NEWS: Tokyo Electric To Build US Nuclear Plants: The No-BS Info On Japan’s Disastrous Nuclear Operators

CULTURE: Tokyo Electric To Build US Nuclear Plants: The No-BS Info On Japan’s Disastrous Nuclear Operators

by Greg Palast

I need to speak to you, not as a reporter, but in my former capacity as lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations.

I don’t know the law in Japan, so I can’t tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.

But what will Obama plead? The Administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas — by Tokyo Electric Power and local partners. As if the Gulf hasn’t suffered enough.

Here are the facts about Tokyo Electric and the industry you haven’t heard on CNN:

The failure of emergency systems at Japan’s nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.

Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called “SQ” or “Seismic Qualification.” That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from Al Qaeda.

The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie. The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York. Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from ‘failed’ to ‘passed.’



The company that put in the false safety report? Stone & Webster, now the nuclear unit of Shaw Construction which will work with Tokyo Electric to build the Texas plant, Lord help us.

There’s more.

Last night I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.

These safety back-up systems are the ‘EDGs’ in nuke-speak: Emergency Diesel Generators. That they didn’t work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn’t save a building because “it was on fire.”

What dim bulbs designed this system? One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was built by Toshiba. Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel system.

Now be afraid. Obama’s $4 billion bail-out-in-the-making is called the South Texas Project. It’s been sold as a red-white-and-blue way to make power domestically with a reactor from Westinghouse, a great American brand. However, the reactor will be made substantially in Japan by the company that bought the US brand name, Westinghouse — Toshiba.

I once had a Toshiba computer. I only had to send it in once for warranty work. However, it’s kind of hard to mail back a reactor with the warranty slip inside the box if the fuel rods are melted and sinking halfway to the earth’s core.

TEPCO and Toshiba don’t know what my son learned in 8th grade science class: tsunamis follow Pacific Rim earthquakes. So these companies are real stupid, eh? Maybe. More likely is that the diesels and related systems wouldn’t have worked on a fine, dry afternoon.

Back in the day, when we checked the emergency back-up diesels in America, a mind-blowing number flunked. At the New York nuke, for example, the builders swore under oath that their three diesel engines were ready for an emergency. They’d been tested. The tests were faked, the diesels run for just a short time at low speed. When the diesels were put through a real test under emergency-like conditions, the crankshaft on the first one snapped in about an hour, then the second and third. We nicknamed the diesels, “Snap, Crackle and Pop.”

(Note: Moments after I wrote that sentence, word came that two of three diesels failed at the Tokai Station as well.)

In the US, we supposedly fixed our diesels after much complaining by the industry. But in Japan, no one tells Tokyo Electric to do anything the Emperor of Electricity doesn’t want to do.

I get lots of confidential notes from nuclear industry insiders. One engineer, a big name in the field, is especially concerned that Obama waved the come-hither check to Toshiba and Tokyo Electric to lure them to America. The US has a long history of whistleblowers willing to put themselves on the line to save the public. In our racketeering case in New York, the government only found out about the seismic test fraud because two courageous engineers, Gordon Dick and John Daly, gave our team the documentary evidence.

In Japan, it’s simply not done. The culture does not allow the salary-men, who work all their their lives for one company, to drop the dime.

Not that US law is a wondrous shield: both engineers in the New York case were fired and blacklisted by the industry. Nevertheless, the government (local, state, federal) brought civil racketeering charges against the builders. The jury didn’t buy the corporation’s excuses and, in the end, the plant was, thankfully, dismantled.

Am I on some kind of xenophobic anti-Nippon crusade? No. In fact, I’m far more frightened by the American operators in the South Texas nuclear project, especially Shaw. Stone & Webster, now the Shaw nuclear division, was also the firm that conspired to fake the EDG tests in New York. (The company’s other exploits have been exposed by their former consultant, John Perkins, in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.)

If the planet wants to shiver, consider this: Toshiba and Shaw have recently signed a deal to become world-wide partners in the construction of nuclear stations.

The other characters involved at the South Texas Plant that Obama is backing should also give you the willies. But as I’m in the middle of investigating the American partners, I’ll save that for another day.

So, if we turned to America’s own nuclear contractors, would we be safe? Well, two of the melting Japanese reactors, including the one whose building blew sky high, were built by General Electric of the Good Old US of A.

After Texas, you’re next. The Obama Administration is planning a total of $56 billion in loans for nuclear reactors all over America.

And now, the homicides:

CNN is only interested in body counts, how many workers burnt by radiation, swept away or lost in the explosion. These plants are now releasing radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Be skeptical about the statements that the “levels are not dangerous.” These are the same people who said these meltdowns could never happen. Over years, not days, there may be a thousand people, two thousand, ten thousand who will suffer from cancers induced by this radiation.

In my New York investigation, I had the unhappy job of totaling up post-meltdown “morbidity” rates for the county government. It would be irresponsible for me to estimate the number of cancer deaths that will occur from these releases without further information; but it is just plain criminal for the Tokyo Electric shoguns to say that these releases are not dangerous. Indeed, the fact that residents near the Japanese nuclear plants were not issued iodine pills to keep at the ready shows TEPCO doesn’t care who lives and who dies whether in Japan or the USA. The carcinogenic isotopes that are released at Fukushima are already floating to Seattle with effects we simply cannot measure.

Heaven help us. Because Obama won’t.

***

Greg Palast is the co-author of Democracy and Regulation, the United Nations ILO guide for public service regulators, with Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor. Palast has advised regulators in 26 states and in 12 nations on the regulation of the utility industry.

Palast, whose reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight, is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for investigative reporting. Visit GregPalast.com for more info.

I've heard before about the corruption and fraud in the nuclear power industry. The problem is, electricity has to come from somewhere. Existing alternative clean energy sources seem inadequate, technologically, to keep pace with demand right now, and demand is so high that we can't afford to wait for the technology to catch up. Nuclear seems like a decent option IF the regulators and operators can be trusted, but, as you've written about many times, they can't.

So what do we do for now, stick with fossil fuels?

This is an interesting article, full of stuff I hadn't considered. I still like nuclear power overall better than fossil fuels (especially coal), assuming the plants are built right. Then there's the whole question of what to do with the relatively smaller amounts of positively godawful waste that nuclear power produces.

and yet Nuclear is still safer.... "Math" kind of beat you on that one.

Smart people at MIT contradict your statements

and comparing a laptop to a nuclear power plant could be the most ludicrous thing i think i have read today, not to mention all the other falicies in this article.

Hey, let's not get snarky. Let's have a discussion here.

I have to agree with DevilsReject

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=17129&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fukushima-reactors-and-the-public

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

that's where i stopped reading. He's comparing apples to whales at this point.

Personally, I think he's mainly talking about a specific proposed plant, and brings up some valid concerns about the specific companies involved in it. I didn't think he was saying Toshiba makes faulty laptops and thus would make faulty reactors, just that it's a little more serious in the case of the latter.

No.

I have been watching media outlets regarding the Japanese quake and following tsunami for days. I am pretty sure if we're to place the responsibility for ignorance of the United States population squarely on the shoulders of someone, it should be media outlets.

Watching media outlets blatantly fail at simple things like Earth Science, how earthquakes work, Base-10 math and numerous other things has done nothing but disgust me.

The general lack of knowledge on how nuclear power plants work is disgusting and this article does nothing but enhance it. I am not talking about going in depth on the major differences between fission and fusion, just simple things.

What makes it even worse is that rather than investigating on their own, the majority of the populace follows whatever the talking box says.

I live with in spitting distance of Perry Nuclear and Davis Besse and beyond human error, both of the plants have done everything they were designed to do. Officials are inspecting Davis-Besse regularly and doing what they are supposed to do.

I would rather have two large Nuclear Power Plants near me than another effing coal plant on the Ohio River, vomitting waste into it it gets old rather quickly

good article, it seems to me its not the nuclear power, but the people in charge, the same problem here with sellafeild, but listening to the radio today, more coal miners will be killed in one year, than to nuclear accidents ever, the problem with nuclear, when it goes bang, it certainly does, what would have happened if the emergency had worked ?

I am no lover of atomic power, largely because of the problems presented by a burned out plant and its spent fuel over the next two or three hundred thousand years, or more. Still, there have to be plants that are well run and reasonably well designed. As it turns out the Fukushima plant is not among them.

There are too few fail-safes and what few exist are not functioning, which is frankly inexcusable. Any plant in this region must be better built and maintained in order to provide reasonable safety, and clearly this is not the case here.

As with every single industry, money rules (as it should). What we must insist as unacceptable are shortcuts in backup, containment and disaster safety systems in plants such as these. The added cost will affect the end price of power from these plants but the potential damage is really quite extraordinary. Like the space shuttle, a nuclear power plants construction and design really cannot be based solely on lowest bid, its just stupid.

Ugh.

I'm not saying I agree with the post, I don't, other than general suspicion of corporate greed and government incompetence. Nuclear is far, far safer and cleaner than fossil fuels. I was among the first around here to link to quality science reporting about how we shouldn't panic about nuclear power.

I was not saying that you shouldn't argue with the post, I'd just rather have people respond to his specific points than devolve into just a general "Blargh this is garbage" response.

It bothers me that he has oversimplified it to that.

Even if Toshiba did deliver a bad reactor or reactor head, it would have to go through many extremely rigorous tests before it is even put into nuclear production.

It's not like the U.S.NRC just lets you toss up a nuclear power plant like you're building a house of cards or a shack for your lawnmower so you can stop stowing it under your front porch.

Everything gets tested long before nuclear energy is produced.

Pointing out a few bad apples, who have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law, doesn't make up for the millions, if not billions of dollars the Oil Lobbyists or Coal Lobbyists have thrown at our local and federal government to overlook things like fishkills, water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution and general health issues that come from using carbon based fuels.

In reading about the reactors in Japan, they were built to the worst case scenario, seeing as the recent quake and following tsunami were far beyond what anyone ever expected, I am quite impressed with the way the reactors have held up. They have failed to release anything significant at this point. That is an engineering marvel considering that the entire country of Japan shifted 8 foot and the quake was powerful enough to shift the Earth on it's axis. No engineer on the planet can prepare for that.

Looks awful right now...

I've been wondering how much of the motivation to focus the US media's reporting on the possibility of nuclear plant problems (Anybody see Wolf Blitzer talking like a moron to the guy in Orange County today? He came off like a total tool. I had to shut it off.) has to do with sensationalism to keep people hooked on the story by hinting at possible future drama, and how much of it has to do with advertising money from US coal and oil interests. This is completely speculation, I have no interesting links to add here.

As part of my training I was required to provide healthcare to a small town in the Western United States dedicated to mining coal and then immediately burning it in a local power plant. The whole place was sick in both literal terms and in more general socioeconomic squalor. Anyone with even a fraction of education got out of that place fast. Above mentioned coal-mining "accidents" are discussed already though the total health consequences for these workers are grossly underestimated. Even when things run just peachy they would literally need to work in hazmat suits to prevent the chronic absorption of small carcinogenic coal dust particles through their lungs and skin. I think it is a grave injustice to ask these blue collar workers to die young and broken for our electricity, and then scream at an unknown risk of possibly being exposed to a cloud that might once have been radioactive. It isn't just about the numbers, but also whether that cost is distributed equally to society.

I disagree, to a point. Too much faith was placed in the seawall placement, height and strength, since reportedly the backup generators were drowned by water that overtopped or penetrated various seawalls. New Orleans had similar problems when their low-lying drainage pump systems were overwhelmed by floodwater from overtopped and breached levees. Once the pump stations or backup generators are drowned you're in deep shit...

If those diesel generators, their fuel tanks and automatic controls were mounted on steel-reinforced concrete pads 50 feet above sea level we'd probably have a much better idea if they were adequate.

Mounting them low enough to be drowned if the seawall is topped or breached is a critical design error, especially considering the consequence of failure of the seawall then almost inevitably becomes failure of both the standard power supply and the backup power supply to the reactor cooling system.

Hell, when I was hired to consult on a whole-house backup generator for a Miami mansion, I recommended installing *that* atop a 6 foot concrete platform, along with the tank that fed it. If installed at grade (ground level) on a standard lawn genset pad, 2 feet of water would have shorted it out.

You want your fail-safes to really be as fail-safe as possible, especially when the worst-case scenario verges on apocalyptic (like, say, multiple reactor meltdowns).

NHK reporting increased levels of radioactive emissions from the Fukushima plant and plant workers are being evacuated.

This is no fooling.

Look, these explosions (and possible meltdowns) are not going to change the majority of opinion on either side of the nuclear fence. You cited Toshiba as manufacturing the generators, but General Electric actually designed the reactors. So I'm not quite sure what your point is.

The bigger takeaway from these incidents is that the situation in Japan is something that nuclear experts said could never happen -- that all backup systems would fail. That a tsunami would be big enough to take out the backup generators. The fact that they started dumping seawater into the reactors on Friday meant they were already out of options. It's the equivalent of McGuyver using a matchstick and an eraser to stop a bomb from going off. Except that they aren't McGuyver, and it didn't work.

NPR was interviewing a nuclear expert today, and he basically said, "Even though the Japanese reactors are about 40 years old, I don't think any plant in the U.S. would have fared better. The industry just didn't think it could play out like this."

There's been a false mantra chanted for years by pro-nuclear folk that modern nuclear plants are completely safe. The reality is somewhere in the middle. But politicians and lobbyists don't like to speak publicly of the grey area nuclear energy lives in. The public needs to understand that what is happening in Japan is a tradeoff they have to live with if they are willing to accept nuclear plants in their backyard. The problem is that radiation exposure is a silent, odorless, invisible threat, and its effects may linger on in unverifiable medical conditions. This makes it very hard to gauge the safety and realistic fear factor of nuclear plants.

In my opinion, nuclear is the "easy" option. The tech exists, but like passenger jets it comes with some low-possibility risks that are quite severe. And it comes with some ongoing environmental issues like radioactive waste that no one wants in their backyard. The hard option is renewable energy sources which won't kill or mutate people when something goes wrong. But these are in their infancy, and needs more private and public investment to be cost-effective on a large scale. In my opinion, reducing public and environmental risk is worth the initial investment cost.

Then if anything we've learned something from the fact that this is one of the biggest earthquake to ever hit Japan, i can't imagine that any engineer would have expected the tsunami to be bigger than anything they ever calculated.

From your link:

You are well aware of the fact that when you engineer something, you can't use an infinite number to build. You have to have predictive numbers. The sea walls were built to meet the criteria they had, you're talking about an anomaly that never could have been expected.

To turn around and use this to frown on any Nuclear Power Plants being built in the United States is foolish, especially when our climates and conditions are not the same. The reactor he is referring to wasn't even built by Toshiba the one they are having trouble with was supplied by General Electric

Even if this had been a coal plant, the devastation would have been near the same, there isn't going to be a big mushroom cloud like someone detonated a thermonuclear device.

DR, I'm limiting my criticism to my specific point raised, and I stand by it. Engineers must ask the hard what-if questions, such as "what if the seawall/levee fails" since seawalls and levees do fail. Otherwise, a fail safe system is not fail safe.

As noted, avoiding generator, controls or fuel supply drowning of backup/emergency generators in coastal or flood-prone areas is the most basic and universal of installation considerations.

Update: Fukushima 1, reactor no.2 now has a "high possibility" of container vessel damage, according to a Japanese press conference. Hole reported & fire. This is a very bad development.

Readings at Fukushima Daiichi are currently approaching 100 Milli Sieverts, which is enough to cause instant damage to people and render an unprotected person infertile. The fire is probably being caused by the hydrogen explosion, but unfortunately the fire is also carrying the radiation in a 30km range.

By the way, you can watch an english translation of Japanese network NHK here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv

It takes about 1-2 Sievert to cause Acute Radiation Sickness, mostly nausea and a headache at that level, and takes 3 to 5 Sv to begin to cause long term problems and/or death (if untreated). It isn't until you get up past 6 Sv that symptoms appear rapidly (within 1 hour) and are 100% fatal.

100 mSv is noticeable and something to be concerned about, but not an immediate threat to public health. The NRC and other such agencies generally limit exposure of 100 mSv per 5 years as safe for persons working around radioactive sources.