2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster and Aftermath:
De-Branding the Green in Nuclear Energy
By Sung Taek Chung
A full year has passed since the devastating Tohoku earthquake hit the Northeastern coast of Japan. Measuring at a Richter scale of 8.9, the earthquake struck just 70km away from land, creating a ripple of massive tsunamis, obliterating thousands of homes, and causing the death of over 15,000 people in just the matter of a single day. As if that was not enough, Fukushima’s nuclear reactors started to malfunction. And while Japan’s disaster-proof security systems are among the best in the world, as fate would have it, all safety mechanisms failed to work as powers cut off, exposing radioactive fuel rods into the open air and ultimately causing the full meltdown of three nuclear reactors. Reporters and journalists have been thwarted from on-site investigations as previous attempts at coverage had been met with disastrous consequences. Immediately following the disaster last year, Japanese TV personality Otsuka Norikazu, in an act of courage to show that the situation was under control, ate vegetables produced from the affected region on live television. Following the act he soon fell ill and was diagnosed with acute leukemia, providing audiences a living testimony to the ruthless nature of radioactive pollution. As a result, people and organizations around the world are beginning to raise serious doubts over nuclear power’s viability as a safe energy source.
“Before the accident, I explained to many people that the nuclear power plant is safe,” says Saori Kanesaki during an interview on CNN. “Now that this has happened, I feel very sorry I ever said that.” Kanesaki, a Fukushima resident, had worked as a tour guide for the nuclear power plant before the disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was constructed in 1971 under government authorization, in spite of fervent protests by local residents. The government pressed on forward even despite IAEA warnings that the seismic location of the plant makes it extremely vulnerable to a possible disaster, just like the one in 2011. A deserted ghost town is left of what was once a thriving cultural hotspot and fishery. Dangerously high radiation levels continue to remain and prevent some 78,000 people from returning back to their homes.
The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown were a devastating series of blows, even to such a highly developed country as Japan. Coupled with the psychosocial consequences, it is questionable whether Japan will be able to keep its standing as a major economic power in the global arena. Some hopefully point to the economist Josef Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, in which previously existing paradigms are brought down and renewed through the process of challenge and innovation. Major infrastructural changes are certainly underway, as the disaster led to unveiling some of Japan’s most deep-rooted problems, one of which is government credibility. Specifically, the Japanese government consistently failed to give straight and honest statements regarding the actual conditions of the nuclear reactors. It took five days for the government to publicly announce that high levels of radiation were present near the reactors, and nearly two weeks until the government decided to report any numbers from radiation readings taken by the plant. It may be understood in perspective that the Japanese government would naturally want to hide the severity of the situation, as if a diseased man tries to cover up his wounds out of fear of abandonment by his friends and family, in order to prevent the kind of panic that might ultimately lead to mass evacuations. But there is no excuse for lying. Japanese citizens as well as foreign occupants in Japan expressed major frustration and anger to the Japanese government for such lack of transparency in such an urgent situation. The government claims to have the situation “under control,” but most experts agree that it will take decades for the situation to be contained.
It comes as no surprise that the nuclear industry already has a history of disguising information. One major problem is the safety standards regarding nuclear energy, of which most people are misinformed. Safety regulations today have a “threshold” amount of radiation exposure that is classified as “safe” for human beings. According to these standards, humans are able to safely expose themselves to a certain amount of radiation as long as they stay below the minimum threshold. However, actual scientific theory regarding radiation exposure finds that the relationship between bodily harm and the level of exposure is linear; any amount of radiation can be dangerous, no matter how small. In other words, there is no such thing as a “minimum” or “safe” amount of radiation. So where do these standards come from?
The paradox lies in a contradictory structure of incentives. The IAEA and WHO (World Health Organization) entered into an agreement in 1958, which gave the IAEA full authority to prohibit the WHO from conducting any studies on the possible hazards of nuclear energy. As physician and antinuclear advocate Helen Caldicott put it- “the biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine.” And so the very organization that thrives on the promotion and expansion of an industry has also been delegated with the very task of regulating its own safety standards. Due to this paradox, the safety standards under which nuclear power plant workers operate today are based on cost-benefit analyses focusing on economic profit and not human safety. It would be safe to say that pro-nuclear organization will find it in their better interest to execute a level of discretion in disclosing certain information to the public so as to minimize the perceived level of risk posed by using nuclear power as an energy source.
The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 is marked as the worst nuclear disaster in history. It happened when a series of events led to the explosion of a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. In short, radioactive material ten times that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pumped into the atmosphere. Thousands of workers died as an immediate consequence of the catastrophe, and local regions across Europe began experiencing dramatic increases in cancer as well as other incidences of genetic mutation. In 2005, the IAEA released a follow-up study on the longterm health effects of the incident, called “Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident.” Released under the supervision of the UN, this report estimated a total of 4,000 deaths caused by radiation exposure. Scientists and environmentalists around the world responded with protest, criticizing the report as inaccurate and seriously underestimating the real effects of Chernobyl. Promptly “TORCH (The Other Report on Chernobyl)” was released, reassessing the scale of the disaster, predicting between 30,000 and 60,000 casualties as a result of illnesses caused by exposure to radioactive material. Another study, released by the New York Academy of Sciences, estimates a million deaths as a direct result of Chernobyl. The Chernobyl disaster was rated a level 7 on the INES scale of nuclear accidents, with 7 being the highest. And while Fukushima was initially given a level 5, Japanese authorities raised it to 7 following a reevaluation of the amount of radiation discharged.
Simply put, exposure to radiation increases the chance of genetic mutation. Radioactive isotopes such as uranium, plutonium, or caesium-137 emit particles that form ions when interacting with other atoms or molecules. Ions are dangerous because they form free radicals, which can damage cells and mess with DNA structure, leading to genetic mutation. A single mutation is enough to cause abnormal cell growth and develop into cancer. Various types of hazardous radionuclide have been detected outside the Fukushima power plant, including iodine, strontium, caesium, and plutonium. Currently, nuclear pollution is so toxic that animals in the region have been discovered with bizarre birth defects, such as a rabbit without ears, an eight legged frog, and a pig with the face of a monkey.
Unique to the Fukushima disaster is the fact that considerable amounts of radioactive water were dumped directly into the Pacific Ocean as a result of an attempt to cool off the overheating nuclear reactors. In addition, high radiation levels from samples indicated that radioactive contaminants had been seeping into the ground and leaking out onto the ocean floor. This is extremely dangerous because it leads to bioaccumulation of radioactive toxins. Smaller life forms such as algae and krill that take up the toxins are eaten by larger fish which are eaten by even larger fish, accumulating up to the higher ranks of the food chain, arriving at whales and then eventually humans. Traces of radiation have been detected in whales caught by Japanese whale hunters not far from the disaster site. Ironically enough, Japan’s whaling industry operates under a loophole in international law, on the grounds that hunted whales are used for the purposes of scientific research. Japan’s fishing industry, constituting 15% of the world’s total amount, will surely take a toll as a result of the disaster. Most of the fishing boats in the area have already been destroyed as an immediate result of the tsunami itself. But it’s not just the Japanese fishing industry that is at stake here. It is also important to remember that the earth operates through a natural circulatory system known as the biogeochemical cycle. Radioactive contaminants in the sea can evaporate into the air and condense in the sky, returning to the earth as droplets of radioactive rain. Trace amounts of iodine-131, confirmed to have directly come from the Fukushima power plant, were detected in Boston just a few weeks after the disaster.
This doesn’t mean we should wear facial respirators and start carrying portable Geiger counters. Radiation is all around us, coming from sunrays and natural sources inside the earth. But the UV rays emitted by sunlight are nowhere near as harmful as plutonium or caesium, and the “natural radiation” argument is another tactic used to justify threshold radiation levels. The full extent to which artificial radioactive contaminants affect our biology is yet unclear, and currently existing scientific literature on the subject is very limited. It will take decades for any type of conclusion to be made regarding the Fukushima nuclear disaster’s long-term effects on our health and environment.
One thing for sure is that the Japanese public’s belief in safe nuclear power has been completely destroyed. A continuous series of anti-nuclear protests ensued globally throughout 2011, one involving a march of sixty thousand people in Tokyo, Japan on September 19th. The government announced that Japan will steadily diminish its reliance on nuclear power. Fukushima has served as an effective reminder and wake-up call to other nations about the dangers of nuclear energy. Germany has vowed to close all its nuclear reactors by 2022, and the government has stated that by then, 35% of electricity will be from renewable energy sources. China, on the other hand, has 25 new nuclear power plants currently under construction, and plans to build more.
The main argument for nuclear energy goes that it is a carbon-free alternative, which helps reduce greenhouse gases and fight climate change. Unlike coal or fossil fuel, use of nuclear energy does not entail the consequences of toxic emissions such as sulfur and carbon dioxide that poison the atmosphere. But it does produce radioactive waste, which due to extreme toxicity and long half-life has to be quarantined and buried underground. A byproduct of uranium, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years and is a main ingredient for creating nuclear weapons. Moreover, radiation cannot be detected by the naked eye. This invisible nature of radioactivity further increases our vulnerability to underestimating the real danger of nuclear technology.
The Fukushima disaster has, since Chernobyl, yet again revealed to the world what is perhaps the greatest “sin” committed against nature by man and his science. Kofi Annan, in remembrance of the Chernobyl disaster, stated that the incident opened “a Pandora’s box of invisible enemies and nameless anxieties in people’s minds but which most of us probably now think of as safely relegated to the past… this tragedy must not be forgotten.” And just like Chernobyl, we are beginning to forget Fukushima, treating it as any other old news while thousands of Japanese citizens are still afflicted by this catastrophe.
Japan is still in the process of picking up its broken pieces from 2011. The good news is that the Japanese people are beginning to discover some internal flaws which they wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. While the disaster has led to major civil unrest and economic turmoil, it has also shattered the deceptively calm surface of stagnation, which had trapped the country in a crippling twenty-year period of weak economic activity. Old ways of thinking as well as doing business are being challenged as younger generations come together through social media, and as young companies and entrepreneurs find creative ways into the global market. Hopefully, once the pieces are put back together, the Japanese nation will reemerge as an actively integrated, new and improved member of the international community.
What is remarkable about the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima disaster of 2011 is the fact that never before have we seen the wrath of nature ripping through the webs of human civilization as realistically as we did on March 12th, 2011. Go to YouTube and you will find raw video recordings of houses and cars being mercilessly swept away by a mass of water that makes concrete buildings look like plastic dollhouses. These videos certainly gave world viewers a more gripping edge on the reality of the situation, as Red Cross was able to gather over $1.3 billion in donations in just three weeks after the earthquake.
But perhaps our rapid technology advance has mistakenly allowed us to move on. In such a fast and well connected world it is easy to choose and forget those glimpses of the less apparent, underlying forces that continuously threaten the well being of human society. It is our responsibility to not let these forces hinder us from remembering the truth. The Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster is not a Japanese crisis. It is a human crisis, and unless something equally radical can be done on a global scale, the world will have to face a problem bigger than climate change, worse than any recession faced by the world today. The entire circle of life is about to face a radical change, and we as the creators of this dangerous technology have a duty to act responsibly. The earth is crying out for help.
Given the environmental chaos of radioactive pollution, international strife caused by fear of nuclear weapons proliferation, and expensive costs incurred by maintenance in addition to plant construction, nuclear energy seems to be creating more problems than it was meant to solve. On the bright side, solar energy and wind power remain as viable replacement options. These renewable energy sources can solve the dilemma of climate change and at the same time replace the troubles of nuclear energy with more jobs and less worries. As much as 86,000 terawatts of power can be produced from sunrays alone. Flying wind turbines can produce 870 terawatts if developed right. All the world needs is 16 terawatts.
De-Branding the Green in Nuclear Energy
By Sung Taek Chung
A full year has passed since the devastating Tohoku earthquake hit the Northeastern coast of Japan. Measuring at a Richter scale of 8.9, the earthquake struck just 70km away from land, creating a ripple of massive tsunamis, obliterating thousands of homes, and causing the death of over 15,000 people in just the matter of a single day. As if that was not enough, Fukushima’s nuclear reactors started to malfunction. And while Japan’s disaster-proof security systems are among the best in the world, as fate would have it, all safety mechanisms failed to work as powers cut off, exposing radioactive fuel rods into the open air and ultimately causing the full meltdown of three nuclear reactors. Reporters and journalists have been thwarted from on-site investigations as previous attempts at coverage had been met with disastrous consequences. Immediately following the disaster last year, Japanese TV personality Otsuka Norikazu, in an act of courage to show that the situation was under control, ate vegetables produced from the affected region on live television. Following the act he soon fell ill and was diagnosed with acute leukemia, providing audiences a living testimony to the ruthless nature of radioactive pollution. As a result, people and organizations around the world are beginning to raise serious doubts over nuclear power’s viability as a safe energy source.
“Before the accident, I explained to many people that the nuclear power plant is safe,” says Saori Kanesaki during an interview on CNN. “Now that this has happened, I feel very sorry I ever said that.” Kanesaki, a Fukushima resident, had worked as a tour guide for the nuclear power plant before the disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was constructed in 1971 under government authorization, in spite of fervent protests by local residents. The government pressed on forward even despite IAEA warnings that the seismic location of the plant makes it extremely vulnerable to a possible disaster, just like the one in 2011. A deserted ghost town is left of what was once a thriving cultural hotspot and fishery. Dangerously high radiation levels continue to remain and prevent some 78,000 people from returning back to their homes.
The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown were a devastating series of blows, even to such a highly developed country as Japan. Coupled with the psychosocial consequences, it is questionable whether Japan will be able to keep its standing as a major economic power in the global arena. Some hopefully point to the economist Josef Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, in which previously existing paradigms are brought down and renewed through the process of challenge and innovation. Major infrastructural changes are certainly underway, as the disaster led to unveiling some of Japan’s most deep-rooted problems, one of which is government credibility. Specifically, the Japanese government consistently failed to give straight and honest statements regarding the actual conditions of the nuclear reactors. It took five days for the government to publicly announce that high levels of radiation were present near the reactors, and nearly two weeks until the government decided to report any numbers from radiation readings taken by the plant. It may be understood in perspective that the Japanese government would naturally want to hide the severity of the situation, as if a diseased man tries to cover up his wounds out of fear of abandonment by his friends and family, in order to prevent the kind of panic that might ultimately lead to mass evacuations. But there is no excuse for lying. Japanese citizens as well as foreign occupants in Japan expressed major frustration and anger to the Japanese government for such lack of transparency in such an urgent situation. The government claims to have the situation “under control,” but most experts agree that it will take decades for the situation to be contained.
It comes as no surprise that the nuclear industry already has a history of disguising information. One major problem is the safety standards regarding nuclear energy, of which most people are misinformed. Safety regulations today have a “threshold” amount of radiation exposure that is classified as “safe” for human beings. According to these standards, humans are able to safely expose themselves to a certain amount of radiation as long as they stay below the minimum threshold. However, actual scientific theory regarding radiation exposure finds that the relationship between bodily harm and the level of exposure is linear; any amount of radiation can be dangerous, no matter how small. In other words, there is no such thing as a “minimum” or “safe” amount of radiation. So where do these standards come from?
The paradox lies in a contradictory structure of incentives. The IAEA and WHO (World Health Organization) entered into an agreement in 1958, which gave the IAEA full authority to prohibit the WHO from conducting any studies on the possible hazards of nuclear energy. As physician and antinuclear advocate Helen Caldicott put it- “the biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine.” And so the very organization that thrives on the promotion and expansion of an industry has also been delegated with the very task of regulating its own safety standards. Due to this paradox, the safety standards under which nuclear power plant workers operate today are based on cost-benefit analyses focusing on economic profit and not human safety. It would be safe to say that pro-nuclear organization will find it in their better interest to execute a level of discretion in disclosing certain information to the public so as to minimize the perceived level of risk posed by using nuclear power as an energy source.
The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 is marked as the worst nuclear disaster in history. It happened when a series of events led to the explosion of a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. In short, radioactive material ten times that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pumped into the atmosphere. Thousands of workers died as an immediate consequence of the catastrophe, and local regions across Europe began experiencing dramatic increases in cancer as well as other incidences of genetic mutation. In 2005, the IAEA released a follow-up study on the longterm health effects of the incident, called “Chernobyl: The True Scale of the Accident.” Released under the supervision of the UN, this report estimated a total of 4,000 deaths caused by radiation exposure. Scientists and environmentalists around the world responded with protest, criticizing the report as inaccurate and seriously underestimating the real effects of Chernobyl. Promptly “TORCH (The Other Report on Chernobyl)” was released, reassessing the scale of the disaster, predicting between 30,000 and 60,000 casualties as a result of illnesses caused by exposure to radioactive material. Another study, released by the New York Academy of Sciences, estimates a million deaths as a direct result of Chernobyl. The Chernobyl disaster was rated a level 7 on the INES scale of nuclear accidents, with 7 being the highest. And while Fukushima was initially given a level 5, Japanese authorities raised it to 7 following a reevaluation of the amount of radiation discharged.
Simply put, exposure to radiation increases the chance of genetic mutation. Radioactive isotopes such as uranium, plutonium, or caesium-137 emit particles that form ions when interacting with other atoms or molecules. Ions are dangerous because they form free radicals, which can damage cells and mess with DNA structure, leading to genetic mutation. A single mutation is enough to cause abnormal cell growth and develop into cancer. Various types of hazardous radionuclide have been detected outside the Fukushima power plant, including iodine, strontium, caesium, and plutonium. Currently, nuclear pollution is so toxic that animals in the region have been discovered with bizarre birth defects, such as a rabbit without ears, an eight legged frog, and a pig with the face of a monkey.
Unique to the Fukushima disaster is the fact that considerable amounts of radioactive water were dumped directly into the Pacific Ocean as a result of an attempt to cool off the overheating nuclear reactors. In addition, high radiation levels from samples indicated that radioactive contaminants had been seeping into the ground and leaking out onto the ocean floor. This is extremely dangerous because it leads to bioaccumulation of radioactive toxins. Smaller life forms such as algae and krill that take up the toxins are eaten by larger fish which are eaten by even larger fish, accumulating up to the higher ranks of the food chain, arriving at whales and then eventually humans. Traces of radiation have been detected in whales caught by Japanese whale hunters not far from the disaster site. Ironically enough, Japan’s whaling industry operates under a loophole in international law, on the grounds that hunted whales are used for the purposes of scientific research. Japan’s fishing industry, constituting 15% of the world’s total amount, will surely take a toll as a result of the disaster. Most of the fishing boats in the area have already been destroyed as an immediate result of the tsunami itself. But it’s not just the Japanese fishing industry that is at stake here. It is also important to remember that the earth operates through a natural circulatory system known as the biogeochemical cycle. Radioactive contaminants in the sea can evaporate into the air and condense in the sky, returning to the earth as droplets of radioactive rain. Trace amounts of iodine-131, confirmed to have directly come from the Fukushima power plant, were detected in Boston just a few weeks after the disaster.
This doesn’t mean we should wear facial respirators and start carrying portable Geiger counters. Radiation is all around us, coming from sunrays and natural sources inside the earth. But the UV rays emitted by sunlight are nowhere near as harmful as plutonium or caesium, and the “natural radiation” argument is another tactic used to justify threshold radiation levels. The full extent to which artificial radioactive contaminants affect our biology is yet unclear, and currently existing scientific literature on the subject is very limited. It will take decades for any type of conclusion to be made regarding the Fukushima nuclear disaster’s long-term effects on our health and environment.
One thing for sure is that the Japanese public’s belief in safe nuclear power has been completely destroyed. A continuous series of anti-nuclear protests ensued globally throughout 2011, one involving a march of sixty thousand people in Tokyo, Japan on September 19th. The government announced that Japan will steadily diminish its reliance on nuclear power. Fukushima has served as an effective reminder and wake-up call to other nations about the dangers of nuclear energy. Germany has vowed to close all its nuclear reactors by 2022, and the government has stated that by then, 35% of electricity will be from renewable energy sources. China, on the other hand, has 25 new nuclear power plants currently under construction, and plans to build more.
The main argument for nuclear energy goes that it is a carbon-free alternative, which helps reduce greenhouse gases and fight climate change. Unlike coal or fossil fuel, use of nuclear energy does not entail the consequences of toxic emissions such as sulfur and carbon dioxide that poison the atmosphere. But it does produce radioactive waste, which due to extreme toxicity and long half-life has to be quarantined and buried underground. A byproduct of uranium, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years and is a main ingredient for creating nuclear weapons. Moreover, radiation cannot be detected by the naked eye. This invisible nature of radioactivity further increases our vulnerability to underestimating the real danger of nuclear technology.
The Fukushima disaster has, since Chernobyl, yet again revealed to the world what is perhaps the greatest “sin” committed against nature by man and his science. Kofi Annan, in remembrance of the Chernobyl disaster, stated that the incident opened “a Pandora’s box of invisible enemies and nameless anxieties in people’s minds but which most of us probably now think of as safely relegated to the past… this tragedy must not be forgotten.” And just like Chernobyl, we are beginning to forget Fukushima, treating it as any other old news while thousands of Japanese citizens are still afflicted by this catastrophe.
Japan is still in the process of picking up its broken pieces from 2011. The good news is that the Japanese people are beginning to discover some internal flaws which they wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. While the disaster has led to major civil unrest and economic turmoil, it has also shattered the deceptively calm surface of stagnation, which had trapped the country in a crippling twenty-year period of weak economic activity. Old ways of thinking as well as doing business are being challenged as younger generations come together through social media, and as young companies and entrepreneurs find creative ways into the global market. Hopefully, once the pieces are put back together, the Japanese nation will reemerge as an actively integrated, new and improved member of the international community.
What is remarkable about the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima disaster of 2011 is the fact that never before have we seen the wrath of nature ripping through the webs of human civilization as realistically as we did on March 12th, 2011. Go to YouTube and you will find raw video recordings of houses and cars being mercilessly swept away by a mass of water that makes concrete buildings look like plastic dollhouses. These videos certainly gave world viewers a more gripping edge on the reality of the situation, as Red Cross was able to gather over $1.3 billion in donations in just three weeks after the earthquake.
But perhaps our rapid technology advance has mistakenly allowed us to move on. In such a fast and well connected world it is easy to choose and forget those glimpses of the less apparent, underlying forces that continuously threaten the well being of human society. It is our responsibility to not let these forces hinder us from remembering the truth. The Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster is not a Japanese crisis. It is a human crisis, and unless something equally radical can be done on a global scale, the world will have to face a problem bigger than climate change, worse than any recession faced by the world today. The entire circle of life is about to face a radical change, and we as the creators of this dangerous technology have a duty to act responsibly. The earth is crying out for help.
Given the environmental chaos of radioactive pollution, international strife caused by fear of nuclear weapons proliferation, and expensive costs incurred by maintenance in addition to plant construction, nuclear energy seems to be creating more problems than it was meant to solve. On the bright side, solar energy and wind power remain as viable replacement options. These renewable energy sources can solve the dilemma of climate change and at the same time replace the troubles of nuclear energy with more jobs and less worries. As much as 86,000 terawatts of power can be produced from sunrays alone. Flying wind turbines can produce 870 terawatts if developed right. All the world needs is 16 terawatts.
