The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 8 | Article ID 2487 | Aug 01, 2007

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Shaken to the Core: Japan's Nuclear Program Battered byNiigata Quake

David McNeill

Shaken to the Core: Japan’s NuclearProgram Battered by Niigata Quake

David McNeill

One of the lesser-known casualties of thedeadly July 16 quake that struck NiigataPrefecture was a headstone that toppled in avillage a few miles from the epicenter offKashiwazaki. The grave bore the name oflegendary former Prime Minister TanakaKakuei, Japan’s postwar master of pork-barrelpolitics and the man who helped bring theKashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant tothis deprived area on the Sea of Japan coast.

Tombstones toppled in Niigata by the July 16 quake

Tanaka’s pitch was energy self-sufficiency in acountry famously dependent on fuel imports,nearly all of it from the volatile Middle-East.But as its hosts now know, Tanaka’s dreamrequired building the planet’s largest nuclearpower complex directly over an activeearthquake fault. Today, the plant squats on

the outskirts of this town of 93,000, a seven-reactor, 8200-megawatt monster, surroundedby cracked and buckled roads and local peoplewho wonder anew if they are safe living in itsshadow.

Comprehensive view of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NuclearPower Plant

Inside, in the seconds after the 6.8 quake (nowofficially known as Chuetsu-oki) struck justtwelve miles away, pipes burst, drums ofnuclear waste toppled and monitors stoppedworking. A fire in an electrical transformerburned unattended for over two hours and1,200 liters of contaminated water sloshed intothe sea. Ten days later, Tokyo Electric Co.(Tepco), the utility giant that runs the plant,admitted that the damage “extended to theinterior of the reactor building” and, at the endof July, that a small amount of radioactivewater had also escaped from the No.1 reactor.

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Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant entrance daysafter the earthquake

When Tepco President Katsumata Tsunehisa,who heads Japan’s largest electric powercompany and the largest privately ownedelectric utility in the world, surveyed the site inthe aftermath of the quake, he reportedlycalled it “a mess.”

But the full dimensions of the problem wouldcontinue to leak to the public over the comingweeks. Not until July 30 did Tepco acknowledgethat the July 16 quake had caused the PowerPlant to sway a maximum 2,058 gals. A gal is aunit of acceleration equal to 1 centimeter per 1second squared.

It was, the utility reported, not only thestrongest sway recorded at a nuclear powerplant in Japan, but might be the most powerfulat any nuclear plant in the world.

In at least one area of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwaplant, the shaking was 6.8 times larger than themaximum level taken into account when theplant was designed. Following the quake,Tepco had announced that the maximumshaking recorded at the plant was 680 gals onthe lowest basement floor of the No. 1 reactor.

Tepco Shinsaiwaibashi Building

The problems at the complex quickly overtookmedia coverage of the wider and tragicdestruction caused by the quake: eleven dead,over a thousand injured and an estimated 1.5trillion yen in damage. At a time when somegovernments are rethinking a freeze on nuclearpower as an alternative to carbon-basedenergy, Japan was something of an anomaly: anadvanced country that had continued buildingplants despite the twin nuclear disasters ofThree Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986).The country was now “paying a price” for thatcommitment, according to the LA Times, one ofmany foreign news outlets that felt compelledto comment on the disaster.

Such coverage elicited a testy press releasefrom Japan’s Foreign Office on July 27, whichblamed foreign news organizations for“inappropriate or inaccurate” reports on thequake. Like Tepco, the Foreign Office insiststhat the reactors worked as designed,

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automatically shutting down as the quakestruck and releasing an “insignificant” amountof radiation “substantially lower than thestandards under law.” The world awaitsconfirmation of these claims, but they follow ahistory of dissembling and cover-upsconcerning nuclear power that critics saycontinues in Niigata. On July 23, a delegation ofSocial Democratic Party members led byHosaka Nobuhiko was refused entry to severalkey areas of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa complex,including reactor buildings 5 and 7, by Tepcomanagers. A report written afterward bylawyer Ito Yoshinori called the extensivedamage around the plant “alarming.”

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s seven reactors are nowidle, threatening power shortages throughoutthe peak energy-demand summer months andforcing Trade Minister Amari Akira to requestthat business users cut electricity consumption.Kashiwazaki Mayor Aida Hiroshi invoked alittle-used emergency order to shut down thereactors because he considered them “a threatto the safety of the public.” According to theNikkei business newspaper, the plant, whichgenerates enough power to supply 16 millionhouseholds, is likely to be closed for up to ayear.

Locals say that after he read the riot act toTepco’s managers, Mayor Aida sent carsequipped with loudspeakers around the town toreassure his constituents he had been “tough”with the company. Some said he wasn’t toughenough. “I wish the plant wasn’t here,”lamented resident Yamada Koji. “But now thatit is we have to live with it and hope thegovernment keeps us safe.” That’s far from aunanimous view: Igarashi Mitsuo who lives in ahamlet right beside the stricken nuclear giantsaid: “I don’t like it but as long as it stays safe,I think it is better that we have it.”

Locals have argued about the plant’s meritssince it was announced amid a blaze ofpublicity and national pride in 1969. Later, the

central government forcibly bought up the landand surrounding seas, according to local anti-nuclear activist Takemoto Kazuyuki. “Theslogan was: ‘Nuclear power is a state policy, soyou should be cooperative,’” he wrote in a 2002petition to have the plant closed. Takemoto firstpetitioned to close the complex in 1974;demonstrations, petitions and court-cases werea regular feature of life here as the reactorswent online between 1985 and 1997.

Since 2001, the site has been constantlymonitored by police helicopters and coastguardships permanently anchored offshore, the sameyear a public referendum narrowly (53 percent)voted to reject the use of MOX fuel, whichcombines plutonium and natural uraniumoxides, in the reactors. Today, the mostcommon local reaction to questions about thepower station is shikata-ga-nai: It can’t behelped. “Most people who live here keep awary eye on the plant the way they would adangerous neighbor,” says Briton PaulWoodcock, who teaches in the town. “They justhope it stays calm.”

Over the years, a total of $2 billion dollars(2,500 oku) in government subsidies has beenpumped into Kashiwazaki, estimates MayorAida, and hundreds of local people now work atthe complex; a quarter of households in Kariwa(a village of 5,000 people) are dependent on itssalaries. “The plant contributes a lot to the areabut we only want it here if Tepco can guaranteethe safety of the people here,” says Aida in anoffice on the top of the city’s administrationbuilding visibly scared by the quake. “We mustbe assured of this before it is reopened.”

Privately, the mayor is said to be furious atTepco. Japan’s biggest power company initiallyfailed to report the leak, then admitted that itwas 50 percent bigger than previouslyannounced. According to the Asahi, journalistswho visited the reactor building on July 25found workers mopping up radioactive waterwith paper towels. Earlier this year Tepco

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admitted falsifying inspection data 200 times atKashiwazaki-Kariwa and other reactors goingback decades. After the quake, it emerged thatthe International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)had warned the plant managers two years agothat their fire-prevention measures wereinadequate.

Trade Minister Amari warned that suchscandals “could make people lose their trust innuclear power” and ordered the country’s topnuclear power companies to tighten up plantoperations. His concern is understandable.Japan has 55 of the world’s 440-odd operatingreactors, supplying about one-third of thecountry’s demand for electricity, and another11 in cons t ruc t ion or p lanned . Thegovernment’s national energy policy aims tobury the “Hiroshima Syndrome” and raise theproportion of nuclear-generated electricity to40 percent. Japan aims, in the words of GavanMcCormack, author of Client State: Japan inthe American Embrace, to become “a nuclearsuperstate.”

That puts the world’s second-largest economyout of step with much of the developed world.The contribution of nuclear power to globalenergy demand fell by one percent to 16percent in the decade to 2003, and thescheduled closing of many older plants inEurope and the US is likely to reduce that levelin coming years. While the US, Britain andmuch of Europe essentially froze their nuclearprograms in recent years, resource-poor Japancontinued building in the pursuit of energy self-sufficiency. One of the byproducts of this policyis an enormous and growing stock of plutonium– 45 tonnes, or enough to build thousands ofthe bombs that leveled Nagasaki in 1945. “It isastonishing that even after Chernobyl, Japanhas built more than 20 new reactors,” saysMurata Mitsuhei, former Japanese ambassadorto Switzerland and now an antinuclearcampaigner.

Murata says he and his network have collected

900,000 signatures demanding that allJapanese nuclear plants built on active faults beshut down.

Murata and leading seismologist IshibashiKatsuhiko, who coined the phrase genpakushinsai (roughly meaning a nuclear disastertriggered by an earthquake), warn that thenuclear technocrats are dangerously delusionalabout their ability to predict the impact ofquakes on Japan’s 55 reactors. “The people incharge say the faults (under the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant) were unexpected, but they hadactually been predicted,” says Ishibashi, whowarns that the ability to forecast where quakeswill hit is in any case limited. “Even in areaswith no detected faults, M7-class destructiveearthquakes can happen.”

I sh ibash i recent ly res igned f rom asubcommittee of the Japan Nuclear SafetyCommission, set up to revise Japanese nuclearplant seismic standards, because he “didn’tthink the new standards were sufficient.”

Japan’s nuclear plants are designed towithstand M6.5-quakes, but the constructionregulations are a quarter of a century old andnew rules issued last year recommended anupgrade, widely and erroneously reported as6.8, according to Ishibashi. “The newguidelines are vague…and should be reviewedagain. I f we don’t make fundamentalimprovements to nuclear plant earthquakedesign, Japan will suffer a catastrophicgenpaku shinsai.” The most likely venue forsuch a disaster, he contends, is the aging, five-reactor Hamaoka plant in Shizuoka Prefecture,190 km southwest of Tokyo. Seismologistssuggest an 87-percent probability of amagnitude-8 quake striking under or near theChubu Electric Power Co. plant in the next 30years. Doomsday scenarios predict clouds ofradioactive dust from the plant descending onthe world’s most crowded metropolis within sixhours of the quake. “Thirty million peoplewould have to be evacuated from the city,” says

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Ishibashi. “We could never live there again.”

Despite such chilling warnings, there is littleevidence that the Niigata quake has shakengovernment confidence in its nuclear programand, as the Foreign Office statement suggests,may have even reinforced it. “We believe,” saidthe statement, that a joint IAEA investigation“will not only confirm the current safety of theKashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant…butalso further contribute to the transparency inJapan’s Nuclear Energy, and help promote toshare lessons leaned from the earthquakeinternationally” (sic). Many wonder, however,whether the pursuit of transparency and safetywill survive the enormous costs generated.“The logic of nuclear power is that thecompanies want to reduce the costs ofearthquake-resistant design as much aspossible,” says Kyoto University’s ImanakaTetsuji . “That leaves a lot of room forunderestimating the risks.” Ban Hideaki, co-director of the Citizens’ Nuclear InformationCenter, put this more bluntly. “The target ismoney rather than safety” he told the AsiaTimes.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency hasalready ordered an investigation into theNiigata disaster, citing “concern at the delayedreaction to the accident by the operators of theplant.” The result could be a demand that up tohalf of Japan’s nuclear complexes be refitted.Several plants, including the Onagawa facilityin Miyagi Prefecture and the Shika plant inIshikawa Prefecture have recently been rattledby much stronger quakes than they were builtto withstand, and suggest that a quakeresistance of at least 7.0 will have to be thenew standard, a deceptively small change thatcould carry a price tag of hundreds of millions

of dollars. The new regulations may demandthat geologists identify quake faults active upto 130,000 years ago, a reaction to thestunning revelation that the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant sat atop an active fault. In themeantime, Takemoto and his anti-nuclearcolleagues wait for the results of a lawsuit (nowin the Supreme Court) demanding that thegovernment revoke Tepco’s operating licensefor the plant. “We predicted the earthquakeand Tepco did not,” says Takemoto. “Thecompany does not have the right to operate.”

Japan’s nuclear issues are not contained withinits borders and indeed the reverberations ofthe July 16 quake are already being felt aroundthe world: The Niigata plant shutdown is likelyto undermine the country’s commitments to the1997 Kyoto Protocol, which require a six-percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2012,based on an operational rate for its nuclearplants above 85 percent. Tokyo is planning tooffer support and technological assistance toother fast-growing Asian nations that want todevelop their own nuclear programs. Muratabelieves the Niigata quake should be thebeginning of the end for Japan’s entire nuclearprogram. “To me it is a moral and ethicalquestion. How can we keep building theseplants when we don’t know how to dispose ofthe waste they generate or if they will survivean earthquake?”

David McNeill writes regularly from Tokyo forthe Chronicle of Higher Education, the LondonIndependent and other publications. He is acoordinator of Japan Focus.

He wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted atJapan Focus August 1, 2007.