Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster

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Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster Page 12

by David Lochbaum


  There are lessons to be learned from what went wrong at Fukushima. There are equally important lessons to be learned from what went right.

  NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko checked in with the Operations Center at White Flint at around 9:00 p.m. on March 15. Jack Grobe was on duty and gave his boss a rundown. Fresh NRC troops were due to arrive in Japan to provide relief to Jim Trapp and Tony Ulses. (By now, about two hundred people from a variety of federal agencies had arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to assist.)

  Reliable information was still hard to come by, Grobe told Jaczko, and the NRC was relying on “snippets” of information from NISA and U.S. and Japanese news media. “It’s been extremely frustrating,” Grobe said, adding that he hoped to glean more from industry sources in the United States. Also, the DOE’s Radiological Assistance Program teams were now on the ground and would soon be providing crucial land and aerial monitoring. That, Grobe said, “will be a huge benefit.”

  Jaczko reminded Grobe that it would take at least two hours to obtain high-level authorization if an expanded evacuation order for U.S. citizens was deemed necessary. “I don’t anticipate a need for that,” Grobe told his boss. “[T]hings seem to be reasonably stable.”

  Jaczko was due on Capitol Hill the next day for hearings in the House and Senate. He and his staff had been briefing lawmakers since March 11, but this would be the first opportunity for members of Congress to question the chairman in public. Media coverage was a certainty.

  The day wasn’t over yet. At about 10:00 p.m., the NRC team watched Japanese television footage of smoke pouring from Unit 3. TEPCO announced that radiation levels were rising. A short time later, U.S. media began reporting that TEPCO was pulling its workers from the plant. Although it was unclear if that meant everyone, this was extremely troubling news. Without sustained intervention, the plant condition could quickly deteriorate.

  Jim Trapp and Tony Ulses, who had called in to White Flint, confirmed that radiation levels were high. “Unit 4 is in shambles,” Trapp told his colleagues. He handed the phone to one of Ambassador John Roos’s assistants, who asked if the NRC headquarters knew more about the status of workers at the plant. Marty Virgilio read aloud a Washington Post bulletin: “The skeleton crew remaining at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is being evacuated because of the risks they face from dangerous radiation levels.” (This wasn’t quite accurate; it later turned out that the workers had been pulled from the heavily contaminated control rooms but remained on-site, available to return if needed. Nonessential personnel had departed the plant, but they eventually returned.) The line went dead briefly and then Ulses explained the interruption: “We just had an earthquake here.”

  Inside the Seismic Isolation Building, superintendent Yoshida and his fellow workers often had to rely on reports from the emergency crews making brief forays out onto the plant grounds to know what was taking place. Only then were they able to assess just how bad things had gotten. After one explosion, the men inside could hear debris raining down on the roof of the bunker-like building.

  “I really felt we might die,” Yoshida told a reporter in a rare interview, nearly a year and a half after the accident.1

  Working conditions in the Seismic Isolation Building rapidly worsened. Personal dosimeters, used to measure radiation levels, were in short supply. Many had been destroyed by the tsunami or rendered useless when their batteries died. Those still functioning were reserved for workers forced to venture outside. Protective clothing also became scarce. Meals consisted of biscuits and dried food, and water was rationed. Crews slept in the hallways.

  To support his people, Yoshida said, he passed out cigarettes in the heavily used smoking room. He encouraged them to record their names on a large whiteboard as a memorial in case they did not survive. In the circumstances, he told the interviewer, “it was clear from the beginning that we couldn’t run.”

  Tapes from the videoconference link between the Seismic Isolation Building and TEPCO headquarters, released by TEPCO more than a year later, reveal a chaotic scene. Tempers flare as Yoshida and his team are besieged with orders and counterorders from TEPCO headquarters, which was also getting instructions from the prime minister’s office.

  Yoshida would later tell government investigators he believed TEPCO’s chain of command during the accident was “disastrous.” When he was ordered on March 12 to suspend injecting seawater—the order he ignored—Yoshida said he thought: “What the hell is the office talking about?”

  By March 18, his patience had all but run out. When officials at headquarters directed him to send crews out to conduct another check, Yoshida snapped: “My people have been working day and night for eight straight days. . . . I cannot make them be exposed to even more radiation.”

  In the wee hours of March 16, East Coast time, Charles “Chuck” Casto called White Flint from Tokyo, where he had arrived a short time before. Casto, a deputy regional administrator in the NRC’s Atlanta office, had been chosen to head the NRC team in Japan.2 (He would spend almost a year there.) Along with eight other NRC staff members, Casto joined Trapp and Ulses in the U.S. Embassy. The NRC crew set up shop in a large conference room.

  Charles Casto

  Bill Borchardt

  Marty Virgilio. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

  The first thing that Dan Dorman, in charge overnight at White Flint, asked Casto for was an update on the Unit 4 spent fuel pool. Casto promised to get what he could. “As you know,” he said, “the communications channels are very limited.” Even though he had arrived so recently, Casto had picked up the high level of concern pervading the embassy. “[T]hey’re worried about the 170,000 [sic] Americans over here,” he said. “That’s their primary goal. They’re here to protect them. . . . [T]hat’s got to be our focus.”

  Marty Virgilio, who was on the line in White Flint, concurred. “[T]he top priority is to support the ambassador and the U.S. citizens there. I would say second is support for the Japanese government in the recovery of these reactors. And, then, third is gathering insights and lessons learned for us, so that we can assess the implications for our [reactor] operating fleet and applicants.”

  Late the previous evening, a RASCAL simulation had estimated radiation doses from a spent fuel fire in a pool that had lost all its water, as well as its roof, and released 50 percent of its radioactive contents to the atmosphere. Just as for the case of Unit 2 with no containment, the calculation indicated evacuation would be needed at least out to fifty miles downwind, RASCAL’s limit. So now two possible scenarios would warrant a fifty-mile evacuation, and the NRC still had no way to know whether either was occurring.

  But a decision had to be made soon on evacuation advice to Ambassador Roos, and the NRC team needed to judge whether its disaster scenarios were plausible. There would be hell to pay if the United States expanded the evacuation zone and it turned out that the Unit 2 containment remained intact and there was no spent fuel fire at Unit 4.

  The lack of solid data about the status of Fukushima Daiichi frustrated everyone. “It was like trying to investigate a homicide and not having access to the crime scene,” Casto would later say. “There was just so much misinformation, lack of information, and you didn’t know what information to trust.” The NRC crew at White Flint agreed to try harder to get details out of the U.S. and international nuclear industry. GE Hitachi, for instance, had its own emergency operations center in Tokyo; if need be, Casto suggested, Virgilio could ask top-level GE officials in the United States for access.

  Casto had spent a portion of the fourteen-hour flight to Tokyo buried in a couple of NRC technical publications (known as “NUREGs”) relevant to the crisis. For decades, the NRC has funded contractors at U.S. national labs to run computer simulations of possible reactor accidents. Casto was struck by how closely these simulations matched the real-world situation at Fukushima. As he told his colleagues, “of course, that Mark I containment is the worst one of all the containments we have . . . this NUREG tel
ls you that in a station blackout you are going to lose containment. There’s no doubt about it.”3

  About ninety minutes later, John Monninger, an engineer with Casto’s group, called White Flint to report that the NRC team had been invited to a meeting with TEPCO and Japanese nuclear regulators. TEPCO apparently wanted guidance on dealing with spent fuel pools. Monninger also shared bad news: the pools in Units 1 and 2 were “boiling down.” Those in Units 3 and 4 were displaying zirconium-water reactions, meaning that the fuel was exposed. Further, the explosion at the Unit 4 reactor building had “leveled the walls, leveled the structure for the Unit 4 spent fuel pool all the way down to the approximate level of the bottom of the fuel,” Monninger said. “So, there’s no water in there whatsoever.”

  TEPCO was talking about dumping sand in the pool, which would reduce the radiation levels but do nothing to cool the overheated fuel rods. The NRC group agreed that a combination of water and boron (to reduce the risk of criticality in the pool) seemed the best answer. The headquarters team members promised Monninger that they would come up with further suggestions before their colleagues in Tokyo left for the meeting in about forty-five minutes.

  While the NRC was projecting radiation dose levels under various scenarios, the DOE’s Office of Naval Reactors was doing its own assessments, and both agencies were feeding their recommendations to the U.S. ambassador. The two groups weren’t seeing eye to eye, it seemed. To the Office of Naval Reactors, the radiation readings detected on naval vessels and at bases far from Fukushima indicated that the event was much worse than the NRC had painted it. While the NRC was estimating the radiation release from damaged fuel in a single reactor, experts at Naval Reactors saw a far greater danger; they believed the NRC was “undershooting” the potential release. As Stephen Trautman, deputy director of Naval Reactors, told the NRC by phone, “[I]f we end up losing one of these plants, there’s a good possibility we’re going to lose all of these plants.” The two sides agreed that the threats from the spent fuel pools also had to be factored in.

  For U.S. officials, the evacuation decision was a delicate balancing act. On March 13, Ambassador Roos had put out a press release telling Americans in Japan to “follow the instructions of Japanese civil defense authorities,” who were evacuating only a 12.4-mile (twenty-kilometer) zone around Fukushima. Now the ambassador was getting information that suggested the advice might not be sufficient. Yet if the United States were to unilaterally launch a wider evacuation, it could anger an important ally.

  Within the embassy itself, fears were high. When Casto made trips to the cafeteria, he was often stopped by staff members, including pregnant employees worried about their unborn children, asking: how bad is it? “There was significant concern,” he recalled.

  To arrive at a unified recommendation for Ambassador Roos, a high-level phone conference was arranged with Naval Reactors and the NRC teams in Japan and White Flint. During the call Jaczko asked: “[D]o we think this is going to get better or get worse?” Marty Virgilio responded, “It’s going to get worse if you think about the spent fuel pools. Right now, Unit 4 doesn’t have a spent fuel pool anymore.” Water levels couldn’t be maintained in the Units 1, 2, and 3 fuel pools, he added.

  At worst, Jaczko summarized, the accident could involve three reactors “out of control” and possibly up to six spent fuel pools. The ambassador should base any evacuation decision on that information, he said, and then asked: “Does anybody disagree with that?”

  “Chairman,” said Admiral Kirkland Donald of Naval Reactors, “I agree with you.”

  “If this happened in the U.S.,” added Bill Borchardt, the NRC’s executive director and a veteran of the U.S. nuclear navy, “we would go out to fifty miles. That would be our evacuation recommendation.”

  It was about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, March 16. It was time to call the White House.

  Jaczko’s summary to personnel in the White House Situation Room was succinct. In even terser language, a White House official repeated Jaczko’s report to confirm: “Three reactors melting down, six spent fuel ponds go up in flames. And what, then, would be the impact for Tokyo, for example, if the wind kept blowing in that direction?”

  “At this point, I think I would still go with the fifty miles right now,” said Jaczko, noting the lack of solid information. However, he cautioned that even if the estimates were only “off by a little bit,” the impact could be “significantly larger.”

  Before Jaczko’s scheduled 9:30 a.m. testimony on Capitol Hill, he and Borchardt, who was accompanying the chairman, called in to White Flint for updates. Which posed the larger threat now, Jaczko asked his team: Unit 2 or the spent fuel pools? The pools, he was told.

  After Jaczko hung up, Borchardt remained on the line to seek more details. Casto, participating from Japan, said that in addition to the threat posed by the Unit 4 spent fuel pool, one had to assume that conditions at the other endangered reactors and spent fuel pools would also deteriorate because the NRC team wasn’t seeing any “mitigation” of the ongoing crisis.

  Borchardt asked: “I just want to make sure that no one takes anything he [Jaczko] says as implying that, if they resolve the issues with Unit 2, life is going to be a lot better. Right?”

  “No,” someone else on the call replied.

  Discussions at White Flint now focused on how best to deal with the fuel pools. The Japanese were talking about using a helicopter to fly over Unit 4 and dump sand or water into the gaping hole where the roof of the building had been. Casto was growing impatient. “I don’t know what they’re waiting for.”

  Radiation levels at sixty-five feet (twenty meters) above the open pool would be “hundreds of thousands of rads,” came the reply. Helicopter pilots who flew over Chernobyl to dump sand on the burning reactor there “flew until they died, basically,” said one member of the NRC team.

  Borchardt called again to “triple-check” the fifty-mile evacuation recommendation. Was it still a go? Charlie Miller said yes, based on current meteorological conditions. But if conditions changed, even a fifty-mile evacuation might not be sufficient. If the wind shifted, Miller added, even Tokyo—150 miles away—could be affected.

  A short time later, Monninger called White Flint to report that two government ministry employees had asked for help acquiring emergency equipment to move water from the ocean to the reactor buildings, plus water cannons and four or five trucks with aerial booms capable of spraying water at a height of sixty-five to one hundred feet (twenty to thirty meters) to reach the fuel pools. All of this apparatus would need to be positioned quickly because the radiation level near the reactors was thirty rem (three hundred millisieverts) per hour. Robots with remote cameras and radiation measuring equipment also would be useful, the Japanese said.

  “One thing, we went back and forth on [the] Unit 4 [spent fuel pool],” said Monninger, “. . . because we believe the walls were blown out and the water level is at the bottom of the active fuel. That took them back, you know, quite a bit. . . . They said they don’t have any indications of that. They believe, which would be true, there will be screaming radiation levels if those walls were knocked out. They said the walls . . . could have been knocked out, but the spent-fuel pool wall may not be the outermost wall.”

  The Japanese had shown Monninger a “bird’s eye schematic” of the Unit 4 spent fuel floor. “They had a decent level of confidence that . . . the spent-fuel pool walls hadn’t been blown out and the success path was to flood that up and not to go with sand, dirt, or whatever.”

  Borchardt called again from Capitol Hill looking for any new information. Monninger’s report from the Japanese was repeated: “They don’t think the spent fuel pool for Unit 4 is as degraded as we thought.” Borchardt asked for more details. Cooling in the pool still may be possible, he was told. Monninger added that he believed reactor fuel had been ejected in the explosion at Unit 4 and was now lying around the plant site, which would explain high radiation readings on the ground. The Japanese wer
e bulldozing dirt over the rubble, and the radiation levels dropped by as much as 70 percent.

  “So the potential is solely to refill the pool?” Borchardt asked.

  “That’s correct,” came the reply. Even so, Borchardt was told, “there’s no change to the recommendations that we’ve made.” The fifty-mile evacuation stood. As best as the White Flint crew could tell, Units 1 to 3 had damaged cores and the spent fuel pool at Unit 4 was almost dry.

  The NRC had sound reasons for its suspicions. There was no clear proof, but there was plenty of circumstantial evidence. The Unit 4 pool contained the most, and the hottest, spent fuel among the reactors at Fukushima. It would therefore be the first to boil after cooling was lost. The Unit 4 reactor building had blown apart, as TV replays nearly constantly reminded them; the most likely reason would be the detonation of hydrogen gas. Since the Unit 4 reactor core held no fuel, the most likely source of hydrogen gas was exposed fuel in the pool. If the fuel were uncovered, its metal cladding could ignite—explaining the fire reported in Unit 4. And the high radiation levels reported between the Units 3 and 4 buildings could be caused by debris, perhaps even portions of fuel rods, ejected from a dry Unit 4 pool during the explosion.

  Finally, observers reported white vapor emanating from the Unit 3 reactor building while nothing visible wafted from Unit 4. Based on this latest circumstantial evidence, it was reasonable to conclude that the Unit 4 spent fuel pool had boiled or drained itself dry while the Unit 3 pool was boiling toward that outcome.

  But still, there was no definitive proof. The Japanese could turn out to be right after all, but it would be many days before anyone could get close enough to Unit 4 to find out.

 

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