The massive earthquake that struck Japan on New Years Day, killing an estimated 200, also damaged one of the country’s nuclear power plants as the nation is still trying to recover from the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster. An earthquake and resulting tsunami, an enormous wall of sea water, crashed into the nuclear units and destroyed the Fukushima plant.
While no one was injured Jan. 1 as a result of the impact on the nuclear plant on the coast of the Sea of Japan, closed since 2011, the temblor caused damage to transformers, meaning the plant lost outside electrical power, Kyodo News reported. Also, thousands of gallons of water and oil spilled from the reactor into the surrounding plant.
The damaged Shika station consists of two boiling water reactors. Unit 1, with 540-MW of capacity, was commissioned in 1993. The second unit, an advanced BWR with capacity of 1,358 MW, went into service in 2006.
The 2024 earthquake caused stresses greater than the plant was designed to endure, known as the “design basis.” As a result, Japan’s regulatory agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, “ordered its secretariat to thoroughly investigate the cause of damage to a nuclear power plant from the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck the Noto Peninsula on Jan. 1,” according to the Japan Times.
Japan responds to nuclear problems more robustly than U.S. regulators. After Fukushima saw the total destruction of four GE boiling water reactors, Tokyo shut down its entire nuclear fleet of some 33 reactors, despite hosting one of the world’s largest nuclear arrays. Nuclear has long been more important to Japan than to the U.S., as the Land of the Rising Sun has no significant domestic energy resources.
Japan’s actions, including its earlier response to Fukushima, prompted a veteran U.S. nuclear regulator and long-time observer to contrast how Japan has responded to nuclear accidents compared to how the U.S. assesses nuclear safety. In an email exchange, physicist and founding member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Victor Gilinsky told The Quad Report, “US nuclear power is different, also from the airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration, in that it doesn’t have the notion of continual improvement,” which characterizes Japan’s approach to nuclear safety.
When Boeing’s 737-Max generation of passenger planes demonstrated serious flaws – including two fatal crashes five years ago and a failure of a door part in recent weeks, the FAA has responded by shutting down the entire fleet and ordering a searching inquiry. Veteran journalist and amateur pilot James Fallows notes, “An under-appreciated miracle of modern society is how safe and reliable developed-country airlines have become. On a statistical basis, being aboard a North American or Western European airliner is about the safest thing you can do with your time, compared even with taking a walk or sitting in a chair.”
Gilinsky was head of the Rand Corp.’s physical sciences division before President Gerald Ford nominated him in 1974 to the newly created NRC, formed after Congress abolished the Atomic Energy Commission, which both promoted and regulated nuclear power. He took office in 1975 and was reappointed by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
In the email exchange, Gilinsky added that in the U.S., “From the beginning the idea was, what is the minimum we can get away with and still keep the public from stopping us from licensing reactors. Things have improved, but it was largely forced on them. That ‘good enough’ attitude, which you can rationalize to get the first reactors, was never changed. That’s why they still talk about ‘What is safe enough?’ Not, ‘How can we improve safety?’”
Gilinsky, who is not a fan of the U.S. nuclear approach of “probabilistic risk assessment,” or PRA, added, “I also think the NRC’s definition of risk as probability times consequences—the mean risk–is not the right measure. It’s ok in situations where there is lots of data and the consequences are modest, as, say, in deciding whether to put a traffic light at an intersection. But it is not the measure that corresponds to most people’s sense of risk in situations where the concern is rare but huge accidents and both the probabilities and consequences, for all the elaborate PRA calculations, are rough guesses. Most people would like to be sure that the worst consequences can’t happen, period.”
Gilinsky noted that the most recent history of the NRC by the agency’s official historian, Thomas Wellock, is titled Safe Enough?.
“Modern aviation is so incredibly safe because aviation has been so thorough and unsparing about facing and learning from its errors.”–James Fallows
Fallows observes, “Modern aviation is so incredibly safe because aviation has been so thorough and unsparing about facing and learning from its errors.”
Japan, which once had the one of the world’s larger fleets of nuclear power reactors at 33, behind the U.S. with 93, France with 56, China with 55, and Russia with 37, has only 10 units currently generating power. That’s a result of Fukushima, which saw the explosion and fuel meltdown of four large coastal units and shut down the country’s entire nuclear fleet.
Earthquakes are a particular threat to Japan, as the island nation sits on what geologists have termed the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” an active earthquake band that runs some 25,000 miles up the east coast of Asia, across the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands to Alaska and down the west coast of North and South America.
–Kennedy Maize
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