11 Diverse Nuclear Considerations

Well, Giorgio, relax. Be a good boy and go back to 2011, the summer without much hope. Months in limbo. Sitting on packed suitcases, not knowing how the situation in Dai-ichi was. How deep had the burning nuclear fuel penetrated? It had burned through the containment vessels, no doubt about that, but had it really been stopped by the concrete below? Had it burned itself out? This was no ordinary fire. A nuclear chain reaction continues to produce heat as long as there is enough fuel, in our case highly enriched uranium packed closely enough, to sustain the process.

In Chernobyl heroic miners called in from all over the Soviet Union had tunneled underneath the devastated reactor to fill in boron, a neutralizer of nuclear reactions. What they found was that the ugly mess of leaked fuel, the corium, as it is called, had already cooled and hardened. By some not even now understood piece of good luck, that smoldering slow motion nuclear bomb had been defused. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) Would we be so lucky? We sat on our suitcases, and towards winter I bought snow chains, just in case we would have to make a run for it.

We had agreed on a plan: we would drive inland as fast as possible, if necessary in two separate cars, to try and reach Niigata, on the Japanese Sea. Should we indeed have to go in separate cars (in case I was out somewhere, teaching) we would meet up at a certain service station on the highway just before reaching Niigata, the big city on the west coast. From there, we would either go south, towards Osaka, or even try to take a boat to Korea or Russia. The important thing was not to waste time, to be early in the mad rush, we knew. The highway would be choked with refugees like ourselves, we knew, and we were determined not to get stuck in slow traffic.

We didn’t have the faintest idea, indeed nobody had, what the status of melted down Reactors 1, 2 and 3 were. My secret fear was the seeping through of a hot corium, either one would do, into the limestone underneath Dai-ichi. Remember, twenty-five meters had been taken off the seaside cliff to get the reactors closer to the water. It was cheaper that way. Seawater had to be continuously pumped up for the secondary cooling. The genius planners had sharpened their pencils back in the 1960s and calculated that it would make sense to remove those twenty-five meters. “Tsunami? What tsunami?” I can hear them mock the doubters. “Dai-ichi is safe!” Well.

Back to my worst fears that summer of 2011. Suppose any one of the coria, hundreds of tons of red hot nuclear fuel, somehow meets ground water deep down below Dai-ichi? Old fashioned steam explosions pack quite a punch, more than enough to blow up the ruins of the former power plant. Plenty enough to let that house of cards collapse within milliseconds, shooting the thousands of remaining fuel rods high up into the sky and making Dai-ichi and surroundings completely inaccessible for many years to come. There were 10,921 spent fuel elements in the spent fuel assemblies, huge tanks of water, and there were 1,312 additional elements in Reactors 5 and 6, not operating in March 2011, which adds up to 12,233 elements.

Spent Fuel sounds a little like “spent money”, doesn’t it? An empty purse, an empty wallet, right? Far from it. A glossy brochure by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) takes obvious pleasure in informing you. The Nuclear Fuel Cycle for Dummies. Spent fuel rods have had only 5% percent of their original uranium content used up, that is, changed into a plethora of other (also radioactive) elements, that in their turn keep changing and decaying. That is because only uranium 235 is fission material. The remaining 95% of the uranium is uranium-238, which is not directly affected by the fission process, but also produces all kinds of radioactive isotopes while inside the reactor. Even in the spent fuel assemblies, inside those huge tanks of water, nuclear fission goes on and on. That is exactly why the spent fuel has to be cooled for years until it is relatively stable and can be transported to permanent storage sites (those elusive places the whole world is trying to find) or nuclear fuel recycling sites such as La Hague in France or Sellafield in the UK.

Sellafield, the former Windscale, where things went horribly wrong in 1957. The so-called Windscale fire of October 10, 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in UK history, and one of the worst in the world. A BBC mini documentary covering this event makes you shiver with fear, as you hear the original news presented within . The narrator’s smug voice singing out lies, and more lies, and even the present day BBC not really telling the truth about Windscale at all. It was an attempt at producing a British hydrogen bomb, very, very scary, and hushed up, as usual.

Most of the Japanese spent fuel was shipped to La Hague, on the French coast, before. During recycling (a strange word really to describe nuclear fuel reprocessing) plutonium is produced and extracted, including weapons-grade Plutonium-239. Which makes nuclear recycling “extra attractive”, doesn’t it?

Could it be that this is why the giant failure called Rokkasho in the cold north of Japan’s main island of Honshu, under construction since 1993, operations postponed 23 times at the time of writing, and probably completely useless anyway, is not given up on yet Rokkasho, once in operation, could produce several tons of plutonium a year: an atomic bomb needs only a couple of kilograms. Even now Japan legally owns several tons of plutonium-239, most of which is stored at La Hague in France. Some of it is stored in Rokkasho, though.

The so-called closed fuel cycle (Holy Grail of the industry) is just as elusive as permanent storage sites. Are there any of those? I know of only a single one in all of this whole wide world. It is in Finland, with Sweden’s site nearing completion. Those permanent storage sites are supposed to keep highly radioactive nuclear waste in safe storage for up to a million years (which should explain the scarcity of these locations). The Finns and the Swedes enjoy living on what is called the Fennoscandian Shield, if I remember my school lessons. It is a geologically extremely stable part of the earth crust.

Not many countries are blessed with the granite the stoic Scandinavians possess, least of all Japan (the country of volcanoes and earthquakes). So, where will Japan find a storage? The government is looking for one. There is a government agency called NUMO (Nuclear Waste Management Organization), established in the year 2000, that figures it out and reports nicely.It asks all municipalities in Japan to volunteer for such a final repository”, as they call it – none came forth so far. On the contrary, there was quite an outcry when some localities were singled out recently as to be especially suitable. Japan is not really in favor of nuclear, you know! According to an official map issued by NUMO, and isn’t it amazing that most of Japan’s coast “seems” to be well suited for burying nuclear waste for a million years. Isn’t that amazing? Too good to be true!

Makes you wonder why so many countries just can’t come up, let alone follow through with a plan. All the fuss about Yucca Mountain project? Not in Japan. Just bury it close enough to the sea and let Mother Nature take her course. She gave us uranium, didn’t she? She gave us brains to enrich and use it. Well, let her take the responsibility. It’s only fair, isn’t it? We all came from the ocean, crawling ashore at some point in time, why not give something lasting back to it? Forgive me for being cynical – sometimes I just can’t help myself. Those super brains at much feared METI (Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry) who unveiled that map recently and full of confidence (I was tempted to write “full of themselves”) “hope to win over the public”, as Energy Minister Seko said, should think about consulting geologists who disagree with the slick “70% of Japan suitable”.

Sometimes it pays to listen to farsighted people. Short term profits is not all there is. This is a really, really scary map: Treasure Island in reverse. No connection to reality, if you ask me. What would the Finns or the Swedes say? Or the Swedes? A Norwegian, to stay in Scandinavia for a moment, had a comment more than a hundred years ago, but, oh, how modern it is. His name was Edvard Munch, and he was a painter. His Scream gains importance and popularity by the year. How could it not? You see it once (who has not seen a reproduction somewhere) and will never again forget it. Maybe the Minister of Energy, Mr. Seko, and his staff should have a good look at it.

Sorry, but I just can’t stand nonsense such these dreamers try to sell us as reality. We people , here in Fukushima know about pipe dreams turning ugly in a split second.; we do. The stolid Finns and Swedes may get away with their solid granite – volcanic Japan will never.

Let’s not talk about a million-years-plan any more, then. Forget the Scream and be quiet. Relax. Be good. Be docile. Trust in the government. Believe the plans for a time when humans will be – what? A million years ago, we were already human, correct? We walked upright, and we had been using flint stones for over a million years already. Maybe we even could “speak” in grunts. Real language evolved much later, about 200,000 years ago, modern science thinks. What and where will we be a million years from now?

Will we be traversing the universe in fancy spaceships – or will we be back in the trees? No one knows. One thing is certain, though: radioactive waste will be a little dangerous even after a million years. Let’s forget about it, then. The present is difficult enough.

For completeness’s sake, let’s take a look at the other leg of the closed fuel cycle, the fast breeder reactors – which is just as wobbly as the first one. Fast breeding was tried in many countries, and it worked nowhere. Japan had one of these breeders (still has it!) and at last comes to regret it after billions of dollars spent for nothing, after countless minor and at least one major accident.

The name of that ugly bird is Monju, which is an insult on a par with the US navy naming a nuclear attack submarine Corpus Christi. (Well, they added “City of …” after the outcry that blasphemy produced back in 1981.) Monju is the Japanese for “Manjushri”, who is the Buddha of transcendent wisdom. He holds a flaming sword in his right hand to cut through ignorance and duality. What a mockery to give a ast reeder such a nameIt sits by the Japanese Sea and now awaits the wrecking ball. Construction began in 1986, criticality was reached in 1994. A major accident (a sodium leak that caused a fire) occurred in 1995 and had the reactor shut down for 15 years. There were cover-ups, what else, but the scandal reached proportions that made it impossible to hide the facts. Accidentally, the government at the time was not led by the LDP, a rare occurrence in the sad history of Japanese post war democracy, but by a coalition of various “other” parties. Prime Minister was Tooru Murayama, a man of impressive eyebrows as well as of impressive courage. He would not let the issue die. Bad luck for the “atomic village”, as the collusion between industry and LDP became known after 2011.

There had been a suicide in this. A semi-governmental institution, the “Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation” (PNC) was in charge of Monju as well as of the cover-up, and a high official of that agency killed himself in the traditional, the samurai way, of taking responsibility. Monju was abandoned in 2016 after 10 billion dollars and so much else had been wasted. A black joke to top it all off: Monju did actually produce electricity for these 10 billion dollars! – One hour’s worth of it. Hey, you morons of the METI who told us recently, very recently, that nuclear is still the second cheapest energy (at a cost of 9 cent per kw/h, compared with 45 cents per kw/h for photovoltaic systems), could you sharpen your bleeding pencils again, please! And, don’t forget to add the three billion dollars the cleanup will cost – in the best of cases.

Having a quick look at the PNC, you will meet personified deception in the pink: Meet a promotional character with its bright smile. “Hello”, it says, “Welcome to the Friendly Atom!” Characters of this kind were all over the place. I’ve seen them. Your jaw drops in disbelief, but this is meant for children, remember. It is propaganda at its best, never taking reality into account. “Puroto-kun” is mentioned, “Plutonium Boy”, who will educate you about this lovely stuff you can even drink down without suffering much harm. Oh, don’t get me started, as I have seen this nonsense all too often.

I used to go down route 245 on my way to Narita Airport, passing the huge Tokai Installation. It is in Tokai, 120 kilometers north of Tokyo, that the heart of Japanese nuclear ambitions is buried. It is buried, I say, but it is still twitching, if feebly at the moment. The tell tale heart. (With a twist: this is not the victim’s, but the perpetrator’s heart. The perpetrator, aka the nuclear industry, dug in after 2011 – and is already trying to find its way back to the surface now, would you believe it?)

Tokai is huge, it is immense, and it is another catastrophe waiting to happen. It was here, Japan’s first reactor went critical in 1966. Tokai houses an incredible array of failed efforts to develop and produce “future reactors”. It made headlines in 1999.

In the middle of the night, I received an excited call from my eleven-year-old son: “Papa, are you alright?” I had no idea what he was talking about. 10.000 kilometers away, he was better informed than his father: there had been a bad accident at Tokai. Three workers (using stainless steel buckets) had poured too much radioactive liquid into a basin, and thus inadvertentlycaused a chain reaction. The seventh bucket was the one too many. The workers did not know what they were doing, as they had not been properly trained – it is inconceivable, but they didn’t know danger of an out of control reaction existed. Two of them died, the last of them, who had received “only” 3 sieverts of radiation, survived. Hundreds of thousands of residents in the densely populated vicinity were told to stay indoors for 24 hours, 161 from within a 350 meter radius were told to evacuate: I knew nothing of all this. My son was scared. The news overseas had highlighted what the Japanese media had so routinely downplayed. I should have taken notice. I did not. I was as innocent as a baby in those days of the “Friendly Atom”.

I passed by the huge fenced-in area so often and still never stopped to visit the information center – what a shame. It must have been such a laugh. There was one such “Information Center” near Dai-ichi as well, of course – Japan was unabashedly proud of its “bright, nuclear future”. Fine, I think, I can’t blame them as most everybody had believed in “nuclear” during the fifties, even in the sixties: but –- after Windscale, after Mayak (the Kyshtym disaster of 1957, her very little published catastrophe in the USSR), after Three Mile Island of 1979 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a partial meltdown (twelve days after the oh so prescient movie “The China Syndrome” had premiered) and after Chernobyl in 1986 NOBODY in the world could still honestly believe in the fairy tale of the friendly atom with its bright smile. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) We were asked to do so, however, and an inconvenient question arises.

“How stupid do they think we are?” is the question, and there is no good answer to it.We were sold as suckers. Tokai was extremely lucky on March 11th, too. A new seawall had been finished just two days before the tsunami hit, so only part of the Tokai plant was swamped, and although a cooling pump and two out of three backup diesel generators had been incapacitated, no major harm was inflicted on the operating reactor No. 2.

We were lucky in so many respects, so many times. Is it advisable to trust in Lady Luck, though? She is not to be trusted in matters of life and death! Nature has her own ways. Why not play it safe? “NUCLEAR” with all its promises is an illusion. The next big thing is going to happen, and probably sooner than we would like to believe. I have calculated the odds above, and still, I think it bears repeating that we are in for the next civilian meltdown some time around 2020, and help us God.

It could, of course just as well be a catastrophe caused by the military. How many “Broken Arrows” have there been so far? “Wikipedia” has a long and scary list for you. Don’t look at it too closely, should you be the nervous type, dear reader! It is safe to assume the scariest mishaps are misrepresented, to make them look a less horrific, I think. Everything about “nuclear” is secrecy and lies, never forget! It couldn’t be any different, could it, with civilian having such a mother. The bomb is the mother of the “Friendly Atom”, and don’t be fooled about that relationship.

Alright, let’s just look at one exemplary near miss. How about the Goldsboro bomb? In 1961 a B-52 crashed in North Carolina and “lost” its two thermonuclear bombs in the process. One of these was found hanging in a tree, as an emergency parachute had deployed – the other went down into the soft soil it fell into and disappeared. Most of it rests in the muck even today. You think that’s the scary part? It isn’t. The scary part is that six out of seven “safety features” that would have to be deactivated to arm the bomb had been set to “GO!” and only a seventh trigger, set to “ARM” had somehow failed to function. Had the bomb gone off, as it should have by all accounts (you can read up on this easily) much of the East Coast of the US would have turned a wasteland. Well, let’s not talk about military scares anymore.

Let’s go back to our own little problems! One last question, though, before I go (feeling a little like Peter Falk here …). Didn’t I quote George Lee Butler already, the former Head of the US Strategic Air Command? He was in charge of nuclear devices programmed to destroy 12.000 enemy targets. Later in life he turned anti nuclear. He believes mankind survived the Cold War by a mixture of incredible good fortune and what he calls “the grace of God”. This – probably being the more important of the two. Read his speech here. And, didn’t did I speak of Colonel Stanislav Petrov as well? “The man who saved the world”, as he has recently (after decades of obscurity) been called? Those two need to be mentioned again. 1983, September 26th, three weeks after the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was on duty in a military command center when his systems told him six missiles had been launched to attack his country, which, of course, was the USSR. He chose to disobey orders. What orders? To immediately initiate nuclear retaliation. A truly heroic man. Let’s hope for more heroes like Stanislav Petrov! Although I remember someone saying he pitied those who needed heroes. And, I remember Lee Butler, too. We are not out of the woods yet, not at all. Tensions: A New Cold War is in the offing!

And, just in case you have never seen it, watch highly recommended Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”. It has never gone out of style. “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Cheers, and consider yourself lucky to have survived the madness so far. Here’s Wikipedia again: 1964 was the year “Dr. Strangelove” was released, but, the B-52s are still in the air, and the submarines are still cruising relentlessly and ever more quietly. MAD it used to be called: for a reason. Is the world safer than it was in 1964? It’s a three-way-puzzle now, with China part of the game, and, in astronomy at least, a three body problem has no solution. Still, let’s hope.