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

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MONDAY MARCH 14 2011 2:55 PM

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

Submitted by SG_Blog

Edited by SG_Blog

Tags: Activism, Blog, Geek, Politics, Science, Earthquake, Japan, Nuclear Reactor

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.

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Comments

mericus

Aurora, CO

February 2011

MAR 14, 2011 05:43 PM

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.

Stiles

Philadelphia, PA

November 2002

MAR 14, 2011 06:05 PM

DevilsReject said:

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.

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).

The risks of dependence on seawalls were most evident in the crisis at the Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants, both located along the coast close to the earthquake zone. The tsunami that followed the quake washed over walls that were supposed to protect the plants, disabling the diesel generators crucial to maintaining power for the reactors’ cooling systems during shutdown.

...

Peter Yanev, one of the world’s best-known consultants on designing nuclear plants to withstand earthquakes, said the seawalls at the Japanese plants probably could not handle tsunami waves of the height that struck them. And the diesel generators were situated in a low spot on the assumption that the walls were high enough to protect against any likely tsunami.

That turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The tsunami walls either should have been built higher, or the generators should have been placed on higher ground to withstand potential flooding, he said. Increasing the height of tsunami walls, he said, is the obvious answer in the immediate term.

mattacme

Calistoga, CA

February 2006

MAR 14, 2011 06:14 PM

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

This is no fooling.

petsound

USA

January 2007

MAR 14, 2011 06:15 PM

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.

DevilsReject

Cleveland, OH

February 2007

MAR 14, 2011 06:40 PM

Stiles said:

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

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:

The height of seawalls varies according to the predictions of the highest waves in a region. Critics say that no matter how high the seawalls are raised, there will eventually be a higher wave. Indeed, the waves from Friday’s tsunami far exceeded predictions for Japan’s northern region.

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.