retrofits. I have been involved in fire safety analyses and earthquake fault analyses at over 10 nuclear power units in Japan to support restart. We have found the operating staffs and headquarter personnel deeply concerned with safety and doing the right thing. They are doing an excellent job to correct the weak points of the plants, both in engineering and organizationally.
These same activities are being performed at nuclear plants all over the world under names such as “stress tests” or “FLEX” programs. But questions remain: “Are the nuclear plants safe? Will these programs protect us from the next unexpected event?” This remains to be seen.
Four years have passed since Japan’s devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident of March 2011. Since the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan has essentially been without active nuclear power plants.
In April, a Japanese court dismissed a demand by local residents for an injunction to stop the restart of two Kyushu Electric Power reactors.
In April, a Japanese court dismissed a demand by local residents for an injunction to stop the restart of two Kyushu Electric Power reactors.
Restart of the plants is now the government’s and the industry sector’s primary concern. Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority has stated: “We will be tireless in our efforts to improve our regulatory measures so that Japan’s nuclear regulation standards will be among the world’s highest.”
There is no national consensus in Japan for continuing the use of nuclear energy. About 80% of respondents are against nuclear power, or at least favor a retreat from dependence on it. There is strong, lingering public apprehension about nuclear. At the same time, the resumption of nuclear power in Japan is seen as key to the country’s economic recovery.
Court injunction
This year will probably mark the restart of Japan’s nuclear plants. The regulatory body has approved the restart of Sendai Units 1 and 2, owned and operated by Kyushu Electric Power in southwestern Kyushu, and Takahama Units 3 and 4, owned and operated by Kansai Electric Power in Fukui Prefecture.
However, restart of the two Takahama units was in doubt on April 14 when a Fukui district court, deciding in favor of nine private citizens, issued an injunction ordering Kansai Electric to halt restart. The plaintiffs challenged the earthquake safety of the Takahama units, among other points. Kansai Electric will appeal the ruling.
Meanwhile, the Kagoshima District Court made a reverse decision on April 22 to dismiss a demand by local residents for an injunction to stop the restart of two reactors at Sendai.
Why did the court stop the restart of the Takahama reactors? In my opinion, it was trying to strongly point out that no one in the nuclear debate is listening to the people. No one in the Japanese government or industry sector is listening to the public’s doubts and worries about the risks of nuclear power. Instead of listening, business leaders and power companies quickly criticized the court’s decision as lacking in knowledge about seismology and earthquake engineering.
”People aren’t stupid”
Experts and politicians sometimes find it hard to listen. In the summer of 2011, I attended a town meeting in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, to discuss the Fukushima Daiichi accident. Tokaimura has experienced two nuclear accidents: one, ironically, on March 11, 1997; the other, more serious, on Sept. 30, 1999.
During the meeting, a very worried mother asked one of the professors about the amount of radiation which could harm her children. The news had been filled with many different measurements, becquerels and millisieverts. And what did the professor say? He told her to look it up on the Internet. So much for communication.
“The public is not stupid,” said Kiyoshi Kurokawa, chairman of the Japanese diet’s independent panel to investigate the Fukushima accident, at a 2013 press conference. “Accidents happen, machines break and humans make errors. So we have to learn this and minimize risks, or at least become resilient.” Kurokawa wants to challenge the notion of 100% safety and instead enter a conversation with the public, who should not be treated as stupid. How can those of us in the scientific community help this process?
In risk communication, policymakers tend to believe that if we could provide people with more or better information, everyone would make more logical, rational and informed decisions regarding risk. But people do not, necessarily, behave rationally.
Rationality is one part of decisions. Emotions are just as important. Those who ignore the need for emotions, like sympathy and empathy, in decision-making have missed the point of the human condition.
How can we in science and technology work more effectively with the public and government? We need to be better listeners. We need to understand the issues important to all involved. We need to be better at giving easy-to-understand explanations.
Art of conversation
We have lost the art of conversation with the public. A tweet is not a conversation. Many in the scientific community lack the ability to talk straight with people without talking down to them. Everyone in the nuclear power debate must learn to listen. As every married person quickly learns, communication begins with listening, not talking. When you begin to listen, you begin to build a bridge.
We must help the public and policymakers to realize that science is never exact or final. Science changes over the years, sometimes with unanticipated discoveries. All scientific understanding is made through the veils of uncertainty and ignorance. We must help the public understand uncertainty, how to “expect the unexpected,” and how to create resilient institutions that can flexibly respond to an accident when it happens. We must be honest with the public and the policymakers. We must say truthfully what we know and what we do not.
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