The accident apparently was caused by human error, and more human error compounded the damage. Firefighters were sent off to the processing plant without their antinuclear clothing. Police allowed unprotected bystanders to wander around in the radioactive rain. Just outside the plant, radiation levels spiked to 20,000 times normal. At least 49 people were hurt by radiation as emergency workers struggled to stop an out-of-control chain reaction. The crisis wasn’t declared over until nearly 21 hours after it began. And after all that, the plant’s operators said it wouldn’t happen again.
Another nuclear episode, more official assurances. Which ones can we afford to believe? Around the world, government leaders and power-industry executives insist that nuclear reactors and fuel-processing plants are as safe as possible. Yet accidents keep happening, scores of them. So far, nothing else has come close to the terrifying meltdown that knocked out two reactors in Chernobyl in 1986, killing 31 people in the immediate aftermath, condemning countless others to a cancerous future and poisoning vast stretches of what is now independent Ukraine. But nuclear power generation has long since entered late-middle age, when pipes, vats and controls may wear down dangerously. And as long ago as 1979, the radiation leak at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island showed that it can indeed happen here.
The processing plant at Tokaimura, just 75 miles from downtown Tokyo, is operated by a company called JCO, a subsidiary of the Sumitomo Metal Mining conglomerate. JCO now admits the workers in the plant were mixing nuclear fuel without the proper certification and were using a flawed recipe. They intended to make fuel for a fast-breeder reactor, which required them to add 5.5 pounds of uranium to a solution of nitric acid, which eventually converts solid enriched uranium hexaflouride into a powder. Instead, they poured 35 pounds of uranium into the basin. An even bigger mistake–apparently made to speed things up–was to pour the uranium into the basin by the bucketful, instead of using a much slower drip flow. The sudden infusion of excess uranium set off a chain reaction, which one worker described as a “blue flash.” The plant was not designed to contain the resulting burst of radiation; nor were the workers trained or equipped to stop the chain reaction.
The damage was limited by two factors: the small amount of fissionable material involved (35 pounds, compared with about 100 tons at Chernobyl) and the fact that only radiation escaped from the plant, not the radioactive particles that spread widely in fallout. Still, the consequences were grave enough. The people most seriously hurt were three workers who were inside the plant when the chain reaction occurred. They were airlifted from the area wrapped head-to-toe in plastic, to avoid contaminating others. David Kyd, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said two of the men were “so badly irradiated that their [survival] chances are very slim.”
National officials responded to the crisis just as slowly as the locals. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi wasn’t told about the accident until 90 minutes after it happened, and then he delayed for hours before setting up an emergency task force to deal with it.
Eventually, police evacuated more than 200 people from homes near the plant and gave perfunctory radiation checks to thousands more at community centers, waving radiation-detecting wands over their bodies. Within a six-mile radius of the plant, 310,000 people were told to stay inside their homes. A train line was closed down. At a highway toll booth outside Tokaimura, workers hung a swath of brown paper bearing a notice that said: YOU ARE WITHIN 10 KILOMETERS OF A RADIATION LEAK. PLEASE DRIVE QUICKLY. Later the highway was shut down. At one intersection in Tokaimura, policemen in radiation suits sat in their squad car near a 7-Eleven convenience store, which had not been closed. They watched from afar as a woman used an outdoor telephone. Just up the road, barely 100 yards from city hall, an old man sat on the curb in the rain, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the drizzle was radioactive.
Inside the plant, the situation was desperate. The first firefighters weren’t told that a nuclear accident had taken place, so they left their radiation suits back at their station. All of them were contaminated as the unplanned chain reaction–“inadvertent criticality,” in scientific jargon–turned the plant into a crude nuclear reactor. To stop the reaction, someone had to drain the water from a cooling jacket around the basin into which the uranium had been dumped. Working three-minute shifts, 16 JCO technicians attacked the problem tag-team style and eventually opened the valve that drained the basin. “They wore regular protective suits unable to block neutron radiation,” an official with the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute told NEWSWEEK. “They knew very well they’d be affected. It was like a kamikaze mission.” Finally, at 7 o’clock last Friday morning, Kazuo Sato, head of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, told reporters: “The chain reaction has stopped.”
Could another one start up somewhere else? The fact that the United States has gone 20 years without another accident as serious as Three Mile Island may be leading to complacency. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is supported entirely by industry fees, has cut its budget. The number of safety inspections has dropped by about 15 percent, and more cuts are planned. The NRC insists that it has redesigned its inspection process to be more efficient, paying greater attention to plants that have had safety problems in the past. “We would not do anything at the expense of public safety; that’s a religion around here,” says NRC spokesman Victor Dricks. Some environmentalists support the new inspection program but argue that the budget cuts are still dangerous. “It’s one of those things that will change once we have an accident here,” says David Lochbaum, a nuclear-safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “If we were really trying to ensure safety, we wouldn’t have these kinds of cutbacks.”
In terms of nuclear power safety, the United States and other advanced nations are light-years ahead of the countries that used to make up the Soviet Union. According to a 1995 report by the U.S. Energy Department, five of the seven worst reactors in the world–those at “high risk” of a major nuclear accident–are located on former Soviet territory, including the other two reactors still in use, amazingly, at Chernobyl. (The remaining high-risk plants are in Slovakia and Bulgaria.) If anything, safety conditions have worsened in Russia since 1995. The crash of the ruble has left nuclear workers unpaid and safety training and investments in abeyance. When a NEWSWEEK reporter visited a reactor serving St. Petersburg recently, he saw operators of the nuclear pile lounging around unprotected under a sign that said: “Respirators must be worn at all times.” Risky behavior isn’t just Russia’s problem. Fallout from the Chernobyl disaster drifted all the way around the world, doing serious damage as far away as Lapland.
Japanese environmentalists, and many Western experts, think Japan’s safety practices are a bit lax, though not on anything like the Russian scale. There have been dozens of small incidents over the years, and last week’s accident was the sixth major mishap at a Japanese facility since 1997. Yet nuclear power is widely trusted by the Japanese people. “They believe their technology is safe because it is uniquely Japanese,” says Shaun Burnie, research director for Greenpeace International’s Plutonium Campaign, an antinuclear effort. In fact, much of the Japanese nuclear power industry’s capacity consists of 40-year-old designs copied from the United States. Industry critics say safety precautions have been relaxed in recent years, partly because the low price of oil makes nuclear power more expensive than electricity from other sources. Safety standards are especially low, experts say, at Japan’s seven fuel-processing plants, where chain reactions are not supposed to occur.
The presidents of JCO and Sumitomo humbly apologized for all the trouble. “We will thoroughly check the reasons and ensure that this never happens again,” said JCO’s Koji Kitani. But some experts predicted that not much would change in Japan. Almost bereft of natural resources, Japan needs nuclear power more than most countries. It has 51 commercial reactors, which provide 35 percent of the nation’s electricity. (In contrast, the United States gets only about 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants.) In the 1930s the search for a reliable source of energy was one of the main factors that sent Japan’s army marching across Asia, toward the oil fields of Indonesia. “The Japanese think nuclear power is their destiny,” says Burnie of Greenpeace. “The reality is that this accident will not change the course of their nuclear program. I think it would take a Chernobyl to wake them up.”
Just how likely is “another Chernobyl” in the United States? It’s only just conceivable, experts say. Even another Tokaimura isn’t likely to happen here. The seven American factories that produce fuel for commercial nuclear power plants are more closely monitored than their Japanese counterparts. Only one of them has ever had an accidental chain reaction, and that was in 1964. “The control system is set up redundantly,” says the NRC’s Dricks. “It takes [failure of] two controls to have criticality, and we intervene after one.” He adds: “I think our controls are rigorous enough to make it extremely unlikely here.” Lochbaum of the Concerned Scientists disagrees. “The technology in Japan is very similar to ours,” he says. “The controls are also similar, and those controls can break down, and there can be accidents. I think our technology can be equally vulnerable.”
After the Japanese accident, President Clinton ordered the Energy Department and the Pentagon to take a close look at the vulnerability of civilian fuel processing. But a more serious risk may lie elsewhere. Several processing plants owned by the Energy Department handle uranium for nuclear weapons and other military and scientific uses. In a 1997 report, a panel of independent experts said safety personnel at some of those plants “have no prior firsthand experience in criticality.” Between 1958 and 1978 government-owned processing plants had six “criticality” accidents. In all, the world has officially recorded 21 of those mishaps since the dawn of the nuclear age. A third of them happened here.
