Earlier this year, Abe’s environment ministry dealt with nuclear risks by deleting mention of them from its 2013 White Paper. While the 2012 White Paper termed radioactive contamination the nation’s “biggest environmental issue,” a year later the risk just vanished. ... So why didn’t Japanese scientists give the nuclear industry and government regulators a red card instead of propagating the myth of 100-percent safety prior to Fukushima? These paragons of knowledge and objective insight showed themselves to be timid careerists who didn’t want to jeopardize their jobs or research funding. Those few who did raise their hands were booted out of the nuclear village and paid for their apostasy; why didn’t their colleagues rally to their defense? So scores of coopted scientists went along with the string of lies and told the emperor that all was well; it took a tsunami-sized mirror to reveal that he’d been naked all along. Haruki Madarame, former chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission (NSC), testified in February 2012 at a Diet inquiry that the ace scientists who were supposed to be regulating the nuclear industry sat around making up excuses why Japan didn’t need to adopt more stringent international safety standards. Although Japan is renowned for its leading-edge technologies, its nuclear-safety czar acknowledged that on nuclear safety it lagged far behind. Madarame also revealed that when power companies didn’t want to obey regulators’ demands, they just ignored them with impunity. Had Tepco installed the multiple-backup power systems his colleagues recommended back in the early 1990s, there might not have been an outage and blackout at the Fukushima plant following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 — and so, no meltdowns. Oops. Tepco had its own team of crack scientists, but little good that did; they produced the June 2012 report that exonerated Tepco of all wrongdoing in the Fukushima debacle. Ironically, though, that scientific whitewash was so lame that even Tepco subsequently repudiated it and issued a mea culpa; guilty as charged. Progress? Amazingly, almost all of Japan’s utilities admitted to falsifying maintenance and repair data for their reactors over an extended period of time. A lot of scientists had to sign off on those deliberate fabrications. The scientific establishment, whose assessments we are asked to now trust, mimicked the three wise monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. And this ethos facilitated Japan’s Chernobyl. A significant regulatory revamp in 2013 targets lax safety standards, poor industry oversight and widespread concerns about operating nuclear plants in quake-prone Japan. In September 2012, the discredited Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) and the NSC were disbanded and replaced by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) with a staff of 480 under the environment ministry. But the NRA is more a reorganization than a significant reform, as 460 of its staff were transferred from the NISA and NSC. Thus the same regulators who were working in favor of the nuclear village are still in charge. ... The lessons of Fukushima, however, suggest there’s also a pressing need to upgrade basic worker training and crisis-management skills while nurturing a culture of safety — there are no quick fixes. ... Elsewhere, the NRA has determined that an active fault runs directly beneath the No. 2 reactor building at the Tsuruga nuclear power plant, also in Fukui Prefecture, and recommends against restarting it. This decision has been challenged by the plant’s operator, Japan Atomic Power Co., which insists its own scientists know better. Meanwhile, the nuclear village is ratcheting up the pressure on the NRA to reconsider its recommendation, knowing the government is in its pocket. In July, based on the new safety guidelines, four utilities applied to restart a total of 10 reactors nationwide. Approval looks likely, despite the Fukushima fiasco, so setting the stage for restarts in 2014. But can the NRA reform an industry in which lowly Tepco once had the best reputation — and one in which deceit and coverup have been the standard operating procedures? After all, utilities can rely on favorable assessments by the best scientists money can buy — and the nuclear village now has Team Abe championing its cause. That is precisely why everyone has a right to be worried. japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/09/07/commentary/dont-worry-team-abe-is-tackling-the-nuclear-crisis-at-fukushima/
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 06:00:29 +0000
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