[Critics of Tepco, which struggled to keep on top of a crisis that unfolded over the weeks that followed the calamity in 2011, said they were relieved that there had been no immediate damage. But they said they remained skeptical that the company had done enough to prepare for a disaster on the scale of the earthquake five years ago. That quake, which had a magnitude of 8.9, set off tsunami waves as high as 130 feet in some places. (The highest waves on Tuesday reached about 55 inches.)]
By Motoko Rich
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Officers at the Fukushima
prefectural office gathered data on Tuesday following an
earthquake that hit the area. Credit
Jiji Press/Agence France-Presse
— Getty Images
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TOKYO
— There was no avoiding
fearful memories of the Japanese nuclear disaster of 2011 on Tuesday morning
after a powerful earthquake off the coast of Fukushima caused a cooling system
in a nuclear plant to stop, leaving more than 2,500 spent uranium fuel rods at
risk of overheating.
But this time, the Tokyo Electric Power
Company, or Tepco, the utility that operates three nuclear plants, restored the
cooling pump at the Fukushima Daini plant in about an hour and a half. The
Daini plant is about seven miles south of Fukushima Daiichi, the ruined plant
where three reactors melted down five years ago after tsunami waves inundated
the power station and knocked out backup generators.
Tepco reported that it never lost power at
either the Daini plant or its neighbor to the north after the Tuesday quake,
which had a magnitude of 7.4, according to the Japanese weather service. “We
took the regular actions that we should take when handling troubles,” Yuichi
Okamura, acting general manager of the nuclear power division at Tepco, said at
a news conference on Tuesday.
The company was prepared for big tsunamis,
having built sea walls rising to about 46 feet at the Fukushima plants and
enclosing backup generators in waterproof facilities, Mr. Okamura said.
Critics of Tepco, which struggled to keep on
top of a crisis that unfolded over the weeks that followed the calamity in
2011, said they were relieved that there had been no immediate damage. But they
said they remained skeptical that the company had done enough to prepare for a
disaster on the scale of the earthquake five years ago. That quake, which had a
magnitude of 8.9, set off tsunami waves as high as 130 feet in some places.
(The highest waves on Tuesday reached about 55 inches.)
“It looks like the right things have been
done,” said Azby Brown, director of the Future Design Institute at the Kanazawa
Institute of Technology and a volunteer researcher with SafeCast, an
independent radiation-monitoring group. “But you never know until something
happens. As far as this morning goes, they did a decent job, but mainly because
it wasn’t that big of an earthquake or that big of a tsunami.”
Building higher sea walls, for example, “is
all good, but that is like fighting the last war,” Mr. Brown said. “It remains
to be seen how well prepared they would be for some other unusual combination
of disasters.”
Compared with five years ago, Tepco has
improved its communication with the public, reporting information about the
cooling pump at Daini almost as it happened on Tuesday morning.
The company also quickly said that it had
suspended the treatment and transfer of contaminated water from the Daiichi
plant, where an extensive cleanup and decommissioning process is underway. By
the evening, those operations had been restored.
“What I can say is today’s response was
decent and they seemed to be confident,” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, director of the
Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University. But, he
said, it would be difficult to independently verify Tepco’s claims because the
Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority depends on the company to release
information.
Daisuke Maeda, a spokesman for the Nuclear
Regulation Authority, said the agency had offices on the sites of the nuclear
plants and worked with Tepco and other utility companies on Tuesday to confirm
that the power stations were safe after the earthquake.
Regarding the longer-term situation, nuclear
experts expressed concern about the safety of the cleanup operation at the
Daiichi plant.
The melted cores of three reactors have yet
to be removed as they are still too radioactive for workers to approach. Since
the 2011 disaster, groundwater seeps into the reactors daily. The water,
contaminated by the melted fuel rods, needs to be treated and stored on site.
So far, Tepco has built more than 880 tanks of about 1,000 tons each.
The tanks are inspected four times a day to
confirm that they do not leak, said Mr. Okamura of Tepco. And in an effort to
halt the flood of groundwater into the damaged buildings, the company has built
an underground wall of frozen dirt nearly a mile in length encircling the
reactors. The wall is not yet fully frozen, though, and groundwater continues
to flow into the reactors.
Critics worry that the sea walls or storage
tanks might not withstand a more powerful earthquake or tsunami. And Tuesday’s
incident at the Daini reactor showed that quakes can set off problems even at
plants that are not operating.
Most of the country’s 54 plants remain closed
since the 2011 disaster, but the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
wants to restart most of them.
A majority of the Japanese public is opposed
to such a move. Candidates for governor who ran campaigns opposed to the revival
have won elections in recent months in two prefectures that host nuclear
plants.
According to the Nikkei Shimbun, a Japanese
daily, Fumio Sudo, the chairman of Tepco, and Naomi Hirose, the company’s
president, were planning to meet on Tuesday with one of those governors,
Ryuichi Yoneyama of Niigata, to try to persuade him to support a restart of the
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant there. Mr. Sudo and Mr. Hirose returned to Tokyo after
the earthquake.
Kiyoshi Kurokawa, who oversaw an independent
investigation on the Fukushima nuclear accident for the Japanese Parliament,
said that building walls and storage tanks failed to solve the underlying
problem of an earthquake-prone country relying on nuclear power. Instead, he
said, both the government and utility companies should invest in developing
alternative sources of power like solar or wind technology.
He added that he was not convinced that Tepco
was being fully transparent about its decisions, particularly about the cleanup
at the Daiichi plant. “We should be informed fully whether this operation is
reasonably done with cost effectiveness and safety and making sure that the
best technology is being used,” Mr. Suzuki said.
“I think we expect more of such readjusting
plate movements and that has been reasonably predicted, and many volcanic
activity and earthquakes have been rampant over the last five years,” said Mr.
Kurokawa, an adjunct professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy
Studies. “So why are we continuing to restart nuclear plants?”
Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno contributed
reporting