Before March 11, 2011, classifying Chernobyl as the worst disaster at a civilian nuclear plant in history was a no-brainer. But as politicians, journalists, and scholars were gearing up to commemorate Chernobyl's twenty-fifth anniversary in April 2011, a massive earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan's Honshu Island triggered a tsunami that would devastate the Tohoku area. The tsunami killed almost 16,000 people, destroyed or severely damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings, and caused a total station blackout at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Because the tsunami devastated the surrounding infrastructure and massive aftershocks aggravated the damage, plant personnel could not address the station blackout for days, and as a result three reactors suffered core meltdowns and three explosions each destroyed a reactor building. According to the Red Cross, some 78,000 people were evacuated.1 Since then, the plant has continued to release significant amounts of radioactivity, particularly contaminated water, into the environment.
Comparing disasters is always tricky, even two nuclear disasters both of which international experts ranked at 7 (a major accident) on the 7-level International Nuclear and Radiological Events Scale.2 The Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters were very different, starting with the technology: while Chernobyl involved one Soviet-designed graphite-water reactor, Fukushima involved three U.S.-designed boiling-water reactors. Chernobyl happened roughly 70 miles from Kiev, Fukushima about 150 miles from Tokyo, the nearest major population centers. When the tsunami struck, and before the nuclear crisis unfolded, authorities in Japan evacuated parts of the population preemptively and advised others to shelter in place. The evacuation of Chernobyl's satellite town did not start until some 30 hours after the onset of the emergency, and authorities didn't evacuate other nearby villages until days later. Chernobyl occurred in a country that was struggling economically and undergoing unprecedented political changes, and international experts did not rate Soviet technology very highly, especially in the commercial sector. Fukushima, by contrast, occurred in a country whose engineering expertise and sophistication were legendary. Japanese engineers led the world in earthquake-resistant building methods, and nobody doubted that if anyone could build a nuclear reactor on top of an active fault line, it was the Japanese. If an earthquake occurred, the reactor would simply shut itself down safely, sway gently, and restart in due time. Fukushima's reactors had containments, multiple redundant safety systems, and current emergency plans—none of which were in place at Chernobyl.
And yet, all those meticulous plans failed, one after another, as the station blackout at Fukushima dragged on for day after excruciating day. As the Fukushima nuclear emergency unfolded, another set of differences appeared. Fukushima's crew had a big handicap compared to Chernobyl's: they could not count on an all-powerful, centralized government that could rouse top scientists, engineers, and managers to figure out, once and for all, what needed to be done, and then move heaven and earth to make it happen. A private utility company, Tokyo Electric (or TEPCO), operated the Fukushima plant, and given the gravity of the situation, at times they had trouble rounding up a hundred workers to hold the line. At one point, TEPCO even contemplated abandoning the plant because of the life-threatening radiation levels.3 The thought of abandoning the Chernobyl plant never crossed anyone's mind in 1986; quite the contrary, the pressure was on to return the plant to normal operations as quickly as possible. Recruits and volunteers labored jointly to complete the sarcophagus seven months after the explosion, marking the official end of the immediate disaster mitigation phase. In Fukushima, two years after the tsunami, the nuclear disaster is still ongoing. Nobody knows exactly how severe the damage to the reactors is. Spent fuel—hot, radioactive, dangerous spent fuel—remains in each of the wrecked buildings. Radioactive water continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean, despite desperate efforts to catch and store it in hastily built tanks. And we know with certainty that the next earthquake is only a few months, or maybe weeks, away.
Such important differences notwithstanding, we can already see emerge in the interpretation of Fukushima dynamics of simplification and blame similar to those (and as disturbing as those) this book has documented with Chernobyl. It did not take long before international critics started accusing the plant personnel of not acting quickly and decisively enough. The Fukushima version of the operator-error narrative did not charge personnel with conducting unauthorized experiments, as Soviet operators allegedly had in 1986. Ironically, critics charged Fukushima's workers instead with spending too much time coordinating with the utility's headquarters, the prime minister's office, and other superiors. Implicitly, these critics suggested the Japanese were better at rule-following, while their Soviet counterparts had been better at improvising. But there is evidence to the contrary, evidence that Fukushima's staff came up with extremely creative ideas, which unfortunately failed.4 What's more, there is evidence that they also eventually defied orders when the process of getting authorization threatened the plant's safety.5 Extraordinary situations by their very nature require improvisation, but different contexts produce different improvisations.
As readers of this book may have suspected, the design argument soon emerged as well. Fukushima's so-called Mark-1 containment design was originally from General Electric, and it has some twenty “sisters” on U.S. soil. After the accident, an aghast international public learned that in the mid-1970s, three top GE engineers had criticized the design as seriously flawed and resigned from their positions in protest.6 Reactor construction in the United States nevertheless continued, and the industry dismissed the dissident engineers’ concerns as overblown. In the case of Fukushima's reactors, the industry argued, TEPCO had modified the reactor design to suit specific Japanese needs. In other words, the industry implied that the American original had somehow become “tainted” in the process, and that only American plants of this design were “pure” and therefore safe.
And of course, the organizational argument joined the Kabuki dance soon thereafter: critics saw TEPCO, which also operated a number of other Japanese nuclear and nonnuclear power plants, as the embodiment of corporate greed. The utility's leaders maintained a “cozy” relationship with the regulator and even had some serious cases of corruption on their record. And TEPCO had clearly cut corners: against the advice of scientists, they had built their tsunami wall lower than the historically recorded maximum waterline, they had built several reactors on one site, and they had built close to the water—the general public and nuclear experts alike were outraged. Based on some reports, one could have concluded that the Japanese nuclear industry had been concocted by maniacs who deliberately risked the safety of millions, including their own families.
Again, hindsight seemed to make the causes obvious, a contextualized understanding unnecessary. But such an understanding would take into account that combining multiple reactors at one site was (and still is) common practice around the globe; like economies of scale elsewhere, it helps defray the substantial cost of sophisticated infrastructure and expertise. Building a nuclear plant close to a body of water is a simple technical necessity because unimaginable amounts of water are needed for cooling; this often puts a plant on or near a fault line simply because that's where riverbeds tend to form. And finally, economic common sense dictated the need to find a compromise between planning for the absolute worst-case scenario and the probability of that worst case. Only then could a utility determine how much to invest in, for example, tsunami protection walls.
As after Chernobyl, multiple commissions, from government bodies to independent foundations, created accident investigation reports that reached at times contradictory conclusions. The international media and expert community (notably, the IAEA) took note of one assessment that appeared only in the English-language foreword to the Japanese parliament's (the Diet's) report and possibly does not even reflect the entire commission's point of view, because it was authored only by the commission's chairman, namely that this accident was “made in Japan.” 7 In other words, it could never happen here (wherever “here” is). This cultural interpretation of Fukushima will no doubt stand in the way of learning from this disaster, no matter how many commissions and working groups are set up to identify lessons to be learned.8
Under tremendous public pressure, Japan shut down all its nuclear power plants after the triple disaster of March 2011—a step Soviet leaders would not even have considered in 1986. To maintain Japan's modern lifestyle, the country has for the time being switched to expensive, polluting fossil fuels, and will (literally) burn through its CO2 emission reduction targets. Public opinion appears to support a nuclear phaseout. To restart a nuclear reactor, a utility now has to meet additional, exceedingly stringent safety requirements, and even if they do, the governor of the local prefecture still has the authority to veto the start-up.
But the postdisaster restructuring of Japan's nuclear industry also bears similarities to Chernobyl's aftermath. After TEPCO decided (or perhaps realized) that Fukushima Daiichi would never operate again, the company's managers—again in striking similarity to the Ukrainian agencies—singled out the plant from their other operations, most likely to limit future liability claims. As with Chernobyl, this singling out of “the troublemaker” inevitably leads to a loss of expertise in disaster response, safe maintenance of a damaged nuclear facility, and decommissioning. And as with Chernobyl, we will most likely lose the unique knowledge that participants in these operations will accumulate.
The repercussions from Fukushima are thus no less dramatic than Chernobyl's: we are witnessing, yet again, a massive overhaul of technical safety protocols at nuclear power plants, a thorough reevaluation of operating procedures, especially in emergency situations, and a fundamental review of the safety oversight and regulatory apparatus. Fukushima, in contrast to Chernobyl, may have global implications: not only have some countries decided to phase out their nuclear programs, but the process of harmonizing safety norms and measures that the European Union's “Stress Tests” initiated have no precedent in history.9 Nuclear safety after Fukushima has become “the world's business.” 10
We have not even begun to comprehend Fukushima's full impact—on the environment, human health, or the national and international economy, let alone on Japan's national psyche. Let me venture to predict that along with one powerful narrative that views Fukushima as the end of Japan's nuclear exceptionalism, there will be another competing narrative that integrates nuclear energy back into the fabric of Japanese modernity. This latter narrative will portray Fukushima as a hard lesson that had to be learned and nuclear power as a normal industry that, although it suffered a bad accident, is inevitable for the nation's economic, technological, and even environmental survival. Only time will tell which narrative will prevail. But if Chernobyl is a guide, twenty-five years from now Japan's nuclear power program will have again returned to normalcy.