This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 13, 2011 - WASHINGTON - In a nation scarred by the world's first nuclear attack -- the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 -- the radiation leaks and evacuations from the area around two earthquake-damaged nuclear power plants this weekend is causing widespread concern.
Noting that several of Japan's 54 nuclear power plants are near seismic fault lines, Japanese environmental activist Aileen Mioko Smith said Saturday that "we are very concerned that the government has emergency plans for earthquakes and emergency plans for nuclear accidents, but there is no comprehensive plan for when these two events occur a the same time."
That is what happened this week when a devastating earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck northern Japan, damaging two nuclear power plants. On Saturday, the outer walls of one of those plants' Unit 1 reactor were blown off by a hydrogen explosion, although Japanese officials said the Fukushima Daiichi reactor's inner chamber containing the reactor's fuel rods was not damaged.
While Japanese officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency said that there was no imminent danger of a meltdown of the reactor cores, tens of thousands of Japanese who lived within 20 kilometers of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant -- which is located about 160 miles north of Tokyo -- were evacuated.
That is in part because of detected radiation leaks and continuing problems in finding alternate ways to cool the reactor cores, which can melt if not kept below a certain temperature by circulating water. The earthquake had damaged the normal cooling system and the tsunami hit the backup system.
Based on the information available, nuclear experts in the United States said the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi plan appeared to be serious, with the outcome dependent on emergency measures to cool the reactor core.
Late Saturday, news services reported that Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yukio Edano, told reporters there is a "possibility" of a meltdown at the plant's Unit 1 reactor. He said that "it is inside the reactor. We can't see." Edano also said Japanese authorities are also "assuming the possibility of a meltdown" at the power plant's Unit 3 reactor.
"We're hoping that this situation can be stabilized quickly," said Robert Alvarez, a former U.S. Energy Department policy adviser who is now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies think tank. But Alvarez told reporters in a conference call that if, as reported, the Japanese were using seawater mixed with boron to cool one of the reactor cores it was "an extraordinary thing to do" -- indicating that other options had failed.
In the same forum, Ken Bergeron, a physicist who formerly worked on simulating nuclear reactor accidents at Sandia National Laboratories, said the Japanese situation appeared to be what is known as a "station blackout -- the loss of offsite AC power, meaning power lines are down, and the subsequent failure of emergency power on site, the diesel generators. It is considered to be extremely unlikely but the 'station blackout' has been one of the great concerns for decades. ... We are hoping that all of the barriers to the release of radioactivity will not fail."
As for the aging nuclear power plant itself, Bergeron said the containment structure at the plant "is certainly stronger than that of Chernobyl but a lot less strong than at Three Mile Island" (TMI) -- the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania that suffered a partial nuclear meltdown in 1979, leading to major changes in U.S. nuclear power policy.
Peter A. Bradford, a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of TMI who now teaches energy policy at Vermont Law School, said the Japanese situation may be more serious than officials have let on. "An early tipoff that Japanese authorities felt that events at Fukushima were very serious was the ordering of an evacuation within a couple of hours of the earthquake," he said.
In a conference call with journalists, Bradford said he expects the Japanese nuclear plant accidents -- whatever their eventual outcome -- are likely to have a direct impact on the nuclear power debate in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
"The viability of U.S. emergency plans at densely populated reactor sites may have to be re-examined to determine whether they can be implemented in the context of a nuclear accident precipitated by a natural disaster," Bradford said. "This was always a theoretical possibility. Now it's real."
While the extent of radiation leaks from the damaged reactors was unclear this weekend, Dr. Ira Helfand, a board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, told reporters that "the Japanese government should be preparing for the worst-case scenario. After one year of operation, a commercial nuclear reactor contains 1,000 times as much radioactivity as was released by the Hiroshima bomb." He added that, "no one, including the plants' operators, can say what is going to happen."
Mioko Smith, who now works with the Green Action anti-nuclear group in Kyoto, Japan, worked on a project in 1980-82 examining the impacts of the TMI nuclear incident near Harrisburg, Pa. Smith said that many Japanese people were concerned that this weekend's evacuations were not yet extensive enough to protect people from possible radiation leaks if the reactor cores are not sufficiently cooled. And she blamed the government for failing to communicate effectively with people who live near the reactors.
"Just as was the case with Three Mile Island, many people in the areas [near the damaged Japanese power plants] do not have adequate communication. People are finding out about the situation from relatives far away" who listen to news reports and call them. She predicted that there will be a major push in Japan to change the nation's nuclear power policies, which have been under review in recent months.
While Bradford and several other experts predicted that the Japanese incidents are likely to have a major impact on what some have regarded as a potential "nuclear renaissance" for nuclear power in the United States, a spokesman for the nuclear industry's lobbying and information group, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), disputes that notion.
"We believe the American people and Congress will take a wait-and-see attitude toward what is happening in Japan -- how the situation is handled and what the impact is -- before they jump to any conclusions," said NEI spokesman Mitch Singer.
Singer told the Beacon on Saturday that many anti-nuclear activists were predicting "doomsday scenarios" for the damaged Japanese reactors, but he said initial indications were that the reactor cores were still intact. "From those indications, I don't think the Japanese situation will rise to the level of Three Mile Island," he said.