The Age of Radiance (62 page)

A Russian nuclear executive summed up that after the fall of the USSR,
“the great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor. . . . [The]
technology has become a useful tool especially for the weak. It allows them to satisfy their ambitions without much expense. If they want to intimidate others, to be respected by others, this is now the easiest way to do it.”

Journalist Fareed Zakaria countered:
“Does anyone really think that North Korea or Pakistan are regarded as fearsome adversaries, countries to emulate, countries with great influence in the councils of the world? No. They are regarded as basket cases—failed states that are dangerous largely because they are unstable and are run by irresponsible governments that are willing to do destabilizing things in their region. The result is they are more watched, cordoned off, and contained than ever before.”

Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, father of India’s nuclear technology, baldly stated the solution back in 1965: “A way must be found so that a nation will gain as much by not going for nuclear weapons as it might by developing them.”

I
N
the fading-ember days of World War II, Kiwamu Ariga was one of untold dozens of Japanese schoolchildren whose education was postponed. Instead, he and his classmates were sent off into the forests to look for brown or black-spotted rocks. Day after day they dug with small picks and bare hands, their feet bloody from clambering across the jagged hillside. Finally, an army officer explained,
“With the stones that you boys are digging up, we can make a bomb the size of a matchbox that will destroy all of New York.” This was the state of 1940s Japanese nuclear science—instead of the world’s greatest scientific minds gathering at Los Alamos, little boys were digging out bits of uranium with toy shovels—and this childhood mining operation took place in a part of the country that reminds many Americans of Maine, with its undulating pine forests, salt-air towns, and a Miss Peach championship. This is the prefecture of “fortunate island”—Fukushima.

After fallout from the Bikini Mike test infected
Lucky Dragon Number 5
’s Japanese crew and its tuna cargo, Eisenhower’s State Department reported,
“The Japanese are pathologically sensitive about nuclear weapons. They feel they are the chosen victims.” Illinois representative Sidney Yates recommended the United States apologize to the fishermen and build the Japanese their own Atoms for Peace reactor. Many in Japan simultaneously were coming to think that the paucity of their homegrown energy, with the need to constantly import oil and coal, triggered the imperial conquests of the 1930s and 1940s that calamitously thrust their nation into the Axis powers. The answer for them was also nuclear. While the CIA then worked with Japanese baseball’s founding father, Matsutaro Shoriki, and his newspaper chain to promote such stories as “Finally, the Sun Has Been Captured,” Japan’s
atomic plants were fashioned to include visitor’s centers—“PR buildings,” in Japanese—that held IMAX theaters, swimming pools, Disneyfications of Albert Einstein’s and Marie Curie’s homes, and programs designed to appeal to young mothers, as surveys had shown them particularly wary of nuclear contamination. In one of his cartoons, anime variation Little Pluto Boy told children it was A-OK to drink liquid plutonium since “it’s unthinkable that I could cause any effects on the human body!”

Atoms for Peace included a revision of the US Atomic Energy Commission’s agenda. Now, the agency would develop nuclear science and technology; oversee the United States’ atomic stockpile; promote the expansion of nuclear energy; and regulate the nation’s nuclear power utilities. These bedrock conflicts of interest usually ended up meaning regulation took a backseat to promotion and development, a state of affairs mirrored in Japan’s own nuclear agency. In the 1970s, the AEC was split into the Department of Energy, which promotes and develops, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose mission is clear. Japan’s government did not make these changes. Additionally, the United States has a history of civilians and journalists questioning and criticizing state policies. Both Robert Oppenheimer and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, among others, warned of the dangers of civilian nuclear power plants at the industry’s very birth.
“The Atomic Energy Commission was licensing unsafe reactors operating near major metropolitan areas, and they clearly were aware of this lack of safety,” Nader said. “The press wasn’t critical. The Congress bought into the Atomic Energy Commission party line. There was a huge taxpayer-funded propaganda for how good nuclear power was, going right into the high schools and elementary schools in our country with traveling road shows. The scientific community was part of the industry itself and there was no outside critique. There was no government critique. And there was secrecy above it all.” Japanese society has no similar tradition of public dissent. Finally, as private US insurance companies would only cover nuclear plants to $65 million (about one-tenth of what a major accident would cost), in 1957 Washington created a special insurance pool. Such public largesse for private enterprise would apogee in 2012 when the Japanese government was forced to nationalize with taxpayer yen a “too big to fail” utility destroyed by corporate malfeasance and nuclear meltdown.

I
n 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.”