The cataclysms we’re exploring are mostly of natural origin. Our human hands are clean when it comes to supernovas and tsunamis. And although the jury may still be out on the success of the Big Bang—which gave us parakeets but may ultimately crush the cosmos to the size of a dog biscuit—we members of Homo bewilderus can shrug it all off with a “Don’t blame me, I wasn’t even there” innocence.
We are also exploring several full-scale disasters of our species’ deliberate design, among them World War II and the hydrogen bomb. In the past few chapters we’ve looked at the lovable goofs and follies that led to nuclear power plant cataclysms. But now, for the first and only time, we visit a mongrel cataclysm of mixed pedigree.
The 2011 Fukushima event was part natural and part human mea culpa.
The natural component took by far the most lives. In fact, the man-made portion has yet to kill a single person. Yet it is the latter that the public remembers and that produced the most dramatic consequences. Assembled as a cohesive narrative, the story seems more astonishing now than it was that Friday a few years ago.
On March 11, 2011, the strongest earthquake ever to strike Japan shook the country in the early afternoon. Measuring a Richter magnitude 9.1, the Tohoku quake was among the top five strongest earthquakes recorded on the planet. It was caused by a violent undersea tectonic-plate shift in a subduction zone just forty-three miles east of Japan, and it abruptly moved that country eight feet closer to Hawaii while sinking it more than two feet. This in turn sufficiently changed the planet’s mass distribution to speed up its rotation, reducing the day’s length by a few microseconds. This was one of the event’s few positive developments, as Japan’s residents were no doubt happy to see that day end as soon as possible.
An enormous tsunami resulted from the massive water displacement and reached Japan’s east coast just over half an hour later. This tsunami produced all of the casualties that day.
Even now, the event’s harrowing YouTube videos are riveting, especially when you see eighteen-foot-high seawalls engulfed by the fast-rising tidal wave. In most places, the ocean rose an astonishing 45 feet. In a few places, the “wave” was 133 feet high, as tall as a fourteen-story building. I put the word wave in quotation marks because, contrary to popular belief, a tsunami is not a single large wave that wreaks destruction. Indeed, in most places, the first disturbances in the water that day were small ripples or minor waves a few feet high. But this proved to be only the leading edge of seawater that steadily rose, inexorably picked up speed, and then easily carried off cars and entire homes.
The tsunami warning issued minutes after the quake was heeded by many but ignored by some. In a few places, people gathered to watch the strangely behaving water from what they thought were safe perches atop seawalls. In mere minutes, however, these proved inadequate, and some eighteen thousand people lost their lives. In many cases, the retreating water swept bodies as well as still struggling people far out to sea.
Such catastrophic loss of life might indeed qualify as a cataclysm. Nonetheless, the day’s violence is most popularly associated with the core meltdown at the Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant owned by TEPCO, the Japanese electrical-power company. This was odd by itself, because the billion-dollar damage should not have happened. After all, seventeen other nuclear power plants were operating at full power the moment the earthquake struck, and several of these were even in the same region as Fukushima 1. Yet all of them were safely powered off to full cold shutdowns with no damage and no radiation leakage whatsoever. What, then, happened at Fukushima?
The result of a strange sequence of mishaps at that single facility, still largely unknown to the public, created the only consequences now generally remembered. If the whole rationale for global nuclear power vanished in a puff of white smoke that day, along with the reputation for safety of American-designed nuclear plants, and if that did indeed spur Germany and Japan to shut down all their own safely running nuclear plants within a few short years despite their governments’ knowing that such non-carbon-producing electrical generation was vital in the fight against climate change, then the sum of all the consequences was indeed cataclysmic. We obviously need to know what really unfolded that afternoon. All of Japan’s other power plants weathered the earthquake and tsunami; what happened at Fukushima 1?
It wasn’t the earthquake that caused the problem. Historic though it was, and rough as it was on the myriad components of Japan’s complex reactors, they all survived those 2:34 p.m. jolts that were violent enough to make standing impossible. At that point, the automated systems at all of Japan’s nuclear plants initiated shutdowns. As we’ve seen, the fierce heat of a billion-megawatt reactor operating at full power does not abruptly end with a flick of a few switches. When reactors are running, highly radioactive intermediate nuclear materials are continually created, and these keep fissioning for hours and even days as their half-lives convert them to stable substances. As we saw in the previous chapter, the first hour after shutdown is a particularly critical time to maintain coolant to the blisteringly hot core as the fissioning afterglow slowly diminishes.
After an emergency shutdown, coolant pumps are run by external AC current from incoming power lines, but on March 11, the quake knocked out electricity throughout the country, and all the plants’ external power feeds were dead. No problem; power was then supplied by backup diesel generators, and at Fukushima, all twelve of these started roaring away before even one minute had passed. All was well. And the isolation condensers, designed to provide cooling water after a shutdown, were operating normally at each of Fukushima’s six reactors.
But an operator at the Fukushima reactor number 1 thought his reactor was cooling too rapidly. Bewilderingly, and apparently overthinking the situation, he refused to let the computerized system do its job. So this unnamed operator—who deserves to be someday memorialized as a comic-book villain—pulled the handle on a switch that turned off the isolation-condenser coolant. This lever’s commands also then shut down two electrically controlled flow valves, MO3-A and MO3-B. As James Mahaffey summed it up in his analysis, “With that simple action, overriding the judgment of the automatic safety system, an operator doomed Fukushima 1 to be the only power plant in Japan that suffered irreparable damage due to the Tohoku earthquake of 2011.”1
True, plant supervisors and engineers soon realized their urgent need for the coolant. The problem was that most of the valves were electrically operated. They would work as long as the diesel generators were producing backup power. But everything changed when the tsunami hit.
The first wave, arriving forty-one minutes after the earthquake, was thirteen feet tall and was fully contained by the eighteen-foot wall at the beach. But eight minutes later a second wave hit, and then a third. Each was forty-nine feet high, a towering five stories. In a few minutes, the entire nuclear plant was flooded.
Here the first design flaw became spectacularly obvious. At Fukushima 1, all the backup generators in reactors 1 through 5 were in the basement, and so were the emergency batteries. Now, suddenly, these backup generators were underwater. They stopped cold, and thanks to the batteries also being submerged, all coolant pumps halted at that moment as well. The heat from the nearly red-hot reactor core was no longer being carried away. Worse, at unit 1, the condenser-coolant lines, as we know, had been manually switched off, and now there was no way to reopen the electric valves. It was just a matter of time before the reactor’s sixty-nine tons of sizzling uranium would start melting.
On the far end of the property, at reactor 6 alone, a single air-cooled generator had been sited aboveground, and this sole source of electricity let units 5 and 6 safely continue their shutdowns.
With even the battery room underwater, unit 1 had absolutely nothing. Even its gauges were dark. The windowless control room was pitch-black, and operators using flashlights could only stare at the dead instruments that told them nothing about the status of the reactor. Tense minutes elapsed. Inquiries were made: Could portable generators be helicoptered in? No, the company couldn’t help them.
Three hours after the quake, no water remained to cool unit 1’s core; it had all boiled off. Ninety minutes later, the zirconium structures holding the uranium fuel started melting, as did the uranium itself. The four hundred heavy fuel assemblies started falling to the bottom of the reactor, producing steam and newly created hydrogen gas that rose to the ceiling and grew ever more pressurized.
By the next day, March 12, workers knew that an explosion was imminent and that the only hope was letting some of the gaseous radioactive mixture out through the roof vents. They got permission for a release, evacuation warnings were sounded to the neighborhood, and they were set to release the noxious pressurized mixture. But without power, there was no way to open the vents. Heroically, workers rushed to the ceiling areas to hook up jury-rigged hoses and tried to use gasoline-powered compressed air to blast open the valves.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours after the earthquake, the roof valve was at last opened, venting off pressure. Meanwhile, fire trucks had assembled and were standing by with hoses, preparing to pump seawater into the sizzling core of unit 1 to cool it. The salt would destroy the reactor, but it was already destroyed, and this at least would cool the unameliorated residual nuclear fissioning.
It was then that the hydrogen in reactor 1 exploded, hurling radioactive chunks of debris so high into the air, it took quite a while for all of them to land. Though five workers were injured, no one was killed. But the fire hoses were torn and several trucks, cables, and other badly needed equipment were damaged. And radiation now spewed from the wrecked containment building. It thankfully didn’t resemble the instantly lethal levels that had been disgorged from the burst Chernobyl reactor a quarter of a century earlier, but it meant that everyone would now require bulky radiation suits.
The next day, the core of reactor 3 melted down too, and at 11:01 a.m. its copious hydrogen gas exploded. This widely televised fireball injured eleven workers and damaged or destroyed backup generators that had been assembled outside the building. The radiation at the opening to the wreckage, some thirty rem per hour, or less than one-hundredth the levels at Chernobyl, was nonetheless the highest measured at the entire plant complex during the accident sequence, and it meant that no worker could remain for more than twenty minutes.
And still the fireworks weren’t over. One day later, on the ides of March, everyone got a sudden surprise when the unit 4 containment building exploded. This made no sense, since this reactor had been shut down without incident and all its fuel had been removed and safely stored in an open-rooftop floor tank. It took nearly half a year for analysts to figure out that unit 4 was not the problem. Hydrogen gas had mixed with the radioactive steam that had been vented from unit 3 and gathered in a stack the two reactors shared. When this gas from unit 3 was vented out a duct to the ceiling of unit 4, it ignited.
But nobody knew this at the time. Instead, in the frenzied immediate aftermath of the unit 4 explosion, supervisors started worrying about units 5 and 6, which actually were fine. Remember, these were the reactors that had a backup diesel generator aboveground, and thus the generator had provided power throughout. And nobody at unit 5 or 6 had criminally shut off an emergency condenser cooling system the way someone had done at unit 1.
Nonetheless, supervisors imagined that if unit 4 could blow up for no reason, so might 5 and 6, so workers bravely climbed to the units’ roofs and cut crude holes to allow hydrogen gas to escape. There never was any hydrogen gas there, and this worker exuberance was the only damage ever inflicted on those units.
When it was all over, units 5 and 6 would be brought back online without a problem. Unit 4 would be fixable, with relatively small repairs. Unit 1, however, was destroyed, and units 2 and 3 were radioactive and not worth the expense of replacing. A shame; they would have survived if only someone could have replenished the water in their condenser tanks and supplied power. The real villain, other than nature itself, was TEPCO’s failure to address the possible hazards of earthquakes and tsunamis. Ignoring warnings they themselves received from seismologists, administrators counted on an eighteen-foot-high seawall to provide 100 percent protection from a tsunami. Then, being certain that the plant would never experience flooding, they sited nearly all their generators as well as their backup batteries in basement rooms.
Fortunately, the radiation releases were all sublethal. One worker at Fukushima received 59 rem total; another got 64 rem. Typical doses to residents living near the plant were 1 to 1.5 rem, which is less than you get during a CT scan. The number of expected eventual cancer deaths from the Fukushima cataclysm varies widely but is always several orders of magnitude below what is expected from Chernobyl. The United Nations estimates that not one death will ensue, and this will be especially relevant if the theory of radiation hormesis is supported by ongoing studies.2
On the high end of possible consequences, in 2011, epidemiologist Peter Caracappa at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute predicted a few hundred extra cancer cases would ultimately appear in Japan.3 The World Health Organization, using the very conservative LNT model, predicts an increase in thyroid cancer for female infants living near the Fukushima plant at the time of the accident; specifically, a 0.5 percent lifetime increased chance of thyroid cancer. Meanwhile, a June 2012 Stanford University study by John Ten Hoeve and Mark Z. Jacobson deemed that the radioactivity released in the Fukushima sequence could cause 130 future deaths from cancer.
However, annex A of the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee for the Effects of Atomic Radiation) 2013 report to the UN General Assembly says that there has been no discernible increased incidence of radiation-related health effects in people living in Fukushima, and none are expected among exposed members of the public or their descendants.
No cataclysm. Except, once again, for the fact that the events of March 11, 2011, permanently sabotaged one of only two methods we have to generate around-the-clock carbon-free electrical power. Indeed, a Japanese poll conducted a few months after the TEPCO accident found that, of 1,980 respondents, 74 percent said that Japan should gradually decommission all fifty-four of its reactors and become completely nuclear-free. In short, the Fukushima accident does indeed appear to be ending that carbon-free method of generating electricity in that nation. A big bright spot in all this is that since then, Japan has committed to a transition to renewable energy sources of carbon-free power production. Half a year after the accident, Japan’s richest person, Masayoshi Son, donated one billion yen (thirteen million dollars) to create the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation. Later that same month, Japan unveiled plans to build a pilot floating wind farm with six two-megawatt turbines off the Fukushima coast—a wind farm that became operational in 2015. More are planned.
By 2015, all forty-eight of Japan’s nuclear reactors had been taken offline, although the government set a goal of resurrecting a few of them and eventually having a small percentage of the country’s power from nuclear. Before the Fukushima accident, 30 percent of Japan’s power had come from nuclear; after it, that electricity was produced by fossil fuels, which cost the equivalent of eighty billion dollars between 2011 and 2015. But by May 2016, renewables, including hydro, accounted for more than 20 percent of the country’s energy supply.
As with many of our other cataclysms, a phoenix was emerging from the ashes.