Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator by Gregory B. Jaczko

Author:Gregory B. Jaczko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 6

Visiting Tokyo: Crises Reveal Human Beings at Their Best

The phone rang sometime between appetizers and the main course during my mother’s birthday dinner. It was rare that her birthday would fall on a Saturday, when all my immediate family could gather around her. My mom was suffering from cancer, and each birthday was another opportunity to celebrate her success fending off the disease. (She would die a year and a half after I left the NRC.) That day the phone call would end our festivities prematurely.

Flights were found to take me to London and then on to Tokyo, in a blissful sixteen hours of isolation from emails, phone calls, reporters, and grim updates about the radiation released. After just over two weeks of continuous effort to deal with the strain of the Fukushima accident, I was looking forward to spending uninterrupted hours on an airplane. Here, at least, I knew no one would ask difficult questions.

It had been over two weeks since the earthquake and tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear reactors were still not contained. The nuclear fuel had overheated and was continuing to release radiation into the environment. Anyone spending extended periods of time near the three damaged plants would receive lethal doses. Emissions flowed into the air and water, spreading far from the plant thanks to the world’s winds and currents.

The radiation continued to threaten the people of Japan and the many nations nearby. We still didn’t know whether the radiation levels would increase and what this might mean for Tokyo. My job on this trip would be to better understand these issues and to improve communications between the U.S. and Japanese governments.

As soon as I landed, there was a message for me from President Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, a wonderful, intelligent man with a gray-flecked beard who, whenever he walked into a room, seemed to lean slightly to one side, as if he were on a different plane from the rest of us. Holdren had been speaking with Shunsuke Kondo, chairman of the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission and one of his counterparts. Kondo was very concerned that the situation in Fukushima could get significantly worse. He laid out a scenario that involved the complete melting of the fuel in three of the reactors and fires in each of the buildings where old nuclear fuel was kept.

Kondo believed that enough radiation could be released to cause widespread contamination in Tokyo. Emergency response actions would create a tremendous challenge for the millions of people living and working there. Holdren was adamant that I meet with Kondo to discuss his calculations.

The NRC staff was not yet predicting such dire scenarios. But the situation in Japan was very different from what nuclear analysts in America were used to. There were six reactors at the Fukushima site, a much greater number than at any site in the United States. Plus, the hydrogen explosions that had rocked the site a few days after the accident started had challenged many assumptions about the structural integrity of the plant’s protective buildings.

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