Japanese Power Companies Hid Nuclear Safety Problems

(Source: Reuters) Director General Yukiya Amano of the International Atomic Energy Agency talks to the Media

Published Thursday March 17th, in Reuters by Tom Miles 

BEIJING—Eighteen months before Japan’s radiation crisis, U.S. diplomats had lambasted the safety chief of the world’s atomic watchdog for incompetence, especially when it came to the nuclear power industry in his homeland, Japan.

Cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Vienna to Washington, which were obtained by WikiLeaks and reviewed by Reuters, singled out Tomihiro Taniuchi, until last year head of safety and security at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“For the past 10 years, the department has suffered tremendously because of (deputy director general) Taniguchi’s weak management and leadership skills,” said one dispatch on Dec. 1, 2009.

“Taniguchi has been a weak manager and advocate, particularly with respect to confronting Japan’s own safety practices, and he is a particular disappointment to the United States for his unloved-step-child treatment of the Office of Nuclear Security,” said another, which was sent on July 7, 2009.

The IAEA does not comment on the contents of leaked cables.

The evidence of concern about the Japanese national surfaced as his country scrambled to avert a lethal spread of radiation from earthquake-damaged nuclear reactors north of Tokyo.

Japan’s crisis has brought scrutiny of its nuclear authorities and, in particular, the operator of the stricken reactors, which has a history of falsifying data at its plants.

Separate cables quoted a Japanese lawmaker as telling visiting U.S. officials in October 2008 that power companies in Japan were hiding nuclear safety problems and being given an easy ride on commitments to renewable energy by the government.

Taro Kono, a supporter of renewable energy who in 2009 bid unsuccessfully for leadership of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), also said Japan had no solution for nuclear waste storage. He asked if there was anywhere appropriate to store waste given that Japan was the “land of volcanoes.”

Kono was not immediately available for comment.

TOKYO ELECTRIC HAS ROCKY PAST

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant now at the centre of the crisis – the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) – has had a rocky past in an industry plagued by scandal.

Five TEPCO executives resigned in 2002 over suspected falsification of nuclear plant safety records and five reactors were forced to stop operations.

In 2006, the government ordered TEPCO to check past data after it reported finding falsification of coolant water temperatures at its Fukushima Daiichi plant in 1985 and 1988, and that the tweaked data was used in mandatory inspections at the plant, which were completed in October 2005.

The risk of earthquakes and tsunamis was already well known before last Friday’s massive earthquake, but many of Japan’s nuclear power plants, including the now-crippled Fukushima complex, were built before the most modern safety standards.

An unnamed IAEA official told the G8 Nuclear Safety and Security Group in December 2008 that guidelines for seismic safety had only been revised three times in the past 35 years and that the IAEA was re-examining them, another WikiLeaks cable showed.

“Also, the presenter noted recent earthquakes in some cases have exceeded the design basis for some nuclear plants, and that this is a serious problem that is now driving seismic safety work,” the cable said.

‘EVERYTHING IS A SECRET’

Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalogue of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all, the Associated Press reports.

In one case, workers hand-mixed uranium in stainless steel buckets, instead of processing by machine, so the fuel could be reused, exposing hundreds of workers to radiation. Two later died.

“Everything is a secret,” said Kei Sugaoka, a former nuclear power plant engineer in Japan who now lives in California. “There's not enough transparency in the industry.”

Sugaoka worked at the same utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant where workers are racing to prevent a full meltdown following Friday's 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami.

In 1989 Sugaoka received an order that horrified him: edit out footage showing cracks in plant steam pipes in video being submitted to regulators. Sugaoka alerted his superiors in the Tokyo Electric Power Co., but nothing happened. He decided to go public in 2000. Three Tepco executives lost their jobs.

Competence and transparency issues aside, some say it's just too dangerous to build nuclear plants in an earthquake-prone nation like Japan, where land can liquefy during a major temblor.

“You're building on a heap of tofu,” said Philip White of Tokyo-based Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, a group of scientists and activists who have opposed nuclear power since 1975.

“There is absolutely no reason to trust them,” he said of those that run Japan's nuclear power plants.

REPORT WANTED PLANTS FAR FROM SEA

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said on Wednesday before leaving for Japan that the agency had been trying continuously to help improve the safety of nuclear plants against earthquakes.

A draft IAEA report on safety standards, published in October 2009, recommended that nuclear power plants be located more than 10 kilometres from the sea or ocean shoreline, or more than one km from a lake or fjord shoreline; or at an elevation of more than 50 metres from the mean water level.

“To my knowledge, all of the nuclear power plants in Japan are located quite close to the ocean,” said Daniel Aldrich, author of Site fights, a book about how decisions were taken on where to build nuclear power plants in Japan and elsewhere.

“This is for two reasons: 1) normally, cooling pipes carry in seawater through the reactor unit and cool it off, and then dump the warmer water back in the ocean (these pipes are not functioning normally at this point), and 2) these areas are remote, far from high population density areas, and they have the least resistance from civil society,” he said in emailed comments.

The latest IAEA recommendations are far more stringent than the original standards set for Japanese plants. The six reactors at the Daiichi facility were commissioned between 1971 and 1979, while two other Japanese nuclear reactors date back to 1970.

“An anomalous magnitude 9.0 scale is far beyond the assumed safety standard when Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station started up forty years ago,” Yu Shibutani, director of Energy Geopolitics Ltd of Japan, said in an email to Reuters.

“The tsunami walls either should have been built higher, or the generators should have been placed on higher ground to withstand potential flooding, but it has failed.

“The accident exposes shortcomings in risk analysis as well as in engineering, and also the plant didn’t meet safety standards in both quake and tsunami wall.”