The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  In 1971 next to a popular surfing spot on the shores of Fukushima, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) built a nuclear power-generating plant bigger than the Pentagon and staffed by six thousand—Daiichi (Dye-ee-chee). Fortunate Island was the first of many nuclear plants Japan built along its coastline, and hanging from the bridge over the main road’s entry into Futaba, Daiichi’s nearest town, was an exhortation to the plant’s neighbors: NUCLEAR ENERGY: A CORRECT UNDERSTANDING BRINGS A PROSPEROUS LIFESTYLE!

  In the late 1980s, paleontologist Koji Minoura discovered an ancient poem that included:

  Do you remember our sleeves

  wet with mutual tears

  in oath never to leave each other

  as the famed waves of Sue-No-Matsuyama

  never go beyond the cliffs . . .

  Now you’re gone,

  it seems,

  leaving me alone in grief.

  Minoura decided that famed waves meant an enormous tsunami, and looking through civic records, he found it. On July 13, 869, “the tsunami hit Tagajo and killed more than a thousand people,” Minoura learned. “But people soon forgot about the tsunami. I visited Sendai, where the tsunami hit, and found geological evidence.” Excavating rice paddies two and a half miles from the coastline, he discovered a layer of marine sediment. The paleontologist kept digging, uncovering more pelagic deposits nestled between layers of terrestrial soils, and realized that Japan had suffered a massive tsunami attack every thousand years or so. In the early 1990s, Koji Minoura showed these findings to representatives of Tokyo Electric, insisting that their seaside nuclear plants were imperiled. He was ignored.

  On Friday, March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. under the Pacific sixty-two miles due east of Japan’s Honshu Island, the heat of radiation from deep within the earth pushed the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates against each other—the Pacific sliding beneath the Eurasian—until they reached that point where one could bend no more, and there was a tectonic snap. Fifteen seconds later, the first shake of the earth, seismic P waves traveling 4 miles per second, struck Japan’s northeast coastline, and automatic, computer-generated warnings appeared at the bottom of every television screen. In one hundred seconds, the second shake, slower S waves, hit the forty-year-old Daiichi plant, ninety-three miles from the epicenter, swaying the ground for a full five minutes (typical earthquakes in Japan, which strike hundreds of times a year, last a few seconds). Paved walkways rolled in watery undulations, windows exploded, and speakers carried an urgent female voice across the plant: “Please evacuate! Please evacuate!” Nuclear technician Carl Pillitteri was one of forty Americans working at Daiichi that day:

  I still remember it. The first shock of it. It was just one big hammer. We were in a turbine building that is built, for lack of a better term, like Fort Knox. The entire building was shaking.

  I heard that this earthquake lasted six minutes. But for me, it felt like a lifetime. I’m still living it ten months later.

  You could feel it under your feet. It was this entire enormous building moving at once. A lot of things were falling. We lost almost every light in the room. The structural steel was moving overhead. The lights were crashing everywhere. In one nanosecond, the entire floor went black. Every light went out. You would expect some emergency lighting would come on, but there wasn’t a one. And there was this most welcome beam of white light coming from the gap under the door. I made my way over to the door, and the one and only light in the room. It was swinging violently, and then at the same time I opened the door it busted free and shattered on the floor. It was pitch-black again. I remember thinking, “None of you are getting out of here.”

  One of the Japanese guys had grabbed me around the waist. I put my arm up on his shoulder. With every jolt I squeezed his shoulder. I remember praying aloud for him, for all of us. I thought, “We’re going to perish in this turbine building.” I can still hear the turbine making its most unwelcome sound. I had many thoughts. But one of them was “Good God. I got up this morning just to go to work. And this is how it’s written for me? Dying is a fact of life. We all have to do it sooner or later. But this is how it’s written for me? March 11? On a Friday? On a turbine deck? In Fukushima? At work?”

  The earthquake broke the reactor’s cooling pumps, but emergency sensors automatically shut down the station’s six piles, and backup diesel generators powered up. Fission stopped, but a great deal of energy remained as afterheat, what Princeton physicist Robert Socolow described as “the fire that you can’t put out, the generation of heat from fission fragments now and weeks from now and months from now, heat that must be removed.” Physicist Louis Bloomfield: “They aren’t being heated by fission chain reactions, they’re being heated by their own intense spontaneous radioactivity. Only time will reduce that self-heating. Until that time, they have to be cooled and contained. Water slows neutrons and absorbs heat, but that water has to be cooled as well so that the radioactive fuel rods don’t heat it to boiling.”

  That the earthquake did no damage to Daiichi is the official story, but that story is in doubt. “After the second shock wave hit, I heard a loud explosion that was almost deafening,” one worker remembered. “I looked out the window and I could see white smoke coming from reactor one. I thought to myself, ‘This is the end.’ ” “There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant,” a maintenance worker in his twenties said. “I personally saw pipes that came apart, and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for Unit 1 had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor.” Nuclear critic Katsunobu Onda: “If [Tokyo Electric Power Company] and the government of Japan admit an earthquake can do direct damage to the reactor, this raises suspicions about the safety of every reactor they run.”

  What Tokyo Electric did not seem to know was centuries-old lore passed down through generations of the area’s fishermen: After the earthquake, the tsunami. When the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates rebounded from their collision out in the Pacific, that force generated a sixty-mile-wide, three-foot-high ripple in the ocean waters that traveled at over 500 mph—jet speed. As it approached land, the coastal shallows slowed the ocean wave’s forward bottom while the top rear continued, rising ever higher into the air to crest into a smooth, black swell, a wall of water twenty-six to thirty feet high, rolling forth at 50 mph.

  “I saw the tsunami coming. I stood there, and as it came in, I thought, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’ ” Carl Pillitteri said. “This thing was huge. It didn’t resemble a wave. It resembled this huge swell of the ocean. This huge hump in the ocean coming your way. It rolled up over everything. It rolled uphill. It did come up over parking lots and took cars away in front of me. The first one receded back and took enough water to expose the seabed. This big, black ominous front came rolling down on us, so much so that it began to snow. I’ve never heard anyone mention the snow. I mean, it didn’t snow and accumulate. But it snowed. And the wind was—it was like a vacuum going by. There’s a harbor in front of Fukushima. And it was totally drained.”

  Fisherman Yasuo Uchida tried to save his boat. “I went straight to the harbor and headed out to sea. We went over three waves that came directly from the east. They were about fifteen meters high. They were like mountains.” The biggest was over forty feet high and traveling at 100 mph.

  As it moved forward, the tsunami swallowed up into itself boats and cars, homes and stores, all that there is and all that there was, until the water wall was a nearly solid, rolling glacial mass of soil, plants, animals, human bodies, and societal detritus. Finally, as all waves do, it receded back into the sea, leaving behind churning whirlpools, broken gas lines that set debris afire, decimated villages, a series of five hundred aftershocks, and an incomprehensible catastrophe. One-half million were homeless; 1 million had no power; 2 million had no water; and so many were dead, and so many were missing—twenty thousand? It would take a year bef
ore Japan knew anything remotely accurate about the numbers of the dead.

  The Japanese rural coastline is, like Florida, a home of the retired and the elderly. One resident heard the tsunami alert siren and immediately got his aged mother and dog into a truck and drove inland as fast as he dared for two miles, the glacier wave rising inexorably toward them in the rearview mirror. Afterward, a translator said, “He would like to think there will be some assistance from the local government. But all he could think was, the city-assembly office is gone. The mayor could be dead. The only thing he can turn to is the government. But his local government is gone.”

  The earthquake had lowered the coastline by as much as three feet, meaning that the first wave, at 3:27, was still held back by Daiichi’s thirty-three-foot concrete wall. But eight minutes later, the second wave, four stories tall, overcame the wall as well as sixty thousand concrete barriers and flooded into the plant’s basement, where the emergency diesel generators that were cooling the reactor cores were installed. Backup batteries automatically engaged . . . but they only had eight hours of charge. On March 12, those batteries ran out of power. “They sent people out in the parking lots to scavenge batteries from automobiles, and they hooked them together, and they got some critical DC power for valve operation and instrumentation,” MIT Nuclear Science professor Neil Todreas explained. “But you shouldn’t have to do that.”

  The core’s temperatures rose to 4,800°F; the coolant boiled into steam and evaporated. TEPCO admitted in a press release, “The emergency water circulation system was cooling the steam within the core; it has ceased to function.” With forty thousand US citizens in Japan, American nuclear experts tried to monitor the situation from the bare-bones information that the corporation and the government released to the public. Physicist Ken Bergeron said at the time, “We don’t know exactly how they’re getting water to the core, or if they’re getting enough water to the core. We believe, because of the release of cesium, that the core has been exposed above the water level, at least for a portion of time, and has overheated. What we really need to know is how long can they keep that water flowing.” Nuclear analyst Michael Allen: “It’ll be like somebody dropped a bomb, and there’ll be a big cloud of very, very radioactive material above the ground.” Winds could carry that cloud 150 miles south, to the heart of Tokyo.

  Tokyo Electric tried to bring in fire trucks to water the cores, but the earthquake and tsunami had thrown a storage tank into the middle of a road and no pumping truck could reach the buildings. First thing the next morning, plant manager Masao Yoshida decided that the only solution was to flood the reactors with seawater, stopping their nuclear fires but destroying them forever. But it took all day for TEPCO executives back in Tokyo to agree to this last-chance solution, and only after their plant employees were confronted by a terrifying chain of events.

  The melting uranium, breaking through its casing, had combined with the watery vapor to generate plumes of hydrogen, which would, when they contacted the oxygen of the outside world, violently explode. Just as at Three Mile Island, the steam, now highly radioactive, would have to be vented into the outside atmosphere to release a moderate amount of toxic gas since, if there was an explosion, it might release a devastating amount. To do this, TEPCO needed the official permission of Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who agreed, but to open the vent manually, the workers needed the plant’s blueprints. The building housing the blueprints had collapsed, and no one could get inside it. And before any venting could take place, the region had to be evacuated. Residents within three kilometers were checked for exposure, and all within ten kilometers (six miles) of the plant were told to leave. Public broadcaster NHK told those remaining nearby to close their doors and their windows; to put a wet towel over their noses and mouths; and to cover up as much of their skin as possible.

  When the prime minister heard no news for six hours—still, no one had figured out the procedure for manually opening the vent—Kan decided TEPCO was keeping information from him and helicoptered to Daiichi to see for himself what was happening. Finally a work-around for the vent was engineered, and the plant manager told Kan he would send in a suicide team.

  On March 12 at 9:04 a.m., after swallowing potassium iodide tablets, two teams of six workers each donned firefighting suits with oxygen tanks and attached dosimeters to their belts. No clothing could protect their bodies from gamma rays, however, so they would tag-team relay to prevent any single employee from being exposed beyond a lethal seventeen minutes. Those willing to work with such high risks were derisively called gamma sponges, glow boys, jumpers, and dose fodder. One said, “At Chernobyl, you know, the workers received medals. We’ll be lucky if we get a commemorative towel or a ballpoint pen. We are taboo.”

  In a pitch-black tunnel and temperatures of over a hundred degrees with radiation sirens blaring, the first team found the vent crank, but could only get it a quarter of the way open in the eleven minutes they had remaining. One dosimeter showed its crewman exposed to 106 millisieverts, even beyond the 100 dose generously set by TEPCO. At the time, Unit #1’s control room showed levels at a thousand times normal, while the plant’s main-gate readings were eight times normal. The second team entered to find the radiation so severe that they could only spend six minutes inside and weren’t able to even reach the crank. The third team reached the valve, opened it in nine minutes, and at two thirty in the afternoon, the venting released white bursts of radioactive steam into the skies.

  As everyone signed in relief and passed around congratulations, the earth began, again, to move underfoot. At 3:36 p.m., Reactor #1 exploded so violently its metal roof shot into the sky. Jiro Kimura, who had spent his entire adult life working at TEPCO, said, “I thought this country was finished.” Had the core blown itself to bits? In the control room, gauges said if everyone there would live or die, since no one could survive that level of radiance. But then the monitors fell, and everyone knew it was once again a volatile cloud of hydrogen. Ken Bergeron: “The hydrogen is being vented with the steam, and it’s entering some area, some building, where there is oxygen, and that’s where the explosion took place. They’re venting in order to keep the containment vessel from failing. But if a core melts, it will slump to the bottom of the reactor vessel, probably melt through the reactor vessel onto the containment floor. It’s likely to spread as a molten pool—like lava—to the edge of the steel shell and melt through. That would result in a containment failure in a matter of less than a day. It’s good that it’s got a better containment system than Chernobyl, but it’s not as strong as most of the reactors in [the United States]. . . . There is a great deal of concern that, if the core does melt, the containment will not be able to survive. And if the containment doesn’t survive, we have a worst-case situation.”

  Explosions shook the plant, one after the next. Later that night, after one paroxysm tore the wall and roof off a reactor building—though the containment walls remained secure—the government decided TEPCO was out of its depth. Following the technique used at Chernobyl, Colonel Shinji Iwakuma was sent in with a special army team to hose down Reactor #3 and at least begin to get control of the crisis. The men had uniforms that protected them against the worst of the radiation, as well as helicopter bellies plated in lead to shield out gamma rays. Iwakuma: “Just as we were to get out of the jeep to connect the hose, [the reactor] exploded. Lumps of concrete came ripping through the roof of the jeep. Radioactive matter was leaking in through the bindings of our masks. Our dosimeter alarms were ringing constantly.” The men were at least able to evacuate before anyone received a fatal dose, but the readings were so strong that it was perilous to approach even by air, so they tried again the next day. But then, strong winds kept the water from hitting its targets, and they had to give up. Smoke and debris made clear photographs of the site needed for analysis impossible to take from the copters.

  Daiichi stored its spent radioactive fuel rods in water-filled pools on the top floors of each reactor building o
utside the containment shields, with each pool cooling 548 fuel assemblies—four times the size of the cores themselves. Since after dozens of years and billions of dollars, the United States still has no long-term storage facility for nuclear waste, 104 of its atomic plants similarly store sixty-five thousand metric tons—a football field stuffed twenty feet high—of radioactive leftovers, with at least two dozen utilities housing radiant leftovers in aboveground pools, just like Daiichi’s.

  On March 13, Fortunate Island’s pools began to boil and evaporate. As two of the buildings had lost their roofs, their pools were now fully exposed to the outside world. If the afterheat grew strong enough, the pool could boil away and expose those rods igniting and radiating far more powerfully than even a full core failure. “It’s worse than a meltdown,” said nuclear engineer David A. Lochbaum. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”

  Then the water in the spent-fuel-rod pool of Unit #4 also began to boil. Shigekatsu Oomukai of Japan’s NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) insisted that the pool was so deep that this wasn’t of imminent concern, but he also admitted that the temperatures were so high that workers couldn’t reach the pools to replenish them. The gauges in Units 5 and 6 revealed that their own pools were getting hotter and hotter.

  Another hydrogen explosion tore through Daiichi at 3:40 p.m. on the fourteenth, destroying Unit 3’s outer building, injuring four workers, and raising into the air a pink cloud. Some onlookers became terrified when winds pushed it into what to their eyes was a mushroom shape. The emergency cooling system for Reactor #3 stopped working, and its core also began to melt. More radioactive vapor had to be vented, and workers began to flood that reactor with seawater and boric acid.

  Washington became so disturbed by the lack of information coming from either the Japanese government or TEPCO that on March 15 it flew a Global Hawk surveillance drone overhead. Reconnaissance photos revealed the fuel-rod pools in serious trouble, as well as chunks of fuel rods scattered all over the plant’s grounds. Clearly, much of Daiichi was now lethally contaminated.