INCREDULOUS

Though I don't think of myself as being passionate for or against nuclear energy, I do try to learn what I can about it. I take book recommendations and watch informational videos, read the latest about new reactor plans and completions, and try to keep track of the state of the art in experimental fission and fusion. Knowing anything at all (some details about the performance and problems with existing reactors including the latest builds in Finland and America) results in discovering plenty of curious assumptions and serious errors all over the internet. When I come across what I believe to be simple mistakes in the news, popular magazines, or social media I try to leave a note with a link to some reliable sources I believe offer good evidence to the contrary of what was published. I mean, what else can you do?

I reckon the easiest way to receive an abundance of vociferous push-back (and hate mail) is to mention 2011 in any such correspondence. It seems to me we should be able to talk about events that took place on the other side of the planet 15 years ago. We cannot. Seemingly universal among fans of nuclear energy is the conviction that nothing of note transpired at the seashore between the towns of Ōkuma and Futaba in March of that year. At best, Fukushima Daiichi was a fleeting event, really a non-event, used to induce panic and attempt to hamper the inevitable nuclear renaissance. Naturally, the fiercest responses always come from those who seem to know nothing about the causes or consequences of this man-made nuclear disaster. Those you can tease information out of, which is rare, only reference terrible information from sources who should know better — or who should be inclined to explain themselves at least.

For example, I went from offering some conflicting details to eventually getting into it with some folks on the eve of the recent demolition of a cooling tower from a decommissioned nuclear reactor in Germany (one that was shut down not due to radiophobia or radical environmentalism, as typically suggested, but the power plant’s persistent inability to earn a profit on nuclear-generated electricity in light of the collapse in the price to generate with alternatives). After days of back-and-forth, I eventually coaxed someone to offer up a link to what they felt was a reliable source of good information on nuclear power. This is usually all I do and it is rare to come upon anyone who will offer anything other than the Our World in Data website (that I’ve written about at length in the past.) For a change I was thrilled to find their suggestion landed me on the YouTube page for a professor of engineering with the Center for Plasma-Material Interactions in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fantastic. Better still, the professor has a hundred thousand subscribers and ten million views of his more than 150, twenty-minute explainer videos on the ins and outs of many pertinent themes related to energy production including things like the Kyoto Protocol and economics of oil to the smart grid and food irradiation. Fabulous. The video I was directed to was one on Fukushima, published in May of 2019, more than eight years after the earthquake.

TL;DR

I believe the professor knowingly:

• Misrepresents the rarity and severity of the 2011 earthquake

• Claims the tsunami that struck the Fukushima Daiichi power plant was almost three times its actual height while also being unpredictable when many warnings arrived in many forms (from local monuments to scientific papers) from ancient times to the present

• Presents radiation levels on the grounds of the nuclear plant as 27 times lower and nearer the reactors 1,325 times lower than actually measured and reported

• Severely downplays what happened at the nuclear site by completely erasing many known harms and fatalities as well as the ongoing social and ecological catastrophes and expert opinion that those will continue long into the future — and all directly as a result of human stupidity and error and not a pair of natural disasters

  
  

A SEISMIC EVENT

The video begins presenting the earthquake of 3/11 as effectively unprecedented. The professor tells us the Japanese, of course, are “used to earthquakes, they build for earthquakes, but they don’t expect a magnitude 9.0.” That may sound reasonable. Yes this was one of the largest earthquakes on record. Fact. But, it seems worth noting that the depth and distance of the quake's epicenter from the reactor site in question matters a lot. Yes, a 9.0 struck that day but it did so a full 150kms from the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and perhaps 30km below the seafloor. As such, the quake’s intensity was mercifully less severe when the shaking reached this and other nuclear power plants on the coast. From there I notice that, despite the professor providing maps and figures throughout his video, he doesn’t offer a list of even a dozen of the largest earthquakes in history nor their locations or dates. Why do you think that is? All I know is that to do so instantly exposes the reality that quakes at the top end of the intensity scale, 7.0 and up (those you don’t want to experience), happen all the time and the rarest of all, around 8.5 and above, are not exactly uncommon. There have been 14 quakes at or above 8.4 in living memory, most of those on the Pacific coast. For context, Japan built their first nuclear reactor in 1957 and the first reactors at Fukushima Daiichi came online in the 1970s. Around that time, in 1952, just north of Japan in Kamchatka, Russia, a 9.0 quake was recorded; in 1960 Chile saw the most severe quake ever recorded, one that hit a whopping 9.5; and in 1964 a 9.2 struck Alaska. (SIDE NOTE: There are no faults long enough on planet Earth to generate a 10.0 quake, so this 9.5 in Chile would seem to be as big as they come.) In recent times, immediately prior to the big 2011 quake off the coast of Japan, down in Indonesia, the island of Sumatra alone saw a 9.1 in 2004, an 8.6 in 2005, and an 8.4 in 2007. Right. Look at that. So, with just a touch more information, how different does the picture I just painted for you feel compared to the one presented by the professor? Does this make it look like the fiercest quakes are truly rare and unpredictable, something engineers can’t anticipate, build for, or reinforce against especially around the coastlines of the Pacific? Or does it look like seismic events very much like 2011 are almost guaranteed to happen, maybe several of them, in the 40 or 80 year lifetime of any nuclear reactor?

Maybe you feel all of that is nitpicking and unfair. My interlocutor did. I think the opening moments of the video, just 30 seconds in, are a pretty rough and tragic start for an explainer from an academic presenting on events nearly a decade after their occurrence. Sadly, the next 30 seconds of the video were more of the same. 

THE BIGGEST WAVE

The professor explains that it wasn’t just an earthquake that struck but “a tsunami, a tidal wave of water, 40 meters high. 40 meters! Giant!” That fits with what most of us understand to have taken place. On the day of the quake, Japan’s Meteorological Association only predicted a wave height of 6m, with Fukushima prefecture receiving 3m waves. But shortly after the waves arrived and ever since then every source worth reading (from nuclear insiders like the World Nuclear Association and American Nuclear Society to the Japanese press and authorities on the ground in Fukushima prefecture) all agree “the tsunami arrived with an estimated maximum wave height of ~15m.” So what explains the huge discrepancy between what was measured and reported and what is offered by the professor? I don't know. But it should also be mentioned that, even immediately after the tsunami, many major and minor publications and offered podcasts and stories about how, centuries ago, the Japanese placed stone markers, hundreds of them, high in the hills surrounding the region worst impacted by this tsunami. Those markers, known locally as “tsunami stones”, carry engravings specifically warning future generations about the sea’s well-established capacity and propensity to erase the whole of the countryside. Inscriptions are found offering things like:

"High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants"

"Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point"

"Always be prepared for unexpected tsunamis. Choose life over your possessions."

"If and earthquake comes, beware of tsunamis."

There are even Japanese proverbs to this effect, such as "a natural disasters strike when they are forgotten" (天災は忘れられたる頃来る). If that wasn't enough, when I go looking I also find research published in the decades preceding this tremendous tsunamigenic earthquake of 2011 describing this section of the Pacific northeast of Japan being prone to large tsunamis of the sort we saw in 2011, with three bigger ones on record, along with being assessed as long overdue for a culture-transforming wave (a once-in-a-thousand-year mythological-scale event, the kind of cataclysm that might make terrified survivors flee to the hills and etch warnings into stone). But did the electric company respond by reassessing, reoganizing, or reinforcing their reactors along the eastern coast of the country? Did the government or regulators impose any modifications or new preparedness measures? Did international monitors or NGOs offer guidance or financial assistance? Did the world's nuclear science and engineering community conduct their peer review and rally to ensure no tragedy would unfold? No. This is why the serious voices I find, including those who conducted investigations into the events leading up to several massive hydrogen explosions and multiple reactors melting down at the plant, do not brush off the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi as belonging to or the consequence of a natural disaster but as its own starkly man-made event. As such, it strikes me as truly poor form indeed for anyone to explain or merely imply, and thus lead others to mistakenly believe, this event was unanticipated and with properties far beyond anything seen before.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

At this point in the video, minute one, I felt like I was noticing a pattern. To get into the nuclear side of things, after explaining that an earthquake hit and caused a tsunami, the professor then points out that “there also happened to be a nuclear power plant, four of them … in a town called Fukushima.” Except, of course, there is no nuclear power plant in the town of Fukushima, which is about 80km (an hour and a half by car) from the coast and nearly 70m in elevation above the sea and the site of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. To me, professional pedant, that’s not even close. That’s like Abbotsford to Vancouver or Guelph to Toronto, Tillamook to Portland or Tewksbury to New York City. “You know, the Statue of Liberty, in Tewksbury Township.” “Stanley Park, in Abbotsford.” No. Sorry. Seriously, why would an engineer be so passionately disinterested in distance, dimension, or scale except to intentionally mislead (especially in the 21st century when it takes little more time or effort to provide extraordinarily precise GPS coordinates or measurements between any two locations on the globe than it takes to have the thought)? It’s a bit like finding a musician trying to draw a song for you rather than just instinctually whistling, singing, or playing it on the piano they just happen to be sitting at. What is happening? I don’t know. But don’t worry, it gets weirder.

THE HUMAN COST

Then, on the impact of the triple catastrophe, the professor notes 18,000 people lost their lives. Okay. Except even early on, published all over the place in 2011 and across the decade since (and all prior to his video being released), the fatalities were known to have likely exceeded 22,000, with more than 19,500 documented as killed and more than 2,500 still labelled missing years after the event. Japan’s Fire and Disaster Agency gathered and published these numbers within weeks of the disaster. So, again, what’s up? This guy has a serious physics and engineering background. Depending on the context, being off by 2% could be understandable but 20% and with such abundant and well-sourced information to the contrary? I don't know. From there the professor eagerly declares that, of those fatalities, the people “killed because of the nuclear power plant” numbered “zero.” He also highlights that the heroes who worked to keep the disaster from escalating at the power plant did not receive doses of radiation high enough to cause any harm, at least immediate harm. He insists “no one was hurt.” Okay. Only, this set of proposals is more misleading than the earthquake and tsunami information he provided. As was widely reported and even wound up on the relevant Wikipedia pages, many thousands of emergency workers, many of the 20,000 heroes who reported to the nuclear site in the aftermath of the natural disasters, have refused medical testing and would not answer health surveys. We also know that TEPCO, the electric company, did not interview people or investigate after known radiation exposures, that those taken to hospital were not even properly examined, and many emergency workers reported not being convinced such investigations and interventions could undo any harm received even if they yielded to testing. Of course, too, this is happening within the context of Japan, where, like many other places, it is common for doctors and family members to avoid telling their patients and loved ones if they are diagnosed with cancer as they feel it would cause unwanted stress and worsen any prognosis. So then, in the absence of any data, what could we possibly hope to know about the actual situation? Well, despite all that, there are press reports and publicly available documents from the International Atomic Energy Agency (not radical nuclear opponents) about fatalities at the reactor site on the day of the disaster as well as emergency hospitalizations and fatalities in the immediate aftermath for people suffering radiation burns and severe contamination resulting from work sessions on site. We also know of dozens of folks, last time I looked it was 33, seeking medical attention for heat stroke related to emergency work at the reactor site and also of two folks dying from heart failure from these events. If you look a little harder you may also find erected on the former grounds of the nuclear power station a cenotaph, a large stone slab declared a "Martyrs Memorial', placed there by the electric company. Engraved into the back of the cenotaph is no mention of a tsunami or earthquake; instead, and without offering a body count or any names, there is a solemn pledge to prioritize safety in the future “in order to comfort the souls who lost their lives in the line of duty preventing further casualties.” Does that seem like no harm came to anyone at this nuclear power plant and all that took place there was the story you've been told, one in which some back-up generators went down and little else — most certainly no fatalities? Bullsh*t. Known deaths and tremendous harm (as well as an abundance of systemic obfuscation and failures to collect data) arriving directly as a result of hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns and valiant attempts to prevent and mitigate those by men working at the nuclear plant are all gleefully repackaged in this explainer video as “no harms” and “zero deaths.” Wild.

MOUNTAINS OF YEN

To this, the professor also adds that the tsunami and earthquake caused billions of dollars in property damage, including homes, factories, and shipyards. I interpret this as an argument for how unimaginably huge the twin natural disasters were (and in part to diminish the drama at the reactor site). The numbers I’ve seen offer a clean-up cost for the tsunami and quake of ¥20-¥25 trillion ($229 billion) with total economic losses of ¥55 trillion ($550 billion), making it the costliest natural disaster in history. Yup, that’s a lot of dough and a real catastrophe for Japan. The trouble with that offering is that the many catastrophic nuclear events directly and immediately resulting from the loss of some back-up generators have been far worse than the earthquake and tsunami. Not only were there multiple, massive spent fuel-related hydrogen explosions but also meltdowns of three separate reactor cores, yielding a maximum, level 7 radiological event (the second in just 25 years.) So much land and water has been contaminated as a result that it is difficult to quantify or comprehend. Even today, 15 years later, you can go on Google Earth and check out how the farmland for miles around the former power plant has been converted into towering landfills, packed earth and plastic ziggurats, of contaminated waste. You've probably heard about the additional unbelievable volumes of contaminated water and the sea of containment units erected on site and that continues to grow at a rate of 80 tons per day. And maybe you've heard about the fact that, physically unable to store and decontaminate fast enough given this ongoing catastrophe, they eventually decided to just start discharging tritium-laden water used to cool the spent fuel and melted and unmelted reactor cores straight into the Pacific at a rate of about 460 tons per day. And the cost estimates for doing all this and remediating the site? In 2013, an estimate for the cost to taxpayers alone for decontamination, decommissioning, nuclear waste removal and storage, as well as compensation at Fukushima Daiichi landed around ¥11 trillion ($101 billion). Just three years later a reassessment brought that number closer to ¥21 trillion ($193 billion), along with the power company agreeing to contribute another estimated ¥16 trillion (or $147 billion). But in 2018 a revised figure from the Japan Center for Economic Research suggested, considering that ¥12 trillion has already been spent, the clean-up costs could be closer to ¥80 trillion ($734 billion) over just 40 years of decommissioning. Troublingly, this and other such reports have concluded there is no reason to think the job will be done by 2050. Worse, even those pessimistic estimates arrived before the recent discovery of novel fallout particulate, unknown materials near the reactor core, and far higher radiation levels than expected all over the former powerplant site, all resulting in revised recovery timelines stretching beyond a century (with some academic speculation that full recovery will take multiple centuries). As such, I would wager that the next revision to the nuclear clean-up estimates will exceed a trillion dollars and locate the completion date far beyond the lifetime of any living person. Even a 2021 article from The Asahi Shimbun explained:

The job ranks as the most expensive and dangerous nuclear clean-up ever attempted. A decade in, an army of engineers, scientists and 5,000 workers are still mapping out a project many expect will not be completed in their lifetime. Naoaki Okuzumi, the head of research at Japan’s lead research institute on decommissioning, compares the work ahead to climbing a mountain range - without a map. “The feeling we have is, you think the summit’s right there, but then you reach it and can see another summit, further beyond,” Okuzumi told Reuters.

Okuzumi and others need to find a way to remove and safely store 880 tons of highly radioactive uranium fuel along with a larger mass of concrete and metal into which fuel melted a decade ago during the accident. The robotic tools to do the job don’t yet exist. There is no plan for where to put the radioactive material when it is removed. Japan’s government says the job could run 40 years. Outside experts say it could take twice as long, pushing completion near the close of the century.

So, does all of this critical context make the earthquake and tsunami look like the bigger deal, as presented by the professor, or the human failures at this one nuclear power plant? And, considering that none of the above is a worst-case scenario, this seems like a good place to ask if you think the cost/benefit analysis offered to government and the public preceding the building of these reactors pitched generations-long timelines and sums in the trillions even as possible futures? I would guess not. And do you think any reactors built since this disaster offer up these numbers to stakeholders and concerned parties? In response, nuclear enthusiasts would point to new reactors being nothing like old ones. And I would point to old reactors being constructed precisely because, like problems with new reactors, these catastrophes and the many smaller meltdowns and leaks were all said to be effectively impossible…

AN INVISIBLE TSUNAMI

All of that is amazing but my favourite bit from the professor’s video comes near the end, around minute 18, when he throws up a graph showing us how the radiation at and around the Fukushima Daiichi reactor site was and remains no big deal. On a logarithmic scale, the graph shows possible radiation exposure levels. At the bottom in green, the safe zone, are high altitude cities and passenger airplanes receiving doses of 0.01 millisieverts per hour (mSv/h) and less. At the opposite end of the scale, the scary bit in red, are nuclear events like: Daghlian’s and Slotin’s accidents at Los Alamos Laboratory in which each man gifted himself a lethal 1,000 to 10,000 mSv/h dose in just a flash; an atomic bomb, that typically offers 30,000 mSv/h near ground zero an hour after detonation; and, at the very top, Chernobyl’s reactor core explosion reaching “>300,000 mSv/h”. Remember these numbers. Alongside this graph, the professor explains how, so very unlike Chernobyl, radiation levels outside the reactor buildings near the sea in Japan peaked at just 11 mSv/h. Readings near reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi, he tells us and displays on the graph, never went above 400 mSv/h. His graph clearly displays how these readings are in an elevated range but not in the scary range and nothing like what was observed at Los Alamos, Hiroshima, or Chernobyl, for instance. No big deal. He also explains how radiation diminishes with time and so these already low levels will quickly fade away. Well, like everything else the man offers, all this makes perfect sense. Except, of course, that nearly every word of it is wrong. Prior to the making of this video (and published all over the place) the rubble outside the reactor, on the grounds of the power plant, was not measured at a peak of 11 but instead 300 mSv/h. And as early as 2012, a recording near Reactor Two came back at 73,000 mSv/h. In early 2017, years before the professor’s video, a whopping 530,000 mSv/h was recorded and widely published in the popular press. (That said, the device used for these readings is pretty imprecise, with a margin of error of 30%, meaning levels could be as high as 690,000mSv/h.) And, critically, with these readings the electric company along with the world’s nuclear experts were blown away and could not tell us what was going on or why. Just to be perfectly clear, a dose of 1,000 millisieverts can render a person infertile, result in hair loss, and cause sickness. A brief exposure to 4,000 millisieverts will kill 50% of those exposed in under a month. And at these higher levels of radiation, newly documented and still unexplained, 500,000 (or perhaps approaching 700,000) results in 100% of people exposed dying inside of an hour. Actually this level of radiation renders photography equipment and robotics inoperable within a few hours of exposure, making understanding what has taken place or doing any work on site, even remotely and with machines, impossible. As explained in a 2017 Science Alert article:

It's not yet clear exactly what's causing the high levels at this spot, either. Because we haven't taken readings from this point before, it's possible that levels have always been this high and we just haven't known about it. Or maybe something inside the reactor has changed. The fact that these readings were so high in this particular location suggests that maybe melted reactor fuel escaped the pressure vessel, and is located somewhere nearby. Adding to that hypothesis is the fact that the images reveal a gaping 1-metre (3.2-foot) hole in the metal grate underneath the pressure vessel - which could indicate that nuclear fuel had melted out of it.

On Monday, Tepco also saw "black chunks" deposited on the grating directly under the pressure vessel - which could be evidence of melted fuel rods. If confirmed, this would be a huge deal, because in the six years since the three Fukushima reactors went into meltdown, no one has ever been able to find any trace of the nuclear fuel rods. Swimming robots were sent into the reactors last year to search for the fuel rods and hopefully remove them, but their wiring was destroyed by the high levels of radiation. 

There is a lot more we could get into but I think this gets to the point. All of the above should make it clear where the best of nuclear science, engineering, safety, and communication appear to be at. Long live the nuclear revolution, or something.