5th Anniversary: Even Robots Can’t Stand Fukushima Radiation for Long
ENVIRONMENT, 14 Mar 2016
CNBC – TRANSCEND Media Service
9 Mar 2016 – Japan’s long history as a “safe” country meant that the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) was not in the mindset of predicting disasters in a way that may have mitigated the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, an adviser to Tepco says.
Lake Barrett, who is advising Tepco on the decommissioning of the damaged nuclear plant, says that it was also difficult for the Japanese public to understand afterward what went wrong at Fukushima.
“It’s highly technical, and the emotions that go with it are huge,” Barrett told CNBC’s “ Street Signs .”
Now, he needs big leaps in the robotics industry in order to decommission the plant; the technology is there but robots capable of undertaking the job have not yet been built, he said.
Japan’s many “natural risks” means it excels in preparing for natural disasters, and is willing to teach emerging markets how to do so as well, says Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez from the World Bank.
Ijjasz-Vasques, the senior director at the bank’s social, urban, rural and resilience global practice, told CNBC’s “Street Signs” that every $1 spend on preparation for a natural disaster saved $4 that would’ve been spent on repairs and clean-up afterward.
And with climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of weather-related events, such preparation is more important than ever, he says.
Managing contaminated water is the biggest risk in the decommissioning of Fukushima’s nuclear plant, says Toru Ogawa from the Nagaoka University of Technology. He notes that authorities are dealing with much larger amounts of radioactive waste than is usually the case.
Authorities don’t yet have a clear picture of each reactor either. Typically robots are used in such a scenario but the high radiation levels mean they can only work for a brief period of time, Ogawa says. This means connecting this information with simulations to find out what really happened in each reactor.
Yauemon Sato had no experience running an electric power company prior to March 11, 2011.
A ninth-generation sake brewer, the 65 year-old planned to spend his entire life carrying on the family business in Aizuwakamatsu, 75 miles east of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. But five years ago, he faced the prospect of losing his hometown.
“[The nuclear accident] created a huge scare,” he says. “If the radiation reached our area, the water and soil would be contaminated, we wouldn’t be able to live here. I was horrified.”
The worst-case scenario never surfaced, but that fear led to an idea. In 2013, Sato started Aizu Electric Power Company, with help from a number of business leaders, including the former head of Qualcomm Japan.
The goal – using local resources, to power the local community.
Today, Aizu Electric has nearly 50 solar panels in the Fukushima region and generates enough energy to power 2,000 homes. Sato has created a fund that supports other renewable energy projects in the region, to help achieve the prefectural government’s goal of 100 percent renewables by 2040, phasing out nuclear power for good.
“We weren’t doing the obvious thing,” Sato says.
“We had all the energy resources at our feet. We had solar power, we had hydropower, we had geothermal, and biomass. But we didn’t wake up to that fact.”
These images from Google Earth are a good illustration of how the tsunami-hit has changed over the past five years, as regeneration continues.
Among those looking back on March 11, 2011 is Japanese lawmaker Naoto Kan. As Japan’s prime minister at the time of the disaster, he led the country through its worst crisis since World War Two. Some criticized his handling of the disaster, while others say he saved the nation from a far worse fate.
3/11. Or san ichi-ichi for short. Like saying 9/11 in the United States, it’s a number that reminds Japanese of one of the darkest days in their history. March 11, 2011, was a Friday. People were looking forward to the weekend. Children were about to flood out of schools for home. Then at 2:46 p.m. JST, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck. It was one of the most powerful quakes on record, so strong it shifted the earth’s axis and shortened the length of the day by nearly two microseconds. It moved Japan’s main island, Honshu, eastward by more than two meters (6.5 feet) and the seafloor laterally by as much as 50 meters (164 feet).
The Great East Japan Earthquake unleashed towering tsunami that roared ashore, ravaging 700 kilometers (435 miles) of coastline and killing 15,894 people (a further 2,562 others are still listed as missing). More than 450,000 people were forced from their homes. Many in Japan and abroad remember the aerial video of seawater spilling into coastal communities and inland areas like dark ink across a page, destroying residences, offices, cars and anything else in its path. The surges of water were as high as 39 meters (128 feet) in some places, pushing water as far as 10 kilometers (6.24 miles) inland, flooding more than 560 square kilometers (348 square miles) and creating more than 20 million tons of debris, of which 5 million tons was washed out to sea.
Worse, perhaps, the earthquake and tsunami triggered an emergency at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, disabling the power supply and cooling systems of three reactors, resulting in meltdowns and explosions. It was a level-7 event, the highest on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, a major accident on par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and one that a report for the National Diet of Japan called “profoundly manmade.”
Five years on, the decommissioning effort at Fukushima Daiichi is still very much in its early stages. It’s a process that is expected to take 30 to 40 years and cost anywhere from $50 billion to $250 billion dollars, which includes the long and expensive job of decontaminating the communities around the facility.
For the far larger reconstruction of the northeast region, the final bill is expected to be roughly $280 billion. That job, too, is also far from over, but progress has been made, as both the office of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the government’s Reconstruction Agency are quick to point out.
Memories of the disaster, though are still fresh for many people in Japan.
Some lost their husbands or wives, their sons or daughters, their parents, friends and neighbors. They watched the sea wash away their homes and businesses. Thousands of people have spent years in cramped and uncomfortable temporary housing, longing to return to the communities where they were born and raised. Others know they’ll never be able to go back because the radiation from the Fukushima accident is just too high.
CORRECTION
This story has been updated to reflect that the date 3/11 is written as san ichi-ichi in Japanese.
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