Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Context 9780812298000

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Legacies of Fukushima

CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND DISASTER Kim Fortun and Scott Gabriel Knowles, Series Editors Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster explores how environmental, technological, and health risks are created, managed, and analyzed in dif ferent contexts. Global in scope and drawing on perspectives from multiple disciplines, volumes in the series examine the ways in which planning, science, and technology are implicated in disasters. The series also engages public policy formation—including analyses of science, technology, and environmental policy as well as welfare, conflict resolution, and economic policy developments where relevant.

Legacies of FUKUSHIMA 3.11 in Context

Edited by

Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Ryuma Shineha

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-5298-9

CONTENTS

Foreword. Fukushima’s Special Message Robert Jay Lifton

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List of Abbreviations

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Introduction Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Ryuma Shineha

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PART I. LEARNING FROM DISASTER Chapter 1. What Was Learned from 3.11? Scott Gabriel Knowles Chapter 2. Unfulfilled Promises: Why Structural Disasters Make It Difficult to “Learn from Disasters” Kohta Juraku Chapter 3. Fukushima Radiation Inside Out Robert Jacobs Chapter 4. Has Japan Learned a Lesson from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident? Tatsujiro Suzuki Chapter 5. The Developmental State and Nuclear Power in Japan Jeff Kingston

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Contents

PART II. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE AND PUBLIC TRUST Chapter 6. The Road to Fukushima: A US-Japan History James Simms Chapter 7. Media Capture: The Japanese Press and Fukushima Martin Fackler

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Chapter 8. The Politics of Radiation Assessment in the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis Kyle Cleveland

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Chapter 9. Nuclear Labor, Its Invisibility, and the Dispute over Low-Dose Radiation Paul Jobin

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Chapter 10. Food and Water Contamination After the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Tatsuhiro Kamisato

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Chapter 11. Suffering the Effects of Scientific Evidence Ekou Yagi

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PART III. POSSIBLE FUTURES Chapter 12. Building a Community-Based Platform for Radiation Monitoring After 3.11 Luis Felipe R. Murillo and Sean Bonner

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Chapter 13. The Closely Watched Case of Iitate Village: The Need for Global Communication of Local Problems Azby Brown

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Chapter 14. Describing and Memorializing 3.11: Namie and Ishinomaki Ryuma Shineha

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Contents

Chapter 15. Renegotiating Nuclear Safety After Fukushima: Regulatory Dilemmas and Dialogues in the United States William J. Kinsella Chapter 16. International Reactions to Fukushima Sonja D. Schmid and Başak Saraç-Lesavre

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Notes

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Bibliography

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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Legacies of Fukushima

FOREWORD

Fukushima’s Special Message Robert Jay Lifton

The Fukushima nuclear energy disaster was by no means the largest we have encountered. The Chernobyl meltdown twenty-five years earlier retains that distinction. But Fukushima Daiichi was unique in two ways: It revealed the vulnerability of nuclear power to geophysical events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. And it provided a powerful psychological association to the use of a nuclear weapon on an inhabited city, a city that happened to be just about five hundred miles away. When people in or close to Fukushima—and many quite far away— identified themselves with Hiroshima survivors, they were asserting not only their proximity to the atom-bombed city but their sense that they had been subjected to the same highly destructive, and in many ways mysterious, technology. Fukushima, that is, rendered false the constant assertion on the part of advocates that nuclear power was entirely different from, or even had nothing to do with, nuclear weapons. Atomic bomb survivors I interviewed in Hiroshima were profoundly fearful of what I came to call “invisible contamination.” Within hours or days or weeks after the bomb fell, many experienced or observed in others grotesque symptoms that included severe diarrhea and weakness as well as bleeding from all the body orifices and into the skin (the dreaded “purple spots”), often leading to quick and terrifying death. For those who survived, the fear of invisible contamination extended indefinitely as, over years and decades, evidence accumulated of an increased incidence of a variety of cancers, and even of the potential transmission of radiation effects to the next generation.

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People in and around Fukushima did not experience acute radiation symptoms. But high radiation levels were recorded, leading to extremely difficult evacuations that took their own heavy toll on the health of many people. And researchers project future vulnerability to different forms of cancer. One writer observed a “fallout of fear,” and psychiatrists recorded “subclinical problems” that, while not requiring hospitalization, greatly affected everyday life. The remarkable creation by a group of women who had no scientific background of a reliable “mother’s radiation laboratory” was surely an admirable expression of civil society. But it also reflected the deep distrust of the government and nuclear plant spokespeople, a distrust earned by their distortions and lies in minimizing or denying dangers to the population. That constellation of behavior, involving widespread nuclear fear and denial of danger by authorities, has been present in every breakdown of nuclear reactors anywhere and must be seen as characterizing all situations involving radiation danger from nuclear technology. The same constellation has been observed at Hanford, Washington, in connection with the nuclear waste from the production of the Nagasaki bomb; in Rocky Flats, Colorado, after decades of nuclear weapons production; and at test sites at Nevada and elsewhere after US soldiers were exposed to radiation following atomic bomb tests. The Three Mile Island reactor meltdown is a revealing example as well. It came to be seen as borderline in terms of actual radiation danger, but people I interviewed there saw themselves as having been exposed to a hidden poison that could strike them down at any time, and they had their own distrust of the assurances of authorities. We may say that any significant exposure to radiation can create, psychologically, nothing less than a permanent encounter with death. Moreover, there is no getting rid of the poison. Even when nuclear reactors are closed down for safety or economic reasons, as was the case with the Pilgrim reactor in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the Vermont Yankee reactor, the accumulated waste must remain at the site, always dangerous and virtually immortal. After four decades of trying, we have been unable to develop safe permanent repositories for nuclear waste. That is both because the waste is so difficult to contain safely and because people don’t want the waste in their neighborhood. There is also the recognition, not lost on people who live near nuclear plants, that the reactors could lend themselves to potential weaponization—which in turn makes them a tempting target for terrorists. The meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi was a dreadful event, but it can have great value to us in its puncturing of the nuclear mystique. That mystique has

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been exploited from the time of the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower, with its vision of “atoms for peace” that embraced the technology that threatens the human future to instead provide endless amounts of cheap energy for everyone. That vision in turn goes back to the days of Marie Curie, the pioneering nuclear physicist who, like so many others, was enchanted with radiation—and who died from the effects it had upon her. For solving our energy problems, proponents still embrace nuclear technology as “clean,” in contrast with the dirtiness of oil, natural gas, and coal. But Fukushima makes clear that nuclear energy, with its invisible contamination from irradiation and dangerously undisposable waste, may be considered the dirtiest of all.

ABBREVIATIONS

ABCC AEC ARAIC IAEA ICANPS ICAO JAERO JR West JTSB Kemeny Commission LSS METI MITI NAII NISA NRA NRC RERF Rogers Commission SCJ SPEEDI TEPCO

Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission US Atomic Energy Commission Japan Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission International Atomic Energy Agency Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations International Civil Aviation Organization Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization West Japan Railway Company Japan Transportation Safety Board US President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island Life Span Study Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry of International Trade and Industry National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency Japan Nuclear Regulatory Authority US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Radiation Effects Research Foundation US Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident Science Council of Japan System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information Tokyo Electric Power Company

Introduction Kyle Cleveland, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Ryuma Shineha

An Unlikely Convergence It was an unlikely convergence of events: a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest in Japanese memory and the fourth largest recorded in world history; a tsunami that peaked at forty meters, devastating the seaboard of northeastern Japan; three reactors in meltdown at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima; experts in disarray; and suffering victims young and old. It was, as well, an unlikely convergence of legacies. Submerged traumas resurfaced, and communities long accustomed to living quietly with hazards suddenly were heard. New legacies of disaster were handed down, unfolding slowly for generations to come. The defining disaster of contemporary Japanese history still goes by many different names: the Great East Japan Earthquake, the 2011  Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, and the 3.11 Triple Disaster. Each name represents a struggle to position the disaster on a map and fix a date to the timeline. But each of these names hides an unlikely convergence of disasters and legacies that met on March 11, 2011, before veering away in all directions: to the past, to the future, across a nation, and around the world.1 The scale of the 3.11 disasters in the Tōhoku region of northeastern Japan defied government control. Almost 18,000 people were killed or remain missing. Three prefectures in particular—Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima— were the most affected. Deaths in Miyagi Prefecture alone reached almost 10,000. Still reeling from the earthquake and tsunami damage, the national government was soon fighting a war on two fronts—dealing with the recovery of bodies and evacuating, sheltering, and meeting the medical needs of the survivors, while at the same time confronting an escalating nuclear crisis. At

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the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture, a facility under the control of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the staff frantically tried to recover power after the tsunami put much of the facility under fifteen meters of water. The Fukushima prefectural authorities pressed urgently for guidance from the national government and TEPCO. The plant blackout and pace of events conspired to prevent effective communication: the emergency backup generators were swamped by the tsunami on the afternoon of March 11; the reactor cores began melting down within hours from the loss of power; and by the morning of March 12, pressure inside the reactor core containment vessel had risen to 2.5 times the design limits, threatening a catastrophic explosion that would have jeopardized populations across the entire nation. After a frustrating delay in venting reactor number one, a situation that pitted Prime Minister Kan Naoto against the recalcitrant TEPCO management, TEPCO’s assurances that the situation was under tenuous control were soon undermined by the spectacle of a dramatic explosion of the outer (secondary) containment structure of the reactor. This explosion broke windows three kilometers away from the plant and led the plant manager and nuclear authorities watching from afar to believe that a catastrophic failure of the primary containment structure had blown apart the main pressurized reactor vessel. The plant staff at this point faced potentially lethal doses from releases of radiation and scarcely knew how bad the situation was in the confines of the darkened nuclear plant. Instrumentation knocked out by the tsunami was partly restored overnight, but it was once again lost as the unit number one building exploded. Evacuations of people near the plant hurriedly commenced, with little government guidance and no information to help guide Fukushima prefectural authorities in their actions.2 Local evacuations gave rise to rumors of an evacuation of metropolitan Tokyo’s forty-four million residents. Protection from radiation exposures nearby was an immediate priority, but the fear of more distant pollution transmitted by air, water, and food quickly made Fukushima an international concern, and a word that then—and now—stands for the fear of radioactivity, just as surely as does Chernobyl, Hiroshima, or Three Mile Island. Debates over the implications of the Fukushima disaster for the future of nuclear energy revolve around technical and institutional deficiencies such as the archaic reactor design, the lack of a functional regulatory structure, and TEPCO’s inability to anticipate the events that led up to the disaster. Concerns over the social consequences of the evacuations have perhaps proven the most vexing.

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Figure I.1. Earthquake and tsunami damage, Onagawa, April 1, 2011. Jeff Kingston (author of Chapter 5 in this volume) visited Onagawa on April 1, 2011, and parked in front of the hospital, which is built on a fourteen-meter embankment. The first floor was heavily damaged. Kingston chatted to the parking lot attendant and asked about the cars teetering on rooftops of what used to be three-story buildings. The man pictured said that his car had been parked where he and Kingston were standing but had been carried away by the tsunami, and he pointed to the silver car upside down on the rooftop to the left. Copyright Jeff Kingston.

When the radioactive plume escaped the Daiichi plant and pushed the nearby population into a chaotic evacuation, it took with it any semblance of normalcy in the Tōhoku region, eroding the collusive pact between the government and the nuclear industry and calling into question the viability of nuclear energy in Japan and beyond. After a temporary respite, as the utility brought the reactors to a cold shutdown, the true nature of the disaster gradually became known. Journalistic and scholarly scrutiny of industry insiders and government reports revealed a culture of dysfunction. Authorities have tried to cast the disaster as a “black swan” event that never could have been

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Figure I.2. Namie-town, Fukushima Prefecture, October 5, 2014. The shrine was destroyed by the earthquake and left in ruins with a radioactivity monitoring post in place. This was a common site in the region for years following 3.11. Copyright Ryuma Shineha.

reasonably anticipated or controlled.3 But even under a cursory examination, the Fukushima nuclear crisis today looks all too predictable. The Japanese government estimated as early as three months after the disaster that the total losses for homes, factories, public infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and other major economic sectors would reach an almost unimaginable 16.9 trillion yen ($157 billion); and current government estimates predict that at least 32.5 trillion yen ($302 billion) will be spent on reconstruction projects by 2025.4 Japan’s entire fleet of fifty-four nuclear reactors was shuttered after 3.11. Over twenty-five million tons of rubble and general waste were generated. Metaphors are difficult to find for this degree of destruction. Perhaps a war zone is the only image that resonates with the scale of the devastation in places like the coastal areas of Fukushima Prefecture, where the full force of the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation were felt in combination, rendering spaces of utter desolation.

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In general, towns that sustained the most serious injuries had aging populations that were composed of farmers and fishermen and were poorer than metropolitan regions. In addition to the huge damage of the earthquake and tsunami, evacuation zones were set up after the Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, and thousands of people were forced to leave their homes— particularly in the Futaba area of Fukushima Prefecture. In 2017, researchers polled evacuated residents of seven communities in the coastal area of the prefecture. The results were staggering: 58.8  percent of respondents overall answered, “I will not return/I cannot return.” The rate was even higher among people younger than age sixty-five (61.7  percent) than among older people (55.9  percent). Families with children gave that answer at a higher rate (64.6 percent) than those without children (57.5 percent). Relationships have suffered, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is common. Many residents expressed anxiety over their economic losses and lingering vulnerabilities, as well as anger over the compensation schemes put in place by TEPCO and the national government.5 The hardships of evacuation varied according to the socioeconomic characteristics of evacuees, and some difficulties have persisted for years—including the treatment and care of evacuees outside of the evacuation zone and the long-term planning for return in towns close to the Daiichi plant. At Fukushima Daiichi, 6 workers were exposed to radiation levels exceeding safe lifetime levels, and an additional 175 received significant radiation doses. It is estimated that over 1,600 deaths resulted from the evacuation of 160,000 people from the region. Within the 143-square-mile exclusion zone around the plant, an estimated 43,000 people have not yet returned. To give some context, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 killed 30 workers due to radiation sickness within weeks. Estimates from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation indicate that as many as 6,000 local residents died from thyroid cancer attributable to the disaster within thirty years after the event. Approximately 200,000 local residents were evacuated, and a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone still surrounds the facility. Those inclined toward antinuclear views are deeply suspicious of TEPCO’s and the Japanese government’s claims that the situation is well under control today. Those inclined toward pronuclear views, such as the nuclear industry and its supporters, dismiss these concerns as alarmist and unfounded. The debate involves a complex of highly contested questions cutting to the core of public trust in government officials and nuclear experts. At dispute have been the shifting official narratives about the magnitude of

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the disaster in its early days, the protective actions taken (and those not taken) by government authorities, the variable rationales provided for evacuation, the quality and effectiveness of decontamination efforts, the “temporary” location and long-term plans for radioactive debris and soil, and the return of residents to evacuated villages on an accelerated timeline to be finished in time for the 2020 Olympic Games. Ten years into an ongoing nuclear disaster, Japan was preparing to host the 2020 summer Olympic Games—eventually postponed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Olympic torch relay began inside the previous nuclear disaster evacuation zone, and the baseball games were planned for Koriyama, the largest city adjacent to the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Japan’s selection as the host nation of what was billed as the “Reconstruction Olympics” enabled a narrative of resiliency, not only with regard to the people of Tōhoku who endured the worst, but also for the entire Japanese nation. The alloying of the disasters of 3.11 and the globalized mega-event of the Olympics transformed an ongoing crisis into a profitable realignment of Japan’s dark present with a bright future. It is ironic, but hardly surprising, that this kind of political alchemy presented the suffering of the victims of the disaster as a symbol of long-suffering Japanese fortitude. Despite multiple disaster investigations, evidence is mixed as to the extent that significant lessons were learned from the disaster. Technocracy persists, and the restoration of public trust in Japan’s disaster experts remains incomplete. Among those most directly affected by the disasters, there has been a withering, retrospective accounting of disaster management after 3.11 and long-lasting suspicions about the state’s ability to protect public health while promoting reactor restarts under the guise of recovery on an Olympics timeline.

Legacies of Disaster Sadako Sasaki was a young child when the atomic bomb destroyed her hometown of Hiroshima in 1945. As a hibakusha (atomic bomb–affected person) Sasaki would never escape the social stigma of radiation exposure, and more devastatingly, her body would not escape the impact of that exposure. In 1950 she was diagnosed with leukemia. As she suffered, she also took up an amazing and now very famous task: she set to work meeting a challenge of Japanese legend: folding a thousand paper cranes, which is supposed to grant a wish of the diligent folder. Sasaki died in 1955, and her acts of bravery

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in the name of peace and health for all hibakusha, and children everywhere, has proven to be a durable testament to the fact that radiation disasters (or any disasters, for that matter) do not end when the debris is cleared away. The paper crane became a symbol of Hiroshima. People from around the world have been folding cranes since 1955 as a tribute to Sasaki and for all victims of nuclear war, nuclear weapons testing exposures, and nuclear power disasters— indeed, for victims of all types of disasters.6 The American psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton was the first researcher to undertake a major set of interviews with the hibakusha of Hiroshima. Out of this work Lifton published the pathbreaking book Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima in 1968. The story of Sasaki was well known to Lifton, whom he refers to as “the Hiroshima equivalent of an Anne Frank legend.”7 In the case of Sasaki and other hibakusha, Lifton found a grinding feature of postdisaster life: not only were they at higher risk for leukemia and other cancers, but also these conditions could come on very slowly, and as a result “survivors tend to see themselves as endlessly susceptible. . . . Nor are the fears of hibakusha limited to their own bodies, they extend to future generations.”8 The ever-present memories of an unspeakable set of August 6 and August 9, 1945, horrors, followed by the fear of a creeping disease within, social stigma and silence, and the possibility of genetic mutations—this was the “death in life” for the hibakusha. It is what Lifton calls (in his foreword to this volume) a “permanent encounter with death.” Starting in 2011, the power of the cranes was directed to a new generation of sufferers. Hibakusha from Hiroshima and Nagasaki reached out, gave interviews describing their own fear and pain, made visits to comfort victims, and offered both aid and political pressure—all to link the experience of the 3.11 sufferers to their own. It is a political movement that connects two avoidable disasters. Today, a paper crane sculpture—made of steel recovered and recast from the World Trade Towers—sits in a park in Koriyama, Fukushima.9 It is not just a sign and symbol of hope but also a form of protest and a warning for future generations. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster revealed not only that Japan was poorly prepared for such a combination of events, but also that in crucial ways the nation had not yet reckoned with its nuclear past. Indeed, the censorship and segregation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims—especially by the postwar American occupying force—led to the silencing of national discussion and debate and delayed the healing that might have taken place in that moment. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the first nuclear power plants were built in the country, this

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Figure I.3. Protesters on August 6, 2015, at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, in Hiroshima. The top of the banner reads “Fukushima and Hiroshima, vice versa,” and the bottom reads, “What happens to one today may happen to another tomorrow.” The symbolism of the protest taking place on the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was powerful. The connection of the two disasters raises complicated issues for survivors, some of whom may prefer to keep the issues separate. Copyright Scott Gabriel Knowles.

brutal history with nuclear radiation was not available as a cultural or political force to slow down, urge caution about, or shape the nuclear regulatory apparatus. The available lessons of disaster from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never learned. A “myth of safety” emerged in Japan in those decades, a carefully crafted narrative of hope and possibility to be delivered through nuclear power, offered as a palliative against the dark side of nuclear weapons. Public understanding of the risks of nuclear power was limited to information made available by the Japanese and United States governments, and public trust was grounded in the beliefs that rebuilding the nation was the first priority and that public officials had the best interests of citizens in mind. Reflecting on this history in the days after the Fukushima disaster, Hirotami Yamada,

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a Nagasaki bombing victim, observed that “the bureaucracy, industry and the media were able to shut our eyes to the danger of nuclear power. . . . We let them fool us, even in this country that was the victim of the atomic bomb.”10 Masahito Hirose, another Nagasaki bombing survivor, put it in a different context, asking: “Is it Japan’s fate to repeatedly serve as a warning to the world about the dangers of radiation?”11 It is a powerful question, one that extends the value of disaster victims’ experience beyond the boundaries of a single city or nation. Hirose’s question becomes one of a struggle—a form of victim-led protest—to avoid the replication of his experience anywhere in the world and explore possible futures rooted in an honest relationship with a disastrous past.

Legacies of Fukushima What are the legacies of Fukushima—the inheritances of the past and the premonitions of possible futures? They include nuclear power, intended to modernize a nation destroyed by war; a “nuclear village” of experts and policy makers, passing down their knowledge and their professional protocols from one generation to the next; coastal populations tied to the traditional economic activities of the farm and the sea; and disasters in memory— tsunamis, war, earthquakes, famine—filling the storehouse of imagination that holds fear and the knowledge of risk in artifacts that cannot be scientifically measured. These legacies flowed down through a perilous Japanese century into a new century intent on the privatization of public goods like energy and the embracing of urbanization and globalization. The disasters of 3.11 exposed these legacies and immediately initiated a process of sense making and recovery. But how does a person, community, or nation recover from a triple disaster that caused massive evacuations, brought back horrific memories of nuclear attack, and shone a harsh light on the insufficient safety preparations of the world’s most disaster-prepared technocracy? Reckoning with those realities of 3.11, and still mourning the dead, the legacy of Fukushima is now racing forward in time. Which pathways from the past will continue to be followed, which ended with 3.11, and how are these lines of history entangled together? Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11  in Context places these questions front and center. The authors whose work is collected here have each tried to contextualize 3.11 as a disaster with a long period of premonition and an uncertain

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future. The volume engages with the complex and nonlinear trajectories of policy making, risk management, and cultural formation that precede, flow through, and follow as legacies of the 3.11 triple disasters. Our authors are intentionally drawn from the realms of journalism and academia (across disciplines), science policy and citizen science, and activism and governance—and they come from East Asia, America, and Europe. If 3.11 is a Japanese legacy with global impact, we believe that the authors in this book and their methods should reflect the greatest degree of diversity possible. We want our contribution to the legacy of Fukushima to be these new modes of analysis and this spirit of inclusion—a contribution to an understanding that is crucial, but never complete. We utilize a “critical disaster studies” methodology in this volume. Not inherent in a single discipline, it is an approach recently described by the historians Jacob A. C. Remes and Andy Horowitz as primarily rooted in the conviction that “disasters are political. As social constructs, disasters, vulnerability, risk, and resilience shape and are shaped by contests over power.”12 Scholars working in this mode break with research traditions that present disasters as unwanted natural events to be managed and quickly overcome. The approach is a correction to the idea that the pursuit of a decontextualized condition of resilience is the best way to prepare for the worst. Critical disaster studies work also pays close attention to temporal and scalar concerns, central to which is the “slow disaster” concept. The traditional definition of a disaster describes an overwhelming event in time, defined by tightly bounded spatiotemporal limits and with clear cause-and-effect relationships. The idea of a slow disaster makes it possible to think about disasters “not as atomized events but as long-term processes linked across time. . . . The slow disaster stretches both back in time and forward across generations to indeterminate points, punctuated by moments we have traditionally conceptualized as ‘disaster,’ but in fact claiming much more life, health, and wealth across time than is generally calculated.”13 The experience of hibakusha and now of the victims of 3.11 and its overlapping traumas is the best evidence of the need for a way to see disaster playing out over time as a process, often in ways that powerful interests would rather disregard. Though disciplinarily diverse, the authors in this volume work from two crucial premises: first, disasters are never singular moments in time, nor are they bounded by strict geographical boundaries; and second, disasters reflect existing power relationships and simultaneously create new ones. To conceive of 3.11 as an event of a few days, weeks, or months is to miss crucial contexts

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fundamental to seeing it as a culmination and continuance of processes long under way. These processes were in some respects as routine and documentable as governance and expertise, but also as contingent and ephemeral as national and global imaginations of risk. What defines the 3.11 experience is a sense that we are dealing with legacies—which can refer not only to the wealth or privileges handed down from one generation to the next, but also to the pathologies handed down as well. The use of comparative analysis is also crucial to understanding 3.11: it is not a single event, it occurred across a vast Japanese geography, and that geography became global as the earthquake and tsunami gave rise to the nuclear explosions and release of radiation. This volume is organized by parts to explore three major themes related to 3.11, from a critical disaster studies perspective. The first part of the book (“Learning from Disaster”) interrogates the ever-present epistemological promise that significant knowledge is produced in the aftermath of disaster, especially through expert investigation. After all, how could a modern society not learn from disaster? But who learns, how they structure their questions, and which findings lead to significant change are not matters of simple forensic ability. A crucial concept here is the “structural disaster” idea advanced by the sociologist Miwao Matsumoto, an early advocate and stalwart friend of this project.14 Matsumoto’s close attention to inherited institutional practices and patterns, especially bureaucratic complexity and secrecy, are especially useful. The authors in this part (Knowles, Juraku, Jacobs, Suzuki, and Kingston) provide cases demonstrating the nuances involved in learning from Japanese disasters, both within and outside the country. These chapters are informed by policy history, the history of technology, and science and technology studies (STS) methods that expose the rhetorics of technical competency as artifacts for analysis, reflective of broader disputes over risk and society. Factors of history have shaped the ways that disaster learning is framed, who is allowed to ask questions, and which political outcomes are feasible. The second part of the book centers on the theme of “Public Knowledge and Public Trust.” Here we are keyed into long-standing debates in media studies, communication, and STS around public understanding of science and the ways that scientific technocracy itself shapes the terms of risk debates in society. The authors in this section (Simms, Fackler, Cleveland, Jobin, Kamisato, and Yagi) carefully chart the ongoing struggle over time within the Japanese public for information about the realities of risk in their society. From the early postwar years, through the rise of the “nuclear village,” and into the aftermath of 3.11, the role of public scrutiny is evident yet

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often mediated through the actions of expert intermediaries in the press or the scientific establishment. Fukushima demonstrated a rupture in trust that has often been characterized as a novel development in Japanese society, but this part of the book provides the background necessary to hear the echoes of earlier eras in contemporary debates. What seemed to begin on March 11, 2011, actually has a history that goes back at least as far as World War II—and even longer, if one considers the history of seismicity and tsunami in Japan. This section weaves together not only the current methods of research used by analysts of risk and disaster but also the very human stories of disaster survivors and nuclear workers. Story, history, and expertise are intertwined as social forces in Japan—forces that are harnessed simultaneously by policy makers to move the nation forward from 3.11 and by victims and their advocates to hold onto the disaster and address its injustices. In the third part of the book, we examine the “Possible Futures” that flow from the 3.11 disasters. In this part we engage with cutting-edge scholarship of citizen science, internationalization, and the role of emergency management and planning to intervene in the normal logics of disaster and recovery. The authors here (Murillo and Bonner, Brown, Shineha, Kinsella, and Schmid and Saraç-Lesavre) present multiple perspectives on the ways that people ranging from local residents to international nuclear experts have sought to memorialize, institutionalize, and activate a new and safer world post-3.11. Case studies across multiple domains show the advantages of comparative analysis crucial to critical disaster studies work. Even when Fukushima is considered in the context of other disasters, it is rooted in a complicated historical ground, the event itself is still under dispute, and its future is uncertain. Thus, the cases in this part of the book provide tools to understand those different temporal and geographical scales and analytic methods with which to unpack and contextualize expert disputes over what happened and what to expect next. Legacies of Fukushima: 3.11 in Context emerges from eight years of interactions among interested disaster research collaborators, travels and site visits, meetings with sufferers and experts (and experts who are also suffering), research workshops, and scholarly efforts among a wide range of writers who bring a critical disaster studies perspective to bear on 3.11. It is fair to say that September 11, the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina brought new legions of researchers into disaster work. Fukushima capped this tumultuous decade of disasters and forged a truly multi- or interdisciplinary, international disaster studies community.

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The chapters in this volume were selected to bring this prismatic view to the subjects touched by Fukushima. The methods of anthropology, sociology, STS, history, journalism, and communications are employed in the chapters that follow. We believe that we have a responsibility to explain the legacies of Fukushima not as belonging only to the usual cast of actors in disaster: the policy makers, technical experts, and investigators who leave the clearest documentary trail. We take seriously the need to engage the perspectives of the widest possible range of people and institutions affected by 3.11. We look to scientists, but we look as eagerly to victims, outsiders, and nonexperts, as well as to the legacies that are not just recordable in official reports. We look to memorials, art, overlooked artifacts, social media, and the full cabinet of 3.11, within which resides the elements of a story that is truly only just beginning.

CHAPTER 1

What Was Learned from 3.11? Scott Gabriel Knowles

When a disaster occurs, it immediately unleashes a wave of inquiry that is generally described as a process of “learning from disaster.” But what is actually being learned? Are the lessons of disaster fundamental? Do they have the force to change long-standing patterns of capital investment, land use, human settlement, or governance? Or are the lessons mostly operational, fine-tuning disaster response plans and reminding homeowners to update their postdisaster policies? Considering the rapidity with which postdisaster reconstruction begins, it is reasonable to ask whether or not anything at all impor tant is learned from disasters. This is especially true in the case of high-risk technological systems, where the inability to fix and restart a system threatens public trust in technology and in the experts who govern it. Indeed, learning lessons fits into an ongoing process in a knowledge-hungry, technocratic, and technoscientific time. If experts do not learn something, then a valuable commodity— information in and about the wreckage—has been lost. The authoritative realm for postdisaster learning is the formal disaster inquiry or investigation. Major disaster events often initiate multiple disaster investigations, sometimes ranging widely in scale and scope. Disaster investigations provide the venues through which chronology, causality, and blame are allocated. The earthquake-resistant building codes, the levees, the backup generators—none can be restored to normalcy or profitability without the formal study and closure that an investigation provides.1 In such investigative moments we also find an open-mindedness about change not usually present

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among the public and policy makers. The mood is right in such moments for paradigm-shifting learning, but the moment does not last long. The Fukushima “triple disaster” presented experts with the data and the public attention necessary to expand their investigations beyond narrowly technical limits. Fukushima also occurred against the backdrop of emerging historical trends that appear to be opening the way for postdisaster learning that is broader and has a greater impact. This chapter employs a disaster studies methodology to examine Fukushima investigations as venues for expert deliberation and sense making. Technical findings were determined and policy prescriptions made, but the investigations simultaneously served as venues for political dispute. The wide variety of ideological perspectives, methods used, and conclusions drawn suggests that postdisaster investigations should be seen less as objective sites of knowledge production and more as highly contingent sites of dispute over disasters and their meanings. Like other authors in this part of the book, especially Kohta Juraku, I see the wave of immediate post-Fukushima investigative reports in Japan as a critical literature that can be used to understand exactly how technical experts and government officials sought to shape the public imagination of the triple disaster. I expand on the Japanese case by comparing investigations there with those in the United States, and I close with a synopsis of new trends in disaster investigation that have crystalized since 3.11.

The Fukushima Investigations in Japan According to Yotaro Hatamura, an emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo, “They should have been saying that nuclear energy was dangerous. Instead they said that nuclear power was safe.”2 This is the conclusion he reached after directing Japan’s first major investigation—of the four that were conducted—into the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Organized by the government, Hatamura’s committee—the Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations—released an interim report in December 2011 confirming the generally understood narrative of the disaster. A 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011, badly damaged the Fukushima Daiichi complex and cut its power supply; three of the six reactors melted down; and hydrogen explosions damaged three reactor buildings, releasing a massive amount of radiation. On-site technicians from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)

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lacked the equipment and training to handle the multiple simultaneous failures, and in the worst moments of the crisis leadership from Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, TEPCO executives, and top government officials was halting at best and devastatingly slow at worst. In a lengthy 2012 interview, Hatamura emphasized the point that TEPCO had no plan for a complete loss of power at the plant, despite the known seismicity of the region and the evidence that the site of the plant was also vulnerable to tsunami. How is such an oversight to be explained? The governmental regulatory bodies responsible for nuclear safety apparently did not require such planning, and so it was never done—as simple as that. Hatamura pointed out that this type of failure to plan for a horrible, yet still foreseeable, disaster rests not only in the narrow calculations of profit for TEPCO but more broadly in the fact that the Japanese government had for decades taken great pride in the resiliency of its electric power grid. The authority of the Hatamura investigation was questionable. All interviews were voluntary, “without compelling legal force,” and according to Hatamura, “determining responsibility wasn’t one of our goals.”3 The inquiry also focused narrowly on Fukushima. As the New York Times noted, Hatamura “also said the panel’s findings should not affect debate on the safety of Japan’s four dozen other nuclear reactors.” 4 This is precisely the point at which most disaster investigations end. Systematic failures in high-risk technological systems are documented. Systematic failures in regulation and political leadership are mourned. Lessons are learned, there is a regulatory shake-up (in this instance, the moving of nuclear safety oversight from one agency to another), and it is time to move along. This is the point at which the US government’s “Failure of Initiative” investigation into Hurricane Katrina found lots of flawed policies and bad communication, shrugged its shoulders, and called it a day—with only the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency forced out of his post. This is the point at which the 9/11 Commission found flawed policies and bad communication and ordered a wrong-headed reorganization of American disaster policy to focus entirely on terrorism. Though the Hatamura investigation was designed to restore both Japanese and international faith in the nation’s technical and regulatory abilities, he also emphasized that he wanted a final report “that would meet the approval of someone looking at it 100 years from now, and that they would be able to say that we had truly learned an impor tant lesson from that time.”5 In other words, this inquiry was also aimed at impressing future scholars of

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technological failure, a pitch into the far future tense for the efficiency and evenhandedness of this investigation—trapped as it was in the heat of the political moment and the raw memory of the worst cascading disaster ever to strike an industrialized nation. On December 1, 2011, Kiyoshi Kurokawa coauthored an editorial in the Japan Times characterizing the Fukushima disaster as the country’s “third opening” (the Meiji Restoration and the Allied occupation after World War II being the first two). In the view of Kurokawa and his coauthor, Hiromi Murakami, it was the moment when a society collectively woke up: While the authorities failed to deliver substantive action, individuals started to act. Many donated money for the first time and participated in voluntary activities; scientists gathered to offer credible information and explanations via Twitter; voluntary individuals in various regional areas monitored radioactivity levels and gathered data through the Internet that they immediately made public; and parents organized and demanded that the authorities measure ground and food radioactivity levels in kindergartens and schools, which quickly became the norm. Japanese citizens now strongly demand transparency, so that they can judge how to protect themselves.6 To Kurokawa and Murakami, the disaster opened the way for tired traditions of one-party rule and faith in bureaucracy to subside and to create government transparency and a robust civil society.7 An independent-minded doctor, science policy expert, and education reformer who had taught at the University of Tokyo and the University of California, Los Angeles, Kurokawa was known not to be afraid to decry what he saw as a dangerous adherence to rigid tradition in Japanese business and government. One week after his and Murakami’s article was published, he was named by the Japanese Diet to head an investigation that was unprecedented (a second governmentchartered Fukushima inquiry) and the first to be charged by the Diet to have a membership fully independent of the government. In fact, anyone with a connection to TEPCO, the government, or a regulatory agency was barred from participation. The National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) was conceived of quite differently from its predecessor, the Hatamura investigation, primarily in that the Diet granted

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the commission subpoena power and that it was charged with providing concrete recommendations on preventing future nuclear accidents. At the time, it was understood that it was not out of the realm of possibility that Kurokawa would take this opportunity to transform his broad-based call for government reform into a forceful rebuke of TEPCO and an indictment of Japan’s flawed nuclear regulatory process. How do you evacuate the world’s most populous city? That scenario, a complete removal of thirty million people from metropolitan Tokyo, was on the table in March 2011, as political leaders scrambled to understand what might happen if a large release of radiation and unfavorable wind conditions put Tokyo directly in harm’s way. “I think that’s mission impossible,” said Yoichi Funabashi, head of the third major Fukushima investigation—this one sponsored by a private policy think tank, the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (RJIF). Funabashi said, “Even though they came up with this worst-case scenario, actually they could not do anything to respond to this worst-case scenario because to evacuate thirty million people from [the] Tokyo metropolitan area is simply impossible.”8 This leaves us with two chilling images: of Tokyo’s residents bathed in radiation, a post–Cold War apocalyptic nightmare; and of how little the country’s political leaders could have done to prevent such a disaster. In 2011 Funabashi was the former editor of the Asahi Shimbun, and his investigative team leveraged its freedom from the government and its public intellectual status to gain perhaps unexpected access to top government officials—including Naoto Kan, who was prime minister at the time of the disaster. It was Kan who ordered the TEPCO workers (and ultimately national defense forces) to stay at the Fukushima site and take whatever steps necessary to keep the reactors cool and avoid an even more catastrophic event.9 The major conclusions of the RJIF report were thus as follows: the possibilities of technical failure were never fully realized through clear planning, technical skill was in short supply at TEPCO, communication breakdowns between central TEPCO management and Fukushima were evident as the disaster unfolded, and ultimately the government lost faith in TEPCO and took decisive action to order the cooling of the reactors and spent-rod cooling facilities. These findings corroborated those of the Hatamura commission. However, Funabashi’s team took the broadest view of the three major investigations thus far discussed, focusing not only on the narrative of the

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disaster itself but going well beyond it to evaluate Japan’s system of governmentbusiness interaction. According to Funabashi, The relevance of these accidents and related damages are not restricted solely to the technical and operational collapse of nuclear reactors and nuclear power plants. They also highlight a governance crisis involving corporations along with municipal and central government agencies, as well as something inherent in the way Japanese citizens think. We believe it is important to carry out a rigorous review of these points and thus draw lessons in order to rebuild Japan’s “national foundation” in areas such as future energy policies and national security policies, as well as with regard to national governance and leadership.10 At the core of this critique was a strong challenge to the nation’s “myth of absolute safety,” a long-propagandized mantra of risk-free nuclear power. Along with their like-minded allies on NAIIC, the RJIF investigators may very well have been poised to recommend that Japan not restart its stillshuttered nuclear reactors. This would have meant continued hardship in a nation that had struggled with draconian conservation measures since the disaster struck. It might also, as the NAIIC and RJIF seemed to indicate, have led to meaningful government and business reforms and an invigorated, grassroots movement for a new Japan—more open to new ideas, less bureaucratic, more sensitive to local politics, and less trusting in the mythical infallibility of high-risk technology. It is worth noting that although the NAIIC and RJIF investigations focused in part on matters of technical explanation, they were not conducted by technical experts with strong commitments to the sociotechnical status quo of so-called big nuclear Japan. At times in modern history, technological disaster investigations have mirrored (perhaps even provoked) societal unrest that was fomenting a break with tradition and designing a new way forward. Such was the case with the investigations following New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 and with the Kemeny Commission after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. In the first case, the United States was beginning to finally reckon with the need for a more humane industrialization, and in the second, the nation was about to turn its back (which is still turned) on the construction of new nuclear power plants. If NAIIC and RJIF had been even more populist in their educational, media, and direct civic engagement efforts, they might very well have fallen into line

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with these historical precedents. In other words, they might have broken out of the more common mode of disaster investigations, in which the investigation calms the public so it returns to high-risk business as usual. As time has elapsed since these investigations ended, though, such hopes have faded. As Japanese public opinion in the first two years after 3.11 shifted markedly away from support for nuclear power (70 percent favored its reduction or elimination), could the NAIIC and RJIF investigations have proven enough to close the gap between public opinion and public policy? With 87 percent of the public reporting a negative assessment of the government’s communication efforts after the disaster, there may never have been a better time to transform a disaster investigation into something more profoundly evolutionary (if not revolutionary) for post-Fukushima Japan.11 The final NAIIC report was published in July  2012, and it immediately stirred up controversy. First, it took a hard line on the idea that no natural disaster was involved—the real disaster, it argued, was a failure to adequately prepare for foreseeable hazards. Second, as Kohta Juraku describes closely in Chapter 2, Kurokawa invoked Japanese cultural exceptionalism: “What must be admitted—very painfully—is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan.’ Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.” It was an astonishing (and unrequested) mea culpa on behalf of an entire nation. But this critique raised an obvious problem: if “Japanese culture” was to blame for Fukushima, then it would be very hard to focus that blame on any single institution and impossible to blame individuals. The NAIIC report also focused attention on TEPCO’s flawed risk-modeling protocols, noting that “the risk of . . . a tsunami was overlooked not because of reasons related to seismology or the evaluation methodology. The reason was TEPCO’s concept of risk management, which interpreted and applied seismology and the evaluation methodology to suit their own convenience.” Furthermore, “the facilities and the equipment of the nuclear power plant were designed using the tsunami height projected by this evaluation method as a benchmark. TEPCO did not implement any specific measures to cope with the risk of a tsunami beyond the projected height.”12 In a stinging analysis, NAIIC ultimately found an anemic regulatory system that was in thrall to power producers, with priorities badly distorted away from public safety and instead geared toward avoiding public scrutiny

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and exposure to legal action. It was a case of negligence (a strong finding, to be sure): The accident was the result of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) failure in preparing against earthquakes and tsunamis, despite repeated warnings about the potential for such catastrophes. Although TEPCO had reviewed possible countermeasures for the kind of events that subsequently transpired, it postponed putting any measures into place for the other events, using the scientific improbability of such events as an excuse. TEPCO’s concept of risk management was fundamentally flawed. The regulatory bodies that allowed TEPCO to do this also bear a heavy responsibility. Because of their lack of influence, the regulatory bodies could not override the opposition of the electricity industry as represented by the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC), and neglected to give the industry guidance or supervision. The regulatory bodies accepted the model proposed by the FEPC, and worked hand-inhand with TEPCO to avoid the risk of lawsuits. The regulatory bodies did not fulfill their intended roles, leading us to conclude that there was inexcusable negligence on the part of the administrative bodies.13 Ultimately, the NAIIC report made seven recommendations: (1) a new nuclear regulatory body should be monitored directly by the legislature; (2) the crisis management system must be reformed; (3) the government must accept responsibility for public health and welfare; (4) TEPCO must be closely watched; (5) an independent, transparent, professional, consolidated, and proactive regulatory agency must arise; (6) Japanese nuclear laws must be brought into compliance with global standards of best practices; and (7) a system of investigation commissions must be developed. Reform of the Japanese nuclear regulatory system proceeded rapidly. Indeed, the final NAIIC report was instrumental in attracting enhanced attention to Japan’s crisis management system and the creation of a new, more independent nuclear regulatory body, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA). Established in 2012, the NRA established some of its early authority by releasing its own investigation report in 2014. Nevertheless, early discussions about reducing or ending the nation’s reliance on nuclear power stalled. The larger commitment to high-risk technology remains in place today.

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It should be noted that in the end, none of NAIIC’s recommendations was very surprising or earth-shattering. But the way the committee went about its work, the high profile of its chairman, its use of the subpoena power, its hours and hours of public hearings (archived on YouTube), and its independence from the cabinet and prime minister gave it a stage on which to perform public safety after a disaster in a way never before possible in Japan.

Fukushima: The View from America Within two weeks of the March 11, 2011, triple disasters in Japan, the US nuclear community turned to the implications of Fukushima for American nuclear safety. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) put out statements early and frequently, and it convened a task force that released a report in July 2011. In its report, the NRC listed twelve specific action items (the “lessons learned” from Fukushima), and the first item listed speaks to the nature of the regulatory system itself—calling for a “logical, systematic, and coherent regulatory framework.” The report goes on to explain the regulatory framework in place for nuclear safety in the United States. In brief, the framework consists of three parts: (1) “requirements for design-basis events . . . controlled through specific regulations or the general design criteria,” (2) “requirements for some ‘beyond-design-basis’ events” like blackouts and fires, and (3) “voluntary industry initiatives” aimed at preventing severe accidents.14 It is critical to take a moment to understand the terminology at play here and to see how the NRC describes the history of its unique regulatory framework. According to the NRC, Design-basis events became a central element of the safety approach almost 50  years ago when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) formulated the idea of requiring safety systems to address a prescribed set of anticipated operational occurrences and postulated accidents. . . . That approach and its related concepts of design-basis events and design bases were used in licensing the current generation of nuclear plants in the 1960s and 1970s. Frequently, the concept of design-basis events has been equated to adequate protection, and the concept of beyond-design-basis events has been equated to beyond adequate protection (i.e., safety enhancements).15

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The NRC continued to use the design-basis concept after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, adding new rules and orders as necessary to address new issues of concern—120 in total, some design-basis and others beyond-design-basis in nature. Similarly, September 11 led to a raft of new regulations. Fukushima presented new issues for power plant operators as well as emergency managers. Of immediate concern were three major risks represented by the Daiichi plant’s failures: station blackout mitigation, design modifications to meet seismic and flooding risks, and emergency management preparations for cascading and interconnected disasters. In each of these areas the NRC set out to develop new standards of safety for US nuclear plants and initiated studies and dialogue with industry. It is important to point out the fact that the NRC report (at least theoretically) had the opportunity through Fukushima to come to conclusions that would fundamentally alter the conceptual basis of US nuclear safety. However, that did not happen. The conclusion of the NRC report’s assessment of its regulatory practices is clear: “Although complex, the current regulatory approach has served the Commission and the public well and allows the Task Force to conclude that a sequence of events like those occurring in the Fukushima accident is unlikely to occur in the United States. . . . Therefore, in light of the low likelihood of an event beyond the design basis of a U.S. nuclear power plant and the current mitigation capabilities at those facilities, the Task Force concludes that continued operation and continued licensing activities do not pose an imminent risk to the public health and safety and are not inimical to the common defense and security.”16 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers—representing another key perspective of technically minded disaster experts—came to a similar conclusion in its June 2012 assessment of lessons learned from Fukushima. The engineers accepted the NRC’s core claim of the value of the “design basis” as a tried and true frame of reference for nuclear safety. The report goes a step further, calling for a “new nuclear safety construct.” This “new safety construct” introduced two new concepts beyond the NRC’s thinking: the “all-risk approach” and “cliff-edge events.”17 To quote the report, the new construct: extends the design basis to consider all risks, and includes rare yet credible events . . . the new safety construct [should] be based on an all-risk approach, addressing a broad range of challenges to nuclear power plant safety, including internal and external hazards, during

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all modes of plant operation, evaluated in a risk-informed manner. Cliff-edge events—those for which a small incremental increase in severity can yield a disproportionate increase in consequences— should be discovered and mitigation approaches implemented. The objective . . . is to take reasonable and practical measures to deal with credible events . . . while realizing that the overall risk will not be zero. Echoing the perspective of the nuclear power industry as well as that of the NRC, the engineers argued that enhanced regulatory practice was not the best way to achieve the goals of this new safety construct. Rather, “accountability for protection of people and property must extend beyond the regulatory requirements to plant designers, manufacturers, owners and operators,” ideally extending beyond the United States and into the international nuclear community.18 As is clear from the above statement, concluding that nuclear power risk could never get down to zero is another way of saying that nuclear abolition— a goal seriously debated in Japan throughout 2011 and 2012—was not in the cards for the United States. In sum, we see that from the perspectives of the US science policy establishment, the military, the NRC, the nuclear power industry, and the engineering community (or at least a mainstream contingent of engineers), Fukushima was a disaster from which much was to be learned. The key lessons, though, did not fundamentally alter the US commitment to nuclear power or its support for the Japanese use of such power. Instead, the experts were reaching consensus that Fukushima provided an opportunity to enhance a regulatory structure that relied heavily on industry self-policing and a “design basis” framework rooted in fifty-plus years of plant construction and maintenance. In this context, Fukushima was not a disaster that should change the overall trajectory of risk governance in the United States. The NRC—a successor to the US AEC—was launched in 1975. The NRC is directed by five commissioners (named by the president and confirmed by the Senate), one of whom serves as chairman. The commissioners serve fiveyear terms and are generally appointed two at a time, one Republican and one Democrat. The current NRC oversees nuclear reactor safety and security, the issuing and renewal of licenses, the safety of radioactive materials, and fuel management. The NRC is not without critics in the environmental advocacy community who point to the high level of industry self-regulation and close connections among industry and NRC officials and staff members. Industry groups like the Institute of Nuclear Power Operators and

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Nuclear Energy Institute represent powerful constituencies of nuclear utilities and manufacturers. Just a year after Fukushima, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko began to push back against the notion that lessons learned from Fukushima were going to lead to safer nuclear plants—exposing dissent within the ranks that was not necessarily obvious from the 2011 task force report. Jaczko had been appointed to the NRC in 2005, but from the beginning he was seen as outside of the established nuclear community. As a particle physicist who had never worked in the industry, Jaczko had more of a background in nuclear science policy. As a candidate for the presidency in 2007, Barack Obama had cited regulatory capture as a problem for the agency. And by the time Obama named Jaczko chairman of the NRC in 2009 he was considered outright unfriendly to the nuclear power industry, in large part because of his move to scuttle the proposed nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Jaczko’s more aggressively reform-minded posture toward nuclear safety following Fukushima led to conflict with his colleagues at the agency and with industry leaders. In February  2012 Jaczko cast the lone dissenting vote when the NRC voted to approve two new reactors to be built in Georgia—the first in thirty years in the United States—and he cited Fukushima as a reason. With his eye on the new post-Fukushima reality, he found himself on the outside at NRC (and was berated before a House of Representatives committee after his colleagues testified against him) in his stance on safety. For example, he cited long-standing safety concerns about fire (and a practice of having workers walk around smelling for smoke).19 Three new orders went into effect in March  2012. One required new safety equipment on all reactors, and there were special instructions for Mark I and II reactors allowing for water level monitoring and venting systems. These orders allowed nuclear producers until the end of 2016 to comply.20 Such moves certainly grew from the lessons of Fukushima, yet a review of NRC’s actions by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) raised troubling questions. Founded in 1969, the UCS is a group of politically engaged and reform-minded scientists who often work on issues of environmental concern—frequently on nuclear safety issues. The UCS found the NRC’s response to Fukushima “commendable” and it appreciated the 2011 NRC report’s emphasis on regulating “beyond design basis events.” Yet that is where the accolades ended. The UCS found that a year after Fukushima, the NRC had “decided to put this first and most important recommendation at the bottom of its priority list.”21 The UCS assessment goes on:

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While the NRC has been deliberating on how to implement the task force recommendations, the nuclear power industry has jumped into the breach, proposing what it calls the “Diverse and Flexible Coping Capability” program, or FLEX, as the foundation of its Fukushima response. The FLEX approach involves buying additional emergency equipment (such as pumps and generators) and scattering it in multiple locations to increase the likelihood that at least some of it would survive a severe accident. This approach appeals to the industry because it is cheaper than hardening existing equipment against natural disasters; as one industry executive commented, “It’s cheaper to buy three [pumps] than one and a heckuva big building [to put it in].” Some nuclear plants have already begun implementing the FLEX strategy, which could make it difficult for the NRC to impose higher standards which FLEX equipment might fail to meet. The industry tail may be wagging the regulatory dog.22 The more activist environmental justice community in the United States (echoing international environmentalist perspectives on Fukushima) weighed in with a report in May 2012. Greenpeace’s Lessons from Fukushima lines up with the critical perspective of the UCS. From the Greenpeace perspective, “after what we have seen of the failures in Fukushima, we can conclude that ‘nuclear safety’ does not exist in reality.”23 According to Greenpeace, the “standard of self-regulation by the nuclear industry can be found in many places in the world . . . the Fukushima Daiichi disaster has demonstrated that the safety claims of the nuclear industry and its national as well as international regulators are false.”24 Greenpeace outlined a strategy for regulatory reform that included regulatory independence, public participation, and “a rigorous review of the design basis against what would be considered modern standards and the new reality after the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi. Given the risk involved, reactor safety reviews and life-extensions should never be rubber stamp procedures.” The report assessed Fukushima from a framework that worked outward from core considerations of human rights and worker rights, and its lessons as to risk governance stand in stark contrast to those of the NRC and the American nuclear establishment. In May 2012 Jaczko found his reformist position at the NRC untenable, with his four fellow commissioners (two Republicans and two Democrats) writing a letter complaining about him directly to the president and testifying

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that he was a bully and ran the NRC offices in an imperious manner. Jaczko resigned. Critics of the NRC rushed to his defense, seeing in him a reformer who had failed against big odds to use the Fukushima disaster as a moment to push for serious regulatory reforms. “Washington, you’ve got a situation where the ‘nuclear party’ transcends the Republican and Democratic party,” former NRC commissioner Peter A. Bradford said. “You’ve got four members of the nuclear party writing a letter about the chairman, who’s never been a member of the nuclear party.”25 Speaking on behalf of the UCS, Lisbeth Gronlund moved the emphasis away from Jaczko and back onto the American nuclear regulatory establishment. “The NRC’s failure to protect the public existed long before Gregory Jaczko became the NRC chairman,” she said. “Congress should not be sidetracked into thinking he is the source of the problem or that his removal would be the solution.”26 In the case of Jaczko, the UCS, and Greenpeace we see a coherent critique of the lessons learned from Fukushima by the American nuclear establishment. These critics worked from the premise that regulatory capture was the norm and that the design basis paradigm was flawed. A key point to stress here is the assertion that so-called outside expert groups are the ones most capable of arriving at independent and balanced assessments of nuclear risk. Instead, the UCS and Greenpeace reports draw their authority not only from technical sophistication but more centrally from commitments to democratic practice in the governance of science and technology. By inserting the perspectives of environmental justice, human rights, and reform-minded regulatory practice, these critics provide a minority view, yet one that should be examined as we think more deeply about risk governance post-Fukushima.

Slow Disaster: Another Type of Disaster Learning The word “disaster” focuses our attention on the exceptional event: the external threat. In the traditional conception, a disaster conveys something strange in the ways it rearranges time, space, causality. It is not representative of everyday life but is apolitical, ahistorical, and maybe even supernatural—an act of God. The 3.11 triple disaster contests all of those common understandings of what a disaster is and what it does. The intertwined events of 3.11 were not a surprise, except perhaps in their exact timing. As a moment in time, the events were a profound disruption to Japanese society, but in many demonstrable

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ways they were also a continuation of previous disruptions—disruptions of health, the economy, and confidence in the government and science. The linked disasters of 3.11 were in crucial ways part of a much longer process, a slow disaster that connected the events of a disastrous era: the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), the atomic bombings of 1945, the Niigata Earthquake and Tsunami (1964), the Great Hanshin–Awaji or Kobe Earthquake and fire (1995). The seismic threat and the following tsunami, the history of nuclear power and exposures to radiation, the evacuations and decimated places—none of these was a visitation from some imagined external force. Rather, these disasters were the ones that have shaped modern Japanese politics, science, and culture. What if we intentionally politicized, historicized, interrogated a disaster? What if we thought of disaster not as a surreal moment in time but instead as part and parcel of the world we inhabit, with all of its messier historical legacies, risks, rewards, and inequalities? To do this requires work to piece together the preconditions of a disaster, untangle the multiple and nested bits of violence that make up some sort of whole tragedy, suss out its long aftereffects, and unmask the power relations inherent in the suffering of some and not of others. This approach is the core of a slow disaster methodology. Temporally, slow disaster is a concept that helps us make sense of the tension between disasters as events that strike in a moment and disasters as processes that grind along like tectonic plates, over vast distances and stretches of time. If we are focused on the event, then our attention is limited to the near past, the present, and the near future. This is the temporal frame that elected officials and the media generally occupy. However, a slow disaster approach frees us to consider a disaster as a process playing out over long periods of time, with intermittent processes of risk taking and loss that might be just out of sight, long-standing connections of memory, and forgotten stories of suffering that lie dormant until a new disaster reawakens them. The 3.11 triple disaster carried forward previous and well-known traumas of the Japa nese past: radiation exposure, tsunami flooding, seismic destruction, massive evacuation and loss of home and community, and post-traumatic stress. In 2015 I visited Ishinomaki, Japan, to meet Eichi Honma. We were introduced to one another by Daisuke Sato, a professor of history at Tōhoku University. Honma welcomed us very warmly with tea and snacks, and we sat in the clubhouse of the tennis club he was running at the time. He pulled out a book of photographs from March 11, 2011, and it was hard to imagine the violence portrayed in the images. Honma’s entire neighborhood was leveled

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by the tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake, with cars, buildings, and earth mangled together and washed up against the base of a hill. By the time of my visit the debris was gone, and what remained was an open field with one curious exception: a warehouse. The Honma Warehouse was built in 1897, part of the Honma Soy Sauce factory complex. Photos from that time show the building as one part of the complex. Over the decades that followed, the factory closed and the buildings were replaced with a neighborhood, one in a low-lying tsunami zone. Documents from the warehouse were salvaged after the tsunami, but authorities wanted to demolish the building. Honma rallied his neighbors’ support, and with the assistance of researchers affiliated with the Miyagi Shiryo Net from Sendai, he succeeded in saving the building. The Miyagi  Shiryo Net is a collection of researchers and volunteers who formed after the 2003 Miyagi Earthquake. They developed a particular form of postdisaster recovery, one focused on the recovery of archival materials like those stored in the Honma Warehouse (pictured in Figure 1.1). Their philosophy is straightforward: disaster victims obtain healing through the restoration of their communities, and this restoration can be accelerated by the recovery and preservation of documents, photographs, and oral history.27 The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake provides a key historical turning point in the history of Japanese disaster research. The earthquake defied expectations in terms of its size (it was 6.9 on the Richter Scale) and also its location: Kobe was not considered a primary target for a seismic event of such a high magnitude. The earthquake and fire that followed claimed the lives of 6,434 people. Aside from the failure to predict the seismic activity, it was widely felt that the failure of communications and emergency planning in Kobe led to unnecessary suffering. In the months following the disaster, posttraumatic stress was common among survivors, many of whom had been placed in temporary housing that had been assigned with no attempt to maintain community bonds. In the aftermath of the disaster, Prefectural Governor Toshitami Kaihara petitioned the central government for a remarkable, oneof-a-kind combination research and teaching center, memorial, and museum to be built in Kobe. The result—with half of the funding from the prefectural government and half from the central government—is the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution (DRI).28 The research center is connected to the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) and also to the Kansai University Faculty of Safety Science, with some involvement by faculty members of Kobe University. The DRI opened in Kobe in 2002, and according to

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Figure 1.1. Eichi Honma’s warehouse in Ishinomaki. This warehouse was built in 1897 as part of a soy sauce and soybean paste factory complex in Ishinomaki, Japan. In the intervening years a residential neighborhood replaced the factory, but the warehouse remained. The region was badly damaged by the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami. An enormous debris field surrounded the warehouse, with it being the only structure left standing after the disaster. The owner, Eiichi Honma, undertook the conservation of documents salvaged from the warehouse and the renovation of the warehouse as a museum. The photo was taken August 26, 2015, when Honma’s warehouse, by this time a symbol of recovery for the region, was being structurally repaired. Special thanks to Eiichi Honma, Miyagi Shiryō Net, Professor John F. Morris, and Professor Daisuke Sato of Tohoku University. Copyright Scott Gabriel Knowles.

former DPRI and DRI director Yoshiaki Kawata, it had six million visitors in that year. Every year an average of 500,000 people visit, and many of them are students in elementary or middle school. The DRI also provides education programs for emergency managers, offering training to about six hundred of them per year.29 Taking each of these activities into account, one might surmise that the DRI is the first disaster research center of its type in Japan (and

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probably in the world). It is connected with fundamental seismological research and civil engineering research, while also being informed by social science and humanities disaster research in public administration, education, and history. The DRI also has the mission of teaching multiple audiences. Finally, in its glass-sheathed museum—with the day and time of the earthquake visible from the street—the DRI collects and interprets the meaning of the disaster for the citizens of Kobe and its many visitors.

Conclusion The rhetoric of “lessons learned” from disaster is a powerful one, but it can also be deceptive. The language presumes that the event was expected and is expected to recur: you can’t learn from something that has no cognitive frame, and there is no point in learning from something that will never happen again. The cases of expert postdisaster disputes presented in this chapter merely open the discussion of the possibilities inherent in this moment—when disaster losses are on the rise, and climate change provides no prospect for an easy way out of life in disaster. As disaster investigations are reshaped to address the broader concerns of regulatory debate, social vulnerability, social media, and more, disaster researchers have an opening to promote their knowledge in the ser vice of sustainable and effective disaster mitigation. As we see from the formal Japanese disaster investigations, new frames of understanding were presented, some highly critical of the nuclear village and even of Japanese society and democracy more broadly. But did these investigations alter the course of post-Fukushima technology in Japan? The willingness of the government to move toward restarting the nuclear complex today—a process that is incomplete now but not foreclosed—tells us that the investigations seem to have accomplished more in terms of signaling national seriousness rather than actually delivering meaningful changes. The same may be said of the studies based in the United States, where experts from different perspectives mostly have used Fukushima to support their own ideological commitments. Thus, as suggested toward the end of the chapter, looking at more social modes of learning from disaster open up new possibilities. Museums, memorials, and social activities of community recovery are other venues for learning that do not feature the forensic certainties offered by formal investigations, but they may operate more effectively in the end.

CHAPTER 2

Unfulfilled Promises Why Structural Disasters Make It Difficult to “Learn from Disasters” Kohta Juraku

Official organizations must formally conduct deliberate, comprehensive, and careful investigations of disastrous technological accidents. When they do, they can further improve what we call a “learning from disasters” paradigm. But this is not always the case. What differentiates the success and the failure of formal attempts to learn from disaster? This is the question at the center of this chapter. The “learning from disasters” paradigm had its origins in the United Kingdom in the late nineteenth century. Two instances demonstrated it poignantly: the Dee Bridge disaster of 1847 and the Tay Rail Bridge disaster of 1879. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, modern accident investigation procedures and techniques further evolved in the United States as well as the United Kingdom. Engineering textbooks often cite the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse of 1940 and the Comet disaster of 1954 as especially influential instances. In the first case, the US government established a Board of Engineers, consisting of three experienced engineers, under the Federal Works Agency. The engineers conducted a comprehensive scientific survey of the cause of the devastating tremor that destroyed a suspension bridge that had been only four months old. Their examination shed light on an important phenomenon—self-induced vibration—that opened eyes to the importance of aerodynamic considerations in designing and constructing safer suspension bridges. This example of learning from disaster

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encouraged the progress of research and development in relevant engineering fields.1 In the Comet disaster case, a series of in-flight disintegration accidents with the world’s first jet airliner necessitated the world’s most modern, systematic, and stringent airplane accident investigation at that time. Undertaken by the Royal Aircraft Establishment and strongly supported by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, this investigation resulted in several new intellectual considerations, including the phenomenon of metal fatigue and methods of aviation accident investigation. All of these developments contributed to conspicuous progress in aviation safety.2 Both of these learning processes led to great strides in the advancement of engineering. Although these outcomes could not make up for the damage caused by the disasters, they helped significantly mitigate further tragedies. In par ticular, they demonstrated the effectiveness and necessity of postaccident investigation for technological improvement (especially for engineering safety). The process of learning from tragic disasters has contributed to technological and social progress. It has helped prevent subsequent similar disasters and has offered some kind of meaning for the victims of accidents. Such a tradition of accident investigation has been especially successful in the aviation field. Almost all countries now have permanent official institutions for inquiring into aviation accidents, and sometimes into accidents in public transportation in general. Practitioners and experts took this paradigm from aviation and applied it to the field of space vehicles, because these two fields are closely related and have many similarities. After the crash of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, the United States established the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (informally known as the Rogers Commission after its chairman, William Rogers). Years later, in response to the space shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration convened the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (not a presidential commission) as the official accident investigation body. Apart from these cases, many official investigations have followed serious technological accidents in countries around the world. The scope of these investigations has expanded as increasing attention has been paid to the importance of so-called human actors, systemic risks, and other characteristics of advanced technologies. This has also been the case with nuclear technology. Often acknowledged as a milestone in the history of postaccident investigations, the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (called the Kemeny Com-

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mission after its chairman, John Kemeny) in the United States played an important role in safety improvement in the nuclear field. Now many people believe that we have learned and can learn from disasters through accident investigation processes. The same tradition seems accepted in Japan as well. For example, in 1971, two consecutive major airplane crashes stunned Japanese society.3 The Japanese government began to discuss having a permanent aviation accident investigation system, following the establishment of the US National Transportation Safety Board in 1967. The government established the Aircraft Accidents Investigation Commission (AAIC) in 1974. The AAIC evolved into the Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission (ARAIC) in 2001 and finally became the Japan Transportation Safety Board (JTSB), which has also had jurisdiction over maritime accidents since 2008. As of 2019, the JTSB had investigated 1,390 aviation accidents, 282 railway accidents, and 9,492 maritime accidents. In its activities, the JTSB follows relevant international conventions, such as the Chicago Convention for civil aviation, and it exchanges technical information, data, recommendations, and bulletins with foreign governments, private bodies, and international organizations. From this perspective, the paradigm of “learning from disasters” through official investigations looks like a well-accepted notion within Japanese society, and in fact Japanese policy makers promptly applied this paradigm to the nuclear disaster in the wake of the Fukushima accident, as the US did thirty-two years earlier with Three Mile Island.

Post-Fukushima Accident Investigations Soon after the Fukushima accident, calls for a formal and comprehensive accident investigation began. In the belief that this was necessary, the Japanese government; the Japanese Diet; the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO); and the nonprofit Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (RJIF) independently determined to conduct investigations. The relevant four major commissions each lasted for about a year. All of them had published their final reports by mid-2012. Available online and in print, some of these reports have also been translated into English. If the historical precedent of learning from disaster applied in this case, we could expect that engineers and government officials would already have learned many lessons and that the next Fukushima-like disaster could be

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prevented, or at least mitigated, by the measures taken as a result of those lessons. Society as a whole would have become more resilient to similar (and even other types of) disasters. In addition, such changes would have had positive effects on public opinion about the Japanese nuclear program. This is what the paradigm promises. As  B. Bowonder, Jeanne Kasperson, and Roger Kasperson explained, an investigation should be an experience of social learning, a “process by which a society or nation perceives, assesses and acts upon harmful experiences or past mistakes in purposeful ways.” 4 In 2019, however, the reality in Japan is quite different from these expectations. The nation has not experienced the theorized and anticipated trajectory of learning from disasters through investigation. Numerous major deficits in Japanese nuclear governance persist or have worsened, even after investigations yielded reports and implemented reforms in policy and institutions.5 Public opinion remains skeptical about restarting nuclear power plants with “upgraded safety” and about the nuclear program as a whole.6 The pronuclear versus antinuclear controversy continues to rage, almost unchanged from pre-Fukushima disputes. Sandwiched between these polarized views, public opinion on the use of nuclear power has stabilized, leaning a little toward the negative. The public’s attention has already moved away from such arenas of dispute. However, the restart of nuclear power stations and the decisions of relevant court cases are still uncertain, and experts in the nuclear field seem demoralized. In the wake of Fukushima, the learning process of accident investigations seems to have gone unfulfilled. That said, there may be reasons for this that could lead to lessons from these events and ones like it in the future. At least two carried-over problems reduced the possibility of successful social learning from the official investigations: an unsettled social justice dilemma as to its purpose, and an unclear linkage of its results with the procedure of policy reform, as examined in the following sections. These two problems point to a broader phenomenon that may impact learning from disasters: the particularities of “structural disasters.”7 Approaching the Fukushima events through this analytical framework will shed new light on the mechanism that allows similar types of disasters to recur at the interface of science, technology, and society.

Conflicts with Social Justice: An Unsettled Dilemma When the Japanese government convened its official investigation committee, people expected the committee to identify the locus of responsibility

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through extensive and authoritative surveys. This was quite different from the UK and US tradition of accident investigation. And the expectation prevented social learning from disaster. Japanese culture has a relatively strong propensity for retributivism. Japanese society tends to pursue individual responsibility more aggressively than the many countries in North America and Europe, even when the nature of an accident is “organizational,” which has been argued that it is not appropriate and effective to do so.8 Since at least the establishment of the AAIC in 1974, there has been a long history of controversy over the separation of criminal prosecution and accident investigation in Japan. Japanese people feel strongly that those who caused or aggravated the damage of an accident should be punished severely, to apologize to the victims and their families as well as to prevent future accidents by cautioning the relevant professionals not to make mistakes. People understand the concept of professional negligence in a broad sense and routinely call for the criminal prosecution of individuals responsible for manmade disasters (人災, jin-sai). Because of this, the Japanese legal system has not adopted the US and European policy of offering relevant figures immunity from criminal responsibility. Japan sent the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) an official “notice of difference from ICAO standards,” which explained its limited compliance with annex 13 of the Chicago Convention. Annex 13 calls for the clear separation of accident investigation processes from criminal prosecutions. This includes any related evidence or data. It serves to limit the liability of crews and organizations, protect their rights, encourage truthful and detailed testimony, and ensure that the investigative process is not compromised by the withholding of inconvenient facts. Well before the Fukushima disaster, Japan had experienced international problems in relation to liability and accidents. In 1997 after severe turbulence caused an accident involving Japan Airlines flight 706, resulting in the death of a crew member and injuries to several other people, the Japanese court admitted the data and the report of the AAIC’s accident investigation as evidence and invited AAIC commissioners to testify as witnesses for the first time since the organization’s establishment. The court prosecuted the captain for professional negligence. This case led to strong opposition from domestic and international aviation crews and experts. They viewed the decision as a violation of the international standards clearly shown by the Chicago Convention. The Japanese court refused to retract its decision. After ten years, the court found the

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captain innocent, but the victim’s family expressed deep disappointment with the judge.9 What was missing was any substantial attention to the nonhuman systemic reasons for the tragedy. Both the AAIC and the court failed to look seriously into the aerodynamic instability of McDonnell Douglas MD-11 aircraft in certain severe conditions, resulting from a flaw in design and the flight computer’s performance that was probably deeply involved in the cause of the accident. Japanese society as a whole seemed too intent on determining who to blame, rather than what to learn. The prosecution-oriented investigation process impeded a root-cause analysis such as that described above, but it also failed to punish the captain. In contrast to public sentiment, the court was prevented from broadening the definition of criminal professional negligence to include a so-called organizational accident. It adopted instead another European tradition: the legality principle. Thus, in many cases of serious technological disasters, prosecuted individuals—often elites—are exculpated. In a sense, this is a historically constructed contradiction between the Japanese (or more broadly, East Asian) cultural tradition and a transplanted Western origin legal system. Criminal prosecution still has a space for retributivism under the name of relief of victim and social convention, and relevant individuals are often prosecuted. However, in reality, the result is usually based not on retributivism but on modern legal principles, which tend not to make individuals criminally responsible for highly complex technological disasters. This often leads to judgments of innocence for relevant individuals—a consequence that has been repeatedly observed for a long time. It has always disappointed the victims and their families, frustrated public sentiment that calls for justice, and spoiled the effective application of the “learning from disasters” paradigm. Technological disasters have been becoming increasingly complex in nature, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the nuclear realm. This increasing complexity makes it difficult to identify the locus of responsibility, especially with a legal and cultural system that focuses on finding a “bad guy.” This has created a fundamental problem for Japanese disaster investigations since 3.11. If the only acceptable outcome is the prosecution of an individual, then how can more systemic issues be explored and ultimately altered to improve safety? There was no attention given to this issue when the ARAIC was transformed into the JTSB in 2008. The separation of duties between law enforcement authorities and the JSTB remained ambiguous. The Science Council of Japan (SCJ) emphasized the advantages gained by limiting liability in these cases, but its report had little impact on public opinion or legislators.

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Then another tragic disaster, the April 2005 crash of a train on the Fukuchiyama line of the West Japan Railway Company (JR West), triggered public outrage against the Japanese legal system—which, in the public’s view, did not punish responsible individuals and institutions severely enough. Victims’ families started a campaign to call for amending the criminal law to enable a corporate body to be punished for professional negligence, because the top executives of JR West had been found innocent of such negligence. The families conducted a petition campaign and, in October 2018, submitted over ten thousand citizens’ signatures, but the minister of justice showed his reluctance to amend the criminal law. In the media coverage of the campaign no mention was made of the SCJ’s 2005 report, which strongly argued the rigorous separation between accident investigation (not to blame someone) and criminal prosecution, and the priority of the former. Its recommendation has also not been accepted or even acknowledged by society so far. It was in the midst of such tension that a tsunami hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and the discussion of official accident investigations began again. No deliberate consideration was given to the design of the investigation commission when people discussed its establishment. Yotaro Hatamura—chair of the Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations (ICANPS), the governmental commission—stirred public debate on the role, objectives, and principles of official investigations by proposing certain policies for the ICANPS commission. An emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Tokyo, Hatamura is well-known as a strong advocate of failure studies (失 敗学, shippai-gaku) that emphasize the importance and advantage of learning from failures in a systematic manner.10 Hatamura has published numerous articles on this topic and clearly favors separating investigation from prosecution. His “failure studies” concept seems to be completely in line with the theory of “learning from disaster.” Soon after the establishment of ICANPS, he made the idea of “not pursuing individual’s responsibility” a policy of the commission and declared that fact to the public.11 He took this idea for granted and rightly viewed it as consistent with international standards. But many people in Japan dissented and criticized his policies. Some media coverage and online discussions described his announcement as an abdication of the commission’s mission. However, as of early 2019 no one has been officially punished for the Fukushima accident through criminal prosecution. Instead, three former TEPCO top executives were found innocent in September  2019, but the

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matter is ongoing. This likely leaves accident victims quite uncomfortable. Of course, damage compensation and life recovery assistance for those who suffered has been provided through incrementally improving official programs to be provided by the government. However, this does not hold the same meaning as the punishment of the responsible persons. This situation has caused frustration and a feeling that justice has not been restored in society. As a result, major accident investigations and their final reports have to be more than just societal learning processes: they have to play a role in assuaging desires for justice.

“Manmade,” “Regulatory Capture,” and “Made in Japan” Disaster: Eye-Catching Rhetoric and Neglected Wisdom TV news programs, newspapers, and various forms of online communication repeatedly highlighted the outlines of the investigation reports—or to be more exact, the eye-catching rhetoric featured in those documents. These perspectives have attracted public attention and triggered public debate on the causes of the disaster among Japanese citizens and the international community, but they also blurred the effective and organized social-learning process. In this section of the chapter, I examine the cases of the two most “official” investigations—that of the Cabinet and that of the Diet, while two other commissions not discussed below are also widely accepted as major ones.12 Established on December 8, 2011, the National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) has been considered the most authoritative among the four major investigation commissions established after the Fukushima accident. It published its report on July 5, 2012. Several statements from the report drew intense reaction, even public anger. Two examples of the provocative theories suggested in the report are that “manmade” and “made in Japan” disaster theories were the root cause of the accident, and that “regulatory capture” theories criticize corruption in past nuclear regulation.13 The first example, the manmade disaster theory, appeared at the beginning of the accident report—as part of the preface written by Chairman Kurokawa: “THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI of March  11, 2011 were natural disasters of a magnitude that shocked the entire world. Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a

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profoundly manmade disaster—that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response.”14 The word “manmade” attracted significant attention among the Japanese public, in large part because it facilitated the cultural tradition of placing blame on individuals or groups of people and then calling for retributive justice. Wording used in the other parts of the report—such as “collusion,” “effectively betrayed the nation’s right,” and “faulty rationale”— gave the impression that there were intentional mistakes and conspiracies in nuclear regulation before Fukushima. It even seemed to encourage the criminal prosecution of relevant officials in the government, TEPCO, and other institutions. After the NAIIC published its report, a process of prosecution started on August 2, 2012. The Tokyo District Prosecutor’s Office exempted all accused persons from prosecution in 2013. However, three former executives of TEPCO were prosecuted by decision of the Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution— which has the authority to override the prosecutor’s office’s decisions. Kurokawa also suggested in the preface the theory of “made in Japan” disasters as well as the “Japanese culture” explanation. He wrote: For all the extensive detail it provides, what this report cannot fully convey—especially to a global audience—is the mindset that supported the negligence behind this disaster. What must be admitted—very painfully—is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.” Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to “sticking with the program”; our groupism; and our insularity. Had other Japanese been in the shoes of those who bear responsibility for this accident, the result may well have been the same.15 Regardless of Kurokawa’s disclaimer that this position was not part of the formal document, the “made in Japan” or “Japanese culture” theory spread all over the world.16 It elicited swift reactions from the international community. Foreign journalists attacked it. Bloomberg News criticized Kurokawa’s perspective in a July  9 editorial titled “Japan’s Unsatisfying Nuclear Report.”17 The Financial Times also published an article on this issue titled “Beware Post-Crisis ‘Made in Japan’ Labels” on July 8.18 Both of these articles criticized Kurokawa’s theory as a retrogressive perspective on the accident

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that tried to blur the locus of responsibility by taking advantage of cultural essentialist rhetoric. Kurokawa’s theory seemed to contradict or invalidate itself. If the accident was a “manmade disaster” rooted in “Japanese culture,” then how could any individual be held accountable for it? Everyone, it would seem, should be exonerated because the accident was simply part of their society. Nevertheless, the two phrases are often cited together and considered to be the most important messages of the NAIIC report. The third eye-catching narrative suggested by the NAIIC report was the criticism of corruption within the nuclear regulatory enforcement system. This narrative pinpointed the deficits of the past system and used a fascinating phrase to label them: “regulatory capture.” Shuya Nomura, a member of the NAIIC and a well-known lawyer, supported this concept. According to him, “Regulatory capture is a theory posited by George Stigler in The Theory of Economic Regulation. It refers to a condition in which regulators are ‘taken over’ by the operators due to their lack of expertise and information, which results in the regulations becoming ineffective.”19 The body of the report never used this concept by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics as an analytical framework. It just listed the historical process of collusive regulatory practices as an example of “regulatory capture.” Media outlets interpreted this to be a harsh criticism of the so-called nuclear village. The causal relationship between any particular factors observed in the Japanese nuclear community, the result (that is, corruption), and the process of “capture” was never actually examined in the report. These NAIIC narratives inspired an approach that punished victimizers by sanctioning them with more stringent and tighter regulations. In reality, after this official condemnation, the criteria for a “good regulator” were clearly changed. It seems that people now expect regulators to make unlimited efforts to reduce the risk of potential hazards from nuclear activities. Obviously, this is quite different from the reality of industry regulation: regulators usually pursue the reasonably achievable best, often exemplified by the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) principle. Japan’s newly established Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) adopted a decisive, strict approach that calls for additional measures to increase and demonstrate plant safety in an incremental manner, with no explicitly prescribed goal. This includes additional safety measures to prevent scenarios similar to what happened in the Fukushima case, safety reviews complying with the new regulatory standards, retrofitted earthquake resistance measures, and on-site active fault surveys.

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These elevated regulatory requirements have burdened operators and manufacturers with never-ending and costly review processes, while public trust has not recovered as a result. This situation could be interpreted as a “punishment” of the “evil” nuclear industry through the regulatory process instead of through the legal prosecution process. Contrary to popu lar views, this ostensibly strict regulation does not necessarily enhance nuclear safety. In fact, the deficits of nuclear risk governance actually seem to have been retained or even worsened after the accident.20 Apart from supplying catchy rhetoric, the investigation reports did not have a clear-cut and direct influence on the design of nuclear regulatory reform. The discussion about reformation took place in the government and the Diet before the NAIIC and other major final reports were published. The government established the NRA in September 19, 2012, three months after approving the Act for Establishment of the Nuclear Regulation Authority on June 20, 2012. Sessions to discuss the legislative changes took place during the spring of the same year. At that time, only the report of a so-called independent commission, established by RJIF, and the interim report of the ICANPS had been released. It was chronologically impossible for the institutional reformation to reflect the final recommendations of the NAIIC report. According to its website, the NRA did not consider the NAIIC report as one of the reasons for its establishment. It seems quite unreasonable that the Diet would not wait for their own commission’s conclusion and recommendations, as well as those of other major committees, when these reports were almost finished. In sum, the new regulatory body, which was strongly endorsed by society to reflect the lessons from the Fukushima disaster, was not the product of an official investigation, contrary to the popu lar story. Both in terms of theoretical reflection and practical steps, the reformation was virtually disconnected from the formal learning process.

A Result of the Failure of Social Learning: The Case of SPEEDI Disputes After the establishment of the NRA, the inability of organizations and government officials to participate in or benefit from the social learning process actually led to an ill-advised dispute centering on the use of real-time simulation technology for nuclear emergency response.

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When the Fukushima nuclear accident happened, SPEEDI (the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information), a real-time simulation system for radiation protection developed and implemented over thirty years, failed to perform its expected mission. Its output was never released to help evacuation in the acute phase of the disaster. This became one of the focal points in the controversy over off-site nuclear emergency management. NAIIC and ICANPS differed in their evaluations of how SPEEDI failed. The ICANPS report claimed that SPEEDI had been mishandled and its results poorly utilized in the accident, arguing for better procedures and more active use of SPEEDI to improve emergency response. In contrast, the NAIIC report argued that there were many intrinsic technical limitations to real-time prediction and advised against its use. Along with the differing assessments, the committees offered their perspectives using different rhetorics and tones. ICANPS published its report as a detached, objective narrative, while the NAIIC report used heated language, criticizing the decisions, behav iors, and general incapability of those involved in the accident. Consequently, the failure of SPEEDI has generally been framed as a problem of political secrecy (the reluctance to disclose inconvenient information) and/or technical insufficiency. Even some social scientists criticized it as a problem of structured secrecy.21 However, as Shin-etsu Sugawara and I have analyzed in detail, the failure of SPEEDI should be interpreted as a result of the “structural negligence” of expertise related to atmospheric radionuclide dispersion simulation.22 This hindered the development of a plan to use SPEEDI for nuclear emergency preparedness. The biggest and most fundamental limitation of SPEEDI does not lie in the shortcomings of the simulation technology but in the availability of input data—that is, the difficulty of evaluating radioactive source terms for an ongoing accident. If we wish to take advantage of SPEEDI despite such limitations, it is important to establish a well-articulated institutional design of professional technical consultation, as other countries have tried to do. This would necessitate social learning from disaster.23 For example, we would be able to prescribe how to use SPEEDI for emergency response in a more concrete manner, before the next disaster happens. Or we might be able to give the role of emergency responder to SPEEDI developers and researchers, to take full advantage of the system. We could introduce a more strategic decisionmaking program in Japanese nuclear emergency planning and articulate

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the role of SPEEDI within it. In the study cited above, the authors found that Canada, France, and Sweden have already pursued such practical implementation. Doing so in this case would demonstrate social learning from disaster in Japan. Such a perspective on the SPEEDI dispute was not explicitly set forth by the major investigation reports and has also been neglected by the newly established NRA. The organization denied the reliability of real-time simulations of radionuclide dispersion and banned the use of SPEEDI and any other real-time radionuclide dispersion simulations for nuclear emergency decision making in 2016.24 It did not present details about why it concluded that such simulations are totally unreliable for nuclear emergency response. Nor did it cite any investigation reports or initiate any public policy deliberations on the use of such technology. Thus, the social learning process from the failure of SPEEDI was mothballed, while in formal terms the NRA succeeded the mission of further official investigation of the Fukushima disaster. In contrast, just five days before the NRA published its official statement, the Ministerial Council for Nuclear Power Utilization of the Japanese government released what could be read as a pro-SPEEDI recommendation to reduce the risks of future nuclear disasters.25 It argued that the national government should not prevent prefectural or municipal governments from referring to SPEEDI calculation results on their own responsibility, for the purposes of both making decisions in nuclear emergencies and holding emergency drills.26 As a result, the government of each prefecture with a nuclear power plant has to make its own choice about whether or not to use real-time radionuclide dispersion simulations in case of nuclear emergency. This is a difficult decision to make. Many local government officials responding in author interviews by saying that “it is actually impossible to use it on our own responsibility without formal national governmental endorsement. It is very difficult to legitimate and be accountable to our citizens.”27 In addition, the NRA has already terminated the funding for the operation and maintenance of the SPEEDI computer system, and SPEEDI terminals have been removed from prefectural government offices. Effectively, communities with nuclear power plants cannot use SPEEDI if a nuclear accident occurs, despite the fact that the Ministerial Council’s judgment that it can be used “at your own responsibility” is still in effect. Official investigations have not contributed to identifying and sorting out problems or to

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learning from the failures. The reports just fueled both pro- and anti-SPEEDI arguments. This can be recognized as a failure of the “investigation of failures.”

Lessons Never Learned, the Disaster Forgotten: Investigation Processes That Constitute Further Structural Disaster In conclusion, it is questionable that the investigations of the Fukushima accident have helped our social learning in a logical and explicit manner. Rather, the releases of major investigation reports acted as milestones, separating the acute phase and chronic phase of Japanese society after the accident. However, it seems to be relatively clear that such publications helped bring public outrage to a close, if we look at the declining trend of media coverage and the absence of further formal investigation. The most observable societal function might be the forgetting process of disaster. This hypothesis has a striking implication: We might not have changed at all in how we prevent, prepare for, or are resilient in the fact of the next disaster after the investigation activities concluded, because we simply have come to terms with the traumatic event. That is, we have convinced ourselves that the event was well investigated and clarified—without actually having learned anything from it. If this is the case, the accident investigation process itself might be part of the structural problems of our society that will make the next disaster even worse. Accident investigation may be a component of the structural disaster in a very negative sense. Miwao Matsumoto, a Japanese sociologist of science, uses the concept of structural disaster, defined as a structural defect at the interface of science, technology, and society that produces continuous, similar, patterned, and serious disasters. He defined the characteristics of a structural disaster as follows: 1. Adherence to erroneous precedents causes problems to be carried over and reproduced. 2. The complexity of a system under consideration and the interdependence of its units aggravate problems. 3. The invisible norms of informal groups essentially hollow out formal norms. 4. Quick fixes for problems at hand lead to further such fixes for temporary countermeasures.

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5. Secrecy develops across different sectors and blurs the locus of agents responsible for the problems to be addressed.28 It seems clear that the story described in this chapter satisfies many of these conditions in more than a few ways. For example, despite the contradiction between Anglo-Saxon traditions of investigation and Japanese cultural values of social justice, accident investigations took place without deliberated consensus. This refers to Matsumoto’s first and fourth points. Matsumoto himself mentioned the development of secrecy at ICANPS as a case of the fifth point. The NRA’s obscure and unaccountable policy decision on banning SPEEDI is also an instance of the fifth point. Japa nese society has yet to learn from the failure of its technological enterprise. The structural disaster is ongoing. This has several important future implications, based on Matsumoto’s analysis. First, similar types of failures would be repeated and result in unacceptable damage of public interests if we do not take any effective actions to fix these problems. Second, the remedies should be systematic and institutional, not just an ad hoc fix for incremental and local problems. Third and finally, the policy and principles of such reforms should be set and supported by clear and robust social consensus, which could be achieved through appropriate processes of participatory deliberation. Acceptance of poorly defined attempts to investigate accidents could have adverse effects and cause further failures in par ticular social contexts. If nothing is changed, then the Japanese people, their government, and their organizations will fail to learn from disasters, and the lessons they could have learned will be withheld from the rest of the world.

CHAPTER 3

Fukushima Radiation Inside Out Robert Jacobs

The maps of Fukushima are broken.1 The maps we often see of the radiation in Fukushima present two different maps, with one overlaid on the other. One shows evacuation distances from ground zero (that is, the highly radioactive plants with their melted nuclear cores), while the other displays the radiological hazards from the deposition of the plumes of radiation that spread downwind from the explosions and fires during the first week after the earthquake and tsunami. These imbricated maps present incoherent information and contribute to our difficulty in understanding the situation faced by people living in Fukushima today. The public Geiger counters of Fukushima are also broken. Like the maps, they emphasize the levels of external gamma radiation where they are located. While there is danger from gamma radiation, that is not where the primary danger facing people lies. Of course, neither the maps nor the Geiger counters are actually broken, but their ability to communicate is broken, and this has led to an inability to understand the dangers to people living in Fukushima today. When we look at maps of Fukushima what we see is disinformation. This is rooted in the difficulty in understanding ionizing radiation (simply referred to as “radiation” in this chapter) without study or training.2 If we can separate the imbricated maps, we may be able to grasp the dangers more readily and thus understand the situation in a more functional way. For starters, we tend to assume that radiation is a thing: something is radioactive or it is not. We are affected by the radiation or we are not. This is not quite accurate. Radiation is a quality or a process: something radiates. The forms in which that radiation reaches us can differ, and it is in this difference that half-truths can be told as

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whole truths. While there are many aspects to this, for the discussion here I want to concentrate on the differences between gamma radiation (which penetrates the body from external sources) and beta and alpha radiation (which are dangerous when they are taken into the body). Most of the discourse that you hear about radiation related to Fukushima is exclusively about gamma radiation. The danger to most of the people in contaminated areas is in the form of alpha or beta radiation, so when we hear people talk about radiation in Fukushima, most of the time they are not talking about the types of radiation that cause the primary danger—internalized radiation. Gamma radiation is emitted by radioactive material in waves. These waves can penetrate almost anything, they are partially filtered by heavy materials such as lead or soil. You can think of gamma radiation as functionally similar to X-rays. We try to limit our exposures to X-rays or what parts of us are exposed when we have an X-ray. This is why you have a lead apron placed on you when you have dental X-rays and why the technician goes behind a lead-lined wall. The technician, who must operate this equipment on a daily basis, needs to minimize their accrued dosage. The more radiation there is, the higher the risk. Gamma radiation passes through your body: it does not stay in your body unless a source remains inside your body. When the X-ray machine is turned off, it is safe for the technician to come out from behind the wall and safe to remove the lead apron, because your body is no longer being irradiated. Alpha and beta radiation come from specific irradiated particles, such as the isotopes plutonium-239 and cesium-157. These particles cannot penetrate most materials. Alpha radiation cannot penetrate skin or even paper. The particles are dangerous primarily when we take them into our bodies and they become permanently lodged there. These particles generally give off a relatively small amount of gamma radiation because they are single atoms. If a lot of them are present, they collectively give off correspondingly larger amounts of radiation. If individual particles are internalized in the body, they emit their singular, small amounts of gamma radiation to the same cells surrounding the place where they have lodged, 24/7. While the amount of radiation would not be very dangerous if it were external to the body, constant exposure to this radiation may cause mutations in the surrounding cells, which may cause cancers. When we measure radiation in the inhabited areas of Fukushima, away from the crippled plants, we are measuring the gamma radiation emitted by the alpha- and beta-radiation-emitting particles that have collected in the

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area. The melted cores of the plants give off intense levels of gamma radiation, while the dispersed particles that have been deposited by the plumes of the explosions each give off small amounts of gamma radiation. Geiger counters measuring radiation in towns and schools around Fukushima are measuring the collective gamma radiation from these dispersed particles. Large amounts of gamma radiation fill an area roughly equally, lessening as you get further from the source. This is what most Geiger counters are set to measure: the levels of gamma radiation present. When you have alpharadiation-emitting particles scattered in an area, the amount of detectable radiation varies. In Fukushima City (about eighty kilometers from the nuclear plants), you can hold a Geiger counter at chest level on a street and find a low level of radiation. However, when that same Geiger counter is placed on the ground, much higher levels of radiation can be found. That is because particles fall and collect on the ground. Moving that Geiger counter to the gutter at the side of the street typically detects significantly more radiation. This is because rain and wind push the particles into the gutter. So the distribution of the particles is irregular, depending on how recently they fell out of the sky (fallout) and how much wind and rain there has been. Once the particles enter the ecosystem, they move around, disperse and collect, reflecting the dynamics of wind and water in the underlying systems. This is why you can hold a Geiger counter in the air (or place a public Geiger counter two or ten meters in the air) and find very low levels of radiation, yet there can still be significant dangers underneath the same spot. If the danger is from alpha- and beta-radiation-emitting particles, the readings taken in midair can be low. Such particles can be dangerous to us if we internalize them, typically by inhaling them, swallowing them, or having them enter through cuts in our skin. Once inside the body, they may pass through it and be expelled, but they may also lodge permanently within us.3 The body is tricked into thinking that these particles are useful chemicals. Strontium-90 “mimics” calcium, and the body can put it into the bones. Since the body puts iodine into the thyroid gland, if someone has internalized iodine-131 (a radioactive isotope of iodine), the body may put that in the thyroid gland. Thyroid cancer is one of the first cancers to develop from internalized particles, and that is why our conversation about the health impacts in Fukushima are currently focused on thyroid cancer.4 Other cancers will follow as we move through their latency periods. These internalized particles are particularly dangerous for children. Children are lower to the ground. They tend to put things into their mouths,

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play outdoors, and suffer cuts and bruises. Since their bodies are growing quickly, damage to cells can replicate faster. That is one reason that parents agonize over whether to stay in or evacuate from an area that has had radiological fallout. This is also why it is hard to be certain about the contamination to the food supply. It is virtually impossible to test all food, so samples are tested: samples of rice from rice fields, samples of fish from catches, samples of fruit from orchards. Because the danger to these crops is not from gamma radiation but from the possible uptake of radioactive particles, portions of a crop or a haul of fish can test negative while other portions can contain significant amounts of radiation. Our ability to technologically determine the distribution of radiological particles is limited because of the irregular deposit of the material from fallout clouds and the subsequent scattering of the particles by wind and water. This is also why it is possible to “decontaminate” an area, only to have it recontaminated as the wind and rain redistribute the particles that fell on nearby forests. Technically it is not possible to fully decontaminate a natural area (see Figure 3.2). In Fukushima, decontamination was only undertaken out to twenty meters into forests from individual homes or schools.5 This leaves vast amounts of radionuclides further into the forest that can drift back into the town. The radioactive particles will remain dangerous for their natural life. For plutonium-239 that is over 100,000  years. Cesium-137, which is the most widely distributed radionuclide in Fukushima, remains dangerous for several centuries. During that time, the isotope’s radiation cannot be decreased, it can only be moved. We can attempt to contain these particles, but most of them will long outlive the plastic bags into which we place them, at which time they may reenter the ecosystem and continue to cycle through it.6

Not Learning from the Life Span Study Much of our understanding of the health impacts of radiation come from the Life Span Study (LSS) initiated in the late 1940s at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) and currently maintained by its successor organization, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), located in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.7 The ABCC set out to track the health of the hibakusha, the survivors of the nuclear attacks. While there may have been some political motives behind the initiation of this study, there were clear research motives.

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Regardless of the politics of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of the politics of the continued production and deployment of nuclear weaponry, the nuclear attacks created an opportunity to study the health impacts of radiation on an unprecedented scale. There were hundreds of thousands of survivors, and it was possible to track the subsequent health outcomes of this huge cohort and assemble a robust database that correlates radiation exposures with health outcomes. This inquiry was predicated on a few conditions. For the data on the health outcomes to be relevant, each person tracked must have an accurate assignment of the radioactive dose that they received. Thus, a tremendous amount of resources was devoted to dose reconstruction. There were several pieces to this puzzle. First, a model was constructed of the gamma ray and neutron burst created by the detonation of the two weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two weapons were of completely different design and used different materials to achieve their nuclear detonation: the Hiroshima bomb used uranium-235, while the Nagasaki bomb used plutonium-239. Each detonation had to be modeled to determine the measure of the rays as the burst spread outward from the epicenter. The intense burst of gamma and neutron radiation dissipated as it moved out from the detonation point.8 To accomplish dose reconstruction, each hibakusha was interviewed about their exact location at the time of the detonations and about what kind of structure they were in or what else was between them and the detonation. Structures would provide some shielding and would thus moderate the gamma and neutron bursts. Dose reconstruction was thus calculated, with distance plus shielding determining the dosage for anyone from the burst of radiation at the epicenter.9 There is criticism of this dose reconstruction approach. For example, anyone who died from radiation-related sickness in the first five years after the nuclear attacks was not included, and researchers have found that many of the estimates were based on interviews in which only one or two questions were asked. Additionally, the interviews were conducted at least five years, and often ten years, after the bombing, and in them people were asked to report data about the most traumatic experience of their lives—a day when they may have feared they would die, may have watched many other people die, and may have lost family members and friends.10 So at its core, dose reconstruction is partly based on a numerical value that is derived from subjective reporting. The ambiguity that this introduces into a scientific database has always been an impediment

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to the LSS, and refinements of dose reconstruction have been ongoing for decades.11 Where the LSS begins to move in a direction that reduces its later relevance for people in Fukushima is in its exclusion of people who internalized beta- or alpha-radiation-emitting particles. Most of the people present in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the attacks experienced significant exposures to external radiation. Many who died in the first days, weeks, and months after the attacks died because of the level of their external exposures. High exposure to gamma radiation can cause systemic problems in the human body, affecting cells and organs throughout the organism. The failures that eventuate from these exposures can compound quickly. In the years immediately after the attacks, those with high external exposures were suffering substantial health problems and dying. Given that they were exposed to a singular intense burst of gamma and neutron radiation, it was relatively straightforward how to calculate their dose and then their trace health outcomes. Tracking internalized radiation is much more problematic.12 While those inside the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obviously exposed to external radiation, those who internalized beta- and alpha-radiationemitting particles were not a clearly defined cohort. Many people who entered one of the cities after the detonation internalized radioactive particles, but so did many people who lived downwind of the epicenters, where the plumes of the mushroom clouds deposited the material they were carry ing. These particles are not distributed evenly, and the levels of radiation that they emit are irregular. Particles may fall to the earth and then be swept by winds and rain so that they are concentrated in some areas and relatively absent from other, nearby areas. Someone may inhale a particle on one side of a street, while their neighbor on the other side of the street may not. This cohort is not easy to study or assess.13 Unlike the cohort that experienced external exposures, where one or two data points could result in dose reconstruction, the cohort that internalized radiation would have first to be assessed as having deposited the particles somewhere in their bodies or not. This would require the testing of each individual with expensive detection equipment that was not available in numbers that could achieve this outcome for researchers at the ABCC. The facts that there was such a large cohort of people exposed to external radiation and that their dose assignment was relatively straightforward, coupled with the structural difficulties of studying the cohort of people who

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Figure 3.1. US Department of Energy & MEXT Radiation Survey Map. Concentric circles radiating from the Daiichi plants (marked X) demarcate officially designated evacuation zones. Gradations of shading indicate the density of radioactive fallout depositions, which streak out irregularly from the plants as the plumes of various explosions drifted. Image produced by MEXT, a Japanese government agency. From Authority, Nuclear Regulation, “Results of Airborne Monitoring by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the US Department of Energy,” May 6, 2011, accessed July 3, 2020, https://radioactivity.nsr.go .jp/en/contents/4000/3180/24 /1304797_0506.pdf.

may have internalized radioactive particles, resulted in the LSS’s tracking only those with external exposures. This protocol has endured for the almost seven decades that the study has been conducted.

Not Seeing the Problems in Fukushima Whenever large groups of people are exposed to radiation, the LSS provides the primary model of how their health risks are assessed. A 2017 article in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine repeated the often-made claim that “the atomic-bomb survivor cohort of the Life Span Study (LSS) is the single most important dataset—the gold standard—for estimating radiation effects in humans.”14 Health physicists frequently use “the gold standard” to describe the value of the LSS in estimating radiation effects. There is little argument that the LSS is a valuable assessment of the impact on human health of external radiation, but the absence of any data related to internalized radiation makes this gold standard inapplicable to such radiation sufferers.15

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Figure 3.2. Radioactive debris and soil decontamination bags near Namie. In the years following the nuclear accident in Fukushima, the small villages near the plant were decontaminated by scraping away topsoil to remove the nuclear fallout. The town of Namie, located only 2.5 miles from the plant, suffered some of the most severe contamination as the radioactive plume wafted northwest, directly into the path of the nuclear evacuees. Copyright Kyle Cleveland.

In Fukushima, the LSS and the Ionising Radiation and Risk of Death from Leukaemia and Lymphoma in Radiation-Monitored Workers (INWORKS) study are powerful tools to help us understand the risks faced by workers at the plants, who spend a great deal of time around sources of high levels of external radiation. However, for those who live far from the melted cores of the plants and those who live where the plumes of the explosions of the first week of the nuclear disaster came down, the primary threat to their health and the health of their families is not that of external radiation but of internalizing radionuclides into their bodies. They live immersed in an ecosystem rich in radiological particles, and those particles will cycle through the ecosystem for as long as they remain radioactive. They can be scooped up and put into plastic bags, but that does not make them not radioactive. Radionuclides like cesium-137 will remain dangerous for over three

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hundred years, by which time they will surely no longer be contained in the ubiquitous black plastic bags we see piled into mountains of waste around Fukushima Prefecture. Even if all those bags are ultimately moved into a long-term storage facility, as is planned, immense amounts of radionuclides are still distributed throughout the forests, streams, and mountain areas of the prefecture where the plumes deposited them. Additionally, the government of Japan has recently declared villages to be “safe” for former residents to return to their abandoned homes.16 The removal of evacuation orders comes after the average gamma radiation levels of a town are reduced to below twenty millisieverts per year. The INWORKS study has established that even at low levels of external radiation such as twenty millisieverts per year (the legally allowed level of exposures for adult nuclear industry workers), there remain heightened risks to public health and specific risks of both leukemia and solid cancers.17

Seeing the Contaminated Forest for the Radioactive Trees The maps of the radiation dangers at Fukushima present two kinds of information about radiation risks in a singular depiction of the risks. First are the concentric circles with the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant at their center. Second are the color-coded splotches and streaks that show where the plumes of the three nuclear plant explosions and the fires deposited their fallout. Concentric circles describe relative distances from a point—in this case, distances from the nuclear plants. People were evacuated based on their distance from the plants. The mandatory evacuation area was within twenty kilometers of the plants, and the suggested evacuation area was with thirty kilometers (a key difference between “mandatory” and “suggested” evacuation is liability). The reason that people had to evacuate from these areas was because of the high levels of gamma radiation coming from the melted cores of the nuclear plants and the high levels where the plumes deposited the largest amounts of fallout. The levels of gamma radiation near the reactors is lethally high, and only in late 2017 were robots able to function in some areas. Humans still cannot enter the buildings that housed the plants. Moving away from the point at the center of these circles will decrease one’s exposure to radiation. The amount of gamma radiation coming from the plants is measurable and constant across the areas at similar distances.

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Hence the use of concentric circles to mark decreasing levels of gamma radiation from the melted cores and from potential risks of additional releases from the plants. The splotches of color marking the levels of radiation from the plumes is irregular, unlike the neat and cleanly measured concentric circles. The colors mark the different levels of radiation from the fallout. They are created based on the gamma radiation from the fallout. However, the primary danger to people living in these areas is not from the gamma radiation but from internalizing individual radionuclides. There is no single source, like the melted cores, but rather untold numbers of individual particles. And once the plume has deposited its particulates and these particles have reached the ground, they begin to move through the ecosystem via the dynamic motion of wind and water. From then on there is no center, no specific source that one must move away from. The dangers are unevenly distributed, and they are constantly changing. The contamination that comes from alpha and beta-radiationemitting particles is unpredictable, irregular, and changes over time. Each particle has a specific period of radioactivity, and during that time period it will move through the ecosystem, being taken up by plants, moved by wind, entering the soil, eaten by animals, and returning to the soil when the animals die. The particles may move outward from the direction of the plants or back toward them. This will continue for centuries. Much like the incongruity of these maps, since the 3.11 tragedy the LSS has been used to claim that the people who live where the plumes deposited fallout face little danger to their health since the “radiation levels” are too low to be significant. This once again overlays information that is accurate for one set of circumstances onto another set. Few of the people who live in the downwind area are being exposed to levels of external gamma radiation similar to the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose health progressions inform the database of the LSS. The information in the LSS is “true,” just not applicable to the dangers faced by most of the people living with radiation in Fukushima. Just as living beyond the evacuation zones has not spared people from exposures to radiation, measuring gamma radiation alone with Geiger counters placed five or ten feet in the air does not accurately reflect the risks to the people passing by and reading the numbers on the LED screens attached to the Geiger counters. The risks to people living in Fukushima are very similar to the risks of people who live downwind from nuclear weapons testing or production sites. People in these communities have not often faced high levels of external

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gamma radiation. The threats to their health have come from the distribution of large amounts of radionuclides that have been deposited in their towns and on their food supplies, usually from the fallout from nuclear weapon detonations but also from routine and unplanned releases from production sites—such as nuclear power plants used for the production of plutonium. Their plight has not received much attention in the West, as the people living in these areas are frequently members of politically marginalized communities who live in colonial or postcolonial societies.18 The claims of adverse effects to their health of many people living in such communities have been dismissed, and rarely have the residents even been told that the gamma levels are too low to be dangerous. For those in developed countries, such as people living downwind from the Nevada Test Site and the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State, any public discussion of the health impacts of radiation in the communities did evoke an explanation that the LSS—the gold standard study of the health effects of radiation exposures—indicated that their health problems could not have come from radiation. There has been pushback in these communities, and the US government does now recognize that living in the areas where the plumes of the fallout clouds dispersed radionuclides did, in fact, impact the health of those downwind. However, it took decades to get that admission, which is still limited to a very small group of claimants. There is a chance that the exposure of such a large cohort of people to a radiologically contaminated environment in a modern, developed nation like Japan might lead to a more holistic understanding of the health risks of internalized radiation. In the past, people living in such environments had little access to information and little political power. However, there has been a very large effort to dismiss the concerns of the people of Fukushima as irrational, since they do not conform to the outcomes of the LSS. The need for understanding the risks of radiation strictly through the prism of the LSS has repeatedly been stressed to those who question the safety of their communities, and many who have spoken out against these understandings have been labeled as irrational and uninformed. Mothers who have expressed concerns about the health of their children have been dismissed as suffering from “radiophobia,” an irrational fear of radiation, and even blamed for producing their own health problems because of their anxieties.19 This could be, in part, because of the ongoing difficulties of quantifying the risks of internalized radiation, but is also likely to be because of

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the ongoing need to manage public perceptions of risk in communities who live in contaminated environments. Shizuyo Sutou of the School of Pharmacy of Shujitsu University in Okayama, Japan, offers this standard advice in “A Message to Fukushima: Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself.” He used the LSS to show his readers that there is no danger to people living in Fukushima from radiation, and that their problems are caused by incorrect understanding, or “fear itself.” He concludes his study by saying: “When people return to the evacuation zones in Fukushima now and in the future, they will be exposed to such low radiation doses as to cause no physical effects. The most threatening public health issue is the adverse effect on mental health caused by undue fear of radiation.”20 Sutuo bases his assessments on the risk models developed from the LSS about the health risks of very low levels of gamma radiation to human beings. Nowhere in his study does he mention the dangers of internal radiation exposures, the primary threat to people living in areas such as Fukushima where plumes have deposited large amounts of radionuclides across a large area. While his work presents an analytical outcome from very valid research of the LSS, it also is aligned with a public management strategy that has long been employed to calm people living with radiation: relax, your situation does not resemble the situation of the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so you have nothing to worry about.

Conclusion: The Broken Maps of Fukushima The maps of Fukushima are broken. These broken maps, which mingle the dangers of both external and internal radiation in one graphic, present the idea that the dangers from radiation near Fukushima are fixed and knowable. This is not true. Massive amounts of radionuclides have been deposited across large areas of Fukushima, and they will now fluctuate within the dynamics of that ecosystem for as long as each particle remains radioactive. Most of them will be hard to trace and difficult to control. The dangers are uncertain, and the particles can move around—just like the people. This puts the health of those living there is a very different relationship to the risks. To fix the maps, we need to fix the knowledge chain. Radiation is very difficult to understand, and that difficulty allows disinformation such as citing the LSS to dismiss worries about radioactive particles in the local ecosystem

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and the dangers of internalized radiation when they lecture to people who must live with these dangers, and who dismiss the concerns of those people as a result of their ignorance of the scientific facts. Clear information about internalized radiation and how these dangers persist in their communities is essential for most people having to live with the radiation scattered by TEPCO’s meltdowns, so they can map their own paths to a future of their choosing. No one should insist that they live with higher levels of radiation by changing their ideas to the “correct understanding.”

CHAPTER 4

Has Japan Learned a Lesson from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident? Tatsujiro Suzuki

March 11, 2011, became a day to remember for all Japanese citizens, especially for those associated with nuclear energy. The Tokyo Electric Power Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident was a turning point for Japan’s nuclear energy and overall energy policy. Even years after the earthquake, the disaster has not finished its work. As of early 2020, about 41,000 evacuated residents of Fukushima Prefecture were still living in temporary housing, uncertain when they could return to their hometowns. Conditions at the Fukushima power stations have improved, but it will take more than forty years to remove melted fuel debris from the site and then decommission the plant. Although the majority of the public seems to favor phasing out the use of nuclear energy, the Japanese government continues to maintain its commitment to nuclear power. As a result, the country has divided into people who hold “pro” or “anti” positions on nuclear energy. Polarized policy debates have resulted in unproductive discussions. Regardless of nuclear energy’s future in Japan, the issues that need to be addressed must be clarified. By focusing on these issues and through more productive policy discussion, public consensus may emerge on the future of nuclear energy in Japan.

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Loss of Public Trust Public opinion on nuclear power in Japan has changed dramatically since the Fukushima accident in 2011. Perhaps the most obvious reason is lack of trust, especially of the government but also of the nuclear industry and nuclear experts. This lack underpins the challenges facing Japan’s nuclear industry since the Fukushima disaster, and it is a fundamental problem. According to the public polling done by the Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization (JAERO) in 2010, 49.1  percent of the public believed that it was necessary to use nuclear power. That percentage dropped to 15.7 percent right after the accident and then plummeted to 9.8 percent in 2017. The percentage of those distrusting experts and industry associated with nuclear power rose from 8.9 percent in 2010 to 30.7 percent in 2011. Six years later, 30.2 percent of Japanese citizens expressed distrust of experts and industry associated with nuclear power. The public has lost faith in nuclear safety regulation as well. The establishment of a new independent Nuclear Regulation Authority in 2012 and new tougher regulatory standards have failed to revive that faith. According to the same JAERO polling in 2017, only 1.9 percent of the public trusted the government and 1.2  percent trusted the nuclear industry in 2016. Furthermore, 20.5 percent distrusted the government in 2017 and 22.0 percent distrusted the nuclear industry in 2016. Survey respondents gave several reasons for their distrust: lack of information disclosure (68.3 reported this for the nuclear industry 68.3%, and 62.5 percent reported it for the government), insufficient preparation and management for safety (60.4  percent and 54.1 percent, respectively), and not speaking honestly (59.8 percent and 59.2 percent, respectively). As a result, the share of the public who think that use of nuclear power should be increased or even maintained dropped to 10.1 percent in 2014 and 9.6 percent in 2018. Understandably, the share who are in favor of phasing out or abolishing the use of nuclear power immediately had increased to 66.7  percent by 2018.1 JAERO is a pronuclear organization, and thus the changes it reported are particularly striking. In the latest polling undertaken by Mainichi Shimbun in March  2018, the proportion of the public opposed to restarting existing reactors had increased to 55 percent, while the proportion of the public who supported restarting existing reactors stood at only 26  percent.2 This loss of trust is the most serious challenge that nuclear policy makers and the nuclear industry

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now face in Japan. Even many years after the accident, the distrust has yet to be addressed adequately, and it continues to grow.

The Energy Policy of Japan after 3.11: Lost Directions and Polarized Debate The Fukushima accident shook the government energy policy. It initiated fundamental changes in national energy policy-making processes. Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced plans to review that policy “from scratch” and establish new policy-making processes to encourage a “national public debate” on nuclear energy.3 The government instituted a new cabinet-level Council on Energy and Environment and promoted public participation in policy-making processes. One result was the “Innovative Energy and Environmental Strategy,” issued in September 2012. It incorporated public opinion poll results showing that the majority of the public was in favor of “phasing out nuclear power.” The new strategy aimed at doing so by the end of the 2030s and forbade construction of new nuclear power plants.4 But the government of the newly elected prime minister, Shinzo Abe, abolished the previous government’s nuclear phase-out policy. On April 11, 2014, the cabinet adopted a new Strategic Energy Plan.5 This plan stated that the government will decrease its dependence on nuclear energy as much as possible but maintained that the nation should use nuclear power as an important base-load energy source. This meant that the government intended to use nuclear energy as the power source to meet the fundamental needs of energy customers. Such a plan would result in power plants operating twenty-four hours per day without changing their output. The government failed to specify how much energy nuclear power would have to provide. As a result, its dual policy goals (that of decreasing dependence on nuclear power as much as possible and that of use nuclear power as a base-load energy source) send mixed signals to the public and energy market. Since then, the debate over nuclear energy—especially the restarting of existing reactors—has been polarized as the government pushed its pronuclear stance while the public still favored the eventual phase-out of nuclear energy. After the Fukushima accident, the utilities shut down existing reactors one by one for regular maintenance purposes. This resulted in all nuclear plants in Japan being shut down by September 2013. In one sense, the nation

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achieved a nuclear phase-out in just two and a half years. In July 2013, new regulatory standards were introduced, and if utilities want to restart the existing reactors, they must meet the new standards. As of the end of July 2019, fifteen reactors had obtained licenses to restart reactors, while the applications of eleven reactors, including one under construction, were under review. However, of the fifteen reactors that had received the licenses, only seven were operating as of 2020. The reason for this gap is the social and political difficulties that utilities face in restarting the reactors. The political process involved in restarting existing reactors is confusing. Technically, getting approval to do so from the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) is sufficient, but it is not politically sufficient. Utilities must get local governments’ approval under a so-called safety agreement, which is an agreement between local governments and utilities that is not legally binding. Most often, evacuation issues are the major hurdle in getting a safety agreement. Not a requirement of the NRA licensing process, evacuation plans become messy items since no one is certain who should validate the plans made by utility companies. Lawsuits constitute another challenge to utilities and government agencies when it comes to nuclear safety. After the Fukushima accident, it is no longer assumed that local residents and nuclear power opponents will lose their cases. On December  13, 2017, Hiroshima’s high court granted the injunction requested by the residents of Hiroshima and opponents of nuclear energy that prevented the operation of the Ikata number three and number four reactors. This is the first time that the high court granted such an injunction.6 On July 3, 2018, the Japanese government adopted the new Strategic Energy Plan of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) as a cabinet decision.7 Although the new plan emphasizes renewable energy and offers new statements on plutonium stockpiles, it follows the 2014 plan almost completely. It still defines nuclear power as an important base-load energy source, while also aiming to reduce dependency on nuclear power as much as possible. Unfortunately, because of growing distrust and such polarized debate, there is little substantial discussion of four major policy issues to be resolved, regardless of the future of nuclear power: (1) decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the reconstruction of contaminated areas, and restoring the lives of evacuated citizens; (2) the nuclear fuel cycle and plutonium stockpile management; (3) high-level nuclear waste disposal; and (4) the decision-making process and the public trust. These four issues are vital

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because they are essential to restoring public trust and will not disappear even if all nuclear plants were shut down, or if they started operating tomorrow.

Decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the Reconstruction of the Contaminated Areas, and Restoring the Lives of Evacuated Citizens On September  26, 2017, the Inter-Ministerial Council for Contaminated Water and Decommissioning Issues published an updated version of the “Mid-and-Long-Term Roadmap Towards the Decommissioning of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.”8 The report again delayed the first phase (removing the spent fuel from storage pools of reactor numbers 1–3) for more than three years, and it showed more willingness to use flexible approaches that emphasized risk reduction. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the owner and operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, is responsible for decommissioning the plant. It has struggled with managing such a huge and steadily increasing amount of contaminated water, some of which leaks into the sea. Contaminated water is just one of the unprecedented challenges that TEPCO and METI face. The mid- to long-term road map estimates that it will take at least thirty to forty years to finish the decommissioning. The first stage is to remove the spent fuel, which is estimated to take 2–3 years. The second stage is to remove the melted core debris from reactor numbers 1–3 (estimated to take at least 10 years), and the third and final stage is to decontaminate the whole plant (estimated to take 30–40 years). The removal of spent fuel (1,331 spent fuel assemblies and 202 fuel assemblies that had not been irradiated) from the storage pool of reactor number 4 completed on December 22, 2014. According to the road map, removal of spent fuel from the other three reactors (numbers 1–3) can be completed at the earliest by 2023. The most difficult task is the removal of melted core debris from the three reactors. Since it is impossible for any person to access the reactor buildings due to high radiation levels, advanced robots have been developed to investigate and obtain more information. While the robots have gathered useful information on the debris and the reactor vessels, they have not been able to do any more. Because it will be extremely difficult to contain water leaks from the reactor vessels, TEPCO and METI are considering a partial submersion method instead of a full submersion method. Still, little information has

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been obtained on the debris, and it is fair to say that no one is sure that the task of debris removal will be completed within the planned timeframe. Concerns remain about the lack of transparency and independent oversight of the whole decommissioning process. To maximize transparency, the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) recommended that the government establish an independent organization with overseas experts as members to assess and audit the entire process.9 As of early 2020, the government had yet to establish this independent organization. One good example of the lack of transparency was the selection of the frozen-wall method to address underground water problems. On September 7, 2013, Prime Minister Abe made a speech at the 125th session of the International Olympic Committee in which he stressed that the situation in Fukushima was “under control” and announced that the government would take more responsibility for addressing problems related to contaminated water.10 As a result, the government also established the Inter-Ministerial Council for Contaminated Water and Decommissioning Issues, mentioned above, although the government stated TEPCO is primarily responsible for management of decommissioning process. However, it is unclear why the government selected the frozen-wall method. Many underground water experts have raised doubts about its effectiveness, because this technology is often used for small-scale underground water treatments but has never been used for such large-scale operations. Experts have also suggested that simpler and cheaper alternative technologies are available. The selection was made in a closed meeting without full disclosure of the selection process.11 The NRA gave a license to TEPCO to start operation of the frozen wall on August 15, 2017, but the technology’s effectiveness is still unclear. There is also a lack of transparency regarding the total costs of decommissioning. On December 20, 2016, the METI’s Committee for Reforming Tokyo Electric Power and Overcoming 1F Challenges (TEPCO Committee) published a new cost estimate for decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi, which included compensation and decontamination of lands. The total cost jumped from a previous estimate of 11 trillion yen to 22 trillion yen.12 The foundations for the estimate seem weak. An independent economic think tank, the Japan Center for Economic Research estimated the cost to be 35–80 trillion yen. The center suggested that METI’s estimates had failed to include the cost of the final disposal of the waste coming from the decommissioning and decontamination.13 METI admitted this but decided that part of the total cost would be paid by other power producers and taxpayers.14

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These examples illustrate the need for independent oversight of the Fukushima decommissioning process. Lack of independent oversight has led to lack of transparency, which in turn has increased mistrust among stakeholders—as shown in the cases of contaminated water and the total cost estimate. The government designated three different levels of evacuated zones for decontamination and reconstruction: (1) the “Non-Return Zone,” in which the average radiation level in the area is 50 mSv per year or above); (2) the “Preparation for Return Zone” (below 50 mSv per year and 20 mSv per year or above); and (3) the “Possible to Return Zone” (below 20 mSv per year).15 Due to reductions in the radiation levels in zones in the second and third levels, the government announced that people could return to most of the relevant villages and towns after April 2017. However, the level of 20 mSv per year has been a source of public debate, as it is much higher than the level of 5 mSv per year—which was the criteria for Chernobyl to allow evacuees to return, five years after the accident. Returning to hometowns is connected to compensation issues. Under the current rule, once a town ceases to be considered an evacuated zone, its citizens lose their eligibility for compensation. As of early 2020, the total compensation amount had risen to 9.3 trillion yen, and it is still growing.16

The Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Plutonium Stockpile Management Even before the Fukushima accident, utilities and government agencies had focused upon issues related to the accumulating spent fuel at nuclear power plants. The disasters compelled these entities to reconsider their approaches. The basic policy for managing spent fuel in Japan has been (and still is) reprocessing and recycling plutonium for energy use. Since plutonium can also be used to manufacture nuclear bombs, the JAEC has had a “no plutonium surplus” policy since 1991. It introduced new, stronger guidelines to improve its transparency in 2003, when the Rokkasho commercial reprocessing plant was expected to start operation.17 According to the guidelines, before a utility reprocesses and recovers plutonium, it must submit a “plutonium usage plan” annually. In short, the intent is to ensure that Japan will not possess plutonium without plans for its use. In reality, implementation of the plutonium usage program (recycling plutonium as a mixed-oxide fuel for use in existing reactors and fast-breeder

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Table 4.1. Japan’s Stock of Separated Plutonium 2018 (kg) Stock in Japan Reprocessing plants MOX fuel plant Stored at reactors Subtotal (Pu fissile) Stock in Europe United Kingdom France Subtotal (Pu fissile) Total (Pu fissile)

3,603 3,919 1,305 9,022 (6,073) 21,205 15,460 36,666 (24,212) 45,688 (30,285)*

2017 (kg) 3,604 3,854 2,829 10,546 (7,050) 21,232 15,486 36,718 (24,265) 47,264 (31,315)

Notes: Fissile plutonium (“Pu fissile”—that is, Pu 239 and Pu 241) typically contains about 60 percent plutonium, which includes nonfissile isotopes of plutonium (Pu 240 and Pu 242). MOX is mixed oxide. The table is based on Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2019. The figures are rounded, so the total does not necessarily equal to the sum of each figure.

reactors in the future) has been delayed significantly. As a result, as of the end of 2018, Japan possessed 45.7 tons of separated plutonium (9.0 tons in Japan, and 36.7 tons in France and the United Kingdom, where Japan had commercial reprocessing contracts) (see Table 4.1).18 The result is the largest stockpile among states that do not have nuclear weapons, and it could increase further if the Rokkasho reprocessing plant starts operations.19 This plutonium stockpile has raised international concern. In 2016, John Wolfsthal, then senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council, expressed his worry about Japan’s plutonium stockpile and its reprocessing policy in an interview: “There is no question that plutonium recycling in Japan has been expensive. That is a challenging future for Japan. If Japan were to change course, they would find the United States to be supportive. . . . The upcoming renewal in 2018 of a bilateral nuclear agreement with Japan has the potential to become a very controversial issue. . . . If Japan keeps recycling plutonium, what is to stop other countries from thinking the exact same thing?”20 Under the 1988 US-Japan bilateral nuclear energy cooperation agreement, Japan received a thirty-year “programmatic prior consent” on reprocessing. In contrast to the situation with a typical bilateral agreement, Japan does not need prior consent for case-by-case reprocessing. This was a special privilege, as only the European Atomic Energy Community and Japan have such special arrangements. Extended without any amendment in July 2018,

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the agreement could be cancelled if either party notified the other party six months in advance. Concerns over reprocessing programs are also spreading throughout northeast Asia. The government of South Korea, during bilateral negotiations with the United States, insisted that it has a sovereign right to reprocessing as Japan does. China now plans to build a commercial reprocessing plant, imported from France, while criticizing Japan for holding a large plutonium stockpile. The stockpile has become a regional security issue and needs to be addressed.21 To reduce such concerns and minimize nuclear proliferation and security risks, the new strategic energy plan mentions that Japan for the first time aims to “reduce its plutonium stockpile.”22 Until then, the government promises only that Japan will not own plutonium without specific plans to use it for peaceful purposes. The JAEC also issued a new policy on plutonium management on July 31, 2018, in which it declared that Japan will reduce its current stockpile.23 Although such new policies can be positive steps, they may not be enough. In 2017, experts from the United States and Japan who participated in the International Conference on Plutonium Policy made important policy recommendations. They asked that joint commissions be formed in the context of the US-Japan Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with plans to: (1) review the issue of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, in particular with regard to its implications for regional and international security; (2) analyze ways of storing Japan’s existing separated plutonium safely and securely, while mitigating the regional and international concerns—possibly by putting the plutonium in the custody of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); and (3) exchange information on and analyses of plutonium disposition.24 These are worthy recommendations to consider, especially now that the denuclearization of North Korea has become a major policy issue in northeast Asia and the US-Japan agreement has been extended without any specific timeframe. It is, therefore, important for the US and Japan to agree on how to manage the latter’s plutonium stockpile.

High-Level Nuclear Waste Disposal Japanese officials consider spent fuel to be a resource, not waste. Under the Japanese Law on Final Disposal of Specified Radioactive Waste (which is the

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law governing the geologic disposal of radioactive waste), the “Specified Waste” is defined as the waste from reprocessing plants—that is, vitrified waste and transuranic waste. It does not include spent fuel. Like many other countries, Japan has not found a final repository site for high-level radioactive waste (HLW). Since the passing of the law in 2000 and the establishment of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization as the institution chiefly responsible for final disposal of the waste, all efforts to find even a single candidate site for possible investigation have failed. Japan waited for local communities to volunteer as candidates, but only one town (Toyo-town) has done so. Later, the town withdrew its offer, due to strong public opposition. In 2010, the JAEC issued a request to the Science Council of Japan (SCJ) for advice on how to improve public communication about HLW and achieve a possible breakthrough. On September 11, 2012, the SCJ published its answers to the JAEC’s request in a report. That report recommended “fundamental reform” of Japan’s HLW waste disposal policy. In particular, one important recommendation was using “(long term) temporary storage” instead of going directly to “geological disposal.”25 The JAEC responded with its own policy statement on December  18, 2012. It agreed with the SCJ that the current HLW disposal program needed to be reviewed with fresh eyes. The JAEC also agreed with the SCJ that constant review of the program is necessary and that disposal programs should clearly integrate “retrievability” and “reversibility.” Furthermore, it recommended that the government “establish an independent and functionally effective third party organization to provide suitable advice to the government and related parties in time.”26 METI established two working groups to review the HLW disposal program. One group looked at the whole process and all of the programs, including public participation, while the other reviewed scientific knowledge on HLW disposal in Japan, especially after 3.11. Based on the former groups’ findings, the Japanese government published a new Basic Policy for HLW Disposal in May 2015,27 which included recommendations that the government publish a list of “appropriate candidate sites” based on scientific study, adopt the ideas of “flexibility” and “retrievability,” and ask the JAEC to review METI’s program. On April 14, 2017, METI published its “Scientific Map for HLW Disposal,” which shows three different categories of sites depending on their suitability for the final disposal of HLW.28 The Nuclear Waste Management Organization initiated a public consultation process based on this map, but the future of the disposal program is still uncertain.

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As was the case with other primary problems, public trust stands as a fundamental issue. The SCJ recently published a report to follow its 2012 report in 2015. In the new report, it reemphasized the importance of a “consensus building process” for HLW disposal and proposed the creation of a “national people’s conference on radioactive waste.”29 It also proposed using the period established by the “temporary storage” (not “interim storage,” which assumes that the decision on final HLW disposal has been made) for gaining national consensus. In addition, the “review by an independent organization” is still lacking, as the JAEC is not an independent organization.

The Decision-Making Process and the Public Trust Last, and connected to all of the other problems, is restoring public trust— a paramount issue. As noted above, the loss of public trust has had the biggest impact since the Fukushima accident on nuclear energy policy in Japan. As a member of the JAEC, I learned a hard lesson on this issue. As chairperson of the JAEC’s Subcommittee on Nuclear Power and Nuclear Fuel Cycle Technologies, I tried to design a fair and transparent decision-making process. The public and media were welcome to all of the subcommittee’s meetings, and all documents used in the meetings can be found on its website. However, reports circulated that the JAEC had “secret meetings” behind the scenes to “manipulate” the contents of the report.30 The JAEC explained that the meetings were attended by secretariat staff members to prepare for the public meetings, but then the public discovered that officials from private utilities had also attended these meetings.31 In fact, key staff members from the JAEC secretariat were from nuclear utilities and vendors, and they often shared information with the nuclear industry. The JAEC disclosed all documents used in the internal meetings. JAEC dismissed its staff members who had previously worked in the nuclear industry. The JAEC also issued a series of new rules to make the decision-making process more transparent.32 Later, an independent investigation team was established, and it found that the JAEC’s decision-making process should be modified to be “fair and transparent.”33 It was a hard lesson for me and the JAEC. As a result, the JAEC was later transformed into a smaller and weaker policy institution. Based on these experiences, the JAEC issued a policy statement on this issue on December 25, 2012, listing four basic principles for restoring public confidence:

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Accountability First, it is important to reveal the mission of individuals/organizations tackling such challenges to public interests, for what, why, and how they do it. In other words, such individuals/organizations should be aware of taking actions for the public, on the grounds of awareness, planning and promoting actions, seeking solutions to challenges, the results achieved and how to handle risk management commitment. On this basis, they should continuously explain to the public that commitment is a proper action. Correct Information Disclosure Secondly, it is important to remember that these explanations should be provided based on sufficient and correct information to the public on a timely basis. For example, in discussing a facility’s actions for nuclear power safety, we should carefully explain the nature of the threat facing a facility, its target, and how it intends to reach the target. In doing so, explaining using comparisons with other facilities is acceptable but must be done carefully. This is because essentially, evaluations should be made in terms of all factors, including costs, environmental impacts (EI), and stability and comparison based on one point alone may be improper, even if accurate. However, we should also note that speed is sometimes more important than accuracy. In that case, we should immediately provide details of what has happened and why, and what would happen in the future while clarifying some uncertainties in such information. Transparency/Fairness and Public Involvement in Decision Process Thirdly, it is important to design a fair decision-making process, as the basis for various administrative decisions, and while making the process open, to provide opportunities for public participation in the process. In this case, the parties concerned should deeply appreciate that securing transparency means the public can view the decision-making process related to their interests, access information related to their interests, and make remarks on the same. Based on this acknowledgment, the greater the public interest in a decision, the more carefully we should notify the public at the earliest possible stage before making it. We should strive to give the public opportunities to express their views. JAEC feels remorse for the lack of compassion at this point in the process of preparing documents carried out by the Subcommittee on

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Nuclear Power/Nuclear Fuel Cycle Technology and continues to reform its operations based on verification results. Further, administrative bodies should establish a verifiable decision-making process, namely, from the creation of administrative documents, hearing from experts, interested parties and the public, to finally making decisions. Easy to Understand Explanations Fourth, public explanations should be clear and plain, with accuracy a prerequisite. It is often noted that if the public cannot understand information released, it cannot be considered transparent, even if we believe transparency is attained in doing so. It is not easy to ensure material is both accurate and comprehensible, but court decisions have long since been written in normal Japanese. Administrative bodies must not forget to check the processes of creating documents and preparing explanations from this perspective, continuously educating and training themselves in this area.34

Lack of Independent Oversight by a Third Party The need for independent oversight seems to be the most important lesson learned from the Fukushima accident. When I was a commissioner, the JAEC emphasized the importance of having independent oversight by a third party. The proposal to establish such an independent oversight organization was made in the context of the decommissioning process of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, the decision-making process about the final disposal of radioactive waste, and the assessment of nuclear fuel cycle and research and development programs. In all these cases, oversight has been done only by the responsible government agencies or an advisory council under the agencies. They pretend to be a third party but in reality are not at all. I believe it is now essential for the government to set up such an independent oversight organization to assess nuclear policy in Japan.

Conclusion Nuclear energy policy after 3.11 needs to be changed to reflect lessons learned from the Fukushima accident and the different priorities and tasks required

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after the accident, which are the decommissioning of the Fukushima site and restoring the lives and livelihoods for people in Fukushima and other affected areas; enhancing safety and security, spent fuel management, plutonium stockpile management, waste disposal, and human resource development; and—most of all—restoring public trust. These are necessary changes regardless of the future direction of nuclear energy in Japan. In particular, the establishment of an independent and trustworthy organization to provide objective information and conduct comprehensive reviews and assessments of nuclear energy policy is indispensable for policy reform in Japan.

CHAPTER 5

The Developmental State and Nuclear Power in Japan Jeff Kingston

This chapter examines the role of the developmental state in Japan’s continued investment in nuclear energy and the resilience of key institutional actors despite adverse headwinds. Japan’s fleet of nuclear reactors—there were fifty-four at the time of the Fukushima accident in 2011—were all built on the watch of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has dominated Japanese politics since 1955. At the time of the three reactor meltdowns in 2011, nuclear energy was generating 30 percent of Japan’s electricity, but by May 2012 all reactors had been idled for safety checks, and public opinion was strongly opposed to restarting them and in favor of phasing out the use of nuclear energy. Although twenty-seven reactors are shutdown, it is remarkable that by 2020 two reactors were under construction, nine reactors were back online, and eighteen applications for resumption of operations were under review.1 Although the official target of generating 20–22  percent of electricity from nuclear reactors by 2030 may not be achieved, these developments suggest a significant reversal of fortunes. I argue that this comeback owes much to the machinations of the nuclear village—a term used for the institutions of the developmental state relevant to the national energy strategy that include the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI); the Keidanren, a leading business lobbying group; the LDP; utilities; their lenders and investors in the financial sector; and conservative media groups.2 The LDP, governmental bureaucracy, and big business constitute the key players in Japan’s developmental state. Nuclear energy was championed by the

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Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), becoming in the 1970s a key component of Japan’s national energy strategy to reduce reliance on imported fuels. The oil shocks of the 1970s that were engineered by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries led to a quadrupling of oil prices that gave urgency to this policy initiative, one that was deemed essential to risk management. At MITI’s behest, Japan’s utilities invested heavily in nuclear energy, and domestic producers established ties with leading international vendors: Hitachi with General Electric, Toshiba with Westinghouse, and Mitsubishi with Areva. This placed Japan at the nexus of the international nuclear-industrial complex. Financial institutions provided funding, knowing that government backing virtually guaranteed that debts would be paid. Moreover, the government invested heavily in helping utilities ramp up capacity and in securing sites for nuclear plants.3 Although beyond the scope of the current chapter, this avid embrace of nuclear power is all the more remarkable for a nation with a strong nuclear allergy owing to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.4 Japan’s developmental state was established in the Meiji era (1868–1911) under the slogan “ fukoku kyohei” (enrich the country, strengthen the military). This agenda involved state-sponsored industrialization to overcome Japan’s relative backwardness by jump-starting an industrial revolution and promoting a wider, rapid modernization deemed essential to fend off Western imperial powers and gain parity with them.5 In doing so, the government rejected the laissez-faire policies of Adam Smith in favor of the neo-mercantilist policies of Friedrich List that advocated extensive state intervention to sponsor targeted sectors and manage market forces.6 In the Meiji era the state invested heavily in establishing model factories, including the hiring of foreign experts adept in the new technologies—and once those experts got the factories up and running, the state quickly privatized them. This process forged close ties between bureaucrats and businessmen, featuring extensive publicand private-sector cooperation that persists today.7 In wartime Japan (1931–45), to maximize output to meet military needs, the government expanded its control of the economy. This so-called 1940 system endowed bureaucrats with extensive discretionary powers to secure and allocate resources and to set production targets and priorities in a hybrid government-managed capitalist system that drew on private-sector efficiencies.8 During the US occupation of Japan after World War II (1945–52), this system was revived. When the Americans first arrived in 1945, they were eager to punish and reinvent Japan, but with the onset of the Cold War in

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1947, Washington’s priorities shifted. It became imperative to promote Japan’s rapid recovery. This so-called reverse course involved an extraordinary fencemending with Japan’s wartime conservative elite, as they were seen to be the officials and politicians who could get things done.9 Japan was the designated showcase of the superiority of capitalism over communism and the United States over the Soviet Union, so those who had sustained a long war effort despite considerable handicaps were rehabilitated to help the United States win the Cold War: the developmental state was resurrected by the reverse course. These elites lobbied the Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP), the occupation government under General Douglas MacArthur, to refrain from taking punitive actions targeting the family-owned conglomerates (zaibatsu) that dominated the Japanese economy. In addition, these conglomerates called on their corporate contacts in the United States to lobby the US Congress to pressure SCAP to back off. Thus, the planned zaibatsu busting shifted toward reorganization of these conglomerates into bank-centered keiretsu run by professional managers rather than family scions. In this way, the developmental state was modernized under the aegis of the United States, which also helped boost the prospects for Japan’s successful recovery by opening its markets and facilitating access to US technologies at bargain prices.10 There has been extensive debate regarding the role of the developmental state in East Asian economies, and to what extent that role has been decisive, effective, exaggerated, or tangential.11 In the case of nuclear power in Japan, I argue that the developmental state has played a decisive role. The developmental state relies on extensive intervention in the economy, requiring sufficient concentration of government power and capacity to orchestrate and realize explicit development objectives in a system of private-public collaboration in a hybrid capitalist economy where market forces are managed to the advantage of domestic producers. Pilot agents like MITI guided industry and skewed market forces in pursuit of specific agendas. As Hironori Sasada further argues, Japan’s developmental state evolves to ensure the realization of specific policies and outcomes.12 Institutional resilience and adaptation explain the evident persistence of Japan’s coordinated market economy. Expectations that Asia’s economic crises in 1998 or 2008 had irreparably tarnished the developmental state model and augured its demise have proven premature.13 Rather than converging toward the Anglo-American model, the model has shown a significant degree of institutional stickiness or path dependency signaling that the developmental state remains in business. Indeed, the sense of American decline has gained momentum since the 2008 financial crisis,

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while China’s rapid rise has reinforced perceptions about the relative strengths of state capitalism vis-à-vis neoliberalism. In Japan, stakeholders still rally around specific developmental state agendas and cooperate to ensure that they are realized. The nuclear village is one such grouping that focuses on promoting national energy security, the essential foundation of a modern economy. This issue resonates with widespread anxieties regarding Japan’s dependence on imported energy and the possible disruption of supplies, as happened during the Pacific War (1941–45) when the United States imposed sanctions. This vulnerability is a powerful argument in the corridors of power where energy policy is debated and decided. Although the shock of the Fukushima reactor meltdowns and subsequent revelations breached the moat surrounding the nuclear village by exposing dubious machinations, implausibly optimistic estimates of electricity-generating costs, and the questionable logic of operating nuclear plants in such a seismically active archipelago, institutional inertia concerning energy security has provided the basis for a limited nuclear revival. Obstacles remain to achieving the 2030 goal of effectively remainstreaming nuclear energy, but the nuclear village’s renewed momentum renders plausible what was unthinkable in 2012 when the nation witnessed massive antinuclear demonstrations—the largest since the turbulent 1960s.

Renaissance? There were good reasons to expect that Japan would reconsider the use of nuclear energy, but instead the nuclear village has weathered the storm and is mounting a significant comeback. Following the 2012 publication of three investigations into the Fukushima nuclear accident, the public favored phasing out nuclear energy, but this has not happened. As Brian Woodall explains, “much of what is puzzling about Japanese energy policymaking derives from institutional hangover, structural rigidities, and path dependence that are byproducts of a ‘developmental state’ approach to industrialization.”14 The inclusion of nuclear energy in the 2014 national energy plan with a stated target of 20–22  percent of Japan’s electricity-generating capacity by 2030 marked the beginning of the nuclear renaissance. This was affirmed in the 2018 national energy plan. Reinstating nuclear energy as a key component of the nation’s energy strategy overcame significant impediments, including strong public opposition, judicial setbacks, the staggering costs of

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the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of Fukushima, and the steep price of upgrading safety for an aging fleet of reactors. The nuclear village is a virtual village of the like-minded focused on the imperatives of promoting nuclear energy. This Japan, Inc., system is characterized by cozy and collusive relations between the government and private sector that prioritize the interests of producers over those of consumers.15 This bias is especially prominent when it comes to nuclear energy, where the public interest and opinion has been held hostage to the financial and political interests of the nuclear-industrial complex. In the corridors of power where energy policy is crafted, the fix is in because the nuclear village controls the commanding heights. Its relatively successful damage control is an object lesson in power politics because nuclear power is commercially unviable with unanswered questions about waste disposal.16 As Japan’s nuclear sector grew over the decades, so did the nuclear village’s power and influence.17 There has been a proliferation of vested interests in nuclear power that benefit from its expansion. The nuclear village is not monolithic in terms of policy, and there are disagreements among members on various issues that are bitterly contested. However, these are the squabbles of an insular community where cooperation and reciprocity prevail. Advocates share a common mentality and sensibilities about nuclear energy, and that means ostracizing naysayers and critics and denying them the access and benefits that “members” enjoy.18 Researchers who question the safety, reliability, economic logic of and need for nuclear power do not get grants and are denied promotions. Journalists who criticize the nuclear village are denied access and other perks, while politicians who seek contributions and media companies eager for a slice of the utilities’ massive advertising budgets trim their sails accordingly. These institutions enjoy considerable advantages in terms of energy policy making. The nuclear village has played a crucial role in managing the crisis after the Fukushima accident, including damning revelations about lax safety practices, inadequate worker training, and poor evacuation planning and the inescapable conclusion that the three reactor meltdowns were due to human error and woeful risk management. The nuclear village’s resilience is manifested in the restarting of nine reactors as of 2020. This reversal of fortunes illustrates path dependency and is consistent with expectations regarding oligopolistic institutions such as utilities.19 However, to reach the goal in the 2014 national energy plan of generating one-fifth of Japan’s electricity from nuclear energy by 2030, more than twenty more reactors will have to go back online. Achieving this goal

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would signal a remarkable nuclear renaissance, but there are numerous obstacles—including the relatively high cost of nuclear energy, the skyrocketing costs of decommissioning Fukushima’s stricken reactors, concerns about extending the operating licenses beyond forty years, the absence of a nuclear waste disposal plan, and significant prospects for both the further expansion of renewable energy and robust public opposition. There is a disconnect between public opinion and the ongoing revival of nuclear power, but the nuclear village deems the national energy strategy too important to leave it up to ordinary citizens. Most Japanese want to pull the plug on nuclear energy due to safety concerns. In 2015, a poll conducted by the pronuclear Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization found that 12 percent of respondents favored maintaining or increasing Japan’s nuclear energy output, while 63  percent wanted to end the use of nuclear power in Japan, either by phasing it out (48 percent) or immediately pulling the plug (15 percent).20 An Asahi Shimbun poll found that 77 percent of respondents favored phasing out nuclear energy, while only 14  percent opposed such a policy.21 Restarting nuclear reactors were opposed by 59  percent, while just 28 percent supported doing so. The spiraling costs of decommissioning the Fukushima reactors also contribute to popular opposition, but the public is excluded from deliberations over national energy strategy. Moreover, the nuclear village is insulated from public sentiments because voters don’t assess candidates based on their stance on nuclear energy—instead, voters are more focused on economic conditions, pensions, and medical care.22

Contesting Fukushima In July 2011 Prime Minister Kan Naoto announced that he no longer believed that nuclear reactors could be operated safely in Japan due to the frequency of powerful earthquakes and vulnerability to large tsunami.23 He called for all reactors to undergo two-stage stress tests, and by May 2012 all of Japan’s viable reactors were shut down for these safety inspections. Kan seized the opportunity presented by revelations in June 2011 that METI had collaborated with utilities to orchestrate town hall meetings to fabricate local support for nuclear energy.24 This exposure of the nuclear village’s tactics spurred a strong public backlash and overwhelming support for his nuclear shutdown. Existing plans to boost nuclear energy to provide 50 percent of Japan’s electricity generating capacity were scrapped, and the government enacted a feed-in-tariff (mandat-

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ing utilities pay a high rate per kWh to attract investments) in order to boost renewable energy, the price Kan demanded for his resignation. He had been on the nuclear village’s hit list since May 2011, when he had called for Chubu Electric to shut down the vulnerable Hamaoka plant, announced an independent investigation into the Fukushima accident, and eliminated nuclear power from the national energy strategy. Moreover, he drew attention to the inherent conflict of interest between METI, the ministry that promoted nuclear energy, and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, the nuclear watchdog agency, and called for the latter to be reorganized and split from METI. Kan was an apostate, having been a supporter of nuclear energy before the Fukushima debacle. But as he saw firsthand how ill prepared the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the government were to cope with the nuclear accident and came to understand how slipshod safety practices and monitoring had been, he concluded that Japan needed to phase out nuclear energy. The nuclear village actually tried to shift the blame for the three meltdowns and hydrogen explosions onto Kan, leaking fake news to the pliant media in an effort to discredit him.25 The nuclear village’s campaign partially succeeded but was discredited by investigations into the accident that made TEPCO’s responsibility clear.26

Meek Media The power of the nuclear village to manipulate the narrative was also evident in the domestic media’s collective failure to refer to the three meltdowns for two months after they occurred. It was only toward the end of May  2011 that TEPCO and the government acknowledged that there had been three meltdowns, and that was only because of an impending site inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.27 The media’s downplaying of the Fukushima accident has much to do with the kisha clubs (press clubs) that control access to government sources.28 In the developmental state, every ministry maintains a kisha club and manages the relevant news by distributing information to club members and giving them monopoly access to backgrounders and interviews with top officials. The price of this system is the loss of media autonomy, as assigned journalists are required to play by government-dictated rules and face excommunication if they violate those rules. In practice this means that reporters do not report a lot of what they know, especially if it is critical of the ministry they are

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assigned to cover. This access journalism allows the government to manage the news and pressures the media into self-censorship.29 So rather than living up to the ethos of the fourth estate and serving as a watchdog for the public interest, the media is often more like a lapdog currying favor, doing what it is told or assumes it should do. METI wanted to keep a lid on the Fukushima story, and the media played ball, not reporting what the powerful interests did not want known. The muzzling of the mainstream media began as the Fukushima accident started to unfold. According to Honma Ryu, the advertising powerhouse Dentsu quashed negative coverage of the nuclear industry following the Fukushima disaster.30 Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill found that the mass media (including the state-funded public broadcaster NHK) were overly deferential to the nuclear village in downplaying the severity of the nuclear accident and featuring experts with well-known pronuclear views.31 But as the Fukushima story moved beyond the confines of the energy kisha club and as news organizations assigned other reporters to the story, the press began to find its voice. In an act of penance for meekly going along with the official Fukushima narrative for two months, the Asahi Shimbun created an investigative team charged with uncovering what the nuclear village was hiding. This team went on to win press prizes for its investigative reporting, but the Asahi Shimbun later suffered an orchestrated attack by pronuclear media.32

Reverse Course The reverse course overcame three major investigations into the Fukushima accident that described the absence of a culture of safety in the nuclear industry and the cozy and collusive relations between regulators and the utilities that compromised safety. All three investigations asserted that the meltdowns had been preventable and refuted TEPCO’s claim that the massive tsunami was an inconceivable event that caused the meltdowns and hydrogen explosions.33 Finally, in October 2012, TEPCO confessed that it had erred in not adopting stricter safety measures and could have prevented the nuclear crisis had it done so.34 TEPCO further conceded that it had not managed risk properly because it feared that any measures to improve safety at the Fukushima plant would arouse local people’s anxieties, strengthen the antinuclear movement, interfere with operations, raise costs, and create legal and political problems. This mea culpa was an extraordinary develop-

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ment, one that exposed the skewed priorities of the nuclear village that jeopardized public safety to cut costs. TEPCO had considered building a higher seawall that might have prevented the disaster, but the $1 billion price tag was rejected as too costly—though it represents a drop in the bucket, given current estimates that the cleanup and decommissioning of Fukushima will exceed $600 billion. But the imperatives of the developmental state’s commitment to nuclear power mean that public opinion, staggering costs, and major errors must be shrugged off. After Kan’s ouster in August 2011, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) elected Noda Yoshihiko, who undermined Kan’s antinuclear revolution. In June 2012, for example, Noda approved the restarting of two nuclear reactors, sparking mass protests that continued throughout Japan’s summer of discontent. In September 2012 an advisory panel recommended to Noda’s cabinet that nuclear energy be phased out by 2040, prompting harsh criticism from various business lobbies and the LDP.35 Washington also lobbied Tokyo, warning that phasing out the use of nuclear energy would harm bilateral relations because it would raise concerns about Japan’s large stockpiles of plutonium and uncomfortable questions about US nuclear nonproliferation efforts targeting Iran and North Korea.36 In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Suzuki Tatsujiro, vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, reported that officials in the administration of President Barack Obama pressured Japan not to phase out nuclear energy.37 Four days after apparently adopting the phase-out proposal, Noda’s cabinet did a volte-face and declared that it was merely a reference document, not the government’s policy. The phase-out timeline was rescinded so that nuclear fuel reprocessing would continue, as would the ongoing construction of new reactors. This was a stunning victory for the nuclear village, one that relied on US lobbying to derail the 2030 nuclear phaseout that 81  percent of Japanese supported in an August 2012 deliberative poll.38 Thus, lobbying by the global nuclear village trumped public opposition and also helps explain why nuclear energy was reinstated in the 2014 national energy plan.

Regulatory Capture Risk perceptions shifted dramatically after the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami, as Fukushima became Japan’s Chernobyl, and the public came to learn about lax safety practices and regulatory capture that compromised safety.39 The problem of METI’s conflict of interest as the agency responsible for both

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promoting nuclear energy and overseeing nuclear safety came to light when a whistleblower informed the ministry in 2001 that TEPCO had systematically falsified repair and maintenance data at its seventeen reactors.40 The ministry then informed TEPCO that there was a problem—the whistleblower. The media eventually reported this story of collusion between the government and the utility, sparking a public outcry that forced the government to shut down TEPCO’s reactors for safety checks. It later became apparent that the falsification of repair and maintenance records for nuclear reactors was standard practice. In 2007, the government reported that seven of Japan’s twelve utilities admitted they had also falsified safety records over the past three decades.41 Despite such warning signs, at the end of February 2011, shortly before the meltdowns, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) extended the operating license of the forty-year-old Fukushima Daiichi reactors. NISA did so even as it expressed reservations about a suspect maintenance record and stress cracks in the backup diesel generators that left them vulnerable to tsunami. Lax enforcement of safety standards to cut costs was the developmental state norm, as boosting profits was routinely prioritized over public safety. This regulatory capture means that regulators were regulating in favor of the regulated so that safety protocols were ignored while risks were downplayed.42

Costly Power In 2017, the Japan Center for Economic Research, a private think tank, estimated that the nuclear debacle at Fukushima could end up costing taxpayers $626 billion (70 trillion yen) over the next four decades, triple the government’s 2016 revised estimate of about $190 billion—which in turn had quadrupled the original forecast.43 In 2018 the government announced that decommissioning Fukushima will cost $2 billion annually, and TEPCO is planning to spend an additional $2 billion just to prepare for the extraction of melted fuel at some point in the future.44 These astounding but shifting figures reflect uncertainty about the final reckoning. Such estimates confute the claim that nuclear energy has a low-cost advantage and makes the ongoing nuclear comeback all the more remarkable, since taxpayers will pick up the tab. If the nuclear village had a coat of arms, it would be emblazoned with the motto: Safe, Cheap, and Reliable. This was the mantra nuclear advocates used to entice local communities to host nuclear reactors. For Japan’s 160,000 nu-

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clear refugees, only about half of whom returned to their homes as of 2020, this mantra is a joke in poor taste.45 Fukushima shattered the myth of 100  percent safety nurtured by the government and utilities since the 1960s, while investigations have exposed a culture of complacency in which cost cutting meant cutting corners at the risk of public safety. The financial interests of private operators were prioritized over the public interest with the knowledge of government agencies, while the costs of the accident have become the public’s burden. At the casino of risk management, the nuclear village placed large bets on wishing risk away, and now Japan’s taxpayers and utility ratepayers are picking up the tab for the gambling losses incurred. Yet METI doesn’t give up easily, as it argued in its 2014 report justifying the reinstatement of nuclear energy that it is relatively cheap.46 The government’s estimates about the costs of generating nuclear energy are based on unduly optimistic assumptions. For example, the government grossly underestimates the price tag for the Fukushima cleanup and decommissioning at 9.1 trillion yen, shaving 3.1 trillion yen from the previous government estimate while the Renewable Energy Institute projects a much higher figure of at least 21.5 trillion yen.47 And these figures are all well below the 70 trillion yen estimate by the Japan Center for Economic Research cited above. Each trillion yen of this cost gap translates into nuclear generation costs of 0.04 yen per kilowatt hour (kWh). Moreover, METI downplays the costs of disposal and storage, selecting a figure out of the air since a radioactive waste site has not even been selected and the costs will be borne by a succession of future generations. It is also notable that METI favors building new nuclear reactors, but the construction cost estimates are unrealistically low: recent reactor building costs elsewhere in the world have skyrocketed, which is a major reason why nuclear power is economically unviable. Can Japan really build a new generation of nuclear reactors safely at less than half of the actual cost of recent projects? Construction costs on these projects are 2.4 times higher than the METI estimates, meaning an additional cost of 4.4 yen per kWh, and the official cost of nuclear power per kWh of 10.3 yen is a lowball estimate that does not reflect such realities.48 Simply put, advocates greatly exaggerate the nuclear cost advantage. In reality, the main factors favoring nuclear power in Japan are the massive sunken investment in existing nuclear plants, as well as the need to pay off associated loans and postpone the staggering costs of decommissioning by extending the operating licenses of aging plants for twenty more years. The human cost has also been high. In the aftermath of the meltdowns, many of the tens of thousands displaced from their hometowns near the

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stricken reactors are unable or unwilling to return to the once-thriving communities that have withered due to a combination of exclusion zones and an exodus driven by fears that the area is unsafe. The government has been cutting housing subsidies for evacuees, putting pressure on them to return. However, the ghost towns they left behind no longer offer the services, jobs, and sense of community that once made them desirable places to live and raise a family. Farmers and fishermen operate under the stigma of contamination, as their products are shunned despite passing safety tests. The government has mismanaged and downplayed the crisis, and its reassurances have little credibility. Aging and depopulated towns lack the resilience to bounce back, as younger people migrate in search of work and peace of mind. Alas, such tranquility is elusive, as children from Fukushima have been subjected to bullying in their new schools. TEPCO is paying compensation, but nothing can atone for the staggering toll on people’s lives and well-being. The folly of Fukushima and the mismanagement of risk has inflicted a devastating legacy of loss on the prefecture. The Fukushima plant looks to be a bottomless pit, with the tab set to grow as decontamination and decommissioning will take decades. And the government has not explained how much it will cost to deal with all the radioactive waste accumulated at the dozens of other reactors in Japan, or where it will be stored. Japan’s nuclear fuel recycling plans have also been costly and have not paid off. In June 2018 the government announced that it would decommission the Tokai reprocessing facility over the next seventy years, at a projected cost of 1 trillion yen ($9 billion), but here too there is no plan for storing the plant’s nuclear waste. Taxpayers will cover the entire cost. In addition, the Monju fast-breeder reactor plant will be decommissioned over the next three decades. This $9 billion white elephant project lurched from crisis to cover-up and hardly operated, turning into a black hole for billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money that will cost billions more to scrap. Rokkasho represents yet another pricy nuclear folly, a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing and waste storage project in Aomori that has cost $22 billion and is now two decades past its original deadline to start operating.

An Aging Fleet Japan is also facing the massive costs of decommissioning an aging fleet of reactors. Following Fukushima, the government adopted the principle of

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not extending the licenses beyond the original forty years when the reactors were built to operate. This was partly in recognition of the consequences of extending the operating license of the forty-year-old Fukushima Daiichi reactors less than two weeks before the March 2011 meltdowns. Older reactors and equipment are subject to deterioration over time and thus more vulnerable to accidents. After Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) stipulated that in principle reactors would be shut down after four decades of operation, but that in exceptional cases a license could be extended for twenty more years, provided that the equipment essential to reactor safety was upgraded and met stringent new safety criteria. It now appears that extensions have become the default option as no applications have been rejected, and it is up to the utility to decide whether it wants to spend the money to upgrade safety features. In November 2018 the NRA extended the operating license of the fortyyear-old Tokai reactor for an additional two decades. The 1.1-gigawatt boiling water reactor is the same design as the stricken reactors at Fukushima. This is the fourth forty-year-old reactor since 2011 that has gained NRA approval for an extension of its operating license, which suggests that what was supposed to be exceptional has become normal. Tokai is the first reactor affected by the tsunami (it had trouble achieving a cold shutdown), and the first boiling water reactor, to gain a twenty-year extension. The reactor closest to Tokyo, Tokai is a mere 120 kilometers from the capital, in whose greater metropolitan area reside thirty million people. Upgrading operational safety for this reactor will be very expensive, including a 20-meter high, 1.3-kilometer-long sea wall that will cost some $1.54 billion. It is also problematic that the NRA has mandated an evacuation zone with a radius of thirty kilometers for reactors, requiring all towns in that zone to prepare emergency evacuation plans and conduct drills. The Tokai plant has 960,000 residents in its evacuation zone, the most populous in the nation, which greatly complicates disaster emergency planning. Japan Atomic Power, the financially strapped entity that operates the plant, will need to gain approval from Ibaragi Prefecture and six surrounding municipalities, but two of them have already made clear that they oppose the restart. Extending the shelf life of aging nuclear reactors is helpful for improving the bottom line of utilities and suggests that the commitment to safety remains flexible. For example, in 2017 Tanaka Shunichi, the NRA chief, publicly lambasted TEPCO, saying that it was not qualified to operate nuclear reactors and referring to its checkered track record on safety and post-Fukushima

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evasions and misrepresentations about safety upgrades at its Niigata plant.49 TEPCO submitted false information about the ability to resist earthquakes of an onsite emergency headquarters building and doctored other data in applying for permission to restart the plant, exactly the sort of problems that contributed to the Fukushima accident—problems that were supposed to end due to the more rigorous NRA safety criteria. Yet TEPCO was still trying to cut corners and bamboozle regulators. As of 2020, Japan has thirty-three operable reactors, but within a decade about half will become forty years old and face being shut down. This is problematic from a safety standpoint because for Japan to generate 20–22 percent of its energy from nuclear power by 2030, as stipulated in the 2014 national energy plan, it will need to restart about thirty reactors—which means many older plants will have to have their operating license extended to sixty years. The cost of safety upgrades means that smaller reactors cannot generate enough revenues to cover those costs and thus are slated for decommissioning, an expensive process that will take a few decades or so. As of 2020, nine reactors have been scrapped, a figure that is certain to rise, but the utilities have not put enough money aside to cover the costs of decommissioning. Typically, it will take 25–30 years to decommission each reactor, and there is no permanent site yet for waste disposal. The attendant high costs further undermine the commercial viability of nuclear energy. Larger older reactors can generate sufficient revenues to cover the costs of upgrades, and several such reactors are getting a new lease on life. Two reactors at TEPCO’s Niigata plant have passed NRA screening, but local residents and the previous governor opposed restarting them. However, the governor resigned due to a sex scandal, and in the 2018 election to replace him the antinuclear vote was split between two candidates. The LDP pronuclear candidate won, despite exit polls indicating that 75  percent of Niigata residents opposed restarting the reactors.50 This means that TEPCO’s financial rehabilitation plan is back on track, as the new governor will not impede restarts at the world’s largest nuclear plant as his predecessor did.51 Utilities have gained permission to restart fourteen reactors at seven plants, but the high costs of retrofitting old reactors to meet new safety guidelines— some $17 billion—overshadow plans to resume operations.52 Moreover, district court judges have sided with plaintiffs in doubting the utilities’ safety reassurances and have issued injunctions. Judges have drawn on new seismic assessments that find some of the existing reactor sites chosen in the 1970s are in

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hazardous locations. These judicial setbacks are almost always overcome on appeal, but they underscore lingering doubts about the wisdom of relying on nuclear power and scientists in thrall to the utilities. The NRA has leaned over backward to help Kansai Electric Power Company, the utility that serves the Osaka region, pass safety screenings for two of its aging reactors. The safety watchdog agency postponed seismic shaking tests until after the extension of operating licenses was granted so that the deadline was not missed, and it also waived the requirement to replace older cables with new ones possessing enhanced fire-retardant qualities that are costly and require considerable time for installation. Remarkably, the NRA also declared that even if the reactors did not pass the seismic vibration test, their extended licenses would not be revoked. While there are good reasons to subject older reactors to more stringent safety inspections than newer ones receive, the NRA seems inclined to pass reactors first and ask questions later—continuing the averted eye approach to safety inspections that prevailed at NISA, its discredited predecessor. It is hard to reconcile the government’s repeated emphasis on Japan’s having the strictest safety criteria in the world with this record of lax implementation of those standards. In an editorial, the Mainichi fumed: “NRA Chairman Tanaka Shunichi had said when he assumed his post that it’s ‘extremely difficult to extend’ the operation of aging reactors beyond the 40-year limit. However, he has since changed his view to the effect that ‘technical challenges can be overcome if necessary money is spent.’ He appears as if he were speaking on behalf of power companies.” The newspaper added: “If the 40-year rule were to be thoroughly observed, the ratio would be around 15  percent even if all the existing reactors and those under construction were to be fully in operation. This will encourage power companies to extend the lifespans of their nuclear plants.” Noting strong public opposition, the editorial concluded, “Japan should phase out nuclear power rather than extending the lifespan of aging reactors.”53 However, the media and public do not get to decide.

Abe’s Comeback and Japan’s Nuclear Revival The political comeback of Abe Shinzo was almost as improbable as that of Japan’s nuclear industry. Abe had resigned in disgrace in 2007, dismissed as clueless and responsible for the LDP’s losing control of the Upper House of the Diet

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in elections due to his political ineptitude. Abe was the only LDP candidate in the 2012 presidential election who vowed to revive nuclear energy. He won that election and led the LDP to a convincing victory over the DPJ in December 2012. Abe’s victory helps explain why the nuclear village recovered from the perfect storm in 2012 of damning revelations, massive demonstrations, and negative public sentiments. Under Abe’s leadership, the nuclear village has rebounded, regaining momentum for reactor restarts while the protest movement abated. In 2018 the government crafted a new national energy plan that vaguely referred to minimizing the use of nuclear energy but left untouched the 2014 target calling for it to provide 20–22 percent of Japan’s electricity generating capacity by 2030. The Abe government reinstated nuclear energy into the national energy plan, reversing the decision of Prime Minster Kan to eliminate it from the nation’s energy mix due to safety concerns. METI explained its 2014 decision in terms of energy security, low and stable operational costs, and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.54 It warns about the high costs of fossil fuel imports as long as reactors remain idle, while acknowledging that there is no plan for disposing of spent fuel. METI also asserts that Japan should participate in the global renaissance for nuclear energy, despite the reality of waning global interest and investments in nuclear projects in other advanced industrialized nations. The 2014 METI report, in the monotone prose of bureaucrats everywhere, ignores public sentiments. It makes clear that the national energy strategy is too important an issue for the public to have a say in, and thus it is certain that there will be no national referendum on the use of nuclear power. Hence Japan’s nuclear revival has been insulated from the scrum of democracy by those who believe nuclear power is indispensable and that they know better than the public.

Veto Power It appears unlikely that there will be a significant shift in Japan’s nuclear energy policy any time soon despite public opinion favoring phasing out the use of nuclear energy. As Jacques Hymans argues, nuclear institutions are “extremely well insulated from democratic processes” and not subject to the passions of public opinion.55 He writes: “Opinion swings are certainly worth tracking, but it is also necessary to recognize that in countries with large

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numbers of nuclear veto players, whichever direction the political winds end up blowing, abrupt, radical nuclear policy reorientations are very difficult to achieve and are therefore rare.”56 Hymans reminds us that links with General Electric, Westinghouse, and Areva mean that “Japan now sits at the epicenter of the global nuclear energy industry. Given the economic stakes involved, the government simply cannot ignore the manufacturers’ nuclear policy preferences.”57 Hymans’s historical institutionalist angle on veto players and the policy rigidity they sustain explains why public preferences about nuclear energy have not prevailed. The nuclear village is able to block “radical Japanese nuclear policy change in any direction, even in the face of the most serious disaster Japan has faced since World War II. After all, even in crises, veto players tend to stand up for their perceived interests.”58 Mark Ramseyer explains the legal and financial calculations that make nuclear restarts attractive to the utilities despite the seismic risks.59 Limited liability means the utilities can shift the risks so that in the event of a catastrophic accident, the government and taxpayers have to cover the losses. Thus, the potential downside of restarting reactors is financially much more attractive than the certain downside of keeping the reactors idled, and bringing a reactor online confers considerable benefits on the utilities and its shareholders and lenders. In short, the nuclear village captures the benefits while externalizing the most catastrophic risks. Hosting communities also stand to reap benefits, but evacuees from near the Fukushima plant know all too well about TEPCO’s empty promises. The 2014 national energy plan marks a comeback for nuclear power and a settling back into established policy ruts. As Richard Samuels argues, the 3.11 disaster produced remarkably little substantive policy change, a stasis that was orchestrated to the advantage of the developmental state.60 The state certainly did not have every thing its way, and the shift toward greater reliance on renewable energy is gaining momentum. However, given the magnitude of what TEPCO inflicted on local communities and the massive costs to taxpayers and utility ratepayers over the next few decades, this was quite a reversal of fortunes.

Conclusion Institutions are not destiny, but in Japan’s nuclear sector they are proving resilient in a very unfavorable environment. It was never going to be easy to

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reset the national energy strategy or take on the nuclear village, even if it seemed that Fukushima was a game-changing event that provided an opportunity for sweeping policy reform. Given negative public opinion, the nuclear village relied on outrage ebbing and policy inertia to minimize reform. The nuclear village has engaged in effective damage control, spreading blame, blurring responsibility, and otherwise shaping public discourse while lobbying in the corridors of power on behalf of nuclear energy. The reinstatement of nuclear energy in the 2014 national energy plan ensures that it will remain a key part of Japan’s energy mix over the next few decades. This is an ideal outcome for nuclear energy advocates and underscores their strong influence on national energy strategy. Nonetheless, they will have to contend with the massive and escalating costs of decommissioning in a nation speeding toward sharp decreases in population and electricity demand and expanding renewable energy potential, where the politics of nuclear energy are likely to become more hotly contested. Moreover, disruptive technologies and the desire to increase disaster resilience are transforming Japan’s energy landscape, promoting a decentralized model based on smart cities that is unfavorable to the centralized, large-scale nuclear paradigm that is a legacy of twentieth-century technology. Promises of safer designs and better safety controls confront a skeptical public that already knows the risks of accepting such reassurances. The nuclear village has successfully spread the costs of bailing out nuclear energy to taxpayers and utility ratepayers, but it has not been able to overcome their opposition.

CHAPTER 6

The Road to Fukushima A US-Japan History James Simms

“You have an independent regulator [in the United States] but haven’t built a new nuclear plant in decades,” a Japanese bureaucrat said to US officials in Tokyo in 2000.1 Relayed to me a few days after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, those discomforting words indicated to me that Japan had put the safety of its citizens second to nuclear power. Tokyo was also politely rebuffing the only ally with which it had a mutual defense treaty, its largest trading partner at the time, and the father of and partner in its nearly $40-billion-dollar nuclear-industrial complex. The comments from the Japanese official to a US delegation came a little more than a decade before the triple reactor meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Washington had learned its lessons the hard way. From the dawn of US atomic energy, trust issues had shadowed the nuclear sector because of questions over whether conflicts of interest were driving regulators to place the building and operating of reactors ahead of safety. The United States was trying to impart that wisdom to its ally, Japan. Indeed, starting in the 1950s, some lawmakers in Washington expressed concern that the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) both promoted the nuclear power sector and regulated it.2 Probably the earliest example of this conflict of interest revolved around the licensing of an experimental reactor in 1956. The AEC ignored the concerns of its own reactor-safety panel

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and approved the license, raising the conflict issue in Congress and the general public. To address that issue, the United States eventually removed the AEC’s dual mandate in 1974 and created the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, giving it licensing and oversight authority. The organization that eventually became the Department of Energy received the responsibility for nuclear weapons research, development, and production, as well as civilian nuclear power promotion. Even with this division, some critics continue to maintain that the relationship between regulated and regulators is too cozy.3 In 2001, however, Tokyo refused to deal with its own conflicts of interest. That mistake helped put Japan on the road toward the world’s first and only triple-reactor meltdown, which in turn spawned the most severe crisis in the nation’s postwar history. As in past decades, in 2001 it doubled down on a policy that had enabled it to build the world’s third largest fleet of commercial reactors (there were fifty-four at the time of the 2011 disaster), behind only the United States and France. Plans were afoot for more reactors, along with hopes for billions of dollars in nuclear plant exports. During a massive government restructuring that slashed the number of agencies, Tokyo placed nuclear oversight and government expertise under the new Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).4 The regulator had minimal oversight by advisory panels, which mostly rubber-stamped METI’s decisions. Equally important, the new ministry—like its predecessor, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry—oversaw the development and promotion of the civilian nuclear sector and energy policy.5 The government established a new watchdog, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), shortly after the 1999 Tokaimura Village accident—the worst accident to date, which killed two workers at a nuclear fuel production plant. However, NISA’s structure failed to address Japan’s systemic defects in atomic regulation.6 Just north of Tokyo, Tokaimura served as the nerve center of the nation’s nuclear enterprise, hosting its first commercial reactor, its first spent-fuel reprocessing plant, and many of Japan’s atomic research facilities. The Tokaimura accident resulted from the use of illegal slipshod procedures for making uranium fuel for the prototype fast-breeder reactor Monju: The process cut corners in a production process that already had cut corners. Other key factors included lax oversight—namely, the regulator’s ruling out the possibility of a criticality accident—and a fuel manufacturer that lacked a safety culture and proper emergency procedures. This horrible ex-

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ample in the nuclear sector should have sounded an alarm. A little over a decade later, the structural problems exposed at Tokaimura were echoed in the Fukushima disaster. According to one METI official, the organization did not intend to concentrate nuclear regulation and promotion in NISA.7 After the Tokaimura accident, oversight problems at the Science and Technology Agency and during the government restructuring, no other ministry wanted the responsibility of regulation. Because of that, METI accepted them reluctantly, claimed the official, who later joined the board of a major nuclear-related Japanese corporation. Before the changes, the Science and Technology Agency had housed the secretariats for both the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) and the Japan Nuclear Safety Commission. In 2001, the agency merged with the education ministry, and the new entity remained in charge of nuclear research and development. This meant that the Nuclear Safety Commission retained its role as a secondary check on nuclear safety after METI, and the JAEC continued to oversee nuclear promotion and development along with METI and advise it on reactor licensing. The concentration of nuclear power under METI became far more than an abstract public administration issue. A decade later, the real-world implications emerged with a vengeance. Eliminating the conflict of interest could have prevented or mitigated the 2011 Fukushima accident. Numerous public and private accident investigations cited that conflict as a key factor for the disaster at the plant 140 miles from Tokyo.8 Fundamental reforms would not happen until the formation of the Japan Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) in 2012. These events constitute some examples of the numerous instances after which both Japan’s nuclear industry and its regulators could have improved the country’s nuclear safety and oversight radically. Unfortunately, few changes occurred—and sometimes Tokyo made the situation worse. Potential turning points included utility, government, and academic studies leading, for example, to internal warnings that dated back over a decade about large tsunamis potentially inundating the Daiichi plant.9 There were also major accidents and precursor incidents, like flooding caused by the rupture of a water pipe for cooling emergency generators at Daiichi that took out most of its reactor cooling systems in 1991.10 Global best practices established by international organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were ignored, such as 2003 guidelines that called for looking at historic and prehistoric tsunami data, including archeological,

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when siting plants and a 2007 recommendation to Japan to bolster the independence of its regulator.11 There were falsified safety reports and cover-ups, as well as overseas and domestic supervision and safety reforms such as the so-called B.5.b rules—issued by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in February 2002, after the 9/11 terror attacks, to reinforce plant security and the ability to cool reactors. According to Nils Diaz, a former NRC chairman, if implemented effectively by Japan, those rules “should have . . . very specifically dealt with ‘station blackout’ and cooling” of the Daiichi reactor and spent fuel pools.12 While some officials in Washington felt concerns over Tokyo’s nuclear oversight, they mainly kept those concerns private and did not exert much pressure on the Japanese government. US cables released by WikiLeaks, for example, and the bilateral talks after Tokaimura underscored that unease. In the former, IAEA officials noted in 2008 that Japan had only revised seismic guidelines for reactors three times in thirty-five years and that some quakes had exceeded the design basis of reactors.13

Regulatory Capture and Japan’s Nuclear-Industrial Complex Japan missed countless opportunities to avert a nuclear crisis, but the combination of narrow sectoral interests and larger national security concerns created a system of complacency. The system lacked sufficient oversight and scrutiny. These interests coalesced into what critics called the nuclear village of regulators, utilities, politicians, corporations, and academics who promoted nuclear power and feasted at the atomic trough. In turn, the village spread the myth that nuclear power in Japan was absolutely safe. Loath to admit any potential or actual problems, the village papered over concerns and accidents and downplayed risks to the point of saying that there were none. TEPCO wrote in a 2012 accident report that “there was concern that by implementing severe accident measures, it would exacerbate siting community and public anxiety and add momentum to anti-nuclear movements,” including lawsuits.14 Meanwhile, some opponents seized on even the smallest incidents to push for plant closings and ending the use of nuclear power. This created a vicious cycle of pro- and antinuclear groups doubling down on their views. Even before 2011, support for new plants was not assured. Nearly a dozen

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reactors never got beyond the planning stage because of opposition from host communities and outside groups and delays caused by lawsuits. Despite some successful opposition at local levels, there was never enough momentum to develop national attention to ensure safety through regulators.15 In the 1960s and 1970s, in contrast, massive pollution and visible victims—like those poisoned by mercury in Minamata—enabled civil society to push the government for landmark environmental regulations. This, for example, resulted in the establishment of the Environment Agency.16 Rather than explaining the risks of nuclear power, regulators and the industry gave ironclad safety guarantees. The Science Council of Japan, similar to the US National Academy of Sciences, wrote in its 2014 Fukushima accident report: “In explaining to host communities and the general public, the rhetoric went from ‘[the plants] are built with safety in mind, so there is no reason for concern,’ to ‘there will never be an accident’ and ‘they are absolutely safe.’”17 The media aided the nuclear village because of the billions of dollars in electric company advertising. Over the decades, newspapers, magazines, and television networks largely failed to cast a critical eye on atomic power and its oversight. Some were—and continue to be—cheerleaders, such as the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. It played a key part in the political and business interests pushing for the atom from the 1950s. The paper’s owner, Matsutaro Shoriki, who was a senior lawmaker in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), became the first chairman of the JAEC in 1956. He hoped that the use of the atom for power would propel him to become prime minister and wanted US support but failed to get Washington’s backing for his career goals.18 After the 2011 accident, the Yomiuri Shimbun pushed for quick restarts of reactors outside of Fukushima in its coverage and editorials, citing concerns over fossil fuel carbon emissions and energy security. Nonetheless, the supervisory authorities, politicians, utilities, and plant builders were the nuclear village’s core. The regulators depended on the utilities and contractors for expertise and lucrative employment known as amakudari (descent from heaven). This partly resulted from the structure of the personnel system: Promotions are based on seniority, and the number of posts decline as bureaucrats advance. At the top, traditionally only one member of an agency’s entering class holds the top job as the administrative vice minister. As a result, bureaucrats in their fifties are pushed out and require jobs until they retire. Moreover, regulators do not want to upset potential employers or create waves that might hurt their government careers—which works in the utilities’ favor.

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In an important 1971 paper on regulation, George Stigler, a professor at the University of Chicago, maintained that “as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.”19 There are many ways to entice regulators to bend to their interests: promise well-paid jobs after leaving government employment, provide outright bribes, and leverage pressure from politicians who benefit from special interests, as lawmakers have a greater stake in the outcome of oversight than the average voter.20 At the time of the Fukushima accident, for example, TEPCO had a former chief of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy as an advisor, but he resigned after there was a public outcry. One of the positions of vice president at the utility had been filled almost continuously since at least 1962 by a former METI bureaucrat, including former heads and deputy heads of the agency.21 Along with potential future jobs, the nuclear industry enabled METI to expand its regulatory authority and budget. Nothing says success to a bureaucrat—and ability to a boss who is evaluating a subordinate—more than expanding these two bureaucratic pillars. For instance, in the fiscal year that ended in March 2011, METI had over $4 billion to support the siting of reactors and nuclear research through a combination of budget allocations and earmarked taxes. In turn, politicians depended on nuclear power companies, which offered sinecures to former officials, and utilities and their labor unions to provide votes and campaign contributions. In many of the isolated rural communities where reactors sit, the economic impact of the industry was profound due to the effects of plant construction, operation, and maintenance. The facilities employed thousands of local citizens, many of whom had high-paying jobs that did not require college degrees, and relied on a variety of contractors and suppliers to support the plants. In the case of Fukushima, the southern coastal region had seen a large decline in coal mining in the 1960s and needed new economic drivers. Generous government subsidies and aid from utilities also factored in hosting packages, which were essentially bribes. According to a 2010 government booklet for potential plant sites, in just the first decade a host community could receive over $400 million (44.9 billion yen) in state assistance.22 Extended over thirty-five years, that’s more than $1.1 billion (122 billion yen). In western Japan, the village of Kaminoseki received nearly a quarter of its budget from preliminary site work in 2011.23 Until the Fukushima accident, and in some cases even after it, these were strong reasons to bring the atom to your hometown and remain close to the nuclear village.

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Several strategic issues also led to lax oversight. After the 1970s Mideast oil embargoes, Tokyo realized that it needed more secure forms of energy because it imported virtually all of its fossil fuel. Citing the near-zero carbon emissions of nuclear power and energy security, Japan had planned before Fukushima to increase the proportion of electricity generated from nuclear power to 50 percent from 30 percent by 2030. Because of the structure of the electricity rate system, utilities charged more for their electrons when they had more expensive generation facilities and grid assets. In other words, the more gold-plated, the better it was for the bottom line.24 For the plant builders, construction contracts were guaranteed profits, and even better margins came with the decades of maintenance and refueling. Equally impor tant, some politicians from the LDP, which has ruled Japan almost without interruption since 1955, acknowledged (usually quietly) that Japan needed to maintain a latent nuclear weapons capability because neighbors like China and the Soviet Union had atomic arsenals aimed at Tokyo. In the late 1960s, when Japan was considering signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Foreign Ministry determined that the country needed to maintain a technological base for nuclear weapons but also to sign the treaty.25 The long-term dependability of the US nuclear umbrella and commitment to defend Japan against military threats was equally important. President Donald Trump’s musings before and after his 2016 election regarding the possible reduction of US military forces in East Asia, if US allies didn’t provide more financial support, and his comments about Japan and South Korea developing nuclear weapons underscore this point. Japan’s satellitelaunch rockets, uranium fuel enrichment, and work on spent-fuel reprocessing to extract plutonium demonstrated Tokyo’s mind-set. Nonetheless, the country has foregone the nuclear option for many reasons, including the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US opposition, regional public opinion, and fears of triggering an East Asian nuclear arms race.

Atoms for Peace (and War) Japan’s enthusiasm alone did not enable it to become an atomic power. The United States had been a key driver of Japan’s nuclear program since the 1950s.26 After President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech at

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the United Nations in 1953, the United States advanced strategies to help provide cheap electricity and nuclear isotopes for medical and industrial usage globally. While partly motivated by idealism and altruism, Washington also hoped to convince other nations to reduce their resistance to nuclear weapons and tests and to ensure that the Soviet Union could not use the lure of atomic energy to spread its influence. Nowhere was that truer than in Japan. In the 1950s, when Japan passed legislation to enable nuclear development, Washington conducted successful propaganda efforts to overcome Japanese public opposition to the atom.27 Eventually, Tokyo became an integral part of the US nuclear industry, global rule-setting agenda, and nonproliferation efforts, culminating in Toshiba’s acquisition of Westinghouse in 2006 and the nuclear power joint venture between Hitachi and General Electric in 2007.28 A question that emerges is why the United States did not push Japan harder to improve its oversight of nuclear power plants, as Japan had done, for example, in stiffening both banking regulations to fix its bad loan problem and increase penalties for monopolistic behav ior. The lack of pressure on the nuclear industry is especially puzzling given the leading role the United States played in the start of Japan’s nuclear enterprise and the fact that an accident anywhere around the world could undermine global public support for atomic power. An important—and maybe the most plausible—theory was that the United States needed Japan not only for business reasons but also for national security ones. Therefore, it could not push Japan too hard. Before the Three Mile Island accident, the United States was in the driver’s seat for plant construction, but it was Japan after that.29 According to a book coedited by the former deputy chairman of Japan’s JAEC (and the author of Chapter 4 in this volume), Tatsujiro Suzuki, If Japan exits the nuclear power business, the next in line to take the lead (in nuclear plant construction) appears to be France. Already, France is the leader in spent fuel reprocessing, and Areva has several nuclear-related companies under its umbrella that are a threat to the U.S. nuclear sector. But going forward, nuclear-related companies in Russia and China could take the lead and already have become a threat to the U.S. nuclear sector. If Russia and China become the leaders, that would be a severe blow to the U.S. That’s why American nuclear companies want to continue to cooperate with Japanese nuclear companies, which have refined their technology.30

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Figure 6.1. Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, reactor number four building and spent fuel pool, July 2013. The photograph shows a cover being built over the reactor and the pool, along with machinery to remove the spent fuel, after the 3.11 accident blew out the sides and the roof. Copyright James Simms.

Japan provided technology and decades of experience with nuclear plant operation and construction, including the forging of critical steel components like the giant reactor pressure vessels. It also helped spread the financial risk of new reactor development and projects. Backing up that theory, after Fukushima, Washington’s Japan hands feared that Japan would abandon nuclear power. That fear deepened after Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda announced in September 2012 that Tokyo was considering phasing out its use of nuclear energy by the 2030s. “Americans cannot afford from a security standpoint to have Japan abandon nuclear power. It’s too important to us,” John Hamre, the president of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Japanese business leaders in November.31 Two days before Noda’s announcement, Hamre, formerly the Defense Department’s second in command, published

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an opinion piece in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun calling on Tokyo to rethink its atomic withdrawal plans.32 In a series of bilateral Washington meetings, the United States expressed strong concerns over Japan’s spent fuel reprocessing and talk of ending its use of atomic energy, according to an October  2012 report in the liberal Tokyo Shimbun, which had taken an editorial policy calling for Japan’s nuclear exit. Japan may have been using outside pressure (gaiatsu) from its main ally—as it had in the past to push through contentious domestic policies, such as agricultural reform—to build support for continuing its nuclear programs.33 That US pressure led Noda’s government to reverse the Cabinet decision to consider phasing those programs out, the newspaper said.34 Yet the outcome might not have been that straightforward. Washington’s objection may have been over the combination of the lack of operating plants and the reprocessing, which exacerbated proliferation concerns because the plutonium would pile up with no foreseeable end use.35 In the Japanese language, parts of the Tokyo Shimbun article could be interpreted that way. Indeed, six years later, Nikkei ran a front-page story about Washington pushing Tokyo to reduce its forty-seven-ton plutonium stockpile.36 The next month, Japan announced that it would do so, though it didn’t set a specific cap on the amount of plutonium or a timeframe to accomplish the reduction.

Japan’s New Nuclear Watchdog and the LDP After Fukushima, if the Japanese government was ever to have a chance to regain public support and public trust in nuclear energy, it needed to fix the discredited regulatory system. A new regulatory system established under the Ministry of Environment in 2012 was a solid start for ensuring independent and transparent oversight of the sector. Among other reforms, the new NRA, which replaced NISA, mandated the disclosure of all meetings between agency staff members and representatives of the nuclear sector. It also broadcast hearings live and released all background and briefing materials on the internet, unless they dealt with sensitive issues like plant security. Equally important, in principle it said bureaucrats from METI and the energy agency, which is under METI and also promotes nuclear power, transferred to the new watchdog couldn’t return to their old posts. That way

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the bureaucrats would not have to worry about repercussions should they make decisions against their previous agency’s interests. Even after those reforms, questions remained, and the answers to them may affect Tokyo’s ability to restart Japan’s nuclear plants. These questions include whether the utilities will truly take safety seriously, the new regulator and lawmakers will backslide, and the press and the public will continue to scrutinize the nuclear sector and its oversight. Complacency could set in over time, too, just as people ignored the warning of stone markers from Tōhoku tsunami centuries ago that people should not to live lower than the markers. Nonetheless, TEPCO has put much time and money into attempts to show that it is changing. It hired former US and UK government officials, including Dale Klein (former NRC chairman) and Charles Casto (who led the US response for the NRC in 2011 in Japan). These acts serve as efforts to show that TEPCO is creating a genuine safety culture, one that is proactive and will go beyond the legal minimum; establishing a safety first mind-set; and upgrading the physical plants. Despite industry efforts, small and major issues alike have continued to emerge, undermining its efforts to build credibility with the skeptical public. As a case in point, TEPCO announced in 2016 that it had not realized for nearly five years that it had forgotten it had had a standard definition of a reactor meltdown. After 3.11, while admitting the possibility of meltdowns, the utility had said that it did not have internal guidelines on how to define core melts. One major concern is that the LDP could undermine the independence of the new regulator. The LDP was responsible for Japan’s efforts to develop, promote, and oversee the nuclear power sector from its inception in the 1950s, including how to deal with severe accidents. It has been out of power only twice, and only briefly, since its 1955 establishment—including the 2009– 12 period bracketing the 2011 Fukushima disaster, when the now-defunct Democratic Party of Japan struggled to address the accident and passed legislation creating the new independent nuclear watchdog. The LDP has criticized the slow pace of the NRA’s vetting of reactor restarts and could appoint industry-friendly commissioners and officials and weaken oversight through legislation and budget reductions. How the party handled itself immediately after the disaster and how introspective it was regarding its own responsibility for creating the conditions for the Fukushima accident provide clues on how policy might change in the future. On those counts, the LDP’s actions are not comforting.

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Without an official investigation of the disaster, memories of it will fade. Some members of the LDP recognized this. Shigeru Ishiba—the party’s policy chief at the time of the disaster, who set up a panel to investigate the party’s responsibility for it and the party’s energy policies—stated, “Someone once said that ‘the lesson of history is that we fail to learn from history.’ I don’t want that to happen.”37 The party’s four-page interim Fukushima report of February 2012 took the party to task and apologized for its shortcomings.38 In May, however, the next draft cut two pages and the elements critical of the party.39 Two pages remained that discussed the LDP’s role in postwar nuclear policy, the Fukushima accident, and future energy policy. After the party returned to power in December, it quickly abandoned that inquiry, and it never issued a final report.40 Over a year later, Toshimitsu Motegi—the head of METI, who had served as the party’s policy chief after Ishiba—acknowledged the LDP’s failures at a press conference for foreign journalists. This included failing to expect a severe accident and to establish an independent regulator. He also acknowledged the party’s mistake in clinging to the myth of absolute safety. But these were obvious. Not acknowledging them was impossible after Japan’s gut-wrenching experience and the various official and private accident investigations, including that of the Diet (of which he was a member), that already had cited them. Failing to acknowledge the gross failures would have been akin to declaring that he believed the earth was flat. Regarding the lack of a final report, he said, “What we in the government do is much more important than a piece of paper.”41 This is not quite the serious analysis and self-examination, especially regarding the LDP’s role within the nuclear village and the road to Fukushima, that one would expect of an alumnus of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former McKinsey consultant.

Restarts and Trust (or Lack Thereof) Despite the regulatory reforms and plans by utilities to spend $30 billion on safety upgrades, the prospects for Japan’s restarting a significant proportion of its downed reactors is poor. Lingering opposition from the public and some politicians in host communities account for this. Two-thirds of Japanese want either an immediate or a gradual termination of the use of nuclear power, and the most frequently cited reason for

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that desire is concern about safety. The closer people are to a plant, the more they support restarts in polls. The overwhelming reason for this is the positive economic impact of plant operations.42 Nuclear proponents, especially outside of Japan, claim that the opposition results from the political leanings, ignorance, or irrationality—or a combination thereof—on the part of the public and the media. Before Fukushima, Japanese public support for the use of nuclear power was close to 60  percent. Unlike most other industrial economies, where views were more evenly split or majorities favored phasing that use out, Japan may well be a case where the industry and regulators destroyed the solid support nuclear power had through their own actions. In a key article on trust and technology, William Freudenburg wrote that the largest factor affecting support for the use of high-risk technologies in the United States was trust, and not political affiliation or depth of knowledge.43 Interestingly, distrust of nuclear power in Japan has been high for the past two decades, despite previously high support for it—which may be linked to the continuing collapse in support for the use of nuclear power since Fukushima. According to a study in an in-house journal of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, 71  percent of survey respondents in 1998 said that they did not trust the government or utilities to release “truthful information” to the public about safety issues at nuclear plants.44 That jumped to 84 percent nearly a year after the 2011 Fukushima accident, up from the relatively high level of 59  percent in 2010. That question was added to the Institute of Nuclear Safety Systems’ regular survey after the highly publicized cover-up of a 1995 accident at the Monju experimental fast-breeder reactor. The lack of trust on such a fundamental matter, even two decades before Fukushima, indicates that while the Japanese public had backed the use of nuclear power for economic, energy security, and environmental reasons, that support rested on sand. It could easily collapse permanently. Because of the overall level of distrust, privately industry officials say that it may take a generation to rebuild trust in nuclear power in Japan, much like the case in the United States after Three Mile Island. And while the government has lifted mandatory evacuation orders for most of Fukushima, limited areas may remain no-go zones for generations. Parts of some towns have become interim storage sites for radioactive waste resulting from the decontamination efforts—though they could become de facto permanent repositories because of the difficulty in locating final disposal sites after the promised thirty years of temporary storage. In the village

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of Kawauchi in the central Fukushima mountains, the Japanese government offered hundreds of millions of dollars to the town to pay for an interim facility that would cover most of it. Few people have returned to the reopened areas. For instance, in the case of Namie, which was heavily contaminated by one of the radiation plumes after the accident, only 1,700 of the original 21,000 residents have returned. Those who do return are mainly sixty-five or older. In the latest government survey, released in January  2020, of people still registered as residents of Namie, over half say that they will not return. That share rises to nearly 70  percent for people under forty.45 The accident has accelerated the trend of hollowing out in rural areas in Fukushima, as younger people move to find work and the elderly remain—a situation similar to that in unaffected rural areas throughout Japan. The top reasons for not returning to Namie, similar to those in other towns’ surveys, range from fear about the Daiichi plant’s safety and radiation concerns to having already established new lives elsewhere and a dearth of medical facilities.46 The lack of well-paying jobs is another top issue. People with children express acute concern about radiation, too. Distrust of the decontamination programs and the government conducting them, combined with inadequate knowledge about radiation, contributed to this. Health fears have led families to live separately in what are sometimes called nuclear divorces—cases in which fathers and mothers split over how seriously to take radiation risks. Katsunobu Sakurai, the former mayor of Minami Soma City, who gained global fame for his plea for help on YouTube immediately after the disaster, said that he knows that radiation levels have come down and that parents, especially mothers, may be too concerned. “So even if we say that the levels have come down, of course, I can’t really be critical of the mothers wanting to protect their children. Obviously, I would like them to return, but we can’t force them to return,” he said. “There’s definitely been a mental impact on the children and their mothers from the accident and the radiation.” 47 Almost a decade after the accident, nine reactors have been restarted. All of these are located in western Japan, and each uses a different type of reactor (pressurized water reactors) than the one used in Fukushima. Prospects are slim for TEPCO’s only remaining plant, at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, to obtain an early approval to restart because of opposition from the new governor (the previous two were also opposed) and the host prefecture of Niigata, in east-

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ern Japan. The utility said it will scrap all of the reactors, damaged or undamaged, at the two Fukushima plants, including the Daini plant, which didn’t suffer meltdowns. The governor of Niigata, Hideyo Hanazumi, won election saying that he would support his predecessors’ policy of thoroughly investigating the Fukushima accident before approving a restart, meaning that it could be years before the prefecture gives an okay—if it ever does. Embittered by the disaster, Naoto Kan, who was prime minister on 3.11, and another leader, the perennially popular Junichiro Koizumi, now oppose the use of nuclear power and the LDP’s plans to restart old plants and open new ones. Mayors in affected towns, while antinuclear either by choice or because of outraged local voters, still have to play ball with the central government on nuclear issues, such as accepting interim storage facilities. They do not have much choice because the accident devastated their local economies. Sakurai, who now opposes the use of nuclear power after previously being skeptical of it, noted that central government officials did not talk about the downside or educate the public about radiation and advertised only the positive aspects. “The problem was that they disregarded their duty to inform people about the scientific basis for why they thought nuclear power was safe,” said Sakurai, who was wearing a “No Nukes” button during an interview. “There were big campaigns on TV and radio to say that nuclear power was safe, efficient, and good for the environment. That’s the only thing that they said.” 48

CHAPTER 7

Media Capture The Japanese Press and Fukushima Martin Fackler

Prologue: Where Are the Journalists? It was more than two weeks after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant when I first visited Minamisoma, a small city of 70,000 residents that sits on a coastal plain just north of the plant.1 Like many communities in Fukushima, Minamisoma suffered a double blow from the huge March 11, 2011, earthquake. The megajolt unleashed a tsunami fifteen meters high that swept inland to wash away entire neighborhoods, killing 926 people. The ground was still shaking from aftershocks a day later when the first of the plant’s reactor buildings exploded, forcing the government to evacuate the area within twenty kilometers from the plant that included the southern third of Minamisoma. Many people who lived outside the evacuation zone fled, too. Those who stayed behind were told to remain indoors. When truck drivers refused to enter the city for fear of radiation, cutting off deliveries of food and medicine, the desperate mayor posted a video on the internet pleading for help. My photographer and I arrived on a sunny day that bathed Minamisoma in the thin warmth of early spring. The roads were filled with what appeared to be normal traffic, although there was no one to be seen walking outside. I entered the city hall without an appointment, something not normally done in Japan. But this was not a normal time, as was evident by the unusual level of excitement elicited by my appearance. “A journalist has come!” a recep-

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tionist announced into a phone. To my surprise, I was immediately ushered in to meet the mayor. Katsunobu Sakurai looked much as he did in the video: a bald man in the beige jumpsuit of a Japanese municipal official, whose exhausted face was hardened by a determination to save his wounded city. After answering my questions about the video, he gave me a quick tour of city hall, where grim officials rushed down corridors darkened by electricity rationing, and anxious survivors gathered in the lobby to scan ever-growing lists of those confirmed dead. The tour included a stop at the press club, the room set aside for journalists that is a fixture at most major government offices. Having worked for years in Japan, I expected the room to be crowded with journalists from major Japanese media, waiting for the latest scrap of official news about their nation’s first existential crisis since 1945. Minamisoma was, after all, the largest city near the plant, and some 25,000 people still remained there. Instead, the room was empty. The major Japanese media had come here right after the earthquake and tsunami, Sakurai explained. But on the afternoon of March 12, after the first explosion at the plant, they had all fled the city. “Now they just call on the phone to ask questions,” he said with a flash of anger. “The only reporters who come here are a few freelancers and foreigners, like you.” I nodded, mutely jotting down the comments in my notebook before moving on to other questions, wanting to squeeze as much as I could into my short time with him.2 It took a few days for the import of what he had said about the press to sink in. I was in Fukushima City, where I had a chance to read up on the coverage of the disaster in Japan’s big national dailies. The newspapers were all reporting the government’s line—that there was no cause for alarm. Article after article repeated some variation of the reassurances then being given by the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, that the radiation would have no immediate health effects. Experts were cited saying that fears were overblown. The message seemed to be that everyone should stay put and let the authorities handle the situation. Nowhere did I see serious doubts about or challenges expressed toward the official message, much less efforts to independently verify whether officials were telling the truth. Then I felt my own flash of anger. These were the same newspapers whose reporters had abandoned Minamisoma, where tens of thousands of Japanese

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people remained. This retreat demonstrated that they harbored very serious doubts about their own safety near the plant. Yet I saw no evidence of these doubts being reflected in their coverage. In fact, the difference between what they were writing in their articles and the actions that they were taking to protect themselves could not have been starker. This was Japan’s biggest crisis since World War II. And here were the large national dailies, who set the tone for the nation’s public debate, simply repeating the official line of the government and the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), while their own journalists ran for the hills. None of the concerns that the journalists so obviously felt about their safety were being conveyed to their readers. Such an omission was staggering. If the journalists felt that Minamisoma could be too dangerous to visit, why didn’t they tell their readers that?3 What compelled them to stick to the official version of reality, even when they so clearly harbored doubts about it? This question gnawed at me, especially in the months that followed, as many people in Japan seemed to come to the same conclusion. The public turned against the media in a way that I had not seen there before—a way that resembled the angry disillusionment about journalists in the United States. Over time, it became apparent that Fukushima had damaged the Japanese public’s faith in authorities and institutions, and the big national newspapers and broadcasters were no exception.

Failed Watchdogs Many of the more thoughtful Japanese journalists also concluded that their media’s response to Fukushima had been wanting. For a year or two after the disaster, there was widespread soul-searching about the shortcomings in their coverage. Frank discussions were held, many in settings organized by study groups or universities. As in the United States, Japan’s big dailies, which are the largest newspapers in the world in terms of the number of subscribers, present themselves as a fourth estate whose mission is to serve as watchdogs on authorities. If US journalism holds up as role models investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Japanese journalism honors reporters whose dogged investigations toppled prime ministers. One of Japan’s most celebrated journalists is Takashi Tachibana, whose exhaustive reporting about

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the role of money in politics in the 1970s helped bring down one of postwar Japan’s most powerful prime ministers, Kakuei Tanaka. A decade later, a senior reporter in the Kawasaki bureau of the Asahi Shimbun named Hiroshi Yamamoto led investigative reporting about a stock-buying scheme that helped force out another strong prime minister, Noboru Takeshita. In the early days of the crisis at Fukushima, there were Japanese journalists who also did admirable work. One was Kiyoshi Nanasawa of NHK, the public broadcaster, who had done extensive reporting on Chernobyl. Alarmed by what he saw as the Japanese media’s complicity in government obfuscations, he and his producer, Junro Omori, accompanied a radiation scientist into the evacuation zone to find out the true extent of contamination. Nanasawa’s documentary about the scientist—Shinzo Kimura, who quit his job at a government laboratory to help residents measure radiation on their own when secrecy-obsessed officials refused to reveal contamination levels—won awards after it aired on May 15. However, by going into the evacuation zone, Nanasawa had violated an internal order that NHK had issued on March 15, barring its own reporters from approaching within thirty kilometers of the plant. Nanasawa was reprimanded and later taken off reporting. Nanasawa and other journalists told me that, at the urging of the Japanese government, most of the big media companies had issued similar orders to their reporters not to go within thirty kilometers of the plant.4 By deciding not to do their own on-the-ground reporting, media outlets were choosing to rely entirely on the government for information, Nanasawa said. “The mass media were just spreading the announcements by TEPCO and NISA and repeating at face value the line of the government and the socalled nuclear experts that ‘All is safe. Don’t worry,’ ” Nanasawa later wrote, referring to Japan’s main nuclear regulator at the time of the accident, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. “There were no facts that had been obtained by actual reporting.”5 “I had to resort to guerrilla reporting,” he wrote.6 However, journalists like Nanasawa were the exception. In her survey of media coverage of the tsunami and nuclear disaster, the sociologist Kaoru Endo described how major media outlets, faced with a confusing and frightening crisis, played it safe by basing their reports on official announcements. The result was coverage that, instead of trying to independently assess the claims of authorities, ended up simply propagating the official line that every thing was under control.

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Figure 7.1. Martin Fackler in front of reactor building number 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant during a June 2016 reporting trip for the science section of the New York Times. Copyright Martin Fackler.

“The coverage looked like it was simply reading the announcements of NSC, NISA, and TEPCO line by line,” Endo wrote, referring to another nuclear regulator at the time, the Nuclear Safety Commission. “This is a reason why that coverage lost credibility.”7

Credibility Lost That loss of credibility became glaringly evident on social media, where public anger at the major news media found a voice. The distrust grew into a backlash that was not unlike the disillusionment in the United States after the 2003 Iraq War, when mainstream media were blamed for failing to challenge the claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the administration of President George W. Bush had used to justify the invasion of Iraq. By the late spring of 2011, social media in Japan were rife with irate denunciations of the

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media, as well as conspiracy theories and fabricated stories about radiation deaths and other dangers that authorities were said to be covering up. One problem faced by those who felt a genuine concern about coverage in the major media was the dearth of alternative news sources. In 2011, the Japanese media industry remained surprisingly monolithic, dominated by the same big dailies and television stations that had reigned for decades. The digital era had yet to create serious challengers such as the ones that had appeared in the United States. BuzzFeed would not arrive in Japan for a few years, and even at the time that this goes to print, in 2020, Japan has yet to produce a homegrown disruptor that approaches the heft and influence of the postwar media giants. I was slow to notice this fomenting discontent because I spent the first two months after the earthquake up in the disaster zones of northeastern Japan, where electricity and cell-phone ser vice were knocked out for days or weeks, and most of the graying residents did not rely on the internet anyway. When survivors did create their own local outlets for disseminating postdisaster news, these took the form of older media: community radio stations and hand-printed newspapers, not blogs or Twitter handles. When I returned to Tokyo in May, I was struck by the tone of angry distrust in journalism on social media. Japan had been seeing a fraying of faith in public institutions ever since the economic collapse of the early 1990s, but the nuclear accident had become a catalyst for accelerating and broadening the disillusionment. I was also struck by the fact that public critics seemed to be honing in on the same problem that I had noticed: They were less angry about what the media had reported than about what they had left out of their coverage. There were accusations that the media were failing to play watchdog by not challenging the government or exposing what officials were trying to hide. The media were blasted for meekly adhering to the official line. One obvious example that got a lot of attention was the media’s refusal to use the “M” word (meltdown, or merutodaun in Japanese) to describe what was happening at the plant. This was despite the fact that nearly every nuclear expert outside of those in Japan’s official circles agreed that some sort of a meltdown had clearly occurred. National media avoided the “M” word in favor of the arcane technical term roshin yoyu, which means essentially the same thing (literally, “melted reactor core”) but is more abstract and thus less threatening. Journalists later told me that they were instructed by higher-ups not use the “M” word, which they feared would fan the flames of public panic, until government officials gave the OK.

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The result was a sort of pack self-censorship. When the New York Times used “meltdown” in a March 13 headline, local media jumped on us with claims that we were sensationalizing the accident. The “M” word did not appear in most local media reports until mid-May, two months after the accident, when the government finally admitted that meltdowns had indeed occurred in not one but three of the plant’s six reactors—the world’s first triple meltdown. The best-known example of the media’s failure to hold the government’s feet to the fire was in their coverage of the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or SPEEDI. This was a government computer system that was supposed to use weather data to forecast the spread of radiation during an accident to help plan evacuations. While government officials used SPEEDI’s forecasts for their planning, they decided against releasing this information to the public. Officials later said they chose to keep this information away from the public, and even from local governments, for fear of causing a panic. SPEEDI would eventually become a lightning rod for popular outrage at official disinformation and apparent willingness to sacrifice public health to downplay the disaster. This anger crystallized around the story of Namie, a town just north of the plant, whose residents were ordered to evacuate on March 12 but given no instructions on where to go. The mayor, Tamotsu Baba, chose the tall mountains to the plant’s northwest, which he thought would offer sanctuary from the invisible menace of radiation. He found out later that he had led his townspeople right into the heart of the plume, something he believes he would have known had the central government revealed SPEEDI’s maps. He says when he saw them later, he was furious because they clearly showed the plume heading toward the mountainous northwest. “We didn’t learn about SPEEDI until July,” Baba later told me. “The blood ran into my head. What about our lives?” For months after the accident, most major media did not mention SPEEDI, even after opposition lawmakers and local leaders like Baba started voicing anger about the lack of disclosure. The few reports that did appear, like one in the Yomiuri Shimbun in mid-March, said that the system had failed to function properly for lack of data.8 It was not until foreign media published detailed accounts of the cover-up, starting with a front-page story in the New York Times on August 8, that Japanese journalists felt free to challenge the official line.9 By the autumn of 2011, major newspapers like the Asahi

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Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun had printed their own highly critical articles on the government’s failure to disclose information from SPEEDI.10 In fact, the SPEEDI story became an early centerpiece of one of the more interest ing journalistic responses to the nuclear disaster. Seeing the postFukushima plunge in public trust in the media, the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s newspaper favored by the intelligentsia, tried to win readers back by strengthening its independent journalism. It expanded a small investigative reporting team into a major unit in the newspaper, staffing it with some thirty journalists. To lead this new section, the paper tapped Takaaki Yorimitsu, an awardwinning investigative journalist who had been recruited from a regional newspaper. Yorimitsu raised eyebrows at the Asahi Shimbun by taping a sign over the new section’s corner of the sixth-floor newsroom that read “Datsu Pochi Sengen” (No More Pooches Proclamation)—a statement that his group would be watchdogs on authorities, not pooches kept by those in power. In October, seven months after the accident, Yorimitsu’s section launched a series called “The Promethean Trap” that included the Asahi Shimbun’s detailed account of SPEEDI and other cover-ups. During its four and a half years in existence, the series produced some of the hardest-hitting Japanese journalism on the accident, finally poking holes in the official narrative. In 2012, the series won the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association Prize, Japan’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

Press Clubs Why did such investigative journalism remain the exception and not the norm? Why did national media outlets stick so closely to the official line? Why did it take half a year for even the most journalistically inclined to start challenging the government’s and TEPCO’s narratives? To attempt an explanation, we have to look at the practice of journalism in Japan. And to explain that, we need a quick detour into how journalism is done in the United States. To explain media behav ior in the United States, Dean Starkman, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, describes American journalism as swinging between two types of coverage, which he calls accountability journalism and access journalism.11 The former is true watchdog journalism, in which reporters take the initiative to hold the powerful accountable. The most celebrated variant is investigative journalism, in which intrepid reporters try to

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unearth information that people in power would rather keep hidden, to expose misdeeds or injustices. This is what Yorimitsu was trying to do at the Asahi Shimbun. Access journalism is a potentially more problematic practice. It refers to reporters’ emphasizing access to official sources to get exclusive information, called scoops. This approach is particularly prevalent in the coverage of power centers like Washington. While it can be useful, access journalism requires a tricky balancing act of cultivating sources while also maintaining enough distance to make independent judgments. The danger is that journalists will stop criticizing sources to protect their access or allow themselves to be used as conduits for propagating official narratives in exchange for scoops. During my more than fifteen years of working as a journalist in Japan, I have seen Japan’s big national media practice an extreme form of access journalism, offering relatively little accountability journalism to counterbalance it. This is particularly true when it comes to coverage of the powerful central ministries that actually run postwar Japan and have guided the nation’s embrace of nuclear energy. Like their American counterparts in Washington, Japanese journalists covering the national government in Tokyo often get co-opted by their proximity to power. But while American journalism seems to seesaw back and forth between the twin poles of access and accountability, getting cozy with authority and then swinging back toward investigative reporting, Japan’s journalists tend not to problematize their embrace of access journalism. They seem comfortable in a privileged position as insiders, fully embedded within their nation’s postwar establishment. This embedded status is largely a product of history. As Japan rushed to turn itself into a modern industrial power during the Meiji era in the nineteenth century, newspapers became an important forum for public intellectuals seeking a voice in shaping the emerging new order. Prewar Japanese journalism was a contentious and free-spirited world, populated by figures of differing views—from the imperialist Soho Tokutomi to the antiwar socialist Shusui Kotoku. But even as a free press seemed to blossom during the 1920s Taisho Democracy, Japan was already introducing increasingly draconian censorship laws. Japan fell under the control of militarists, who reordered society to prepare for a final showdown with the West. The result was what Japanese journalists sometimes call the 1940 nen taisei (system). This term refers to the organizing of companies and entire industries into tightly regimented cartels, which were pressed into ser vice to

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achieve wartime goals. Newspapers and radio broadcasters were no exception: they came under the control of the government, with the military dictating what they would tell the public about the war effort in the form of announcements from imperial headquarters. To mobilize the media, the army, navy, and the civilian Ministry of Communication took advantage of an existing structure called the press clubs, according to Yoshio Miyamoto, who worked in the ministry during the war.12 The press clubs had formed in prewar Japan as a way for journalists to perform a watchdog function of keeping a close tab on government officials. The idea was for journalists to base themselves within government ministries and agencies and maintain a constant vigilance over authorities. During the war, the arrangement was flipped around, with the press clubs used to monitor and control the media, according to Miyamoto. The media—like many other industries—retained such wartime reorganizations after 1945. The centerpiece remained the press clubs, which in their brighter moments can still support a watchdog function, but which usually serve the interests of the elite civil servants who in postwar Japan replaced the militarists at the nation’s helm. The press clubs still exist today in most government ministries and agencies. Most are actual rooms within the governmental entity provided to journalists, who can be seen sitting at desks or napping on a few natty couches as they wait for news. This usually arrives in the form of official handouts, or invitations to press conferences by officials and the informal, off-the-record briefings known as kondan (literally, “informal conversation”). This is a very convenient arrangement for the civil servants because it essentially empowers them to dictate the day’s news to the journalists, who rely on them for information. A defining feature is the fact that the clubs are organized and run by the journalists. They take turns serving as the club’s kanji (secretary), whose job is to organize press briefings and ask the first question. Membership is often limited to representatives of major news outlets—large newspapers, national broadcasters, and the two big wire services, Kyodo and Jiji—who use the clubs as oligopoly-like arrangements to give themselves exclusive access. Nonmember media, including smaller newspapers and broadcasters, magazines, foreign news agencies, new net-based media, and freelancers, are shut out. I ran into the press clubs when I worked as a reporter in Tokyo at the Wall Street Journal in the early 2000s. I was stunned to discover that I had to ask another journalist, a reporter from the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (a business

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daily) who served as the kanji at the Bank of Japan press club, for permission to attend a regular press conference held by the central bank governor. He said I could come only if I promised not to ask questions. For most foreign journalists, the press club at the prime minister’s office was probably the biggest obstacle to their work. It barred most foreign correspondents from even attending press conferences given by the prime minister of Japan, a fact that brought frequent protests from the Foreign Press in Japan, a correspondents’ group. This continued until 2009, when an opposition prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, finally opened the press conferences to non–club members. To this day, however, the press clubs in most other parts of government remain essentially unchanged. However, the biggest criticism of the press clubs is that they serve as mechanisms for enforcing conformity in domestic media coverage. While the dreaded wartime kempeitai (military police) is gone, the press clubs give officials another, less coercive means of manipulating journalists. Since reporters are constantly stationed inside the ministries, they are dependent on officials for information. This gives officials a form of leverage (the threat of denial of access) to keep them in line. Uncooperative journalists can face the career-damaging prospect of being excluded from leaks of information that officials give to rival news agencies. By the same token, journalists who curry favor with officials are rewarded with scoops, usually in the form of an advanced notice of some action that authorities are about to take. Access thus becomes both a carrot and a stick, giving officials the means to control not just the information appearing in the press, but even the narratives that frame it. In spring 2009, I saw Tokyo prosecutors use this power to control media coverage of their investigation into political donations to Ichiro Ozawa, the opposition party leader. When the feisty Tokyo Shimbun printed an article that deviated from the official story line that cast Ozawa as a modern-day Rasputin, prosecutors punished the newspaper by cutting off its access. For weeks, they refused to talk to its reporters, despite the fact that they were members of the press club. This excluded the reporters from the daily leaks of information, which the more compliant big national dailies were using to fill their front pages with the latest developments in the investigation, told strictly from the prosecutors’ perspective. However, I rarely saw officials having to resort to coercion. Most of the time, the journalists seemed to willingly serve as conduits for a top-down flow of information. The press clubs are part of the reason. By embedding journalists within the ministries, the clubs created constant contact be-

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tween officials and journalists, who often ended up adopting the mind-set of those they covered. But I also believe that there was a deeper affinity at work, one that came from a shared social background. Like the elite civil servants who run the country, the reporters at the big national dailies are products of Japan’s rigorously hierarchical education system and graduates of its top universities. This makes them members of a broader national elite that also includes business leaders and top academics. Thus, they have a common identity. Part of this is a feeling that, as members of an elite, they bear a special responsibility for the welfare of the nation. This goes back to the Meiji era, when a generation of young samurai stepped forward to rescue Japan from the threat of Western domination. In the present day, this concern for the fate of the nation creates a broadly supportive attitude toward the elite civil servants, who are the distant successors of those Meiji leaders. This may help explain why, during the national crisis that was Fukushima, press coverage tended to reflect the priorities of the bureaucrat-led establishment. First and foremost was the preservation of social order. Whether it was eschewing the “M” word, turning a blind eye to SPEEDI, or reporting that there was no cause for alarm even as their own reporters fled, the major media consistently shared the bureaucracy’s obsession with preventing a public panic. Fukushima is hardly an isolated example. The media’s willingness to promote official priorities may help account for the generally uncritical coverage that Japan’s nuclear power industry has enjoyed ever since its inception in the 1950s.

Media Capture The media emerged from World War II not only embedded in war time structures designed to place them at the ser vice of the national government, but also sharing a sense of mission to promote Japan’s peacetime reconstruction. Nowhere was this alignment between the national media and the elite bureaucracy more apparent than in the coverage of postwar Japan’s embrace of civilian nuclear power. Having suffered the atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan had every reason to reject nuclear power. Instead, government and industry embraced a seemingly limitless energy source that promised to end resourcepoor Japan’s reliance on imported fuel. Atomic energy also seemed a natural

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choice for a nation seeking to reinvent itself as a leader in peacetime industry and technology. As building up a domestic atomic energy industry became a high-priority national project, the major media showered it with positive coverage. In his survey of Japanese media coverage of the nuclear industry, veteran Asahi Shimbun reporter Yoichi Jomaru concludes that journalists gave the nuclear industry special treatment, sparing it from critical scrutiny.13 From the industry’s beginnings in the mid-1950s, he says, journalists failed to ask the obvious questions, such as whether it was wise to build nuclear reactors in one of the world’s most seismically active countries. The press also failed to hold the industry accountable, for example by challenging its claims of absolute safety or its lack of transparency. If anything, Jomaru writes, the media worked to assuage public fears about atomic power. This is particularly true of the Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest newspaper in terms of circulation, which played a leading role in launching the civilian nuclear industry. Under the control of its owner, Matsutaro Shoriki, a police officer turned media mogul and conservative politician, the newspaper was a forceful and early advocate of nuclear power. In the mid-1950s, it ran a major series called “Finally Seizing the Sun” that extolled atomic energy’s benefits, and in 1955, it hosted an exhibition with aid from the US government to promote nuclear power (this was the era of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech) that had 367,000 visitors over six weeks. A year later, Shoriki was named chairman of the government committee created to launch a domestic nuclear industry, formalizing the alignment between media and government. But even the liberal Asahi Shimbun, which was more critical of both Japan’s conservative government and US influence, held its fire when it came to nuclear power. According to Jomaru, the newspaper printed critical stories when mishaps happened at one of Japan’s nuclear plants, but it rarely challenged the industry itself or asked probing questions. In fact, Jomaru says, the newspaper played a major role in creating what became known as the safety myth—the idea that Japan’s nuclear technology had reached such a high level of quality that an accident could not happen. After the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the Asahi Shimbun and other newspapers told their readers that Japan’s nuclear industry was immune to such technological and human errors. In his book, Jomaru calls this repeated failure to question nuclear power, or to even seriously probe the way it was managed, a second “capitulation”

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by Japanese journalists—the first being their failure to challenge the militarists in 1941.14 “The bigger problem is what the newspaper did not write,” Jomaru said. “The fifty-four reactors were operating atop a fiction called the nuclear safety myth. The Asahi Shimbun did not have the mental attitude or the structure to slay this beast.”15 Similar criticisms have been leveled against Japanese regulators, who have been blamed for failing to hold the industry’s feet to the fire and forcing it to take safety measures that might have prevented Fukushima. The failure of the government watchdogs to bark is often blamed on something called regulatory capture, when regulators fall under the control of the industry that they are supposed to be monitoring. The career civil servants who oversaw the industry knew very little about nuclear engineering and had to rely on plant operators like TEPCO to police themselves. Something similar happened to muzzle the watchdogs in the press, who also ended up serving the industry’s interests. Like the regulators, the journalists allowed themselves to become dependent on the nuclear industry, about which they had little or no previous knowledge. They became enmeshed in what has been cynically called Japan’s nuclear village, a collusive complex of entangled financial and political interests that formed around the generously funded nuclear industry. Nuclear power plant operators like TEPCO became some of the biggest advertisers on television and were known for offering generous junkets to reporters. However, the financial rewards were not big enough to explain the cooptation of the media. This is particularly true of the newspapers, which in Japan draw their revenues less from advertising than from subscriptions from their huge audiences. I believe that the media capture was largely due to the privileged status that the nuclear energy industry enjoyed in postwar Japan. As a silver bullet for the nation’s energy needs, atomic power became a darling project of bureaucrats in not one but two powerful central ministries: the trade ministry, whose portfolio includes industrial promotion and energy policy, and the education ministry, which oversees scientific research. For more than a halfcentury, Japan has pinned more hopes on nuclear power than almost any other single technology, investing vast sums of money in building not only reactors but also a huge and still unproven fuel recycling program. This made Japan’s journalists almost structurally incapable of challenging the industry. Embedded within the ministries, the journalists could never

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escape the logic of the elite civil servants who guided Japan’s full-throttled drive into atomic energy. As members of an elite who felt a responsibility for the fate of the nation, the journalists were seduced by the same Promethean promise that made the civil servants view atomic power as the answer to Japan’s energy needs. So when disaster struck in March 2011, it should be no surprise that the journalists’ default mode was to promote the same goals as the national government: maintain order, prevent a public panic, and limit damage to both the nuclear industry and the moral authority of the central ministries that had given birth to it. This meant that the journalists—at least those at the big national newspapers and broadcasters—saw their role as defending the narratives put forth by officialdom, not challenging those with reports about the reality on the ground. It would take months for these journalists to realize that by siding so clearly with the officials in Tokyo, they had planted the seeds for an unprecedented public backlash against the media that continues to this day.

CHAPTER 8

The Politics of Radiation Assessment in the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis Kyle Cleveland

The Fukushima Evacuations Evacuations during major disasters are enormously complicated and invariably chaotic.1 In the midst of a crisis, government authorities must address many interrelated issues, and the social and financial costs for evacuation are so high that it is usually seen as the last resort. Despite the need to appease a worried public, governmental authorities are reluctant to accept the consequences and take the requisite actions. Moving an entire population presents logistical challenges that are extraordinarily difficult to meet. In the haste of trying to evacuate, actionable information must be provided, and various levels of governmental authorities and organizations must coordinate their activities.2 This requires levels of cooperation and communication that are difficult to achieve even in the best of circumstances. Despite their best efforts, the governmental organizations tasked with organizing evacuations seem to be chronically ill prepared for the complexity of real-world disasters, even though disaster management plans may be institutionalized and well established.3 As in the case of an army that never goes to war, the drills and preparations eventually become abstracted rituals whose urgency is lost. In the Tōhoku disasters there was a series of three linked evacuations: of citizens in the hot zone near the nuclear plant, of plant workers, and government-assisted departures. These evaluations overlapped to some extent but were distinctive to their constituent populations. Until the Japanese

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Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) could mobilize en masse to Tōhoku to assist, evacuations were haphazard and left to local authorities, who initially had little communication with the national governmental authorities. These evacuations soon overlapped with those initiated by the nuclear crisis. Meltdowns of the reactor cores at the Daiichi plant began within hours of the station blackout, and at 11:00 p.m. on March 11, the government issued an evacuation order to people within a three-kilometer radius of the plant. As the meltdowns accelerated and uncovered the reactor cores on March  12, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), under pressure from the Japanese government, vented the reactor number one at 2:30 p.m., and evacuations continued. An hour later (at 3:36 p.m.), the outer containment structure of that reactor building exploded, a de facto venting that released significant radiation fallout. The explosion was so large (breaking windows at three kilometers distance from the plant) that TEPCO and international nuclear experts monitoring the event believed that the primary pressurized containment vessel itself had exploded. If true, that would have put the entire eastern seaboard of Japan in jeopardy. Over the next few days, the government incrementally expanded the evacuation zone until it set a final radius at thirty kilometers from the plant. Authorities in Tōhoku communities near the Daiichi plant had little available information to orient their actions and address the anxieties of their citizens. As the outer structures of reactors numbers one, three, and four exploded over the next few days, the Japanese government—after consulting with the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency—implemented a fourstage evacuation process: from a prohibited-access area within three kilometers of the plant, an on-alert area three to twenty kilometers from the plant, an evacuation-prepared area twenty to thirty kilometers from it, and later from areas with hot spots. There were other evacuations in the immediate aftermath of the crisis from isolated hotspots that were not initially adequately assessed (such as Iitate village; see Brown, chap. 13 in this volume). The government’s mandatory evaluation order forced a total of 113,000 residents from eleven municipalities to leave their homes. The lack of a governmental advisory body to provide information about how to coordinate evacuations, combined with increasingly alarming reporting in the media, provoked the voluntary departure of worried citizens outside the officially designated zones. In total, an estimated 170,000 people were evacuated from the prohibited-access and on-alert areas (see Figure 8.1).4 As the nuclear disaster escalated, Prime Minister Naoto Kan instructed people within the on-alert area to leave and urged those in the evacuation-

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Figure 8.1. Man standing outside Koriyama refugee shelter. Evacuations during the Tōhoku disasters included those displaced from their homes by the tsunami and those who were forced to flee the radioactive plume: in villages nearby the nuclear power plant people lost their homes to the tsunami and the ability to return to their land inside the mandatory nuclear evacuation zone. Although shelters were intended to provide short-term relief, years after the 2011 disasters people continued to languish in shelters, uncertain about their future. Copyright Kyle Cleveland.

prepared area to shelter indoors. But no specific technical rationale for these actions was provided, in spite of the ominously deteriorating conditions at the Daiichi plant. Despite increasingly implausible reassurances being put forth by TEPCO, there was inherent uncertainty about the risk to people even outside these official zones, and over the coming weeks the possibility of widespread evacuations to a distance far beyond normally established exclusionary zones all the way to Tokyo and even farther was in play. Looking at the series of events that unfolded at the nuclear accident site and the lack of a coordinated disaster response with regional prefectural and local authorities, it is clear that in each instance government authorities were out of their depth and, despite their best intentions, inept in managing the crisis. This happened in various arenas: at the Daiichi plant; in TEPCO

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corporate headquarters in Tokyo; in the prime minister’s office; and in nuclear regulatory agencies such as the Japan Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Although Japanese officials had technological systems at their disposal that could have helped guide their actions in the disaster response and protect vulnerable citizens from radiation exposure, they failed to use these systems effectively. In response to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, the Japanese government established the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI), a sophisticated atmospheric modeling program that predicts where the radiation plume will disperse into the atmosphere in the case of an accident. Although the system was operational throughout the Fukushima crisis, it was not properly utilized for its intended purpose. Fixed radiation monitoring posts continued to stream data throughout the duration of the crisis, and the other radiation data that were available to the Japanese government and its agencies were not properly compiled and factored into the SPEEDI assessment and made available in a timely manner, which could have helped local authorities make more informed decisions about where to evacuate their citizens. Overwhelmed by the demands made on it in coordinating tsunami relief efforts and totally unprepared for the severity of the nuclear accident, the government stumbled into a chaotic response that left prefectural authorities without support or guidance at the most crucial time. The failure to make use of SPEEDI to help guide the evacuations away from the radioactive fallout unnecessarily exposed citizens from the villages near Daiichi to harm. Some of the evacuees were sent to the northeast, directly into the path of the radiation plume that emerged from the reactor venting and the building explosions at the plant. These evacuees may have received the most significant radiation exposure of the crisis. This generated the first significant scandal of the nuclear crisis, as it indicated government incompetence in failing to make effective use of its own radiation assessment system to provide timely guidance for evacuations and protective health measures.5 Not only was SPEEDI not used properly during crucial moments, but the program was unknown even to the government officials who were ostensibly charged with its oversight and implementation. Although the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) was responsible for radiation assessment and had conceived SPEEDI for this purpose, the vice minister of MEXT, Suzuki Kan, did not even know of SPEEDI’s existence and only learned of it when external parties requested its data to run their own analyses.6

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TEPCO faced a series of setbacks and was in a reactive mode, failing to anticipate where the disaster was heading and defiant of government authorities and critics who were making demands on it. The ultimate victims of this organizational dysfunction were Japanese villagers living nearby the plant, who were inadvertently exposed to high levels of radiation—in some cases even because of the how the evacuations were implemented. On March 12, as fears about the reactors heightened and TEPCO prepared to vent reactor number one, the government ordered the evacuated of residents of four towns near the reactors, increasing the evacuation zone from within two kilometers of the plant, as decided in the evening of the previous day, to within ten kilometers. Two of the towns—Futaba and Okuma—were assisted in the evacuation process, with the government providing buses to transport citizens. However, people in the towns of Namie and Tomioka, which were not initially in the evacuation area, were left to fend for themselves, with no official guidance about the evacuation or governmental assistance and no administration of potassium iodine (as a prophylactic measure to prevent the uptake of radioactive iodine into the thyroid). Tomatsu Baba (see Figure 8.2), the mayor of Namie, a nonconsolidated village that at its closest point is only four kilometers from the plant, said of this experience: At the very moment we were trying so hard to manage the tsunami crisis, this special case of the nuclear incident was going on, and we were not getting that information. The next morning of March 12 we were watching NHK television and by chance saw the government announcing the nuclear accident and advising [people] to stay out of [the] ten kilometers [around the plant]. And, as we watched the TV, we started to feel something was not right . . . like “aren’t they hiding something from us?” There were some victims who were helping us who worked for TEPCO, and they went to the plant. And then, I knew it, he said, ‘Mayor! You’re in danger! You need to go much further away, the nuclear plant is endangered: seriously, it may explode!’ There was an atmosphere like that. We said, “Our citizens’ life is the priority, so, let’s get out to twenty kilometers’ radius, not just ten kilometers.” There was no coordination with the national government. Nothing. There were no instructions on where to evacuate, and so we did every thing ourselves. I am particularly saddened by the fact that the government did not tell us where to evacuate or how to evacuate to places, when they made their announcement on March 12. For the

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Figure 8.2. Namie Mayor Baba in office. Namie Mayor Tomatsu Baba (right) points toward his village’s location on a map of the evacuation and exclusionary zones in Fukushima. The residents of Namie were inadvertently evacuated into the path of the radioactive plume. Copyright Kyle Cleveland.

evacuation, we amassed all the buses we could and pushed everyone aboard. It was our priority to save the lives of our citizens. On the 12th, 13th, and 14th, we felt like we were battling a radiation (genpatsu) monster, and so we thought we should evacuate to an even greater distance. By this time the 21,000 citizens of Namie had been scattered about, just like bees leaving a hive.7 Fueled by the bitter acrimony attached to this experience, the city of Namie eventually sued TEPCO for failing to inform its representatives in a timely manner of the danger posed by the nuclear disaster, and for failing to utilize SPEEDI to protect its citizens from radiation exposure. With little chance of bringing a successful criminal case against the government, Namie submitted to the government’s Alternative Dispute Resolution process, which allowed for civil litigation against TEPCO and the Japanese government. This sped up the search for compensation but dramatically reduced the liability of TEPCO, while removing the complaint from the purview of

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criminal courts. Fifteen thousand Namie citizens signed the Alternative Dispute Resolution complaint.8 Over the next several years, TEPCO rejected Namie’s petition for redress six times and discontinued compensation for mental anguish, even though only 830 of the original 21,000 residents of Namie returned to their homes after the evacuation orders were lifted. Until his death from cancer in 2018 (which TEPCO claimed was unrelated to radiation exposure), Mayor Baba referred to the Japanese government’s and TEPCO’s failure to warn his village’s residents while sending them directly into the path of the radiation plume as “institutional murder.”

Gaiatsu: The Influence of Foreign Pressure on the Nuclear Disaster Mitigation As organizations and nations outside of Japan lent helping hands, they also added to the problematic politics and mechanisms of addressing the nuclear crisis. The Tōhoku disasters were among the most significant events for Japan in the contemporary era, which brought attention and scrutiny from foreign stakeholders whose interests were jeopardized by the implications of the nuclear disaster. One hundred and eighteen countries provided resources and help in the tsunami relief efforts, but very few international parties were allowed access to the inner workings of the Japanese government or TEPCO, which were insular, defensive, fighting among themselves, and wary of external help that threatened their autonomy. Due to its long-standing strategic alliance with the United States, Japan benefited from having US (principally military) assets in Japan for help with tsunami relief efforts, and eventually it would come to rely on US technical expertise, especially in the nuclear disaster mitigation. Nineteen federal US agencies where involved in the tsunami response, and in the nuclear disaster, the US Department of Defense and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) were the most significant players outside the matrix of Japanese organizations that had a direct stake in the disaster response. The US Pacific Command played a vital role in relief efforts in Tōhoku from the beginning, worked closely with the JSDF, and were significant first responders in coastal villages that had been swamped by the tsunami. The coordinated response between the US military and the JSDF was branded as “Operation Tomodachi” (Operation Friendship), an ode to and symbol of the long-standing US/Japan strategic military alliance that dated back to

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conclusion of the Pacific War. This joint task force led the separate organizations to become embedded within one another, share information, and implement interorganizational protective action protocols to protect their troops from radiation exposure, while continuing to run relief operations along the coast to respond to the tsunami damage.9 By March 15, US radiation experts had become convinced that the situation at the nuclear plant was far worse than TEPCO acknowledged and that Japan could not effectively address the crisis.10 As the situation at the Daiichi plant further deteriorated, radiation levels rose so high that on-site staff members faced the prospect of incurring lethal doses if they remained. On March 15, TEPCO’s president, Shimizu Masataka, announced that TEPCO intended to withdraw their staff members from the plant. This implied that they intended to abandon the plant altogether (although later this was strongly disputed and remains unresolved). If this had happened, eventually all the reactor cores would have melted down, along with the inventory of spent fuel (each reactor unit has a spent fuel pool that cools used cores after they are taken off-line—and they are still highly toxic). The resulting radiological releases would have been so catastrophic that the staff at the Daini nuclear plant, just sixteen kilometers south from Daiichi on the coast, would have also been compelled to abandon their plant (the mandatory evacuation zone by this time was thirty kilometers from the Daiichi plant). This would have resulted in the complete meltdowns of all of its reactors and associated spent fuel pools, too. Because each spent fuel pool contains two to five reactor cores, and there are ten reactors between the Daiichi and Daini plants, each with an associated spent fuel pool, the resulting releases could have totaled over twenty reactor cores—a disaster of almost unimaginable scale. This would have been orders of magnitude more severe than the Chernobyl accident. It was with this in mind that the Japanese government seriously considered evacuating Tokyo (this fact was not revealed until a year later, as redacted testimony from the government’s investigation became public).11 Alarmed by this possibility, Prime Minister Kan pointedly confronted TEPCO officials and demanded that the staff remain. This was necessary to address the crisis, but since TEPCO is a commercial enterprise with voluntary citizen employees, its staff could not legally be compelled to remain and face the prospect of significant radiation exposure, and even the possibility of imminent death. Media and government reports characterized the debate about possible withdrawal of plant workers from the Daiichi site as a conflict among TEPCO leaders, the operational staff at the plant, and the prime

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minister’s office. Although these tensions can be explained in terms of organizational interests and personal agendas12 (Kan was infamous—and widely criticized—for being a belligerent annoyance to TEPCO throughout the crisis), the overarching framework must include the military, which monitored the situation as it developed and eventually became embroiled in the interorganizational struggle for control of the plant. US military officials envisioned a scenario in which they would have been compelled to fully engage the nuclear crisis, essentially taking over the Daiichi site in coordination with the JSDF. Faced with this prospect, the United States gave the prime minister’s office an ultimatum, demanding that TEPCO immediately pour water on the reactor cores, prevent the Daiichi staff from abandoning the plant (even if, as a result, they were to incur fatal doses), and accept consultation and direction from the US nuclear authorities. US leaders threatened to remove all US citizens (including nonessential military personnel) from Japan if these demands were not met. It is a measure of the gravity of these concerns that the US embassy and military initiated emergency action plans to protect security assets by destroying confidential information in the move toward evacuation (documents were shredded, burn bags were used to destroy large volumes of materials, and equipment was physically destroyed at the US Embassy in anticipation of an imminent emergency large-scale evacuation). Planning began to put thousands of Americans on the decks of US aircraft carriers to remove them immediately from Japan.13 These decisions were based on advisories by nuclear experts who, despite having gathered both real-world radiation measurements and input from the US national laboratories (the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia labs for the NRC; the Knolls and Bettis labs for Naval reactors), were divided in their conclusions about the level of threat that the radiation dispersion from the Daiichi plant posed.14 The Japanese government came under withering criticism for failing to make use of SPEEDI to guide its protective action protocols, but radiation experts from around the world futilely tried to make use of similar programs (such as the Radiological Assessment System for Consequence Analysis [RASCAL], which is used by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission) only to have similarly ambiguous results. SPEEDI and RASCAL are among a range of diagnostic tools in the category of decision-making support systems for nuclear emergency management, used by nuclear authorities to gauge the severity of a radiological crisis. The underlying basis for these systems is a “source-term” analysis, defined as “the types, quantities, and physical and chemical forms of the radionuclides present in a nuclear

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facility that have the potential to give rise to exposure to ionizing radiation, radioactive waste or discharges.”15 Basically, the source-term is the total inventory of radionuclides in a given nuclear repository that are able to go exvessel into the environment. It may well be that every nuclear laboratory with the ability to do so ran source-term analyses, because without the proprietary data being compiled by the US and Japanese military upon which to base a real-world analysis, this was the only way to assess the situation from afar. And for the insular world of nuclear authorities, the Fukushima crisis was a unique opportunity to generate scientific insights that could be factored into disaster mitigation plans and protective action measures for all sorts of nuclear facilities. Despite their presumed scientific rigor, these atmospheric modeling system estimates were inconsistent, leading to wildly divergent conclusions about the amount of radiation being released into the environment based upon source-term assumptions. Because of the station blackout and the inability of the government ministries responsible for radiation assessment to compile data from the fixed station monitoring posts, the only initial basis for analysis was the source-term for each reactor and associated spent fuel pool. It was not until mid-March that the Japanese radiation authorities, the joint task force of the US and Japanese militaries, and foreign experts (principally from the NRC) developed a process though which they collectively could examine radiation data in a coherent way. On March 17, the US Department of Energy deployed its atmospheric monitoring system to Japan to begin radiation surveys, mapping the atmospheric releases and ground depositions.16 The data derived from these measurements were qualitatively different from the speculative estimates based on computer algorithm modeling programs that used source-term derivatives. These varied to such an extent that the conflicting analyses sowed confusion even among some of the most technically proficient nuclear experts in the world, generating significant conflict among the organizations that were attempting to make use of their diagnostic tools. Over the next few weeks, the US Department of Energy, in coordination with the JSDF, conducted comprehensive radiation surveys, deploying its atmospheric monitoring system to Japan, where they conducted airborne flights to map the area around the Daiichi nuclear plant, and put teams on the ground to do in situ analysis of radiation fallout deposits. These surveys revealed unexpectedly high levels of radiation even at significant distances from the Daiichi plant. Based upon these data, combined with a lack of confidence that TEPCO could effectively halt the progression of meltdowns and

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ever-increasing levels of fallout, the US Department of Energy (via the NRC and with the reluctant acknowledgment of the Department of State) broke with Japan, expanding its evacuation zone from the twenty-kilometer (twelvemile) threshold that it had shared until these discrepancies came to light to eighty-kilometers (fifty-miles). Although the United States had dramatically expanded the evacuation zone and recommended that its citizens stay outside this larger zone, this recommendation had little meaning outside the military: there were very few American civilians living in Tōhoku before the 3.11 disasters, and the few who were there left the region soon after the nuclear crisis began. But this enlargement of the zone had implications for military strategic assets in Tōhoku, where JSDF bases are arrayed—bases that were linked to the joint US-Japan task forces and from which tsunami relief efforts were being staged. In recognition of the threat that nuclear fallout posed to troops in this region, the United States distributed potassium iodide (as a preventative measure to prevent uptake of radioactive iodine into the thyroid) to its military forces (and to embassy personnel and dependents), limited their time within the exclusion zone, and monitored their radiation exposure, to make sure that they did not exceed the requisite protective action guideline limits. Whereas Japan had historically been a nonnuclear state outside the domain of commercial nuclear energy, the US military, especially the nuclear Navy, has nuclear disaster plans integrated into their operations. These protocols have been in place for decades, dating back to the inception of nuclear energy and its use in World War II. The nuclear aircraft carriers George Washington (CVN-73) and Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) were both in Southeast Asia at the time of the disaster (the latter was deployed to a military exercise near Korea, and the former was stationed at the Yokosuka Naval Base and was out of commission for maintenance). These ships (which, in conjunction with their weapon systems, are essentially floating nuclear laboratories) were the only forward deployed nuclear carriers in the world at the time of the 2011 disasters. Within the first few days of the disaster, both of these ships were hit by the radioactive plume disseminating from the Daiichi reactors. This alarmed the US Pacific Command and quickly set in motion a series of decisions that had a significant impact on the disaster response. The US Navy’s concerns drove decision making for both the US and Japanese governments’ responses, putting it at odds with the US State Department and NRC—both of which disagreed with the Navy’s grave assessment of the danger posed by the nuclear fallout to those outside the immediate vicinity of the Daiichi plant. Unlike the Navy, the NRC’s analysis,

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based largely on consultation with its Protective Measures team who had deployed to Japan, in coordination with its national laboratories (Lawrence Livermore and Sandia), claimed that radiation measurements remained below the threshold for protective actions. The Navy rejected this perspective for two reasons: first, the data being generated through radiation monitoring varied so significantly that the accuracy of a particular reading was inherently ambiguous and thus questionable; and second, irrespective of any single radiation reading, over time the doses that people were receiving would accrue and eventually exceed the threshold for protective action guidelines (as threatened to be the case when the Ronald Reagan nuclear carrier was in the plume on March 13). With the military working on the crisis over an indefinite period of time (there was no end in sight during the first several weeks of the disaster), and Department of Defense dependents living at the military bases, the threat of receiving ever-accruing doses would eventually warrant an evacuation as the radiation doses reached the protective action threshold limit and exceeded it. As a result, the US Pacific Command (via the Navy’s Office of Nuclear Propulsion, or “Naval Reactors”) recommended a 200-mile (320-kilometer) exclusionary zone. Ultimately, in the military’s terms, force protection trumps politics, and by law they could impose actions that would protect their personnel, irrespective of the diplomatic pressures that the politics of the moment imposed on its decision making. Shortly thereafter, in a mission called “Operation Pacific Passage,” the US Pacific Command implemented military-assisted departures from Japan, sending 7,452 Department of Defense dependents abroad to escape the threat. This was the largest movement of US citizens since the Pacific War, and it sent a shock wave of anxiety through the federal US agencies that had personnel on the ground in Japan to work on the crisis. Commercial nuclear authorities around the world also felt considerable alarm, because they recognized the threat that this evacuation posed to their domestic nuclear interests.17 Remarkably, the Japanese government based their evacuation zone on a predetermined recommendation in 2007 from the International Atomic Energy Agency. This was derived from the power rating of the reactors, a crude measure at best, which made no accounting for the nuances of radiation dispersion in a nuclear accident, and thus was not conceived to be consolidated with actual radiation monitoring. This initial evacuation advisory had been acted on by March 12, at a time when no firm numbers were available (or if they were available, they were uncompiled). However, within the next two weeks the country was awash with radiation data from a variety of

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sources, including atmospheric monitoring, on-the-ground radiation surveys, fixed station monitoring posts, military drones, and measurements at and near the plant. Even the international space station had been repositioned for flyovers so it could use its sophisticated technology to monitor the plume. Yet when the Japanese government seriously discussed the possibility of evacuating Tokyo, it relied on a report by Shunsuke Kondo, the chairman of Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission, that had no specific basis in the Fukushima disaster. The fifteen-page report, titled “Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant: A Worst Case Scenario,”18 used data from the Chernobyl accident, focusing especially on the spent fuel pools’ radiological inventory, and it was not released until March 25, fully two weeks into the disaster and long after time-sensitive decisions that would affect the public had been made.

Vernacular Epistemologies of Risk Mass media served as the window through which those outside the inner workings of the Japanese government and TEPCO were able to get a sense of the crisis, and much of this was limited by the lack of information and the ideological biases of those who were providing analyses. It was not until months later that an accurate rendering of the situation came into focus, and it took years for investigative panels and scholarly research to accurately characterize the real situation on the ground at Daiichi. The lack of information about what was really transpiring at the plant in the direst phase of the crisis created a vacuum into which antinuclear critics and industry defenders alike cast their fears and hopes. This led to the development of divergent risk narratives. Despite having been vindicated in their concern about the dangers inherent in nuclear energy, antinuclear groups were excluded from direct participation in addressing the disaster. It would be reductive to claim that there was media bias in coverage of the disaster: in fact, the media rendering of the disaster was multifaceted, often contradictory, and even incoherent. Media reports were related only obliquely to the facts of what was really happening at Daiichi because of a lack of meaningful information, a lack of political transparency and due to the obscure complexity of nuclear technology. In an analysis of a sample of 2,144 articles in various media outlets, Celine-Marie Pascale contends that “media practices constructed not only knowledge about the disaster, but also vernacular epistemologies—that is to say, untheorized paradigms for evaluating the

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validity and impact of the disaster in particular and of nuclear radiation in general.”19 These media frames served as a set of heuristics that helped make sense of the disaster and evaluated the severity of the risks. They were not necessarily accurate, in large part because of the dearth of meaningful data that were initially available. This left only conjecture and speculation to fill the gap. These vernacular epistemologies of risk were not data-driven analyses. Outside the insular world of the nuclear industry, meaningful data beyond the visible evidence did not become available until months later. Media coverage became a morally contended discourse that used the nuclear disaster as a proxy for nuclear politics, rather than a scientific rendering of what transpired behind the scene at Daiichi.20 To the government authorities, TEPCO leaders, and others inside the organizational bubble of the nuclear industries who had a direct institutional stake in the disaster and were privy to confidential information, the disaster was entirely different. Meaningful indicators suggested that it was far worse than the general public realized. For nuclear experts, the debate over whether meltdowns had occurred was largely a public relations controversy played out in the mass media echo chamber. As hydrogen explosions rocked the buildings that housed the reactors, authorities took it as a given that significant damage to the reactor core had occurred. As a result, discourses ran along parallel but largely distinct tracks, reflecting the gap between the accident as it actually transpired, and the speculative scenarios conveyed in the public realm through media coverage and governmental statements. Backstage and still largely unknown outside the inner circles of government, a series of high-stakes disputes set federal US agencies at odds with each other and the Japanese government about how dire the accident was and how likely it was to become. It is unsettling to realize that some of the world’s leading radiation experts scrutinized the same data and reached dramatically divergent conclusions.21 All too often in nuclear accidents the reach of experts exceeds their grasp, as political agendas, limited budgets, wishful thinking, and the maddeningly complex nature of radiation assessment compromise data collection, analysis, and its translation into policy.

Conclusion The Fukushima evacuations became controversial because of how they were conducted and whether or not they were ultimately necessary. Woven to-

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gether, these two threads calibrated the balance between the necessity to leave and the degree of harm created by the evacuations. Political demands for transparency eventually resulted in public disclosure, and international agencies such as the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the International Atomic Energy Agency have conducted detailed assessments of the radiation dispersion from the disaster. Their findings are consistent with the information revealed through official government investigations, scholarly work, and the work of independent “watchdog” organizations such as Safecast—a citizen-science nongovernmental organization devoted to compiling comprehensive measurements that exceed the scope of governmental organizations such as the Japanese Ministry of Health. Whether the actual level of radiation exposure would pose a genuine threat to public health remains a contentious issue.22 Over time, as scientific studies offered more deliberate assessments of the actual extent of radiation dispersion in the region, a retrospective critical discourse developed that challenged the rationale for the evacuations. This critique claims that while no deaths could be directly attributed to radiation exposure from the nuclear meltdowns, the evacuations resulted in the deaths of about fifty people in the first few days and as many as a thousand soon thereafter. Most of the people who died did so as a result of hypothermia, dehydration, and deterioration of underlying medical problems,23 especially among critically ill patients—principally the elderly. Several years into the long-term timeframe of the crisis, the Japanese Reconstruction Agency determined that stress and suicide had claimed over two thousand lives. Arguments against the evacuation fail to account for the politics of radiation, in which the social context constrained the so-called objective assessments of scientific regimes. Ultimately, governmental evacuation protocols must take into account not only scientific assessments but also public opinion and political priorities. In a mass panic, the tolerance threshold lowers to such a degree that even if a government determined that people could shelter in place and wait (as was the initial policy regarding evacuations), it would need to obtain general public assent.24 This proved to be impossible under the unique conditions of the Tōhoku disasters, in which in short order the earthquake, followed on by the devastating tsunami and then within a day meltdowns at the Daiichi nuclear power plant, created a sense of mass confusion that overwhelmed all levels of government and dispersed tsunami and nuclear refugees in evacuations that distributed them randomly throughout the region. Simply being able to coordinate messaging

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and communicate with those whose lives were unsettled in these surreal circumstances was beyond the capacity of authorities, and few evacuees had autonomy in their vulnerable state to convey their needs, even if they could get the attention of the relevant authorities. In his analysis of the panic during the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Kai Erikson noted that even though Governor Richard Thornburgh had recommended only a five-mile evacuation zone, more than 200,000 people fled, moving an average of a hundred miles away from the nuclear plant. Into this emotionally overwrought situation an “evacuation shadow phenomenon” developed, “representing the gap between what official wisdom called for and what the people at risk, acting on the wisdoms of their own, decided to do.” In this risk environment, “to describe that response as ‘over-reaction’ or ‘irrationality,’ as specialists and lay people often try to do, is to give it a name without saying anything useful about it at all. The important question is: What were the wisdoms on which the evacuees acted? And the best answer almost certainly is: a profound dread.”25 The counterfactual of a Fukushima disaster with no evacuations in the midst of the most significant radiation threat since Chernobyl is idealistic at best. It presumes that people would be better off staying in place to face the prospects of what might be life-threatening effects. Irrespective of whether evacuation was compelled, people would flee on their own accord. They would often leave behind the infirm and powerless, thus requiring hospital and nursing home health care workers in intensive care units to remain to care for their patients. It would be impossible to require people to stay, caged in what could be a life-threatening situation. The population would be stratified not just by emotional tenor, but also by the resources available for them to depart on their own if they chose to defy the government command to stay. In such a situation, we cannot assume that people would be willing to gamble their lives by adhering to an unlikely best-case scenario and hoping things would go well. Certainly, no one who knew the events at the Daiichi plant envisioned that this was likely, given the ever-increasing severity of the event and the self-evident lack of an organizational response that could address the disaster effectively. Risk parameters in nuclear events differ qualitatively from those related to evacuations in natural disasters, such as hurricanes. Without unambiguous certainty, the default conservative position among authorities is the precautionary principle. Diplomatic terms often refer to this as acting out of an abundance of caution. This is a pragmatic concession to the demands that a

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worried public make on authorities and the recriminations that would result if public concerns were not properly addressed. We see this in evacuations in natural disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, pandemic disease, or any perceived malady that threatens to jeopardize a population. In a major disaster such as Fukushima, the logic is unassailable: if, facing a possible catastrophe, authorities ignored public concerns and simply wished for the best, they would face severe recriminations—including legal consequences—if their optimistic hopes failed to materialize.26 That appeared to be an all too real possibility in the Fukushima nuclear crisis. At the other end of the risk continuum, every aspect of the nuclear industry is guided by the ALARA principle—an acronym that refers to the expectation that radiation exposure should be minimized to “as low as is reasonably achievable.”27 ALARA is inscribed in nuclear power plant operations, medical facilities’ use of radiation therapy, in-flight exposure to ionizing radiation by airline pilots and cabin crews, and the use of nuclear energy even in military platforms. The underlying assumption is that some amount of radiation exposure is an inherent characteristic of the normal operations of nuclear facilities. Thus, the ALARA principle is a pragmatic compromise that attempts to balance the use of nuclear energy with the level of radiation exposure that people will tolerate. The reference points for ALARA are the result of a regulatory process that establishes acceptable standards. While in the abstract ALARA is an overarching philosophy accepted as the cost of doing nuclear business, different organizations may establish their own standards. Thus, there is variance even among the most ardent supporters of nuclear energy. By definition, ALARA is not objective, and in the special circumstances of a nuclear accident, the allowable dose for radiation workers is elevated toward the upper parameters of potential physiological harm. At the Daiichi plant, as workers faced escalating dose rates that would soon exceed the pre-accident threshold limits for radiation exposure, the government simply raised the limits to levels that would never have been tolerated under normal conditions. This is legally permissible because nuclear authorities have predetermined that the normal threshold limits that prevail are on the low end of risk, in keeping with the spirit of the precautionary principle to minimize harm. ALARA is a risk calculation that floats along the low tide of public sentiment, but it is an adjustable standard that may be recalculated based on the prevailing circumstances, which is politically useful and logistically essential for nuclear enterprises to continue their operations in societies that are compelled to heed public sentiment.

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The ALARA principle informs the pro- and antinuclear movements. It helps characterize their fundamentally opposed assumptions about the nature of radiation dispersion. If we were to reconceive this principle from “as low as is reasonably achievable” to “as low as is politically viable,” it would more accurately convey this difference. “Reasonably Achievable” indicates what is pragmatically possible, while “Politically Viable” is a measure of public sentiment taking into account what the political marketplace will bear—the level of risk that is accepted to even be able to operate nuclear plants. This distinction illustrates the point that radiation assessment is just as much a political calculation as it is a scientific one. Scientists are inclined to promote an abstract ideal of the true scientific method, based on strict falsification criteria and contrasted with pseudoscientific methods that do not meet the standard of objectivity. These “demarcation criteria”28 are an admirable and necessary ideal to strive for, especially when public health is at stake, but science does not float outside the institutions in which it resides. What is regarded as a scientifically viable enterprise is unavoidably influenced by the political calculations that produce budgets, priorities, and methodological protocols. This is especially—perhaps even uniquely—true for radiological science, given its historical associations with war. Using the Fukushima disaster as an illustrative case study, I contend that the situation is more complex than these ideologies would allow. Radiation assessment only imperfectly maps objective reality. Civil society organizations and activists who have battled the nuclear industry demand that the industry comply with the regulatory standards that are legally required. This has implications for the onerous process of nuclear plant siting, and it helps set the boundary between nuclear facilities and the surrounding populations, who live in the shadow of potential nuclear threat. It is not only a hedge against litigation, but it is also a kind of bargain with the population to gain acceptance of nuclear operations in every thing from nuclear propulsion plants on submarines and ships to the storage of spent fuel and toxic waste and the siting and relicensing approval for nuclear plants. At a more conceptual level, the ways in which radiation assessment maps onto risk discourses demonstrates how data, theory, and values converge to make sense of reality in a highly contested space.29

CHAPTER 9

Nuclear Labor, Its Invisibility, and the Dispute over Low-Dose Radiation Paul Jobin

In April 2011, the government permitted that Fukushima school children be exposed to a maximum annual dose of 20 millisieverts (mSv). Shocked by this decision, the nuclear expert Toshisō Kosako resigned from his position of special advisor to the prime minister. In a press conference held on April 29 to explain his decision, he insisted that a cumulative annual contamination of 20 mSv was exceptional, even for nuclear plant or uranium mine workers, and that children should not be exposed to such a threshold.1 When interviewed on television, he reinforced the heuristic virtue of this comparison with his emotional tone: it is rare to see a professor at the University of Tokyo cry in public. When I met him one year later, though, he had not turned into an opponent of nuclear energy. He maintained his stance simply against the radiation policy. In August  2015, after several months of discussion, the Japan Nuclear Regulation Authority and the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare finally decided to raise the exceptional emergency dose limit for nuclear workers to 250 mSv from the previous 100 mSv. This measure, which had already been applied from March to December 2011 as an emergency measure, was to cope with the lack of labor at Fukushima Daiichi. Two months later, on October 10, the ministry held a press conference to announce that a worker had seen his application for occupational cancer (leukemia) accepted (that is, his exposure to an occupational hazard had been certified). The forty-one-year-old man had been employed at Fukushima Daiichi

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from October 2012 to December 2013 and exposed to a cumulative dose of 19.8 mSv. The ministry was thereafter compelled to justify the apparent contradiction of a “maximum safety exposure” of 250 mSv and the certification of a cancer with a total dose of 20 mSv. The nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that supported nuclear workers urged the ministry to certify the other cases that were pending and criticized the decision to increase the maximum exposure to 250 mSv. But the ministry responded that certification for occupational hazards did not mean that all workers exposed to those levels would develop cancer, and according to the existing epidemiological surveys and the recommendations from the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP), these levels were safe. These two episodes reveal a great deal about responses to radiation in Japan before and after the 3.11 disasters. In the first part of this chapter, I will show that these episodes reflect the effort spent by Japanese NGOs and labor activists to prevent occupational hazards and to make them more socially visible when they occur. Although their struggle started long before, it has gained momentum since the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In the second part of the chapter, I will show how these episodes condense the conflicting interpretations of low-dose radiation and the relative importance of nuclear labor in that dispute. This chapter follows a study that I began in 2002 on Japanese nuclear contract workers. Further observations and interviews have been conducted since 2011 among cleanup workers, government experts, activists, and epidemiologists.

Nuclear Labor and the Systemic Invisibility of Radiation Hazards The March 2011 chain of events and its legacy have become another episode in the long story of the controversy over the hazards of radiation at low doses. In contrast with a large number of toxic issues that remain critically short of scientific research, abundant research on low-dose radiation has been conducted.2 Starting with the cohort surveys on Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, there is considerable literature on the issue, and studies on nuclear labor play an impor tant role in it. In her impor tant work on the history of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), Susan Lindee concluded that, despite various episodes of protests, “What happened to the

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survivors—the slow and invisible internal pathologies of their bodies over the decades—was gradually made visible and real by the science of ABCC.”3 As she reminds us more recently, the epidemiology of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors became the basis for radiation protection, while the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, which replaced the ABCC, is now conducting studies on a cohort of 20,000 Fukushima Daiichi cleanup workers.4 Though the return rate for a first questionnaire was disappointing, nuclear workers are generally cooperative with this sort of survey.5 However, the hazards resulting from exposure to nuclear radiation and, in par ticular, to so-called low doses, have constantly been downplayed. For instance, the last United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report on Fukushima has confirmed its selffulfilling prophecy that no one would die from exposure to radiation from the accident.6 The report asserts that, despite the ongoing survey of the cohort of 20,000 workers, a maximum of two or three cases of cancer might result from the 173 workers who have been exposed to doses over 100 mSv, but any other increased incidence of cancer will probably remain indiscernible. The report further stresses that the certification of two cases of occupational cancers has no scientific implications. In contrast with this downplaying of the radiation risk for nuclear workers, research conducted by social scientists on nuclear power plant workers in France7 and the United States8 and on African uranium mine workers9 has pointed to a systemic invisibility of related health injuries like cancer. This process is caused by a combination of technological and political layers, a denial of reality, or a voluntary construction of ignorance. Charles Perrow has argued that from Hiroshima to Fukushima, there was an epistemic shift from a full denial of the harm caused by low-dose radiation to a dominant view that the harm is “too low to measure,” an excuse for turning a blind eye to the risk.10 In Japan, injuries or sicknesses caused by worker exposure to ionizing radiation hazards can be compensated by the system for occupational hazards. As of January 2018, only eighteen cases of former nuclear plant workers have been certified: eight cases of acute radiation syndrome caused by sudden exposure to high doses from two dramatic accidents, at the Tokaimura nuclear fuel plant in 1999 and at the Mihama power plant in 2004; eight cases of cancer caused by regular exposure to low doses; and two other cases after 3.11.11 In addition to the case of leukemia mentioned above in this chapter, another worker in his forties was certified in 2016 for thyroid cancer, with a

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cumulative dose of 150 mSv. These figures should be compared to the huge cohort of people who have been employed in Japanese nuclear power plants since the beginning of the industry in the 1970s: some 40,000 were employed every year in the early 1980s, and twice that number were employed by the year preceding the Fukushima disaster. The first certification for cancer occurred in 1991, for a man who died of leukemia at the age of thirty-one after absorbing a total body burden of 40 mSv for his work at Fukushima Daiichi between November  1978 and September 1980 (the disease had its onset in 1982). His family filed a claim for recognition of his cancer as an occupational disease after his death in 1988, but his name has remained anonymous (like most of the known cases), and it is thus difficult to locate additional details. For instance, during my 2002 fieldwork in Tomioka (near Fukushima Daini), a welder who had worked for a Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) subcontractor since 1988 (with a total exposure of 75 mSV) died of leukemia at age forty-six in November 1999. In two other cases, according to documents shown to me by an employee of the local bureau of the Labor Standards and Inspection Office (hereafter, labor office) in Tomioka, “the total radiation dose was below the protection standards,” but there was no mention as to how reliable the dosimeter levels were or reference to any impact of low doses. Another striking testimony was that of a man named Yokota, the head of a small firm hiring subcontract workers for Japan’s reactor manufacturers like General Electric and Hitachi. When I met him near Tomioka in 2002, he had severe diabetes and was out of work because TEPCO had refused him any help. So disgusted was he by TEPCO’s attitude that he explained to me in detail how he had been complicit in systematic falsification of health records, using a fake “no abnormality detected” stamp. These cases remain off the radar for various reasons, such as family fears of attracting company or community opprobrium in a region that had become economically dependent on TEPCO. Another concern is that making a case public might impede the marriage prospects of the worker’s children for fear of genetic disorders, a rationale that echoed the narratives of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors).12 Another reason is that many workers have never heard of the possibility of applying for recognition or are discouraged from doing so by their employer, or because of a systemic manipulation of the data that alter the proof of exposure. Gabrielle Hecht sums up the situation well, saying that this systemic invisibil-

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ity implies a greater and unrecorded exposure of the true collective dose, with few resulting illnesses becoming “occupational diseases.”13

The Struggle for Greater Visibility In her long study of Belarus after Chernobyl, The Politics of Invisibility, Olga Kuchinskaya shows that despite all sorts of measurements, the perception of radiation risk was gradually downplayed as the political regime became more authoritarian. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) provided additional support to make radiation and its related hazards twice invisible—that is, both physically and socially, as well as scientifically and socially. However, some independent NGOs, like Belrad, have been struggling to measure and record that risk and propose treatments to patients. This work itself remains largely invisible to the average person, not to mention to major organizations like the IAEA and the ICRP that set international safety standards.14 Starting with her important work on African uranium mine workers, Gabrielle Hecht has highlighted the structural character of that production of invisibility.15 The Japanese NGOs have been facing a similar obstacle. Particularly interesting are their efforts, long before March 2011, to shine a spotlight on the high price paid by nuclear workers. The most documented cases are those that resulted in a public battle, with some ending in victory. In May 1971, a man named Iwasa Kazuyuki who lived in Osaka suffered from an acute dermatitis on his right knee. This was just one week after a maintenance operation of two hours and a half at the Tsuruga nuclear power plant. His general health started to deteriorate to such an extent that he would soon be unable to work. Two years later, a physician diagnosed his dermatitis as being caused by exposure to radiation. In 1974, Iwasa sued the Japan Atomic Power Company, owner of the Tsuruga power plant, and in 1975, he filed an application claiming occupational disease at the labor office. However, his case was rejected by both the district court and the labor office because the official record of his external dose was only 10 millirems (1 mSv). A probable explanation was that Iwasa’s pocket dosimeter picked up only the gamma rays and not the beta rays. This was the beginning of a regional and later a nationwide mobilization to support his appeal to the High Court and then the Supreme Court. The final decision in 1991 was negative, but it has been instrumental in training the first generation of physicians,

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lawyers, and activists concerned about this issue.16 Meanwhile, reports on the “hibakusha workers” and “nuclear gypsies”17 raised awareness of the working conditions of nuclear plant workers. Iwasa’s struggle, together with these reports, encouraged some contract workers to try to start a union to defend their rights, but this initiative was easily defeated by the industry. Another important step toward making the hazards of nuclear labor less invisible was the mobilization for the case of Shimahashi Nobuyuki, who died of leukemia at age twenty-nine. He had worked from 1981 to 1988 for a subcontractor for the Chūbu electricity company—the owner of the Hamaoka power plant, south of Tokyo. Assigned to the reactor building when periodic checks were being done on the three reactors, Shimahashi had a recorded body burden of 50.93 mSv. The company offered his parents three million yen as consolation and payoff. Appalled and wracked with guilt at having urged their son to carry on working despite his evident fatigue, his parents filed an application to the labor office so that his leukemia would be recognized posthumously as having been caused by his employment at the nuclear plant. They subsequently discovered that, on the very day of his death, the company had falsified his dose record. When the company tried to dissuade the parents from applying for occupational disease status on the ground that they would be used by the antinuclear movement, his mother replied, “No, we’ll use them!”18 The labor office found in their favor in 1991. The Citizen Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), a watchdog organization founded in 1975, and Fujita Yuko, a professor of physics at Keio University, were instrumental in this decision. In the 2000s, the CNIC was involved in two other campaigns with the help of the Japan Occupational Safety and Health Resource Center (JOSHRC) (both of these private non-profit organizations had been committed to the defense of nuclear plant workers since the 1980s). In January 2004, after two years of applications, Nagao Mitsuaki was granted recognition for myeloma, becoming the first nonleukemia case to receive recognition. Considering that TEPCO should apologize directly, Nagao was encouraged to file a claim against the company based on the Law on Compensation of Nuclear Damage, but in 2010, after years of medico-legal hearings and a nationwide petition of support, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal. Nagao had died in 2007, but the activists had found his case so important that they decided to pursue the lawsuit on his behalf.19 Another important posthumous struggle was the case of Kiyuna Tadashi, on the initiative of his widow. Kiyuna had died at the age of fifty-three of malignant lymphoma after working at different nuclear power plants throughout Japan and at the Rokkasho reprocessing plant. After his case was rejected

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by the labor office in 2006 and a new application was filed two years later, a committee of experts concluded that there was a causal relationship between malignant lymphoma and worker radiation exposure. To sum up, Shimahashi, Nagao, and Kiyuna were among the rare cases to be both certified and publicized. Two other cases were supported openly by the CNIC and the JOSHRC, but the labor office rejected the applications. In all of these medico-legal battles, the effects on human health of low-dose radiation were a major issue.20

Nuclear Labor and the Low-Dose Controversy After March 2011 After March 2011, the controversy over low doses has revolved around the scope of exposure in time and space. For instance, the periodic remapping of the contaminated zones by the Japanese state has resulted in a constant trade-off among the expectations of the displaced people, the available scientific safety criteria (mainly from the ICRP, the IAEA, and the World Health Organization), and what the political elites deem to be economically reasonable, depending on governmental policy and the debates in the Diet.21 Arbitrarily changing the maximum exposure for low-dose radiation is one way to cope with the emergency, and this was one of the first decisions made vis-à-vis emergency workers. Citing the state of emergency in Fukushima, the annual exposure limit was raised from 20 to 250 mSv on March 14, 2011. Although the ICRP recommendations of 2007 had set the maximum exposure at 100 mSv over five years (or 20 mSv per year), in case of emergency, these standards could be increased to 500 or 1,000 mSv—or even have no limit, if that is required to save lives, and the rescuers were informed of the risk. An official who advised the French ambassador to Japan in March 2011 gave me a striking interpretation of this rationale: “When there is a need to save the reactors, there are things to do . . . whatever may be the human cost. . . . Therefore, if it is necessary to overexpose some guys to keep filling water into the pools, that’s fine, because otherwise, you know, it’s something that we don’t want to see!”22 The systemic invisibility of nuclear plant workers is an indicator of their poor symbolic value, which justifies their sacrifice in case of catastrophe. However, in the first weeks of the 3.11 disaster, faced with the dramatic working conditions at Fukushima Daiichi (including a lack of dosimeters and protective suits), the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) was urged to open public discussion

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meetings. The initiators were the CNIC and the JOSHRC. Other groups launched after March 2011 joined the campaign under the banner of Hibaku rōdō o kangaeru netto (Network to Reflect on Radiation Work). These activists have aimed to defend the fundamental rights of the workers involved in the cleanup of Fukushima Daiichi and of those hired for the decontamination work in Fukushima Prefecture. Some workers came from Fukushima to join the Tokyo meetings on radiation work with the MHLW, bringing a dose of reality to discussions that might other wise lack the proper context. The criticism presented by these NGOs and workers has dealt mainly with various aspects of the industry’s working conditions. While the specific context of the post-3.11 landscape has created a brand-new situation, some of the problems addressed are similar to those faced by nuclear plant contract workers even before March 2011. One such issue is the practice of modifying dosimeters to minimize radiation readings—since reaching the maximum dose means that one can no longer work at that job, and since employers are not obligated to propose alternative jobs, the result of such exposure implies the loss of employment. Moreover, after 3.11, some contract workers were asked by their supervisors to insert their dosimeters into lead-lined cases so that they would register lower doses. These sensational news items might lead to a temporary hypervisibility of the cleanup workers at Fukushima but do not help capture the disaster over the long haul—what Matsumoto Miwao calls the “structural disaster” and Olga Kuchinskaya the “catastrophe after the disaster.”23 Thanks to their longtime commitment to nuclear plant workers, the CNIC and the JOSHRC have developed the capacity to question the systemic logic of sacrificing workers. They further point to an epistemic contradiction. On the one hand, the MHLW has encouraged the Radiation Effects Research Foundation to conduct a large cohort survey on the workers at Fukushima Daiichi. On the other hand, and once again using the motto of “too low to measure,” TEPCO declared that there no records would be kept for internal radiation below 2 mSv, and the ministry has decided to deny health follow-ups to workers exposed to a cumulative dose below 50 mSv for external radiation exposure (only those exposed to more than this dose will receive a one-year cancer test). Labor activists point out that keeping such records not only poses no great difficulty but also could provide precious data on low-dose radiation. This situation is reminiscent of accusation in the 1950s that the ABCC was treating Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors as guinea pigs solely for the purpose of science.24 The activists therefore de-

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mand that everyone who has worked at the Fukushima Daiichi plant should at least be given access to their own data and regular medical follow-up exams.25 They further emphasize that the existing epidemiological surveys posit no safety threshold, either at 100 mSv or at any other level.26

The Dispute Within the Nuclear Establishment In the 1970s, the ICRP adopted the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model as its working hypothesis, recommending the use of the ALARA principle. In the face of ongoing scientific controversy, this was a compromise between the knowledge accumulated on the radiation risk at low doses and the economic necessities of the nuclear industry. This guideline reflects how some ICRP members have strived to build its autonomy and legitimacy in the face of lobbying pressure.27 However, some studies have been hostile to the LNT model, placing a big divide between the effects of sudden exposure to high doses and those of chronic exposure to low doses and focusing on what they conceive of as an irrational fear of radiation, or “radiophobia”—which they argue would cause more damage (in the form of depressions and suicides) than the risk of radiation.28 Another strategy, as deployed by the Ethos Fukushima project sponsored by the ICRP, aims at “decontaminating the minds” of “false rumors” about radiation, and one way is to promote a “radiation protection culture” based on a cost-benefit calculation.29 Among the proponents of such a line of argumentation in Japan after 3.11 were Yamashita Sun’ichi and Nagataki Shigenobu, government experts who have been labeled by antinuclear activists as “goyō gakusha” (sponsored scholars) for giving priority to industry and government interests rather than the protection of public health. During the interviews that Nagataki gave me on two occasions, he emphasized that, as established from the cohort studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 2011 UNSCEAR report claimed that a cumulative dose below 100 mSv per year had no consequences, and that above that level, the risk of cancer increases regularly, but moderately: at 100 mSv, cancer would affect 1  percent of the population; at 200 mSv, 2 percent; and at 500 mSv, 5 percent.30 Concerning ICRP recommendations in 2007 of 20 mSv for workers and 1 mSv for the general population, to Nagataki, these norms reflected only the need for policy, which implies precautionary measures and social compromises, and the norms are not based on epidemiological evidence. And

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the basic philosophy of the ICRP remains the ALARA principle, implying flexible adjustments in cases of emergency. Insisting on the differences between science and policy, Nagataki unsurprisingly took the existence of a clear boundary between science and politics for granted, thus ignoring the criticism of that illusion by science studies scholars. Yet in sharp contrast with the officials of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare who—with rare exceptions—tend to justify the standards and policies adopted as if they were based on pure science, Nagataki’s argument explicitly posited ICRP standards and the ALARA principle as resulting from a compromise between science and policy. What struck me more, however, was his disapproval of Toshisō Kosako’s declaration in April 2011, as well as his harsh criticism of the studies conducted by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) under the direction of Elisabeth Cardis. Conducted by a large team of researchers on a huge cohort of 407,391 workers in fifteen countries, these studies assumed a linear dose-response model with no threshold and showed an overall estimate limited to a relatively small excess of 1–2 percent of deaths from cancer (including leukemia) attributable to radiation. Nevertheless, the authors concluded that the excess deaths were statistically consistent with ICRP radiation protection standards. Why, then, should experts like Nagataki downplay its results or its methodology? Cardis agreed to an interview with me to discuss these questions. As with all statistical surveys, a major epistemic constraint deals with confidence intervals. Regarding why, despite the excessive risk of cancers, the study concluded that these results were compatible with radiation protection standards, Cardis explained: “The problem was that our confidence intervals are very large—for example, between 0.03 and 1.88 if we look at solid cancers excluding lung and pleura cancers, compared to an interval from 0.01 to 0.5 in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors [for a similar population of men exposed at ages 20–60]. So in our study the relative risk is higher, 0.87 compared to 0.32 in the case of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, but the confidence interval is larger, thus more uncertain.”31 Related studies have further addressed this particular problem.32 As the authors emphasize, and as one of them kindly explained to me in much detail on repeated occasions, despite a reduction in the countries selected (three instead of fifteen), the estimates have gained in precision because of an increase in the cohorts of the three countries selected (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France), with larger numbers of deaths and longer follow-up periods (twenty-seven

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years versus thirteen in the fifteen-country study).33 The first results addressing leukemia were published in June 2015 in Lancet Haematology, with a critical comment by Maria Blettner.34 In its October issue, the journal published even sharper comments. The first, by Nagataki (and Fumiyoshi Kasagi), pointed to inconclusive evidence and premature conclusions.35 Another, by Mohan Doss, can be included in the category of absolute denial: the conclusion of the study cannot be supported, because it is based on a questionable use of the LNT model and ignores the “alternative model known as radiation hormesis . . . according to which low-dose radiation would reduce cancers.”36 This comment was congruent with Doss’s stance in a collective book on Fukushima that included Yamashita Shun’ichi among the authors.37 In addition to the studies on workers, Cardis and colleagues have conducted a large survey on the legacy of Chernobyl, of which Shunichi Yamashita was a coauthor, and which served as a basis for the highly controversial “definitive” World Health Organization report on Chernobyl.38 As Cardis kindly explained to me: I was unlucky to be asked to present this report in Vienna in 2005. The day before, there was a press communiqué in London stating a maximum of 4,000 deaths. This assumption was based on our study published ten years before, but this was not presented like this in the report. Who was in charge of this press release? IAEA? Well, this is the problem. . . . The people in charge were a mix of organizations, and the presentation by the media was made conjunctly by WHO and IAEA. Were they epidemiologists or physicians? No.39 This answer suggests the need for a careful look at the report and the surveys that supported it. For example, even Cardis and colleagues’ abstract states cautiously: Apart from the large increase in thyroid cancer incidence in young people, there are at present no clearly demonstrated radiation-related increases in cancer risk. This should not, however, be interpreted to mean that no increase has in fact occurred. A small increase in the relative risk of cancer is expected, even at the low to moderate doses

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received. Although it is expected that epidemiological studies will have difficulty identifying such a risk, it may nevertheless translate into a substantial number of radiation-related cancer cases in the future, given the very large number of individuals exposed.40

Conclusion The apparently contradictory positions of the Japanese government mainly reflect the dominant international paradigm for radiation protection norms and its epidemiological basis. Studies conducted under the auspices of the IARC have produced conclusions that could help resolve that contradiction, but so far they have been disregarded by UNSCEAR as well as by the ICRP’s governing committee (though some dissension has appeared within the latter since 3.11).41 Another study by Cardis and colleagues challenges the belief that acute exposure at high doses, like that experienced by the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, is more dangerous than chronic exposure at a low dose. But as the authors confessed, such details are unlikely to change the overall ICRP recommendations.42 Any examination of the controversy over nuclear energy in action involves dealing with sources of imperfect reliability. The obligation to communicate with the public can compel scientists to oversimplify their results, since scientific results are generally complex and hence difficult to explain. The continuous lobbying of the “nucleocrats,” with its strong bias in favor of their industry, has provoked the radicalization of the antinuclear critique, particularly in the aftermath of disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Therefore, to observe the controversy in action, social scientists and journalists must contend with lies and half-explanations (intentional or not), and thus some parts of the unknowns (again, intentional or not). As this chapter suggests, both before and after 3.11, the radiation accumulated in the body of nuclear workers is precious for the advancement of knowledge on low-dose risk. But when some of the workers request that the consequence of their exposure be recognized as an occupational disease, they face enormous institutional resistance. The struggle of associations to make these diseases less invisible is a valuable asset in challenging the logic of sacrificing workers and developing a critical review of the current “radiation protection culture.”

CHAPTER 10

Food and Water Contamination After the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Tatsuhiro Kamisato

The Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred on March 11, 2011, brought three different types of hazards: the widespread destruction of the earthquake, the extensive damage by the tsunami, and the sustained damage due to the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Each hazard had significant impacts and led to serious problems. However, we may say that the nuclear accident and subsequent radiation fears may have been different from the direct effects of the earthquake and tsunami, because the fears also affected Japan’s capital, Tokyo. This chapter examines radioactivity by focusing on how it impacted issues related to food and water, elements crucial to life and easily affected by radioactivity in various ways. The radioactivity of food became a major social and political issue after the earthquake. It was a factor in discussions of atomic energy, particularly in terms of risks associated with exposure to low-dose radiation. At that time, there were many food problems related to radioactivity, so it is impossible to cover all of them. Therefore, I examine the chronological sequence of events that occurred in the wake of the nuclear accident, particularly in the early stages. In addition, I would like to shed light on the nature of risk governance in Japan and the problems that emerge by examining responses to these risks.

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The First Two Weeks and Detection The first explosion occurred in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant the day after the huge earthquake. Various problems related to food emerged later. We will review the process by which concern about radioactive pollution gradually spread through Japanese society. After the explosion, it was an executive branch of the Hong Kong government that actually provided the first administrative response to the risk of radioactivity in Japan’s food. The response came on March 12, the day of the explosion. In contrast, the first response by the Japanese government was to issue a notice on March 17—five days after the explosion—by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) to prefectural and city governments.1 This notice required the application of the regulations stipulated in the Food Sanitation Act for the shipment and sale of foods polluted with radioactive material. The notice states that “for the duration [of nuclear emergency] we use an index level shown by the Nuclear Safety Commission temporary regulatory value as a temporary regulatory value.” With the use of the word “temporary,” public anxiety began to grow. The act did not include any standards for upper limits of acceptable levels of radioactivity, so the government hastily applied Nuclear Safety Commission guidelines after the fact and adopted the adjective “temporary.” Did the government lack standards for radioactivity? If so, what would those guidelines mean in the context of such a crisis? Given that there was at least no official standard value for how much radioactivity food could contain, this seems to be a case of “not having assumed what we should assume”—an oversight that became more and more apparent as the result of the accident. We can clarify a specific actor’s range of recognition of risk by analyzing when and where the word “unexpected” is used. It is important to study the boundary between the expected and not expected carefully, because many of the current problems related to safety are a result of gaps between reality and recognition. Each local governing body conducted radioactivity checks based on a notification from the central government. The local bodies found samples that exceeded the regulatory levels the next day. This included milk from Kawamata-machi in Fukushima Prefecture, located 30–40 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Three samples had radioactive iodine 131 (I131) levels that exceeded the regulatory limit—of 1,510, 1,190, and 932 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg), respectively. Also, tests identified spinach samples that exceeded the baseline of I131 at several places in

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Ibaraki Prefecture. Anxiety spread, because excessively high levels of radioactive contamination were also found in spinach from Takahagi City near Fukushima Prefecture. The spinach not only had an I131 level of about 15,000 Bq/kg, or 7.5 times higher than the regulatory limit permitted, but it also had a radioactive cesium level of 524 Bq/kg, which slightly exceeded its permitted regulatory value.2

Case 1. Water Supply: The Timeline of the Controversy over Water Supply Along with food, water was a crucial and necessary item affected by radioactivity. With regard to management of the risk of radioactivity in tap water, the Water Supply Division of the Health Service Bureau in the MHLW provided information to each prefectural and city government on March  15, earlier than measures for dealing with food contamination. This information indicated that each government should follow the instructions in a notice issued by the Water Supply Division in 2009, which outlined a process for risk management of the water supply due to an accidental leak of radioactivity. The notice included a communication system, a system for monitoring radioactivity, and a process for prohibiting the consumption of tap water.3 The Water Supply Division issued another notice on March 19, 2011, in which it outlined measures for prohibiting the consumption of tap water in the event of an accident. This notice stated that people could use the water for daily life—but not for drinking—even if radioactivity levels were beyond temporary permitted levels. It also stated that people could drink contaminated water if they did not have access to clean drinking water. This directive implied that people should weigh the risks of radioactivity poisoning against the health risks of dehydration due to shortages of potable water.4 Although the World Health Organization (WHO) had established already specific guidelines for each radionuclide in its water quality standards, Japan’s water quality standards did not include such information. For most issues, Japan’s public health administration staff members followed WHO administrative guidelines. However, they had not yet introduced WHO standards for water radioactivity.5 This omission parallels the Food Sanitation Act’s omission of radioactivity standards before the accident. Each autonomous body analyzed its tap water, and on March 20, I131 at a level of 965 Bq/kg was detected in a sample of water at Iidate Village in Fukushima

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Prefecture. (The regulations at that time permitted a level for an adult of 300 Bq/kg.) On March 22, the MHLW announced that I131 was beyond the regulatory limit for infants (100 Bq/kg) in five municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture (Date, Kohriyama, Tamura, Minami-soma, and Kawamata) and advised residents not to give babies tap water.6 At this time, people living in the Tokyo metropolitan area likely would have treated issues of radioactive contamination as someone else’s problem. However, this changed on March 23, when radioactivity levels twice the regulatory limits for infants were detected at the Kanamachi Water Purification Plant. One of eleven purification plants serving the area, the Kanamachi plant covers the northeastern section of Tokyo, drawing water from the Edo River. Infants were prohibited from drinking tap water in almost all of Tokyo, since the Kanamachi plant supplied water to some of the special wards, which are basic municipalities located in the center of Tokyo with special administrative qualifications, as well as the Tama area. Radioactivity levels beyond those permitted for infants were also detected at three purification plants in Chiba and Saitama Prefectures. As a result, every supermarket in Tokyo ran out of bottled water, and water hoarding became a social problem. In addition, the residents of Tokyo quickly became familiar with issues of radioactive contamination. Since the shortage of drinking water led to hoarding, the public—especially parents with babies—grew frustrated with the administration. To mitigate the situation, on March 24, officials of the Tokyo Metropolitan government began delivering reserve supplies for natural disasters. This included 240,000 bottles of water to families with infants in the special wards and the Tama area. Although the March 22 analysis of tap water for radioactivity found I131 at a level of 210 Bq/kg, the analysis conducted on March 23 found that radioactivity levels had dropped to 79 Bq/kg. Therefore, officials canceled the prohibition on drinking tap water on March 24.7 The radioactive risk from tap water led many people to consider the nuclear disaster in relation to their own health. Various blogs and tweets initiated discussions on the water quality standard. This led to a rejection of Japan’s regulatory levels for tap water at that time (300 Bq/kg for I131 and 200 Bq/kg for cesium 137) as not strict enough. Most of the world had much higher standards. Critics often noted that the water standard set by WHO for I131 was 10 Bq/kg and that the water quality standards in Germany and the United States were even stricter. In addition, comments often referred to the fact that even in Japanese regulations, radioactivity levels of I131 in the

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Figure 10.1. Map of northeastern Japan. Copyright Tatsuhiro Kamisato.

warm water discharged from nuclear power plants were supposed to be lower than 40 Bq/kg—which, surprisingly, was lower than the standard for drinking water.8

The Temporary Regulatory Value of Risk in Water Questions arise over what to do if radioactivity levels in food and water were lower than the standards but still potentially unhealthy. Even today, related academic, policy, and social controversies on this point remain unsettled. This kind of debate usually uses the paradigm of risk theory, which means that utilitarian values underpin such discussions while deontological philosophy is pushed into the background. From the perspective of science and technology studies, this assumption itself should be reviewed critically. After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the “Guideline for Control of Food Intake” had been adopted by the Japanese government to reduce people’s exposure to radiation in the case of an emergency near where they

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Table 10.1. Differences between Regulatory Standards for Radioactive Iodine 131 (I131) Source

Standard

Description

Guideline for Control of Food Intake (Japan)

300Bq/L

For cases when there has been a declaration of a nuclear emergency situation. The value gives an idea of the level of intervention in a state of emergency (a protective measures index).

Operational Intervention Level 6 (International Atomic Energy Agency)

3,000Bq/L

World Health Organization

10Bq/L

For initial response (within a week) to an accident. The value was calculated so that the thyroid equivalent dose of I131 would never be higher than 50 mSv per year (or 2 mSv per year as the effective dose), and the effective dose of radioactive cesium would never be higher than 5 mSv per year. For ordinary time: The upper limit of annual exposure would be 0.1 mSv, based on the average natural radiation in the world of 2.4 mSv.

Notes: Bq/L, becquerel per liter. mSv, millisievert.

lived.9 This was included in the so-called disaster prevention guideline issued by the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan in 1980. Since then, it has been revised several times.10 The standard values shown in this guideline have been accepted for use as temporary regulatory values in the Food Sanitation Act. Table 10.1 compares the different regulatory standard values for I131 as stipulated by Japan, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),11 and the WHO.12 What seems striking is that these numbers cannot be directly compared, because the underlying assumptions are different. However, this comparison will tell us the differences in ideas about risk management between planned and emergency situations. First, the Japanese and IAEA guidelines provide the reference values for radiation anticipated in an emergency, as opposed to the WHO guidelines for normal situations. In summary, the Japanese guidelines for temporary regulatory values are intended for emergencies, when the delivery of alternative food or water supplies may be difficult. Therefore, they are not values that ordinary citizens should use during normal situations. In the usual sense, it would be suitable and rational to say that the safety standard should be established at a level equivalent to the 10 Bq/L for I131 set by the WHO as shown in Table 10.1.

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Case 2. Spreading Contamination: The Timeline of Food Incidents After 3.11 On March 20, reports stated that radioactive iodine and cesium beyond permissible levels had been found in spinach and kakina (a Japanese vegetable) in Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures. In addition, monitoring conducted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government found I131 concentrations exceeding permitted levels in shungiku (a kind of chrysanthemum that is a vegetable widely eaten in Japan) grown in Asahi City and Chiba Prefecture. In response, the government banned the sale of ninety kilograms of the shungiku grown in Asahi City and imposed a voluntary ban on shipping agricultural products grown there.13 Since the Tokyo region consumes a large quantity of these products, the detection of radioactivity at these levels also raised social anxieties. Public concerns and social anxieties grew as residents of five surrounding prefectures received information regarding the contamination of agricultural products. Local governments reacted on a case-by-case basis, banning products if radioactive contamination was found in them. It was apparent that a more comprehensive approach was required. But a difficult problem emerged. Although the Food Sanitation Act permits the imposition of bans on shipping and the sale of problem products by individual farmers, it does not permit making general references to agricultural products subject to the regulation. Thus, it was difficult to take precautionary measures with regard to products before they had been tested.14 For example, when the governor of Ibaraki Prefecture, Masaru Hashimoto, imposed a voluntary ban on shipping spinach by the farmers in his prefecture, he acknowledged at a news conference that he could not ban the shipping of products that complied with the regulatory limits.15 Voluntary bans by a Japanese-style gyosei-shido (administrative advice) had no legal basis and were of limited effectiveness. To resolve the problem, central government administrators scrutinized Japan’s legal codes. They found an article in the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness stating that “when the directorgeneral of the nuclear emergency response headquarters [that is, the prime minister] finds it especially necessary for implementing emergency response measures accurately and promptly . . . he/she may, within the limits necessary, give necessary instructions to . . . the heads of local governments.”16 Although these instructions would not be enforceable, Kohei Ohtsuka (senior vice minister of health, labor and welfare) said that given the state of emergency, it

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would be impossible not to obey them. In effect, the government administrators expected such instructions to be treated as compulsory orders. Thus, on March  21, they issued an instruction that for the time being banned spinach and kakina grown in Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, and Gunma Prefectures, along with raw milk produced in Fukushima Prefecture.17 Shungiku from Chiba Prefecture were excluded, because their contamination was regarded as limited. This aggressive administrative measure distressed people living in the affected agricultural regions, and Hashimoto submitted an urgent request to the government to improve the regulatory system and its compensation plan.18 However, the most severe issue of contamination emerged later. Shinobufuyuna (another Japanese vegetable) grown in Kawamata-cho in Fukushima Prefecture was found to contain I131 at the highly radioactive level of 22,000 Bq/kg. As is generally known, radioactive iodine can cause cancer of the thyroid. Its risk is higher in younger people, which was demonstrated scientifically by an epidemiological study after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident. In this case, any infant who ingested even 800 grams of this contaminated shinobufuyuna would receive a dose exceeding the maximum annual permissible levels. Therefore, on March 23, the government issued a ban on shipping and consuming shinobufuyuna.19 Ultimately, the government directed the public to not eat leafy vegetables (such as spinach and cabbage) or vegetables in the brassica family (such as broccoli and Brussels sprouts) grown in Fukushima. The government developed substantial regulations, but the explanations for them often seemed confusing and contradictory. In addition, the government issued a ban on the shipping of raw milk and parsley produced in Ibaraki Prefecture—and the explanation for this regulation given at a news conference was ambiguous. For example, it stated that “basically no agricultural products now in the market pose any health hazards.” At the same time, however, it explained that “we issued the instruction prohibiting intake because some samples with higher doses of radioactivity were found than the dose detected when we banned shipping.” Furthermore, at the same conference, Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, stated: “Anyway, any foods in Japan are not harmful to health. Now we are just prohibiting the intake of some agricultural products just in case of the future risk.”20 Perhaps the greatest problem was the government’s handling of the management and communication of risk. At its first press conference after the discovery of radiation in food, it emphasized that foods were safe, while at

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the next, it banned the shipment of foods. At the following press conference, it enlarged the prohibition area, and finally it prohibited the intake of some foods. Given these fluctuations, the public came to believe that the hazard would increase and that any explanations being provided by the government could be rescinded. This fueled mistrust of the government. Conversely, management of the evacuation zone followed an even course. Here the government tried to control the situation as quickly as possible, despite the need to communicate complex (and sometimes conflicting) types of information. However, the government’s efforts were ultimately counterproductive.

Products That Slipped Through While the central government initially targeted prefectures when restricting sales of food products, it gradually moved down to the municipal level, following opposition from producers and related governors. Soon after restrictions were imposed, opposition arose in prefectures surrounding Fukushima, because the shipping bans were imposed on products with very different levels of pollution. Bans could even restrict the shipment of products with no actual radiation risk. In the wake of criticisms from the producers, the governor of Ibaraki met with the minister of the MHLW and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF).21 Also the governor of Gunma met with the minister of the MHLW. And the governors endeavored to review related standards.22 The government then made two announcements. First, it pushed the scope of bans on shipping agricultural products to the city, village, and town level. They decided to impose more detailed regulations. Second, it set principles for cancellations: tests would be carried out each week, and once an area had been below the threshold for three weeks running, the ban on shipping from that area would be rescinded.23 These measures seem to have made it possible to manage crops properly according to the risk. Based on this new rule, products whose shipping was banned included spinach from Katori City, Tako-machi, and Asahi City in Chiba Prefecture, and qing-geng-cai (a Chinese vegetable widely eaten in Japan), shungiku, Korean lettuce, celery, and parsley from Asahi City. However, it became apparent that on three occasions produce from Chiba Prefecture had slipped through in violation of the rules. In one case, supermarkets sold some Korean lettuce from March 29 to April 4, despite the Chiba prefectural government’s

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having asked Asahi City and the local farmers’ cooperative association to refrain from making shipments on March  29. Producers, the supermarket staff, and Asahi officials had allowed the shipments because the lettuce samples showed radiation levels lower than regulations, not all areas in Chiba Prefecture were covered in the central government’s ban before April 4, and shipments had been suppressed on a voluntary basis in Chiba. One of the destinations for the lettuce was Aeon, the biggest supermarket chain in Japan. It announced that it had sold approximately 2,200 packs of the lettuce in fifty-seven stores across metropolitan areas during the no-shipping period.24

Limitations of Risk Management at Local Governments We can determine several reasons why the shipping ban failed to operate smoothly. The first reason concerns the problem of balancing the needs of producers in Chiba with the security of consumers. Chiba is a major food producer for the Tokyo area, and the ordinary role of relevant governmental agencies such as the MAFF is to protect and promote production. Although the role of consumer protection has been emphasized recently, it cannot be denied that the ministry still has a tendency to avoid situations that are not beneficial for the producers.25 It is also difficult to see the magnitude of negative effects caused by radiation contamination, since the causal linkage between low-dose exposure and pathogenesis is unclear. Conversely, the economic damage experienced by producers can easily be visualized. It is likely that this asymmetry caused relevant actors to prioritize the producers over consumer concerns.26 The second reason is that Chiba Prefecture had little authority to deal with nuclear power and radiation. Unlike Fukushima or Ibaraki, Chiba does not host any nuclear power plants. The Chiba prefectural government office does not have any responsible departments or easily accessible expertise to deal with nuclear accidents at the prefectural or municipal government level. The prefectures’ citizens also have a relatively low awareness of radioactivity.27 With regard to risk management for radiation contamination, the fundamental question is whether tackling nuclear power disasters at the prefectural level is really appropriate. The Food Sanitation Act and the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness are structured in ways that make risk management for nuclear disasters the respon-

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sibility of each governor. However, it is inefficient and unbalanced for each prefecture to try to resolve this kind of food incident only within its area. Actually, this arrangement leads to various problems in practice. A similar problem was pointed out in relation to managing tsunami and earthquake disasters being discussed at the national governmental level.28 The details will not be considered here, due to limitations of space, but I would like to emphasize that the events of 3.11 led to new discussions of decentralization and prompted a reconsideration of the basic concept of local autonomy and an appropriate role of the national government.

Conclusion We have considered the problems of radioactive contamination of food and water from several perspectives. Radioactivity has been detected in various foodstuffs other than those considered in this chapter (tea leaves, beef, and rice, for example), which have been discussed at length elsewhere.29 The issue here is as much one of trust as it is of safety. As a result, the adage that a wounded reputation is seldom cured applies. Yet can some method regain the trust that has been damaged? The lessons learned from Japan’s experience with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease) around 2001 could offer guidance. The administration at that time recovered the public’s trust in a relatively short period of time by introducing the blanket testing and complete traceability of beef. At the time, many critics argued that these measures were excessive and unscientific. But there is no doubt that the combination of the two measures achieved success.30 And in the case of 3.11, the measurement and traceability of radiation are still thought to be the two key points. Luckily, the situation after 3.11 was not worse. And compared with detecting the infinitesimal quantities of chemical substances such as dioxins or biological substances such as BSE pathogens, the detection of radiation is relatively easy. Various methods for properly measuring radiation in food were developed, and some food systems were made to ensure traceability so that measured data could be confirmed from farm to table. Measure the radiation of foods and trace them, if this is possible, after which current issues should be resolved. Even so, some issues will remain unresolved. Suppose that all products were measured, and becquerel labeling were required on all foodstuffs. In

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the first place, these values depend on the detection limits of the measuring devices. Second, even without this limitation, who would be the first to start eating foods that are contaminated—even at levels below the permitted regulatory values? Realistically these foodstuffs are likely to be sold along with low-cost processed foods or by the restaurant industry, where low cost is every thing. If the risk of low-dose radiation is proportional to the dose (as the linear non-threshold model has it), the risk involved in eating contaminated food will be concentrated among relatively poor people.31 The German sociologist Ulrich Beck wrote in Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity that “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic.”32 This explains that risks like environmental pollution are faced equally by the poor and the wealthy. However, more reliable and extensive detection and tracing systems undermine this proposition. Technology that supports utilitarianism would lead to a situation in which smog is also hierarchic. Of course, the solution is not to stop testing or tracing. Instead, there is a need to stubbornly pursue this type of ethical questioning with regard to the justice and fairness of detection and regulatory systems. Conversely, if John Rawls’s theory of justice were applied, even the form of regulation would differ. At the very least, any new system should be designed to reduce exposure for the people who are currently most exposed.

CHAPTER 11

Suffering the Effects of Scientific Evidence Ekou Yagi

Introduction: Familiar Questions Raised by the Issue of Low-Dose Radiation Exposure After the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (hereafter, the F-NPP accident), the issue of low-dose radiation exposure drew attention across Japan. This was particularly the case in the areas where radioactive materials caused direct contamination—notably, in Fukushima Prefecture. Scientific positions on the effects of low-dose radiation exposure on health were inconsistent, focusing on the difficulties of quantitatively evaluating the risk of such exposure and balancing that risk against the social costs of evacuation. In other words, discussions of the various issues concerning low-dose radiation exposure tended to be based on the premise that the related factors should be examined scientifically and judged on scientific evidence alone. Of course, scientific perspectives are essential to understanding of these issues. But are they sufficient?1 While thinking about the various issues concerning low-dose radiation exposure immediately after the F-NPP accident, I recalled with a strong sense of familiarity a previous accident: the derailment of a train on the Japan Railway (JR) West Japan Fukuchiyama Line. This occurred about six years before the F-NPP accident. The railway accident—which took place in Amagasaki City in Hyogo Prefecture on April 25, 2005—was catastrophic: five carriages of the seven-carriage train derailed. The first two crashed into

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and destroyed an apartment building beside the railway. Altogether, 107 people died and 562 more were injured. While it may seem that few factors connect these two accidents, to me— as someone who had been involved in activities supporting the Fukuchiyama Line accident victims and their families—the situations felt familiar.2 The victims’ health concerns, the presence of the words “scientific evidence” in claims for compensation, the way people were divided despite their shared status as victims, and how they were forced to keep their mouths shut all seemed to resonate strongly with the aftermath of the F-NPP accident. Every thing pointed to a common social structure in which victims not only face the injustice of having their peaceful lives suddenly disrupted but also begin long, uphill battles following the accident. This chapter attempts to describe the circumstances in which victims find themselves after an accident, focusing particularly on the health concerns and various issues relating to compensation (and the consequent need for evidence-based thinking) they experience.3 My analysis draws upon the stories of victims of the Fukuchiyama Line accident, victims with whom I have been deeply involved.4 I also discuss the value of dealing with various issues surrounding the F-NPP accident both from a scientific viewpoint and also from the lived experiences of the victims. This approach may allow us to reconsider how best to handle the victims of the more recent disasters.

Based on the Stories of Victims: The Fukuchiyama Line Accident as an Example of Suffering over Scientific Evidence Victims of the Fukuchiyama Line accident faced a variety of issues, which varied according to the extent of their injuries and their personal circumstances. Today, many common issues remain. One of these is intense anxiety regarding the possibility of unexpected health problems arising in the future. This is the case even when their conditions may have already stabilized or been resolved. They also worry about the difficulties they might experience when seeking compensation. Might their pain become more severe with age?5 Could they experience unexpected obstacles in major life events such as childbirth? Although the degrees of difficulty vary, the victims and their families endure such anxieties long after the accident. JR West has said that it will discuss the victims’ compensation again if a causal relationship between the accident and JR West is found. However,

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many victims have found it difficult to prove a causal relationship between future illnesses and accidents. Victims of other accidents, natural disasters, and pollution have had similar difficulties.

Living with the Accident Living with the constant reminder of the accident weighs heavily on victims. At first glance, many victims appear to lead peaceful lives. But memories of the event return out of the blue. Seemingly trivial events trigger reminders of the pain a victim feels. For instance, a victim may realize for the first time that he or she is now overly ner vous about traveling on trains. Family members have observed particular behav iors in the victims, such as walking in a way that protects their injured feet or tilting their head in an effort to hear better if their hearing was impaired in the accident. For such people, it is impossible not to wonder, “What if I hadn’t been involved in the accident?” Even after a doctor assures them that a subsequent mental or physical illness has absolutely nothing to do with the accident, they wonder nonetheless. The victims’ thoughts rest on what is scientifically unclear—the slight possibilities that exist, rather than the certainties of the world—and they become incapable of removing these possibilities from consideration.

What Does the Existence of Causality Mean to the Victims? The victims in the Fukuchiyama Line accident proposed reversing the notion of needing to prove a causal relationship between the accident and subsequent complications. Their suggestion was that, as a matter of principle, causality between the accident and symptoms should be accepted in the event of subsequent complications unless the party at fault can disprove the connection. In other words, based on the premise that it is almost impossible to prove causality scientifically, they demanded that the party at fault should have to prove that there is no causal relationship with the accident. This proposal would transfer the burden of proof from the victims to the business. It is extremely difficult to prove the absence of a causal relationship. However, it is likewise extremely difficult to prove its presence—especially in the case of this par ticular accident, where a wide range of injuries were

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suffered and the number of individuals who experienced each condition was limited. Finally, the lack of scientific proof of causality is not proof that such causality does not exist. Given that long-term epidemiological studies can demonstrate the effects of radiation, the issue of low-dose radiation exposure caused by the F-NPP accident cannot be treated in completely the same way as the injuries resulting from the Fukuchiyama Line accident. However, there are probably many victims of the F-NPP accident who think, “Even if the results of the epidemiological study have concluded that the effects of the accident on health (in relation to, for example, carcinogenic effects) cannot be confirmed among the subjects as a group, that does not mean there was no effect (a carcinogenic one, for example) on the health of each individual.”6 If in the future a victim succumbed to an illness described as cancer, it would be difficult to say for certain that had nothing to do with the F-NPP accident. Even if causality were not scientifically proven, the victim would not be able to ignore possible regrets, wondering, “What if I had evacuated?” or “What if I had taken such-and-such a measure?” This is why victims place little emphasis on scientifically proving whether the accident had an effect on their health. Rather, they want to determine who will compensate7 them should they find themselves in such a situation.8 In other words, victims challenge the idea that they should have to prove causality should an abnormality be found in their bodies or the bodies of family members. This is why decisions relating to victim support and compensation should not be made solely by the experts. We must have a framework and forum in which all stakeholders, including the victims, can discuss matters such as those relating to risk reduction, monetary compensation for the effects of radiation exposure, and the scientific evidence of those effects. When thinking specifically about how to create such a forum, however, I recognize that its implementation faces a great many problems. One of these is the difficulty that victims experience in sharing their problems.

Factors That Make the Victims Remain Silent When an accident happens, one of the factors that afflicts the victims is a form of social pressure that says, “There are people suffering more than you (so you have to endure your suffering).” In terms of the various issues sur-

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rounding the F-NPP accident, the narrative says, “You are blessed compared to those in the tsunami-stricken area because it is not like you lost your home or life”9 or “Those who can continue living at home are blessed compared to those from the restricted area who live in evacuation shelters without even being able to go home.”10 Similar tensions arise between residents of Fukushima Prefecture and those living in other areas, which can make it hard for many people to express their feelings honestly. This phenomenon is not limited to the F-NPP accident. Many of the individuals injured in the Fukuchiyama Line accident express feeling hurt by the casual question, “Which carriage were you in?” This question is often followed by “I’m glad you were able to recover well (when so many people died)” if they were at the front of the train or “I’m glad it was a minor injury (compared to those in the front of the train)” if they were at the back, even though there is no correlation between a person’s position in the train and the degree of pain they suffer.11 However, I have learned from experience since the accident that society tends to discount the suffering of victims in this way. Consequently, victims are prevented from making public statements, or at least discouraged by the silent pressure of the words, “There are people in more difficult situations than you.”

Victims Who Continue to Be Undecided About Speaking Up For years, I have been an active member of a self-help group called JR Fukuchiyamasen jiko fushō-sha to kazoku-tō no kai (the association for those injured in the JR Fukuchiyama Line accident and their families).12 It is a network of people engaged in activities such as establishing connections between the victims of the Fukuchiyama Line accident and their families, making recommendations related to the investigation, and suggesting measures for supporting victims based on the perspective of those injured. This self-help group also communicates with the victims of other serious accidents in Japan, such as the Japan Air Lines (JAL) 123 plane crash in 1985, the Shigaraki train disaster in 1991, the Minato Ward elevator accident in 2006, and other rail-crossing accidents, to determine what can be done to prevent these kinds of accidents from happening again. Ms. A, a key member of the self-help group of the injured, works tirelessly to make victims’ voices heard. She continually compares the situation of the injured to that of bereaved families, saying, “I keep asking myself if it’s OK for us, the injured, to disseminate this kind of information.”

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Looking back on the feeling of being torn between a sense of obligation to give a voice to the injured, who continue to suffer from physical and mental pain while the memory of the accident fades in society at large, and her concern that the way her group disseminates information might offend the bereaved families, Ms. A said: When I was working on an initiative that focused on the injured, I said something like “I fret over if it is really OK,” and B-san [a clinical psychologist who supports the activities of the people injured in the accident] assured me it was fine. B-san said, “I was also affected by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, and because there were so many people who were injured or killed during the earthquake, I [as someone who did not suffer major damage] had to keep my mouth shut and not say anything. It was like ‘What? You were lucky because you survived.’ . . . In that way, I could never say anything, but as time passed, I began feeling it’s OK to speak up.”13 As Ms. A explained, there was a long period of hesitation and conflict before she was able to articulate the legitimacy of speaking up as a victim. It is not a bad thing for the injured—many of whom she said “had simply suppressed [things] in the past, thinking that opening their mouths was unacceptable”—to speak about their suffering and the need for measures to relieve it. Ms. A said that she could not speak in this way shortly after the accident; she became capable of doing so only as time passed. She also mentioned that being told, “It’s OK to speak up,” injured people are also victims, by a family member of a victim killed in the JAL 123 plane crash, and receiving similar approval from other people, encouraged her to verbalize her feelings.

Victims’ Feelings of Self-Reproach Feelings of self-reproach constitute another reason why many victims tend to be reluctant to speak. When a family member is killed or seriously injured in an accident, people often feel remorse, even when they are not at fault: “If only I had stopped him or her from boarding that train. If only I had stopped him or her from taking that journey.” Many continue to blame themselves, focusing on possibilities like “Maybe she wouldn’t have been in the accident if we hadn’t purchased a house here” or “If only I hadn’t made him go to that

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particular college, maybe he wouldn’t have been on that train.” Furthermore, those who miraculously survived repeatedly mention a sense of guilt, sometimes referred to as survivor’s guilt. They say or think things like, “I’m sorry—I’m sorry that I survived.” As one victim explained, “I can never say ‘I will give life my best shot to make up for those who lost their lives’; all I can say is that I’m sorry.”14 Constrained by this sense of self-reproach, many victims hesitate to talk publicly about their pain and suffering. The possibility of suffering future remorse is a burden both for those who continue to live in Fukushima and for those who chose to leave the area after the disaster. For those who stayed, this remorse may take the form of “I might reproach myself in the future for not evacuating my children immediately.” For the others, it may be, “My family might be disadvantaged in some way as a result of the evacuation.” These feelings of doubt arising from the need to make decisions occur in every aspect of the victims’ daily lives. As time passes, the impact of the accident remains, and new traumas and concerns cast shadows on the victims’ lives. These problems cannot be resolved, in part because they concern not only the victims, but also their loved ones. It is impossible for people in this situation to feel certain that their decisions have been the right ones.

Conflicting Feelings Toward the Company at Fault The feelings of individuals injured in the Fukuchiyama Line accident vary, as do those of the victims’ families. Some continue to experience a fierce sense of anger about nearly every thing, including how the accident was caused and how the situation was handled afterward. In contrast, some people say, “To prevent a similar accident from happening again, it is necessary for us to cooperate with the company at fault to try to address the post-accident situation, rather than staying in a hostile relationship with them.” Others even say, “I’m actually thankful for the generous response of the company at fault.”15 Of course, rarely are these words said in public. Ms. A repeatedly mentions feeling that “it is presumptuous for injured individuals or their families to say things like this in front of the bereaved families.”16 Furthermore, when she mentions her feelings toward bereaved families, she speaks hesitantly. She often becomes teary-eyed when stating an opinion that differs from theirs. With a strong tendency to highlight conflicts between victims and perpetrators, the media rarely reports the feelings of victims who are not critical

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of those at fault. In many cases, these feelings come out as vacillation rather than as clearly articulated opinion. Recounting several episodes involving point-of-contact staff members from the company at fault, Ms. A said, “Sometimes I feel that individuals working in the company at fault are sincere.” And she noted, “There are staff members who have treated me really well.” Conversely, she said that “things that are unacceptable from the perspective of victims emerge at the organizational level. It is true that there is this kind of tendency.”17 Victims’ feelings about the company at fault frequently constantly waver. However, the media rarely publish or broadcast these vacillations. Instead, they feature examples of conflict involving the company. In light of this, victims gradually lose their motivation to voice their shifting feelings toward the company.

The Harsh Realities of Compensation The current accidental injury compensation system rarely considers an individual’s par ticular circumstances, such as the attachment a person feels to the community and home where he or she has spent many years, the emotional distress of losing contact with friends and acquaintances, family demands such as raising children and caring for the elderly, and the differences of opinion that arise within families. Instead, clear and simple lines are drawn. In the case of the F-NPP accident, guidelines of the Dispute Reconciliation Committee for Nuclear Damage Compensation determine these lines. In the accident on the Fukuchiyama Line, calculation standards were established with reference to those for injuries caused by traffic accidents. While victims see compensation as essential to rebuilding their lives, one point they have repeatedly made is the confusion and anger they feel when the company at fault, and the wider society, see the paying of the negotiated compensation as the final settlement of the accident. For the victims, compensation is only the beginning of a rebuilding process. Many victims cannot bear the idea that compensation is considered a final settlement and ultimate resolution. Recalling the time she volunteered in the area affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and heard victims speaking about their feelings toward the Tokyo Electric Power Company, Ms. A shared her thoughts about that company’s approach to settlement negotiations: “I thought that those

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people—the ones living in the temporary housing because of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident—were feeling the same subtle emotions here. Or maybe there is something that’s different, but it’s similar. There was this nastiness there. The fact that they are a major company and, as you might expect, they flash wads of cash. Why are they so arrogant when they are responsible for this kind of damage? It’s kind of like power harassment. . . . I’m so sick of it. I cannot stand this relationship any more.”18 The F-NPP accident is still ongoing. Nonetheless, since about a year after it began, there have been times when critical eyes were cast at victims making claims. Now that nine years have passed, things are probably worse. An extreme example would be the thoughtless words “It’s great that you were compensated,” which creates divisions among the victims. It pushes them even more to keep quiet and pretend to be satisfied.

What Is Missing? Where to Begin? Supporting the Process of Recovery and Reexamining the Accident with All Parties Involved Beyond providing monetary and material support, I believe it is important to support the process of recovery by respecting victims’ autonomy in deciding how to go about it. Organizations like the self-help group of the Fukuchiyama Line accident make repeated attempts to determine their central objective with regard to recovery. When creating a framework to support the process, victims must take the lead. The self-help group and other such organizations do not allow the “experts” to lead; rather, they are asked to accompany and guide the victims on their journey. I have had many opportunities to listen to victims—not only those involved in the Fukuchiyama Line accident, but also those from other accidents. Those I have met were different from the popular image of the angry and grieving victim.19 Based on the experience of having her own activities criticized, Ms. A had the following to say about what victims want: I was criticized a lot and cried loudly. I never cry in public like that, but I just felt so sorry for the victims, rather than for myself. . . . The association of the injured and their family members is seeking a satisfactory settlement. This does not mean that only ourselves should be guaranteed. We are aiming for a truly satisfactory solution.

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What I feel from the suffering and experience we have had is that we need to build a social system where people don’t have to go through the same kind of suffering. Not only is it important to save ourselves, but it is important . . . to change the structure of society as a whole for future victims.20 Therefore, some people try to involve themselves in matters of public safety by looking beyond their own interests and experiences. In the case of the F-NPP accident, even if we consider the decommissioning of the reactor to be some kind of settlement, the accident will continue to be prominent for decades. Furthermore, the individuals involved will remain deeply affected. Rather than viewing victims as a uniform group, it is paramount to understand the situation of the individual victims of the accident. We must pick through the facts and try to understand the dilemmas victims face and the emotional turmoil that each of them endures individually. It is also paramount that we keep in mind the fact that the victims’ own understanding of their situation is only partial. I believe that the way to begin is to join victims in their attempts to redefine the accidents that they experienced.

Expanding Our View of the Story Despite all of this, we witness constant attempts by experts to assert their scientific view as the only truth and to “correct” the view of the individuals involved. For example, when members of the public raised the issue of Minamata disease and voiced concerns about the effects of the F-NPP accident, a counterargument was made based on scientific reasoning, saying that “internal radiation exposure by cesium via food seems reminiscent of Minamata disease, but whereas Minamata disease was caused by organic mercury from the Chisso Minamata factory being concentrated by the food chain, radioactive cesium, unlike organic mercury, is excreted as urine and is rarely accumulated in the body.”21 What the victims see as a problem does not mean that the F-NPP accident caused the same damage as Minamata disease. What the victims are concerned about is the fact that in the early stages of the process of recognizing Minamata disease as pollution, the government and experts concealed scientific data and did not acknowledge the damage. They are equally concerned that, even though they are said to be fine now, serious damage may be dis-

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covered later. What they refer to is an analogy of the process by which the damage of Minamata disease became apparent. Nuclear power experts make similar mistakes when they maintain their stance on the overall safety of nuclear power. When people expressed anxieties about the Fukushima power plant based on factors such as the perceived deterioration of the plant’s safety culture, the low employee morale in the organization, and the effects of an adverse financial situation on safety management, they asked, “Wouldn’t it be possible for an accident similar to the one at Chernobyl to happen in Japan?” The responses they received addressed a much narrower question, giving reasons why the same accident that occurred at Chernobyl could not happen in Japan. This is an example of how the scientific approach reduces the problem to scientifically provable dimensions. I think that it is natural for people to think about the worst that might happen, rather than what is scientifically likely to happen. Thus, we need to try to bridge the gap between the perspectives of the experts and the victims. When simple questions are asked, too much focus on evidence and data could lead to our missing aspects that we should have noticed. Experts should consider whether they really are correct and whether the situation really is as safe as they claim. Rather than saying “X, Y, or Z couldn’t occur because . . . ,” experts should say, “For X, Y, or Z to occur, as residents fear, it would only be when conditions A, B, and C are met.” This seems like the best way to respond to issues that victims raise, while taking their perspective into account.

Conclusion Whether in or beyond the context of the F-NPP accident, we cannot get close to solving issues of science and technology based only on the premise that scientific knowledge is the truth—or, conversely, that those involved in an accident are the only ones who know the truth. Solutions are best found when both the scientific perspective and the perspective of the parties involved are considered. The academic field of science, technology, and society studies (STS) is one that I believe offers the prospect of bridging these two views. However, since the Great East Japan Earthquake, STS experts including myself have not been able to achieve this. This is extremely regrettable. The reason is that the field of STS was centered on critiquing the problem, and the perspective of rebuilding the relationship between opposing parties was poorly articulated.

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I do not reject the idea that STS experts should continue to question science critically. However, what the victims can teach is that perceiving the scientific view and the view of the parties involved as fixed positions in a dichotomy—trying to reach out to the other side while keeping one foot firmly planted on one’s own side—will not resolve much. Just as victims do, we should embrace both views without identifying ourselves too strongly with either of them. This kind of work can be done only by having each individual embrace the incompatibilities and contradictions between these two perspectives. I sincerely hope to open up the field of STS in just this way.

CHAPTER 12

Building a Community-Based Platform for Radiation Monitoring After 3.11 Luis Felipe R. Murillo and Sean Bonner

In the aftermath of the triple disaster of 3.11 in Japan, the pressing issue of radiation exposure led several independent groups to organize environmental monitoring projects. International groups such as the Citizens’ Radioactivity Measuring Station rapidly built ties with local organizations to help them in their efforts to measure radiation. One of the most comprehensive and long-lasting initiatives in this context was the Safecast project, which started with a bricolage of commercial Geiger counters and scaled up rapidly through the mobilization of local and international networks of volunteers, nonprofit organ izations, companies, and university researchers collaborating in the use of a common pool of radiation data. Safecast’s response to the unfolding disaster was the result of an unusual gathering of technologists who asked themselves how they could use their skills to build an alternative source of information on radiation contamination. What could be easily dismissed as technologists’ hubris turned out to be one of the most important community-led radiation monitoring projects in the past nine years. This collective effort was not only supported by the convergence of concerned technologists who had complementary skills: it was created primarily through their capacity to mobilize a wide array of technical resources and volunteers from various fields of expertise, walks of life, and institutional affiliations.1 Safecast is of particular interest to contemporary disaster studies because of its unique approach to independent platform building.2 The sociotechnical

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system it enabled leads us to ask one of the key questions about the study of participation in science and technology today: what are the material (and immaterial) means of lay-expert participation in science and technology projects? Beyond questions of boundary making and crossing, impor tant research work has been conducted on the entanglement between political and infrastructural processes by addressing “infra-political” processes.3 Another parallel development in the so-called participatory turn of the social studies of science has called for engagement with political theory to achieve greater conceptual clarity and avoid the incorporation of normative models in an unreflexive manner.4 Recent studies have also interrogated the impasses of democratic governance that are primarily shaped by technoscientific issues, calling for specific forms of expertise in adjudication.5 By investigating the communitarian response to the Fukushima disaster, we offer this chapter as a contribution to these debates through the study of an independent lay-expert public and its technologies of participation. The material we discuss in this chapter was drawn from ethnographic research as well as direct participation in the activities of Safecast in Japan. For analytic purposes, we engage the question of the participation of unexpected publics to describe how emerging forms of distributed expertise were mobilized to create an independent but well-resourced response to the radioactive legacy of 3.11. For the conclusion, we respond to the question of lay-expert legitimacy by demonstrating that community-based initiatives have proven to be much more generative than governmental responses in the urgent task of radiation monitoring. Our goal is to identify and describe generative contributions to overcoming the challenge of sustaining and expanding community-based environmental projects, while addressing the lasting effects of the 3.11 legacy. If taken as a sociotechnical platform, the Safecast project constitutes, we argue, an important but understudied part of this legacy—to the limited extent to which any positive effect could be argued to exist in the face of a tragic environmental disaster with unsurmountable human suffering.

Building a Common Platform with Common Tools Out of sheer frustration over the lack of public information, various groups of technologists started to collaborate on the fast development and deployment of disaster relief information ser vices in the aftermath of the triple di-

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saster. At first, online data aggregation ser vices were used by disparate groups within and outside Japan. Soon afterward, an entire radiation monitoring work flow was designed, implemented, and deployed that covered various techniques: from open instrument design, fabrication, and assembly to data acquisition, filtering, visualization, and distribution. In the context of a massive sociotechnical, economic, and political disruption, “openness” meant the ability to draw on existing technology projects, experts, legal devices, documentation, and technical guidance to repurpose tools and techniques for disaster relief. One of the first attempts of the collective formed around Safecast was to create a shared, open technical object. After various experiments and iterations of open-source-based Geiger counters, Safecast stabilized a technical object that would later become its main instrument of community making through collaborative data gathering: the Bento Geiger Counter, nicknamed bGeigie. The very first proof of concept consisted of a suitcase-size radiation mapping setup containing a small laptop, a portable GPS unit, and an offthe-shelf commercial Geiger counter. Later iterations incorporated openhardware-based devices made available through a platform of fast hardware prototyping called Arduino. Only four burdensome weeks after the triple disaster, Safecast volunteers had already assembled a mobile Geiger counter that they used to perform mobile data-gathering sessions, called “Safecast drives,” in Tokyo and Koriyama, in Fukushima Prefecture. From this early experience in the local community space for bricolage, Tokyo Hacker Space, hardware prototypes and data gathering procedures were tested and new conditions for participation in collaborative monitoring were created: a simple kit for hand soldering was designed for assembly workshops (suitable for beginners), and a web platform was implemented and deployed that allowed radiation data to be uploaded and mapped as it was merged with a public-domain data set. In the span of one year, Safecast managed to cover all the aspects of the radiation data work flow except for the final link in the chain of scientific knowledge production: radiation data analysis, which would be necessary for entering expert debates about public safety and harmful levels of exposure. In effect, data interpretation was eventually covered through reliance on expert researchers and professional engineers on sensitive matters of calibration and measurement standards. The project found stability in the distributed network it managed to assemble, serving not only as a condition for building its tools and publics, but also to gain legitimacy for wider circulation of its data sets.

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If an unparalleled sociotechnical dynamism is to be found in the case of Safecast, one might wonder who the dedicated volunteers who made it all possible were. Another more abstract but not less important question is how participation was imagined, designed, and implemented through the Safecast platform. The answers are far from straightforward. Information on volunteers, for example, is not collected, but our ethnographic and direct participation in the project allows us to elaborate on basic profiles. Studies of sociotechnical platforms can start with the consideration of research ethics to ask how sensitive the collected data are for the contributors. In the case of Safecast, geolocated radiation data may be extremely sensitive, since what they convey could be perceived to be damaging for their contributors—with the damage ranging from stigmatization to indirect harm from governmental, corporate, and private interests that are not particularly happy about public disclosure. As one of the ways to protect users’ privacy, Safecast members refuse to collect personal information from volunteers, requiring only an email address for the access to and contribution of data using the web platform. Aside from the access to the platform, anonymous access to the raw data is possible without any form of authentication, which makes explicit another kind of commitment to the public circulation of information regarding differential levels of radiation exposure. As every volunteer quickly learns, Safecast data are comprised of strings containing various types of information. Each Safecast radiation monitoring device logs location data, radiation level, time stamp of measurement, and device identification to be submitted through the web platform. If personal data were collected, it would be trivial to identify who is at the origin of a particular data point. Another key aspect of Safecast demographics is that there is no single, homogeneous group among Safecast volunteers other than the core group, which is responsible for the stewardship of the project. This group is composed of expatriate western European and North American scientists, engineers, journalists, and designers, as well as Japanese researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs with strong links outside Japan. Besides the core group, occasional volunteer groups vary greatly across locations with respect to gender, age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. In Fukushima Prefecture, for instance, Safecast has an incredibly large contingent of women, members of the so-called mothers’ groups who were the early adopters of Safecast and who led the way for local mapping and data adoption by local governments.6 Since their lives were directly disrupted by the events of 3.11, they were the first to respond to the call for independent monitoring as a means of creat-

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ing data to be used by their community members. In the United States, the demographics are rather different: the volunteers there include much younger groups of (chiefly male-identified) technologists who work or study in technology fields and who are interested in building devices and collecting data as part of their hobbyist activities. They represent sectors of the population of foreigners who were not affected by the triple disaster, but they are curious about the potential of Safecast tools. They also represent a rather privileged group, with enough income and time to embark on volunteer-based projects. In sum, US volunteers come from a mixture of backgrounds, genders, and age groups, but they can roughly be classified as being between people who were directly affected by the disaster and those who were scientifically and technically trained. Most of the work of collecting data and designing, implementing, and deploying the digital tools has been performed on a volunteer basis by members of these groups, including children who were recently introduced to the topic of radiation in Safecast workshops to assemble a child-friendly version of the radiation monitoring device, the kGeigie (also known as the eGeigie, or educational Geigie). With the core group and the expert enthusiasts it managed to attract, Safecast laid the groundwork for achieving fast iterative design cycles, owing little to professional hardware prototyping. In fact, “no fewer than seven incrementally-improved hardware detector designs were built, tested, and deployed by Safecast during the first eighteen months following the start of the disaster, a degree of productivity rarely achieved by even well-funded national or university labs, or by the best-motivated technical start-ups.”7 From the creation of the project to the present, over 3,000 units have been collaboratively produced, assembled, and distributed to generate over 88,000,000 data points, covering most roads in Japan and over a hundred other countries. The accelerated pace of shared self-education, research, and development is worth emphasizing: iterations, in some cases, yielded only four or five devices, as the design would be rapidly changed for better usability or function before more devices could be built. Among Safecast volunteers with this type of technical expertise, this approach to rapid instrument making is characterized by the expression “build it today, use it tomorrow,” which resembles the logic of continuous integration in software development—with constant, unscheduled updates that are integrated into the flow of practical use. Safecast’s open technical object—its original radiation monitoring tool, the bGeigie—is much more than the result of a mobilization of distributed networks of volunteer experts, however. In terms of technical specification,

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it represents an assemblage of publicly available technologies coupled with a professional-grade, off-the-shelf radiation detection device produced by International Medcom Inc. (IMI), a specialized scientific instrument maker. The primary sensor component used—a two-inch pancake Geiger-Müller tube driven by a high-voltage board—provided the core functionality in all of the derivative devices. In contrast with other projects that produced Geiger counters in Japan after 3.11, Safecast benefited in its development process from the help of the CEO of IMI, Dan Sythe, who promptly became an active contributor and advisor to the project. The expertise he brought was key in legitimating the process of volunteer-based data collection with factory precalibrated sensors in the inquisitive eyes of local and foreign regulatory agencies. As a constitutive part of the project’s networks of experts, the underlying (and almost invisible) network of technical objects was key for sustaining it. As part of Safecast’s sociotechnical assemblage, the history behind the partnership of a vetted radiation instrument maker and Safecast is also particularly relevant for comparisons between the community response to 3.11 in relation to many other nuclear accidents, such as those at Three Mile Island (TMI), Hanford, and Chernobyl. While Safecast members conducted initial experiments with various Geiger counters and radiation sensors, they were introduced to Sythe, a specialist who had gained his expertise in the context of the TMI accident and promptly offered his sensors to be incorporated into Safecast’s hardware designs. Based on this early collaboration, Safecast became the origin of several derivative devices, including commercial products such as the free and open-source Onyx and its successor, Blue Onyx. IMI was formed when a team of engineers and community activists came together to build radiation detectors for communities surrounding TMI and, later, for those affected by Chernobyl. Starting in 1990, IMI designed and produced long-term outdoor monitors that were deployed around TMI and other nuclear power plants in the United States. In conjunction with the city of Harrisburg, IMI connected those devices around TMI to the web in 1993 to create the first real-time community radiation monitoring efforts. Sythe brought this expertise to the early discussions with the Safecast team and their initial deployments in Japan. Safecast monitoring efforts have also been extended beyond Japan. At the Hanford site, a decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the US federal government in Washington State, the independent group called Hanford Challenge has been dedicated to providing data and other informational resources to employees and surrounding communities. To

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this end, it has adopted a number of Safecast devices to collect data that it later published. The group is particularly aligned with Safecast in terms of its collective mobilization to respond to the risk of nuclear contamination. Safecast has also been extended to more than a hundred countries. But the hardware and platforms it makes are not the only key pieces of technology in the Safecast initiative: data mapping and distribution are other key aspects of its approach to public disclosure.

Data Circulation and Interpretation: Design Orientations and Tensions In his study of participatory cultures of cartography, Jean-Christophe Plantin uses the concept of “remediation” to explore different approaches to radiation mapping.8 One of the conclusions that Plantin reaches is that despite their distributed efforts in data aggregation, early collaborative cartographers did not persist in Japan after 3.11, failing to build a common platform, form a lasting community, or intervene in the public debate. Interestingly, Safecast has been one of the few organizations that survived the prototype phase, going much farther than the “ad hoc infrastructure” that was put in place hastily “to remediate the Fukushima disaster.”9 It has not only created a peculiar community around its digital platform, but it also advanced a key participatory affordance: the capacity for mapping user-contributed radiation data. The mapping functionality was primarily intended to allow data to be processed and published by Safecast, but it quickly became a tool for more general participation by enthusiastic volunteers.10 According to the dataprocessing model, any contributed datum is first filtered, converted and aggregated, going through a process of verification by one of the core Safecast volunteers. Then it is exported to be visualized by web and mobile mapping applications. At the end of this chain, data are distributed in the form of graphs that, invariably, enter a wide public space of interpretive disputes with questions of risk, fear, and doubt of radiation contamination. Different volunteers worked on different forms of visualization, exploring different mapping tools, but other examples could be found in the domain of the electronic arts. The Safecast radiation data set has been used to create three-dimensional models of urban landscapes that can be experienced differently according to the registered level of radiation, but also the clicking sounds that are characteristic of Geiger counters when they detect hot particles.

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Core Safecast volunteers report that one of their early lessons in community mapping was that many users, who were unaware of existing baseline radiation, would often make assumptions about safety levels based on what colors were used on the public maps. This led to much confusion and concern for the users of the early web platform, generating internal debates on how to present data without conveying the sense of unequivocal and undisputable presence or absence of health-related risks. The temporary solution they agreed upon was to create a visualization that would demand further exchange among experts and lay-expert groups to create conditions for interpretation and response. To depict variation in aggregate sums, local levels within contaminated areas, and local levels in noncontaminated areas, an adjustable scale was implemented. This approach consisted of abandoning the traditional green-to-red or good-to-bad scale, due to how easily such scales can lead to false positives and negatives, while adapting scales to particular areas. For example, the community mapping efforts conducted by the Citizens’ Radioactivity Measuring Station via Google Maps used this type of scale, leading to frequent miscommunication. The new color palette adopted by Safecast went from black (lowest) to white (highest) with blue, red, and yellow used to signal impor tant differences and call for further analysis on a case-to-case basis. By virtue of the wide circulation of various forms of data visualization after Fukushima, Safecast was caught in interpretative disputes between groups mobilized around the question of human risk and harm and governmental, corporate, and scientific ways of knowing about the unfolding disaster. Core Safecast volunteers did not aspire to provide any form of self-evident transparency, as it is rather well known how much sensing evidence is a product of material practices, devices of seeing, and particular ways of interpretation.11 As instrument builders, they were particularly skeptical of the politics of big numbers without methodological and instrumental verification. The new approach to scale visualization served to reduce the risk of uninformed and alarmist readings, while retaining the possibility for concerted efforts among experts and nonexperts to collaborate not only on data collection, but also on the interpretation and translation of results across spaces of community and technoscientific knowledge production. One simple but powerful illustration of this problem is the infamous case of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s waveheight map that fueled fast-spreading rumors in the media about the reach of radioactive waters and the impact of 3.11 on the western coast of North

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America. The map was intended to show the change in wave height across the Pacific due to the tsunami generated by the Tōhoku earthquake, but the image and the colors used were rather dramatic. This map had the effect of unmediated transparency, being self-evident to those who quickly jumped to the conclusion that harmful levels of highly radioactive waters were reaching across the Pacific. Red sections on the map were assumed to be deadly levels of radiation, when, in fact, they only indicated up to a shortterm ten-centimeter rise in wave height. As one of the Safecast publications asked, “we know that some of the fish caught off Japan have been too contaminated to be sold for human consumption, and that wide expanses of farmland in Japan have been contaminated as well. But what effects can be expected overseas?”12 As fake news spread like wildfire online, part of Safecast’s educational work consisted in debunking alarmist concerns without detracting from the importance of attending to the disaster. Another community science project—Our Radioactive Oceans, conducted by Ken Buesseler at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution with a group of volunteers—addressed the problem by collecting geolocated data on concentrations of cesium 137 and 134 across the Pacific. His group has published extensively on the impact of 3.11 with respect to a much longer history of nuclear weapons testing and bombings in the Pacific region, which reached peak levels in the 1960s. Interestingly, this research group has found a non-negligible rise in radiation, but at levels that are considerably below the threshold that regulatory agencies describe as harmful. This is not, as Buesseler’s team reiterates, cause for not paying careful attention to what happens in relation to 3.11. Rather, it is a call for further research that can verify and validate the team’s results, as well as for multiple research projects that investigate harms for human and marine life. Another important parallel with Safecast with respect to the use of mapping technologies for disaster release came from a group of volunteers from Kathmandu, Nepal. In 2015, Nepal was shocked by a massive earthquake that led not only to the creation of various local disaster response groups, but also to a massive influx of international aid organizations. Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL), founded in 2013, was quick to mobilize a group of volunteers to use OpenStreetMap to conduct collaborative mapping of the damage done by the disaster, which also contributed to updated counting by more than nine thousand volunteers from all over the world. Similar to Safecast, the KLL collaborative mapping project gained legitimacy in the eyes of established disaster response actors, such as local governments and the

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military, which relied to a great extent on the information provided by volunteer mappers. For instance, KLL’s QuakeMaps was an early effort to map and document people’s direct needs using an approach similar to that of the Ushahidi project (which combines a free and open-source online platform with other forms of communication, such as mobile phone networks). For every reported case for registration in QuakeMaps, KLL had volunteers verify the information. This procedure led the Nepal Army to make great use of this data set in its rescue operations. The director of KLL, Nama Raj Budhathoki, reported in his keynote address at the Third Northern European Conference on Emergency and Disaster Studies in 2018 that more than six hundred air operations by the army had been based on data contributed by KLL. In parallel with Safecast, KLL helped create a digital commons for disaster response. Its activities continued after the earthquake to provide assessments of damage to the built infrastructure. As Budhathoki’s experience suggests, the lesson of KLL in disaster response is one of learning that we must rely on local knowledge. But some help is always needed in coordinating and facilitating the work across different domains of experience that otherwise would rarely (or with great difficulty) come together in the aftermath of a disaster. Such help may be needed in the process of rapid infrastructure implementation or in the difficult task of interpreting community-generated disaster relief data. Examples of mapping efforts and their disputed interpretations evidentiate the relevance of “critical data literacy”13 and “counter mapping”14 in disaster situations. To reexamine the means and conditions for the production of data visualizations is a way of entering the heart of the relation between collective action and lay-expert ways of knowing, as they are reconfigured through projects such as “Our Radioactive Ocean,” QuakeMaps, and Safecast. We take up this question next to address the broader implications of community-based radiation monitoring.

Discussion: Implications of Community-Based Radiation Monitoring In the previous sections of this chapter, we described Safecast’s technologies of participation to address their implications after 3.11. As far as the history of sociotechnical systems go, Safecast’s trajectory is one of fast iterations of trial and error on how to develop, replicate, and use radiation sensors and mapping technologies. Even if the bricoleur approach is not a particularity

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of the project but can be found across cases of community environmental monitoring, its specific use relies upon the capacity to mobilize technologies that are much more conducive to bricolage, which led to the development of an open platform with participatory affordances and differential levels of permeability to public and private participation.15 We have suggested thus far that building tools and resources to create an open platform depended upon the capacity to mobilize technologies and technologists through a process of scaling Safecast up through partnerships, while scaling down its local operations to render volunteer work feasible and training workshops manageable on the ground. This difficult balance in coordination involved the mobilization of international networks of community centers, research institutions, companies, and volunteer groups for prototyping and teaching workshops in Fukushima, as well as in other locations in Japan, East Asia, western Europe, and the United States. Regular hands-on workshops helped promote meaningful experiences of participation and appropriation of monitoring technologies, while conversations about community response echoed local concerns of both affected groups and technologist groups whose members were not directly affected by the triple disaster. In these encounters across different levels of expertise and local knowledge, we find an example of a rather peculiar mode of knowledge production that was enabled through the unlikely engagement of both technoscientific experts and nonexperts.16 For the purposes of comparison, we can identify key parallels and contrasts between Safecast and other community and citizen-science projects. In their analysis of existing “citizen science” projects and their corresponding literature, Aya Kimura and Abby Kinchy describe seven areas of concentration in the debate, covering the politics and the dynamics of collaboration. Citizen-science projects have attracted considerable public attention in serving as drivers of large-scale data collection and in creating interest in abandoned data sets—as exemplified by the project Scifabric, which is involved in important projects in the domains of physics and medical research, as well as by corporate crime investigation. In parallel with other volunteerbased projects, Safecast covers key aspects of contemporary citizen-science activity through data gathering, increasing awareness of the importance of public radiation data. In contrast with these other projects, however, Safecast has been exemplary in its efforts to build tools and platforms. In the process of gathering a large and heterogeneous network of private, public, and individual expert and nonexpert contributors, it also served to refute some journalist

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accounts of the power of the “crowds” of “citizen scientists” by presenting an often forgotten but much richer genealogy of community-science activism.17 Safecast’s efficacy resides in its capacity to aggregate and coordinate volunteer efforts across domains of expertise, often with a relatively small number of core volunteers. The project is anything but immune to technopolitical and ethical divides between pro- and antinuclear positions in Japan and abroad. As part of a wider movement of discontent and skepticism about governmental responses to the triple disaster, Safecast’s approach to expert and regulatory authorities (both local and international) could best be described as integrative. It consisted in creating channels for direct participation of experts and lay experts in radiation monitoring as a practical way to address the corporate and government’s monopoly on the collection and release of radiation data. In the process of designing and implementing technologies of participation, one of the key challenges was how to obtain credibility as a source of information through the legitimization of its technical activities. In early discussions about radiation data availability, one of the Safecast advisors once noted that there was no single data source that both pro- and antinuclear groups could agree to use: existing data sets were created or funded directly by one side of the debate, making it immediately suspect to the other. Given this strong historical partition, Safecast members decided to avoid taking an official position as a group, in spite of their personal opinions, and to direct their attention instead to the lack of publicly available radiation data after 3.11. The distance taken from heated debates regarding the past, present, and future of nuclear energy helped open a new space of for collaborative production of data involving unlikely interlocutors. Without strong questioning of the validity of monitoring efforts, the Safecast data set was promptly adopted by organizations on both sides of the nuclear power debate. Furthermore, Safecast worked to provide resources that opposing parties could agree to share, helping generate new discussions about a new common reference point regarding collaborative methods for tool and platform building. Curiously, an inversion of the accreditation process took place: it was because new channels of collaboration and circulation were created that the process of accreditation was made possible, as legitimization of radiation collection and mapping activities involved not only enrolling technoscientific experts with extensive networks, as we suggested, but also reaching out to established regulatory authorities to enter a space of exchange regarding matters of radiation monitoring. A major turning point for Safecast, in this

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respect, took place during a presentation for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Safecast had been invited by the agency to present its approach to radiation monitoring and mapping on February 18, 2014. Two Safecast members were in charge of the mission, but not without discomfort: they did not know what to expect from the visit to IAEA or from having Safecast to be perceived as unofficially affiliated with the IAEA. At the visit, delegates from several countries expressed skepticism about what they portrayed as a nongovernmental organization publishing data that had not been officially certified. Azby Brown, one of the two Safecast representatives, reported that “finally a delegate from Norway, Astrid Liland, gave us a ringing endorsement, saying, ‘You people are focusing on details and missing the whole picture. These are creative and innovative people developing effective solutions on their own, and if there’s ever an accident in your own countries you will be lucky to find people like them. In fact, you should be looking for people like this now!’ The applause after that was tremendous. You could feel the consensus in the room shift, and we were surrounded afterward and couldn’t get out for over a half-hour.”18 It was as a result of this event that the US Department of Energy and France’s Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN) took Safecast’s example as a model for their future projects and the IAEA included some of Safecast’s basic recommendations into the revised version of its disaster response guidelines. Safecast representatives presented talks and bGeigie assembly classes in the Workshop on Environmental Mapping: Mobilising Trust in Measurements and Engaging Scientific Citizenry offered by International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, and the IAEA. The event was held at the ICTP’s ScientificFabLab (scientific fabrication lab) and attended by physicists, designers, electronics experts, and representatives of the ICTP and IAEA. The consensus had definitely shifted, with increasing permeability of community projects that provided spaces for exchanges between experts and lay experts. Safecast has had a multiplicator effect as well: the National Nuclear Security Administration in the United States has taken the Safecast approach in releasing public data on US cities. The IRSN has created the Open Radiation portal, modeled after Safecast but taking a different approach to data release (using an Attribution-ShareAlike license, instead of putting data in the public domain). Another initiative, which is far from open, was also inspired by Safecast’s hardware project (the bGeigie): the SIGMA program of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is known for taking a similar approach to community-driven radiation monitoring to

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cover wider areas than government approaches could, but the data were limited to governmental and other official uses. In sum, in both the ISRN and DARPA cases we have seen significant investment into replicating Safecast’s process as a way to create siloed and government-owned systems. This shows that even though government agencies might speak highly of open data and open systems in their public relations campaigns, they are still unwilling to relinquish control and, rather than fund existing open systems, fund internal projects and—to a great extent—reinvent the wheel. The broader effects of community-driven radiation monitoring have been realized not only in terms of epistemic practices, but also in terms of the reconfiguration of lay-expert interfaces—which have been first and foremost enabled by the technologies of participation assembled by Safecast and its network of volunteers. As we distance ourselves from the dramatic events of 3.11 but definitely not from their consequences and effects, one positive legacy should now be clear: the assembly of a common, generative platform for radiation measurement and mapping through the Safecast project.

CHAPTER 13

The Closely Watched Case of Iitate Village The Need for Global Communication of Local Problems Azby Brown

In the wake of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011, Iitate Village in north-central Fukushima Prefecture has become a virtual microcosm of every major problem—radiological, economic, social, ethical, and political—the disaster has presented. Many social and institutional fault lines have been exposed by the disaster and the response to it. Community loyalties have been stressed by the displacement of populations, there is an ongoing skepticism about assurances of safety, and claims for compensation remain contentious. Initial government responses on the national, prefectural, and local levels were mishandled and engendered a lasting distrust, and the residents of Iitate have often been presented as textbook victims of the disaster by the activist press and other media. At the same time, many Iitate residents have shown a stubborn resilience and have been working tirelessly to address their many challenges, fully aware of the risks and consequences of the long-term radiological contamination of their environment. Few of them harbor illusions that life in Iitate will return to normal at any time soon. However, their daily lives and decisions depend on a careful evaluation of economic, social, and radiological conditions. As has been the case throughout the region, citizens have increasingly developed the skills and support networks necessary for informing themselves, largely freeing themselves from sole dependence on government or official institutions for information on radiological conditions. The result has been a complex flow of information—much of it user-generated and shared—from

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many sources, which are targeted to different populations and tailored to suit different perceived needs. This has led to some contradictions and misunderstandings, but overall most local stakeholders agree that the ability to compare information from many sources is beneficial for residents. In this situation, accurate and trustworthy data about radiation exposures should in theory be the key to resolving most issues of contention. In actuality, however, responses to this kind of data depend upon who is perceived to own the data, in terms of having originated or endorsed it. As a result, at the time of writing in 2018, the search for data that are credible to all parties has proven to be both essential and difficult.

Prior to the Accident The fate of Iitate is all the more disturbing because so much was going well in the town prior to the accident. As has been well chronicled by sociologists who have followed developments in the town closely since 2011, under the leadership of Mayor Norio Kanno, Iitate had become an admirable model of intelligent and sustainable rural development.1 It had become well known in so-called slow-life circles worldwide for its local implementation of innovative but traditionally rooted agricultural and social principles, called madei life, using a regional dialect term that encapsulates a sense of sincerity. Decades of steady population decline had left the number of residents at about six thousand in 2010, down from over nine thousand in the early 1970s, and the population was somewhat more skewed toward the elderly than the national average. But new future-oriented products and markets had been carefully developed, and Iitate was blessed with positive momentum, a clear identity, and pride—all anchored in generations of close relationships between the people and their mountains, rivers, and soil. The village leadership enjoyed strong support. After March  2011, however, despite a brief initial sense of relief and safety, the implications of the radioactive contamination of these mountains, rivers, and soil gradually sank in. Clear information was soon available indicating that due to high radiation levels, the evacuation of Iitate was advisable,2 and sizable early self-evacuations took place. However, the evacuation order for the village was not given until April 22, 2011, six weeks after the start of the accident.3 This still-unexplained delay in issuing the evacuation order is the primary cause of an underlying sense of betrayal expressed by many residents—particularly since they had

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been lulled into a sense of security for weeks, believing that their town had escaped any serious consequences.

Contention Every aspect of the decisions regarding the demarcation of the evacuation zones in Fukushima, the timing and implementation of decontamination, and the compensation that was offered to displaced residents proved to be extremely contentious. This has been particularly true for Iitate, such decisions coming as they did after the mishandled initial evacuation. Following more detailed radiation surveys, in March 2012 the evacuated area of Fukushima was reconfigured into three zones, which can be characterized as “return possible soon” (green), “return possible after several years” (orange), and “return not possible for a long time” (red).4 By July 2012, Iitate had been divided so that it had territory in all three zones.5 It is possible to say that as time progressed, the overall decontamination and compensation processes became increasingly systematic, but they remain complex and somewhat difficult for laypeople to grasp.6 Hindsight suggests that many disputes could have been prevented if authorities had done adequate planning prior to the accident, clearly laying out what kind of information would need to be gathered and how quickly, what the conditions for both evacuation and return would be, how all of this would be communicated transparently to the public, and ensuring that the public would be fully consulted and included in the decisionmaking process—as delineated in the Aarhus Convention.7 That this was not the case has been amply documented and discussed.8 As Gaston Meskens points out, “from a social justice perspective, involving the (potentially) affected in making sense of the risks and in consequent decision making should be the prime concern,” particularly since the general public already was somewhat distrustful of nuclear energy policy prior to the accident.9 Because the ultimate delineation of the Fukushima evacuation zones was not completed until a year after the start of the accident, public attitudes toward governments at all levels had already crystallized into skepticism and distrust, even when the government or the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) took appropriate action. But although this distrust has had many destructive consequences, it has also led to individuals and communities in Fukushima developing a much greater degree of self-reliance. Few residents accept the government’s radiation data unquestioningly. Most

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seek out alternative sources of information, and even when they accept policy decisions made on the basis of official data, their acceptance is tempered by their own judgments. It should be acknowledged that a large body of social theory exists that may have helped predict these outcomes, and that may still prove applicable in illuminating the ongoing power dynamics between government and governed in Fukushima, whose social and political conflicts cannot be disengaged from the technical and scientific bases for most decisions in which radiation and its measurement plays a part. In this sense, Fukushima’s issues are prime examples of “co-production” as delineated by Sheila Jasanoff (among others), within which science and technology operate as political agents.10 The Japanese government, accustomed to taking an opaque and arguably illiberal technocratic approach to nuclear energy issues (of which the Fukushima accident is one example), expected that its scientific authority would be able to operate unchallenged. Yet as we will see, Fukushima became a zone where citizens have actively tested the performance of their government representatives by establishing alternative, objective scientific knowledge. Despite the high levels of radioactive contamination in Iitate, Mayor Kanno made it clear shortly after the accident that he would focus on reopening the town so that its residents could return. He enthusiastically embraced the central government’s decontamination and renewal plans, a stance that divided the town. Both his supporters (who believe that the level of risk after decontamination will be acceptably low) and his critics, (who believe that risk will remain unacceptably high for most people) have been very vocal, with the critics apparently in the majority. Kanno—who was nevertheless unopposed when he ran for reelection in October 2012—was able to fulfill his promise to reopen the town in April 2017. As has been the case elsewhere in Fukushima, residents have voted with their feet. Opinion surveys from early 2017 suggest that about 30  percent of the original 6,132 residents of the town want to return eventually, but only about 10  percent (roughly 600 people) considered returning soon after it reopened.11 A month after the reopening of the village, 326 people (5.7  percent) had returned, which had increased to about 450 by July 2017 and 607 by February 2018.12 At the same time, a class-action lawsuit with 2,837 signatories from Iitate— nearly half the population—was filed with the Nuclear Damage Compensation Dispute Resolution Center in November 2014 and remains outstanding at the time of this writing.13 Given the small number of returnees and the large number of plaintiffs, we can deduce that a large majority of residents

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feel strongly that conditions in the town, radiological and other wise, are not yet acceptable for people to return. Those most opposed to return argue that the government is unable to guarantee their safety and that of future generations because of the radioactive contamination. They are able to cite measurement data from various sources to support this position. Those most enthusiastic about return express impatience with their opponents, arguing that ample data indicate that the potential health risks are acceptably low and that with government assistance, returnees will be able to adequately minimize their radiation exposure through awareness and continued monitoring. They too are able to cite measurement data to support their position. They also argue that their opponents are largely motivated by the desire for more financial compensation, and they resent the fact that townspeople who refuse to return but who do not change their legal place of residence can continue to influence local decisions while establishing new lives elsewhere, without demonstrating any commitment to the town.14

What Do We Need to Know? Both arguments, not surprisingly, center on risk. To get a full picture of ongoing radiation risks and their changes, citizens need to be aware of radiation dose and dose-rate measurements, which include those made by instruments measuring ambient radiation as well as those from individual dosimeters; radioactive contamination levels in food; and the results of screening for internal radioactive contamination in people. Official programs have been in place for all of these since at least late 2011, and a considerable amount of data is available, though the data are not always easy to find or to interpret. Independent data, often “captured or reformulated by inventive, upstart communities,” as predicted by Jasanoff, is also available for most of these categories—some quite competent and credible.15 The quantity and variety of places and things, including people, that need to be measured for radiation following a nuclear disaster like the one that happened in Fukushima are extremely large. For each, judgments need to be made regarding the risks they pose. For virtually all potential routes and sources of radiation exposure, international bodies like the International Commission on Radiological Protection and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have established guidelines that specify the allowable

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levels of radionuclides of many types.16 If an allowable radiation level is exceeded, then by international agreement, protective actions must be taken. Depending on the particular context, this may mean evacuation, food screening, health screening, remediation of farmland, and so on. In Fukushima, including Iitate, the entire panoply of protective actions—from evacuation to foodstuff intervention and health screening—was eventually invoked and implemented, if unevenly, and most actions remain in effect. Within a year of the disaster, people living in Fukushima were generally very familiar with officially allowable radiation levels; half-lives of important radionuclides; cesium’s migration into soil, weathering, and uptake by food crops; the relative efficacy of various remediation techniques, and so on. They were being given information by antinuclear activists who were skeptical that the regulations were actually protective enough, even in cases where the guidelines were being met. At the same time, the public was presented with information from official sources that generally presented rosier—often transparently manipulative—scenarios. Survey results from 2012 showed that Fukushima residents had different levels of concern about radiation risks from the land, space, food, radon, medical care, and nuclear facilities.17 Other surveys from the same year indicated that 68  percent of Iitate residents felt there were too many different opinions for them to discern what was correct.18 It also became clear that the government lacked the human resources to monitor every thing that needed monitoring to the degree residents demanded. Citizens stepped in to fill the gaps both for their own protection and out of a sense of obligation to their communities, amassing important knowledge and experience in the process.

Sources of Radiation Information Ambient radiation can be considered environmental radiation, and it is primarily a concern for external exposures. Natural background radiation includes ambient radiation emanating from primordial radionuclides in rocks and soil in the earth (terrestrial radiation) as well as radiation caused by cosmic rays. In a situation like that of Fukushima after the accident, radiation from nuclear fallout—generally carried on the wind and then to the ground by precipitation—produces additional external exposures that make monitoring necessary. Ambient radiation measurements are used to estimate possible health impacts to humans from these external exposures, and

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they have some utility in helping indicate possible internal exposures. Broadly speaking, dose estimates derived from ambient radiation monitoring are intentionally overestimated to provide a significant safety margin, since it has been considered preferable to err on the side of being over- rather than underprotective. Measurement methods for ambient radiation include portable handheld radiation detectors, fixed monitoring devices, mobile devices mounted on ground vehicles, and aerial surveys. Any of these can be based on one or more sensor technologies. Emergency decisions regarding evacuation are based almost exclusively on official ambient radiation measurements and are intended to be gradually supplemented by other, more detailed data.19 Although the process was slow after the Fukushima accident,20 ultimately the government was able to provide maps of the affected areas that showed ambient radiation and soil contamination levels on a grid at the one-kilometer scale, with many areas mapped at a five-hundred-meter scale as well. Aerial and vehicle ground surveys have been repeated several times a year since 2011 and their results made available online. These are probably the most significant official radiation-mapping data available to the public.21 In addition, approximately three thousand fixed monitoring posts, which display radiation levels in real time, were installed in Fukushima by The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and by the prefectural government beginning in early 2012. This program was quickly criticized because of an overall lack of transparency about the technical specifications and quality of the devices and because many of them had been installed in locations such as parks and school grounds that had already been decontaminated—making the readings less representative of the wider environment.22 The Iitate Village government installed additional real-time monitoring posts within the town in 2016–17. A notable aspect of radiation monitoring in Fukushima has been the ability to supplement ambient dose monitoring with personal dosimetry data derived from small detectors that are worn on the body (personal dosimeters). Because they are worn on the body continually, a well-calibrated personal dosimeter can provide a much more accurate representation of an individual’s actual radiation exposures than ambient monitoring can.23 In most cases the doses indicated by personal dosimetry are lower than those estimated by ambient monitoring. Beginning in late 2011, municipalities such as Fukushima City, Date, Koriyama, and Minamisoma began to provide their citizens with personal dosimeters (known colloquially as “glass badges,” after one common device type).24 These programs were expanded

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to other municipalities in Fukushima and have continued to date. Though the lack of standardization in hardware and reporting has been an issue, consistent personal dose information has been available for tens of thousands of Fukushima residents since at least 2012 from municipal government sources. This information is primarily directed toward local citizens, although it is gradually being given a higher priority in official decisions regarding reopening evacuated areas to residents. Official radiation monitoring data for Fukushima includes measurements conducted or published by government agencies at the national, prefectural, and municipal levels. International agencies like the IAEA also sometimes collect and publish Fukushima radiation monitoring information, and their data should be considered official in this regard. The IAEA, the United Nations Scientific Committee for the Effects of Atomic Radiation, and the World Health Organization have acknowledged and cited independently collected data when they have found it credible and relevant, but most of the data they report have been provided by official counterpart agencies at the national government level.25 Both the US armed forces and National Nuclear Security Administration in the Department of Energy (DOE/NNSA) also played a large role during the first weeks and months of the disaster in providing radiation monitoring data of many types that can be considered official.26 Data provided by TEPCO, which is often the only source for information regarding the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant site, is technically not official, nor can it be considered independent. It should also be kept in mind that although much of the funding for radiation monitoring programs operated by prefectural and municipal governments in Japan ultimately comes from the national government, in practice their programs are usually quite independent and are sometimes marked by a lack of cooperation. As described above, citizens often view official radiation data with mistrust and skepticism. In fact, for the most part independent data has tended over time to confirm government measurements—particularly in the case of ambient radiation, which is technically the easiest to measure. The strongest outstanding criticisms of official radiation data concern their omissions, specifically of areas or things that are either not measured or not fully reported, and their oversimplification when interpreting and communicating findings, in a way that skews toward positive conclusions.27 A citizen trying to obtain information can locate and use these official information sources, which are generally the only ones being used by government officials at any level to inform their decisions. The availability of

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independent information from a wide range of citizen groups is an increasingly significant factor, however. As Silvio Funkowicz and Jerome Ravetz point out in “Post-Normal Science,” in complex systems in which nature, technology, and human society interact, “there can be no single privileged point of view for measurement, analysis, and evaluation.”28 The emergence of citizen-derived scientific data in Fukushima is a spontaneous illustration of this, in which extended peer communities bring their deep knowledge of the local situations to bear. These groups seek to provide citizens with an alternative to depending on official information and often focus on filling perceived gaps in official coverage. Most important, they make it possible for citizens to directly participate in monitoring their own environment. The majority of groups of this type active in Fukushima are small and locally focused (such as Tarachine [“Mother”], Fukushima Saisei no Kai [“Resurrection of Fukushima Association”], and the Association to Help Chernobyl). However, a few coalitions with nationwide reach have been formed (such as Minna no Data [“Everyone’s Data”]), and at least one group that originated in Japan envisioned global participation from the outset and achieved that within its first year of operation (the group is Safecast, of which the author is a member). In addition, a number of overseas-based nonprofit organizations provided monitoring data on the environment, food, and health and assisted local groups at the outset but have become less active in Fukushima over time (examples include Association pour le Contrôle de la Radioactivité dans l’Ouest, Commission de Recherche et d’Information Indépendantes sur la Radioactivité, and Greenpeace).

Local Versus Global As alluded to above, depending on who is gathering and publishing it and why, radiation monitoring information can be primarily inwardly directed (that is, targeted toward the local community) or outwardly directed (that is, targeted toward an external audience, such as international agencies, national and global media, and overseas activists). The simplest indicator of such targeting in the case of Fukushima is the language in which the information is made available. If it is available only in Japanese, it is likely to be locally targeted. This is generally the case for information regarding municipally run personal dosimetry and internal contamination screening programs, for instance. With notable exceptions, relatively few citizen groups

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in Japan publish their data in languages other than Japanese, and if they do, it is usually just in brief summary form. Such a local focus can undoubtedly be a strength, in that members are very aware of the concerns of their particular communities, know the local physical geography and social dynamics, and are committed to helping those close to them. But few people outside of these communities are likely to be aware that this information exists, and the tendency is for them to work in isolation rather than establish links with similar groups in other towns. Because of its particular circumstances, Iitate has been covered by a greater intensity of radiation monitoring activity on the part of both official and independent bodies than most other parts of Fukushima. While this should make it easier for citizens to inform themselves and make better decisions, in fact there are signs that monitoring fatigue has already set in for some. At the same time, few of those groups that provide information or interpretations of it do so in a way that is truly objective and disinterested. Instead, it is easy to find examples of data being used to shape opinions in one way or another. This is true for both official sources and citizens’ groups and nonprofit organizations. The deployments generally divide along the fault lines of pro- versus antinuclear and/or pro- versus antireturn. The local government of Iitate, for instance, does not seem to express an official position on nuclear energy, but it has clearly been encouraging its citizens to return and presenting data to reinforce its position that the town is safe for residents. This message has been directed almost exclusively at the residents themselves, but it has drawn considerable attention from Japanese and overseas media. To its credit, the town government acknowledges ongoing challenges and the fact that returnees will need to exercise vigilance about their radiation exposures.29 In contrast, Greenpeace has released three publications that focus on the environmental monitoring it has done in Iitate.30 Greenpeace’s monitoring is technically competent, and it has provided useful data about radiation levels in relatively understudied watershed areas, for instance. From the start, its position has been antinuclear, and it was among the first to call for the evacuation of Iitate.31 It has have consistently interpreted its findings there to oppose reopening the town to residence. This messaging is directed partly to the local community, in Japanese, but more prominently to a global audience and media. The citizens’ group Fukushima Saisei no Kai, based in Iitate, has implemented an admirably thorough program of radiation monitoring in the village. With technical advice from a nuclear physicist and an environmental

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Figure 13.1. The author, Safecast’s lead researcher, monitors radiation in Iitate Village in the fall of 2013 using a Safecast-designed GPS-equipped, data-logging “bGeigie” Geiger counter.

biologist, both from the University of Tokyo, the group includes about forty local farmers. Two vehicles have been equipped with high-end radiation detection equipment and are signed out and operated by individual members who coordinate frequent surveys of the town. They conduct soil sampling and ambient radiation monitoring of farm fields, and test food grown in town for radiation. They monitor forest areas as well, including the radioactivity in samples taken from trees. The group has developed its own radiation detection hardware for both portable and fixed use. Since it was founded in 2012, the group has published its radiation survey maps online in a way that makes it easy to examine data for specific hamlets within Iitate.32 It has also published informative booklets that include maps, findings from food and other monitoring, and technical information that is targeted almost exclusively to the local community. Although the group is independent and citizen run and is funded by individual and corporate donations, in 2012 it was asked by the Iitate Village government to conduct monitoring on behalf of the town and to teach residents how to participate. This program was funded by the town and is an unusual example of an arguably successful partnership between a citizens’ group and the local government. Pamphlets

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containing the group’s findings are provided by the town government to interested persons, and a link to the online maps is available—though not prominently displayed—on the Iitate Village website. Although the actual ownership of the data gathered under this cooperative agreement (and hence its openness) is unclear, this is a strongly independent program. Citizens who make use of the information provided can become quite well informed about the radiological situation in their village. Those who participate in the program and assist in the measurement process gain important additional knowledge and skills as well. Safecast is a global, volunteer-based, environmental monitoring group that does not attempt to centrally direct areas to be surveyed. Instead, individual volunteers make those decisions based on their own priorities. Safecast hardware and software designs are open source, and its data are made available under open data principles. The group is neither pro- nor antinuclear, and it adheres to a policy of openness and objectivity.33 It takes no position on decisions to reopen evacuated towns like Iitate to residents. Rather, it strives to encourage citizens to participate in data gathering to better inform themselves about their own situation. Safecast volunteers have gathered a considerable amount of ambient radiation data in Iitate since 2011, which are publicly available as open data online through interactive maps in several languages, including Japanese, and can be downloaded without restriction for independent analysis. The group has also installed a fixed real-time radiation monitor at a private farm in Iitate as part of its wider network.34 Safecast data are easily accessible to the local community, but the group considers its user base to be global. In particular, it recognizes that issues of environmental pollution like that from the Fukushima disaster are of global concern, and that citizens worldwide are legitimate stakeholders in policy decisions and implementation in places like Iitate. Although the Safecast project began in Japan in response to the Fukushima disaster, its hardware and software system quickly generated interest in other nations, and it presently provides radiation data from over a hundred countries worldwide. This technically consistent global coverage makes it easy for users to compare radiation levels in Fukushima with those elsewhere, which helps convey what the normal range of radiation exposure from natural sources is and provides crucial context for objectively evaluating risks in places like Iitate. The credibility and accessibility of this information, and the inexpensiveness of the group’s hardware system, have led to requests from international bodies such as the IAEA for the group to help train scientists in open-source environmental

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monitoring, as well as to supportive citations in official reports.35 Its global context also provides an important objective reality check on more ideologically or politically motivated claims, in a way that has proven important for media and researchers.36

Information Alone Is Not Enough Between the abundant official data and information provided by independent groups, concerned local residents have many sources of reliable information. But being well-informed is not the same as being able to make informed decisions—particularly in a case like Iitate, where no choice is likely to lead to true peace of mind. Although the actual data (the numbers) are fairly consistent between official and independent sources, they are packaged in competing interpretations. Much of the packaging for the global audience (specifically, the narrative in the overseas media) has stressed the victimhood of local residents, while overlooking the degree to which citizens have been able to take control of their own information and use that to influence the decisions that will affect them.37 They are victims, true, but they have also become agents through the force of their will, implicitly in opposition to government, while achieving political compromise and some increased degree of redress. As noted above, the strongly local character of most citizens’ groups active in Fukushima is undoubtedly a strength, and few of them devote their limited resources to global messaging. And while municipal governments have been responsible for many of the most effective and well-thought-out radiation monitoring programs in their jurisdictions—often in the face of a lack of cooperation, if not outright antagonism, from prefectural or central governments—they too rarely seem to acknowledge the potentially global impacts of what they are doing. Japanese government agencies maintain a steady dialogue and presence within the international regulatory sphere, so their message is most readily heard and factored into wider policy making. Antinuclear organizations also often clearly aim their messaging about Fukushima at the global audience, amplifying the victimhood narrative while usually overlooking the stories of empowerment. Because media tend to seek stories in which there are clear victims, villains, and heroes, it is difficult for them to break out of what has become a comfortable portrayal of binary government-versus-people opposition. But in reality many more nuanced and complex partnerships and accommodations have been formed

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among the different interests, and the future will emerge in response to these rather than as a result of simpler schema that make better media copy. It is notable that although social science theory (such as co-production, alluded to above) can be useful in describing and analyzing many aspects of this postdisaster situation, few if any of the real-world approaches I have described have emerged from theory. Rather, they resulted from locally focused, hands-on trials and errors, and I would argue that this is the source of their effectiveness. As Richard Lewontin points out, co-production theory is informative, particularly for understanding relationships between rival knowledge producers and their contexts, but it may not lead to solutions for actual problems. He observes: “It is easy to be a critic. . . . It is rather more difficult to suggest how we can, in practice, do better.”38 My own experience as an active producer of citizen-science knowledge, working alongside Fukushima communities, is that the most successful and enduring efforts are strongly personality driven and emerge in tremendous variety from widely divergent personal and community histories. The fact that these features may play a role in technocratic decision making and implementation is acknowledged by some social theorists, but no real-world guidance is available from them for harnessing these essential social energies. As I have learned, one must simply dive in. I would not argue that all local stakeholders should direct their messaging to the global audience, although it would likely be beneficial to them as well as to the global community if their experiences were more fully shared and understood. Probably few groups could do so without changing important aspects of their local character. I would argue instead that both the official narratives and those of the opposing side, which more easily engage the global audience, should strive to more fully represent what the experience of local monitoring groups has shown. This would undoubtedly temper the overoptimistic language from official sources with reasonable skepticism, while encouraging the discourse on the antinuclear activist side to acknowledge that many people are learning how to live safely in the radiological situation of Fukushima, even if their continuing grievances against the government and TEPCO are largely justified. For this, continuing developments in Iitate Village will warrant close observation.

CHAPTER 14

Describing and Memorializing 3.11 Namie and Ishinomaki Ryuma Shineha

On March  11, 2011, a huge earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, killing and injuring many people. In addition, the earthquake and tsunami caused a severe accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant (NPP). The impact of the triple disasters has been called Higashi Nihon-Daishinsai (East Japan Great Earthquake) or 3.11. The disasters had devastating effects on humans, buildings, the economy, the local community, and agriculture. The tsunami destroyed several hundred kilometers of coastland. According to the latest statistics as of the end of July 2018, over twenty thousand people were dead or missing.1 After the triple disasters, we must realize that 3.11 has continued and that the damage and reconstruction are not monolithic but rather form a mosaic among the devastated sites. Remaining damage and new issues coexist. Both the slowly changed and the unchanged are other realities of 3.11 that should not be overlooked. This situation brings various gaps— sometimes hidden—according to the area. An analysis of media presentations of 3.11 will provide an important perspective. Previous studies have shown that media attention to 3.11 has decreased as time passes, and this trend is even more evident in social media. At the same time, in the national newspapers and social media, the NPP accident alone has received increased attention, despite the fact that 3.11 represents triple disasters. Although news items on the earthquake and tsunami have

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decreased, news about the NPP accident has increased. In other words, the NPP accident deflected attention away from the earthquake and tsunami.2 In contrast, local newspapers showed different realities according to their local contexts. For example, in Kahoku-shimpo, the major local newspaper in Miyagi Prefecture, there were as many items about the tsunami as about the NPP disaster.3 As another example, Akihito Takano, Shunya Yoshimi, and Shinya Miura have pointed out that there was no correlation between the amount of TV air time and the scale of damage of the afflicted communities.4 For example, the tsunami hit Yamaoto Town in Miyagi Prefecture hard, killing over 4 percent of the residents.5 However, fewer broadcasts focused upon the damage there than on the effects of 3.11 generally on famous cities and on the NPP accident. This phenomenon has been called a “depopulated area of information (joho-kasochi).”6 This gap has brought to the forefront the power of media agenda setting concerning 3.11  in Japanese society. The disaster struck local sites, but agenda setting at the national level influences local reconstruction. In the lesson learning workshop with local journalists in 2012, some of them said that they felt too weak to set the agenda at the national level. The local interests were pushed to the periphery, and those at the nation’s center developed an agenda for reconstruction without paying enough attention to local contexts and the diversity of other realities. The peripheralization of local realities of 3.11 is connected to concepts such as disaster capitalism.7 Studies of other disasters and the politics of urban planning can provide ways to interpret the process of reconstruction in Japan after 3.11. In The Shock Doctrine, for example, Naomi Klein demonstrates the ways that powerful political and economic interests can work against disaster victims in times of disaster recovery. Looking at the examples of 9/11, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004, Klein discusses how gaps of power, economic disadvantages, and social division open, widen, and reproduce as disaster capitalism takes hold. Also in the context of 3.11, the local realities of and interests in reconstruction were peripheralized, and the interests of the politically powerful center dictated the distribution of social resources, capital, and public interest. This situation was reinforced by the apportionment of attention in the national and social media. The discussions mentioned above tell us much about the importance of examining various local realities to gain a complete context for understanding 3.11. Local realities and contexts have been often overlooked and forgot-

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ten. Thus, we have to start again from individual narratives and local contexts to consider the various realities of 3.11.

Changing Realities: A Case of Damaged Coastal Areas The results of a poll offers glimpses into the various problems that individuals and communities have experienced since the disaster. In 2012, researchers from Fukushima University constructed a questionnaire that they administered to evacuated residents of eight municipalities in the coastal area of Fukushima Prefecture after 3.11. The researchers collected 13,576 responses (a response rate of 48.2  percent). Of the respondents, 24.8 percent said that they would not return to their homes. But of the respondents younger than thirty-four, 46.0 percent said that they would not return.8 In 2017, the researcher group of Fukushima University conducted a second survey of evacuated residents of seven coastal municipalities (discussed briefly in the Introduction to this volume). There were 10,081 responses (a response rate of 37.1 percent). Of the respondents to this survey, 58.8 percent said that they would not return. This means that returning to their hometown has become less desirable among evacuated residents, and one reason was the loss of infrastructure and social networks. We can also view negative changes to evacuees’ occupations in the report. For those younger than sixty-four, the share of full-time employees had dropped from 61.7  percent before 3.11 to 41.2  percent in 2017, and the share of the unemployed had risen from 10.3 percent to 32.0 percent.9 The second survey shows another important implication of the disaster. Researchers asked about residents’ difficulties with compensation. The highest percentage of answers cited “tangled procedures” (48.8 percent), followed by “low amount of compensation” (46.3 percent), “amount of compensation was decided by TEPCO [the Tokyo Electric Power Company] and the government” (45.0  percent), and “amounts of compensation were different according to areas” (41.9 percent).10 Damage, risks, and other issues vary according to the area and individual contexts. To consider the various issues resulting from the 3.11 disasters, we must understand what occurred at that time, the continuing damage, and the social and structural issues of the devastated areas. In other words, we have to recognize the underlying realities of the devastated sites.

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This chapter aims to describe those realities, recognizing that “reality” is multilayered, multilateral, and impossible to reduce to words. Although these realities may seem common or even trivial, they can provide deeper understanding of the issues. Attention to the local allows us to better identify, and perhaps better address the issues at hand. In this chapter, I examine memory and lessons through narratives and experiences. I give the results of semistructured interviews with two key survivors, one each in Miyagi and Fukushima Prefectures. I focus on how we can best communicate today memories and lessons from the disasters. In the second section of the chapter, I try to reconstruct a sense of 3.11 at the time it happened through stories from then and now. One person I discuss is Mr. Toru Suto, the principal of Ishinomaki High School (IHS). The city suffering the highest human toll from the tsunami, Ishinomaki had 3,518 deaths and 439 missing people. IHS became an emergency evacuation site for residents, and more than 1,500 people took shelter there. Mr. Suto managed the evacuation site. Through his story, we can see some of the realities of the damaged areas at that time. The third section examines the current context of Namie Town, which suffered from the earthquake and the tsunami. The NPP accident also compelled residents of Namie to evacuate. As a result, Namie was split into two areas, an evacuation and a nonevacuation area (it is currently divided into three areas, as discussed below). In other words, Namie has been strongly influenced by the complexity of the 3.11 triple disasters. We can learn the difficulties of understanding the realities of 3.11 from this representative city’s story. In the fourth section, I tell the story of Dr. Arifumi Hasegawa, of Fukushima Medical University (FMU). In the context of 3.11, he has stood at the forefront of modern radiation medicine. To consider the lessons learned from 3.11, FMU initiated a new mandatory curriculum of clinical training in radiation medicine in 2012. Together, these stories and experiences underline the importance of understanding the realities of 3.11. At the same time, we should try to see the synergy between social structural issues and local issues, considering the gaps in terms of damage, economic status, and future movement behind these realities, as well as the previous lessons.

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The Case of Ishinomaki City: “Already Three Years, Still Three Years, Just Three Years” The best way to understand situations is to examine both the macro and the micro-context. The tsunami destroyed cars, boats, and buildings. In Ishinomaki City, over three thousand people died, and a large number of people remain missing. This was the highest number of deaths in all of the municipalities damaged by 3.11.11 Immediately after 3.11, schools became evacuation sites. Familiar to most of Ishinomaki’s residents, IHS served as one of the key places for people to gather. Thus, stories about what happened there contain important meanings and help us understand the realities of the first three days after 3.11. I conducted in-depth interviews with Toru Suto, mentioned above. He collaborated with his colleagues, students, and evacuees and managed the difficult situation in his school, issuing instructions on a moment-to-moment basis. The story below is based on the interviews, a transcript of them, and a memo Mr. Suto provided. Mr. Suto categorized three phases of the evacuation. The first week after the disaster March 11–17) constituted the first phase. The second phase ran from March 17 to April 21, the day of the opening ceremony of IHS. The third phase lasted until October 11, when the evacuation site at IHS was closed. Here, I will focus mainly on the first phase. Some evacuees had serious physical conditions such as hypothermia. The injured needed urgent care. Although some students had lost their families and houses to the tsunami, they helped tend to the injured people at the evacuation site. They prepared themselves to accept a reality beyond imagination. One student said: “I have experienced and thought a lot. If I could live in ordinary days without 3.11, these will last me a lifetime.”12 In the course of the interview, Mr. Suto struggled to find the appropriate words to express his emotions and memories, and to describe what he had seen at that time. Mr. Suto expressed his reality with the haunting phrase “already three years, still three years, only three years.” These words express Mr. Suto’s anxiety about the structural power gaps between the center and periphery. Although the damaged site still has emerging issues, the interest paid to these issues has decreased—at the time of this writing, the planned 2020 Olympics in Tokyo dominated national media attention. What Mr. Suto described related to ongoing damage, changes in the damaged sites, and issues hidden by time and seemingly out of mind. When he searched for the

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appropriate words, his mind filled with grief, worry, and hope. Mr. Suto’s diary and memo expressed his anger at this irrational situation, reflected on the heaviness of words, and ruminated on the pains and the occasional joys of his experiences: The death of people becomes just a number. . . . What an unpleasant sensation! I despise myself, because I can only say my regret to victims with a traditional statement. . . . “Bonding” and “Reconstruction.” . . . What instant words. . . . Now I feel the heaviness of words, and I’ve never felt this until now . . . light and dark sides of words mount us. This question comes back to me keenly. I have to face forward, but something that cannot be spoken agitates my insides like a grout simultaneously. His words encourage the remembering, understanding, and memorializing of 3.11: Don’t forget 3.11 and our current situation. Go to the damaged site and see it, and then listen to the realities of people who experienced that time. We should bear in mind that the Higashi-Nihon Great Earthquake is not just in the past but is ongoing, considering that reconstruction has not been progressing effectively. For the city of Sendai, the share of reconstructed housing damaged by landslides was only 3  percent in 2017, although Sendai is the biggest city in the Tōhoku region. The gap of reconstruction has been widespread. Although there are both good and bad signs, the mass media try to draw overall conclusions. For example, they might say that 80 percent of people nationally felt that the reconstruction was going well, while 20 percent did not. Actually, the only way to understand the reality is to examine local contexts directly.13 Mr. Suto also said, “I hope people collect information, imagine the local and individual contexts, and visit the damaged sites.” The Sendai railroad station has already been repaired, and few marks of the damage from 3.11 remain there. Of course, this does not mean that all other damaged sites in Sendai City have been reconstructed, as Mr.  Suto

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noted. People changed their attitudes in the first month after 3.11, going from a state of stupor to one focused on survival. Then their attention shifted to the work they needed to do to return to daily life. However, the situation changed again half a year later. Residents of Sendai recognized that recovery and reconstruction had not happened and would not be fully achieved. Simultaneously, economic repercussions at the individual level became obvious. In some cases, rather than restart businesses, owners abandoned them because of a decrease of working staff members or a loss of clients. In the survey in 2015, the number of bankruptcies related to 3.11 was 3.8 times greater than after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995.14 It is impossible to understand the scope of devastation and personal loss. And even in a single area, we cannot speak about the overall damage and the complex character of its consequences. Mr.  Suto concluded: “I hope some people try to imagine the various situations, considering the various information and the stories. If you can, touch and hear the voices of those in the damaged sites.” Local people have tried to prevent the memories, emotions, and lessons from fading as long as possible, while dealing with their daily lives. This narrative asks us how to face 3.11, when the mass media and social networking service (SNS) have overlooked the realities of the damaged sites.

Ongoing Damage: The Case of Namie Town On April 1, 2013, the evacuation zone around the Fukushima NPP was redefined into three categories according to the amount of residual radiation: a difficult-to-return (red) zone, a no-residence (yellow) zone, and a zone being prepared for the lifting of the evacuation order (green zone). In addition to the damage from the earthquake and the tsunami, this area was influenced by the set of evacuation zones. Many people had to leave their towns, particularly in the Futaba area of Fukushima Prefecture. At first, officials defined the evacuation zone as the territory within a radius of twenty kilometers from the power plant. This evacuation zone was later divided into the three categories listed above. As a result of this recategorization, Namie had locations in all three categories. Part of the town became available for short-time stays with permission from the local government. Figure 14.1 shows the coastal Ukedo area of Namie Town on March 2, 2014. Destroyed houses, cars, and ships

Figure 14.1. The Ukedo area of Namie Town. Top, March 2, 2014. Bottom, March 7, 2018. Copyright Ryuma Shineha.

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remained untouched over two years after the NPP accident. No people were found: it looked like a ghost town. The figure also shows the same place on March 7, 2018. The reconstruction process had progressed, but the speed of change has been slow. This situation made it difficult for residents to return to Namie. In 2014, the local government published its reconstruction plan.15 However, residents and local administrators faced several issues, such as the reconstruction of infrastructure, industries, medical ser vices, and community networks. Waseda University and Namie officials distributed a questionnaire concerning the willingness of evacuated Namie residents to return. Of the respondents, 34.8  percent answered, “I will not return to Namie,” 45.6  percent answered, “I don’t know,” and 17.0  percent expressed a desire to return to Namie after the completion of decontamination. The people who said they would not return explained their choice this way: “If we return to Namie, we can’t live as before.”16 Namie officials addressed the difficulties involved in returning in their official plans for and reports of reconstruction.17 With decontamination progressing, residents started to return in April 2017. A new elementary and a new junior high school opened in April 2018. However, the present lack of infrastructure for daily life (including supermarkets, hospitals, social networks, and other necessities of life) limits the number of people returning. Construction functions as a process of town resurrection, and it continues to encompass efforts to face existing and emerging issues. These kinds of local stories of suffering have slipped off the front page, particularly in mass media and SNS, because of the slow, incremental process of reconstruction.

The Case of the Medical Doctors in Fukushima As the second tale of the damaged site, I present medical doctors’ experiences in Fukushima Prefecture. Their stories shed light on the difficulties and anxieties of local experts. Arifumi Hasegawa of FMU expressed the situation on 3.11: “I was so scared. . . . . We didn’t have [sufficient and accurate] information and knowledge for the situation at that time. We remained at our hospital, thinking that we might die there. . . . It would have been much easier if God had told us, ‘You don’t need to do it.’ ”18 Hasegawa was vice-director of the Radiation Emergency Medical Center of FMU. Soon after the earthquake and tsunami,

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FMU became the destination for many injured people, because hospitals in coastal areas reached their maximum capacity quite quickly. The nuclear accident worsened the situation. In all of the panic, FMU became a center for emergency radiation medical care. This was difficult, in part because before 3.11, it had been a secondary medical center for radiation medicine. Hospitals in coastal areas near the power plant had served as the primary Fukushima Prefecture medical centers for emergency radiation medicine. This network of hospitals could not assume that role on 3.11, however, because of the destruction and panic, as well as their proximity to the NPP. This situation was not unique. Approximately 40  percent of the emergency radiation medical centers of the thirteen prefectures were within twenty kilometers of the power plant.19 FMU started outpatient screening tests on March 12, 2011; accepted the first patient from the Fukushima NPP on March 14; and admitted and cared for three people injured in the hydrogen explosion of the third reactor at the plant on March 15. This medical care FMU provided required that care for a radioactive disaster and care for a natural disaster be combined. However, FMU had little experience with emergency radiation medical care at that time. FMU’s decontamination ward had been built in 2001, and its guidelines for emergency radiation medicine had been issued in 2002. However, no one at FMU had any experience in caring for people with radiation poisoning. Hasegawa said that the decontamination ward lacked all equipment. From the difficult lessons of that terrible time, FMU created a new education course for emergency radiation medical care. In 2012, it designated a new course with clinical exercises in emergency radiation medical care as mandatory for fifth-year medical students. Regarding the new course, Hasegawa said: “It’s impossible to anticipate all risks. We will be in an unexpected situation at the disaster time . . . so it’s essential for us to preliminarily think about what we should do when the unexpected event occurs . . . it’s difficult, but we always think about it.” He hoped that students would consider these unexpected situations. However, students vary in their awareness of the disaster according to their individual experiences with 3.11. Hasegawa also mentioned the difficulty in conveying some contexts and motivations for education and preparatory emergency radiation medical care. Some students lack the motivation to learn emergency radiation medical care, he said: “I feel there is a big gap in the motivation to study [emergency radiation medicine] between those who experienced 3.11 or not in

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FMU. . . . For those who cannot feel the necessity, the course of emergency radiation medicine of FMU will be irrelevant.” Suto’s story also reveals the difficulties of sharing realities. In the FMU case, Hasegawa and his colleagues asked students to imagine the difficulties at the time of 3.11, such as working without knowledge and judging with a lack of information. The hope is that through simulated experiences, students will study the risks and be prepared to face disaster when it occurs. An interview with another doctor in the coastal area of Fukushima shows some of the difficulties in practicing medicine. He said that the numbers of nurses and assistants of the hospitals decreased rapidly after 3.11, from 108 to 21.20 Of course, that made it impossible to operate the hospital and care for patients. The doctors decided to close the hospital and have the patients transported elsewhere. Like Hasegawa, they also claimed to be scared to death.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have pointed out several common themes to consider regarding 3.11. The first is that 3.11 is a tragedy consisting of three disasters, whose effects have continued to the present. The damage and reconstruction are not monolithic, but rather a mosaic among the devastated sites. For example, in Namie, we can easily find different levels of damage and reconstruction around the town. Although there are changes and some signs of reconstruction, destroyed houses and buildings remain largely untouched even now. Local situations that have slowly changed and those that have not changed at all are among the realities of 3.11 that we should not overlook— even if the mainstream media does not find that these cases fit well into national narratives of reconstruction. The second point to consider is the difficulty of imagining and understanding the realities of 3.11, including those mentioned above. It is essential to imagine the context of 3.11 as much as possible. How can we comprehend the realities expressed as “already three years, still three years, just three years” by Suto? We should continue trying to understand and face these realities. Doing so postpones the disintegration of 3.11 in memory. The third point is the relationship between 3.11 and media attention to it. The center-and-periphery structure and the media’s influence on agenda

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setting exacerbate the gap of reconstruction and the concealment of socialstructural issues behind 3.11. Disaster capitalism appeared not only just after the disaster, but also with disintegration—the forgetting—of the disaster. This process was reinforced by a lapse in media attention. Almost a decade has passed since 3.11. However, almost all of its structural issues remain to be addressed.

CHAPTER 15

Renegotiating Nuclear Safety After Fukushima Regulatory Dilemmas and Dialogues in the United States William J. Kinsella

Following the March 11, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant highlighted impor tant tensions related to the safety of commercial nuclear power. The combined earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear failures have had impacts extending far beyond Japan. This chapter examines responses in the United States, where the nuclear industry, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and other parties continue to address the implications of the Fukushima disaster and its ongoing consequences. The NRC’s initial ninety-day review of the disaster produced a controversial set of recommendations regarding a range of safety considerations, followed quickly by implicit and explicit negotiations between the agency and the industry it regulates.1 Although the NRC has formally concluded many of the activities that followed from the review, the tensions that the review revealed remain relevant to issues of nuclear safety.2 This chapter highlights some of those tensions and develops an analytical perspective for addressing their implications.

Three Negotiated Tensions One tension examined here involves the differences between how the principle known as nuclear safety is characterized by the nuclear industry, regulatory authorities, and policy makers versus how it is pursued in practice.

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Those parties often assert that nuclear safety is a “nonnegotiable” principle, but such claims disregard the degree to which it is in fact an ongoing, negotiated activity. Indeed, the influential research program on high-reliability organizations, which included foundational case studies in nuclear contexts, recognized that nuclear safety exemplifies what Anselm Strauss has called “negotiated social order.”3 The negotiations examined in this chapter range from informal and tacit to highly formal and explicitly contested. A second tension extends the concept of negotiated order beyond the exclusively social domain. While nuclear safety is negotiated among human actors, insights from the field of science and technology studies (STS) suggest that it also involves negotiations between humans and a recalcitrant material world.4 Nuclear technologies may epitomize modernist notions of prediction and control over nature, but the events at Fukushima demonstrated that the dialogue between technoscience and nature is never complete. Thus Sara Pritchard described the Fukushima events as an “envirotechnical disaster” in which nature and culture were mutually implicated.5 People, organizations, and institutions concerned with nuclear energy do not only negotiate with each other. They also negotiate a difficult path through complex and sometimes unstable material terrain, producing a fragile condition that, adapting Strauss’s concept, might be called “negotiated sociomaterial order.” Nuclear risks involve a third tension, one of democratic governance. As Bruno Latour argues, sociotechnical systems often pose as “risk-free objects” with “clear boundaries,” obscuring the “risky attachments” that make them “matters of concern” demanding democratic engagement.6 Nuclear energy is rarely portrayed as entirely risk free, of course, although (arguably paradoxical) concepts such as “inherently safe reactors” have long served to rhetorically minimize its risks.7 Nevertheless, the nuclear industry and its regulatory institutions typically portray their domain as risky but effectively managed, a bounded system or black box opaque to nonexperts but amenable to expert control. This chapter examines some of the processes within that black box and extending riskily beyond it, identifying implications for studies of complex sociotechnical systems, nuclear risk and safety, environmental protection, ecological and economic sustainability, and democratic public discourse.

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Analytical Framework: Reliability, Boundaries, and Materiality Nuclear safety is both a material and a rhetorical accomplishment.8 While the material aspects of nuclear safety are readily apparent, the social and political legitimacy of the nuclear enterprise also depends on the continued public demonstration of safety.9 Three analytical perspectives can help illuminate the links between the material and rhetorical dimensions of nuclear safety: high-reliability organizing, rhetorical and sociological boundary work, and materiality and nonhuman agency.

From High-Reliability Organizations to a High-Reliability System

Expanding the concept of high-reliability organizations (HROs) as organizations that “must not make serious errors because their work is too important and the effects of their failures too disastrous,”10 I argue that nuclear power production must operate more broadly as a high-reliability communication system. Some system components, such as individual power plants, readily fit the original concept of HROs as “technologically complex organizations that can do great physical harm to themselves and their surrounding environments.”11 Others, such as regulatory agencies, technical support organizations, and equipment vendors, must also maintain high reliability due to their direct influences on nuclear operations. The original HRO research program pursued a pragmatic goal of identifying organizations that demonstrate high reliability and learning from empirical studies of their activities.12 The program responded to the earlier work of Charles Perrow, which examined the 1979 nuclear crisis at Three Mile Island and other sociotechnical failures, addressing criticisms of technological determinism or “industrial fatalism” directed at Perrow’s concept of “normal accidents.”13 Accordingly, the HRO perspective incorporated principles such as collective sense making, mindfulness, institutional learning, and organizational culture.14 Nevertheless, the HRO literature has emphasized an organizational level of analysis and an organizational model that is relatively self-contained and autonomous. Addressing the limits of that perspective, this chapter emphasizes principles of interorganizational communication; coproduced human and nonhuman agency; and mutually negotiated, communicatively constituted action. This approach follows the

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HRO framework but expands the unit of analysis and locus of agency to encompass a broader system. HRO research has received some recognition by the nuclear community, and it resonates with the community’s prevailing “safety culture” discourse.15 However, in reviewing the HRO literature, Mathilde Bourrier notes critically that “industry and regulatory circles have always preferred to talk about ‘culture’ when confronted with organizational variance, to the detriment of drawing on well-equipped organizational analysis.”16 Discourses of nuclear safety need to advance further beyond assertions, aspirations, and assumptions of high reliability, in part by recognizing more fully how nuclear safety is communicatively constructed. In the case of Fukushima, broad allusions to a weak culture of regulation have some critical value, but they suggest a need for more fine-grained studies of how safety cultures are produced, maintained, and transformed.17 A step toward that goal would be to examine the range of voices that participate in the ongoing negotiation of nuclear safety and to consider how that conversation might be expanded and reconfigured. At a transorganizational and even transinstitutional scale, checks and balances across the broad range of interested parties are crucial.18 Beyond the nuclear operators, vendors, technical support organizations, and regulatory organizations that dominate the community’s conversation, the high-reliability system conceptualized here more fully incorporates critics, independent analysts, and public interest organizations as necessary and equal partners. Although the latter parties do participate in the current conversation, their voices are often muted in comparison to those of the nuclear industry. Enlarging the scope of nuclear safety negotiations implies greater democratic inclusion and stakeholder participation. Following the events at Fukushima, the NRC appears to have made some well-intentioned efforts to reach such a goal, perhaps prompted as much by emerging technology platforms as by the disaster itself. Those efforts have included new media applications such as meeting webcasts, a public outreach blog, a dedicated YouTube channel and Flickr photostream, and topical web-based chats. Nevertheless, those and other efforts have had limited success, as critics continue to express their frustration with the agency’s communication processes.19

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Rhetorical Boundary Work

Concepts of sociological and rhetorical boundary work can illustrate how dialogue is both constrained and enabled in sociotechnical systems. Early studies of boundary work examined how scientists establish authority over specific fields by differentiating their expertise from the forms of knowledge presented by others.20 Later studies extended the concept to science and technology studies more broadly and to nuclear energy contexts.21 In postFukushima nuclear safety negotiations, rhetorical boundaries affect who can speak with authority, what topics are considered, how those topics are construed, and what outcomes emerge. In Japan, the Fukushima disaster made evident a close and longestablished alliance of industrial and political actors, characterized by some commentators as the nation’s “nuclear village” (genshiryoku-mura).22 Here “village” refers not to a geographic place but to a largely closed system of discourse and power. Understanding how that situation contributed to a weak regulatory culture involves examining how it was historically established and actively maintained, and concepts of boundary work can inform such analyses. While the Japanese and US contexts are clearly distinct and the focus of this chapter is on the latter, rhetorical boundary work provides an analytical tool across such settings. The boundaries at stake can take multiple forms. As an initial example, nuclear safety is often framed in absolute, objectivist, and binary terms: safe versus unsafe conditions, acceptable versus unacceptable risks, affordable versus unaffordable safety measures, regulatory compliance or noncompliance, and the like. Accordingly, policies, practices, activities, and artifacts related to nuclear safety are assigned to par ticular regulatory venues with their own codes and procedures, or else they are defined as outside the scope of regulation. As the social systems theorist Niklas Luhmann has argued, such binary, differentiated discourses simplify communication in complex systems, but they can also lead to problematic system fragmentation.23 The distinctions sustaining such systems involve the ongoing production, maintenance, challenging, and reconfiguration of rhetorical boundaries. Illustrating this principle, I, Ashley Kelly, and Meagan Kittle Autry examined how in the United States, nuclear safety regulation is assigned primarily to the NRC, while economic issues such as cost, financing, and insurance are assigned to other regulatory venues.24 Nuclear safety is ruled outside the

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scope of state-level regulatory hearings, following the logic that it is addressed appropriately by the NRC at the federal level. This arrangement may simplify the regulatory process, but it frustrates critics who seek to link economic issues with environmental and safety concerns. Witnesses at public hearings find creative ways to overcome that boundary, challenging a rhetorically constructed barrier between economic and safety discourses. Witnesses also frequently challenge another boundary that separates testimony by credentialed technocratic experts from vernacular testimony exhibiting local knowledge or public expertise offered by ordinary citizens.25

Materiality and Nonhuman Agency

As a third analytical component, insights from actor-network theory and STS suggest that the nuclear community also includes nonhuman elements.26 Prevailing technoscientific discourses separate material phenomena such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and the behav ior of uncooled nuclear fuel from the domain of the social, with problematic consequences.27 While discourses of nuclear power emphasize notions of accurate scientific representation and precise technological control, failures of representation and control are fatalistically relegated to the realm of natural disasters rather than recognized as challenges to the overall system logic.28 However, representation and control are fundamentally linguistic activities, enacted through natural and mathematical languages.29 STS scholarship supports the recognition that through those linguistic activities humans negotiate with the natu ral world, with varying degrees of success. Interrogating discursively constructed boundaries between nature and society can help provide a foundation for conducting those negotiations more realistically.

Methods and Materials The framework developed above can provide insights into the responses of the US nuclear community to the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Twelve days after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami triggered multiple problems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the NRC chairman initiated a review of the implications for US nuclear safety. On March 30 a staff task force was charged to complete a near-term review within ninety days. Staff members provided pe-

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Table 15.1. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Meetings Reviewed Commissioner briefings and staff meetings 03/21/2011 05/12/2011 06/15/2011 07/19/2011 07/28/2011 09/14/2011 10/07/2011 10/11/2011 10/21/2011

Briefing—USNRC Response to Nuclear Events in Japan 30-day briefing—Near-Term Task Force Review 60-day briefing 90-day briefing Results of the review Task Force Report—Short Term Actions Public Meeting—Petition by Public Interest Group, Beyond Nuclear Task Force Report—Prioritization of Recommendations Briefing—08/28/2011 Mineral, VA Earthquake and Impacts on North Anna Nuclear Plant

05/03/2012 05/14/2012 05/16/2012

Staff Meeting—Tier 3 Recommendations Staff Meeting—Tier 3 Recommendations Staff Meeting—Post-Fukushima USNRC Guidance and Information Request Joint Meeting—Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Nuclear Regulatory Commission Staff Meeting with Industry—Activities Related to Fukushima Lessons Learned Briefing—Economic Consequences of Nuclear Regulation Staff Meeting with Industry—Activities Related to Fukushima Lessons Learned

06/15/2012 07/27/2012 09/11/2012 09/27/2012 08/06/2013 08/22/2013 09/18/2013 11/14/2013

Public Meeting—Seismic Model Updates Public Meeting—Safety of Spent Fuel Storage Public Meeting—Safety of Spent Fuel Storage Public Meeting—Waste Confidence Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement and Proposed Rule

Annual Regulatory Information Conference 3/13–15/2012 (on location) 3/12–14/2013 (webcast) 3/11–13/2014 (webcast) 3/10–12/2015 (on location)

3/8–10/2016 (on location) 3/14–16/2017 (webcast) 3/13–15/2018 (webcast)

Note: Agendas, transcripts, and webcasts are available at US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Meeting Archives,” http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/public-meetings/meeting-archive.html.

riodic briefings for the five commissioners, which were webcast publicly and archived on the NRC’s website along with related meetings that took place before, during, and after the review period. Some meetings included the commissioners, while others brought NRC staff members together with nuclear industry representatives, public interest groups, and other parties. Table 15.1

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lists twenty events that I reviewed online (some in real time and some after the fact) in connection with the present analysis. The table also lists seven annual conferences that occurred during the time period addressed by my analysis, some of which I viewed online and some of which I attended in person. Substantial engagement with the US nuclear community, both before and after the 2011 disaster, has involved interaction with significant individuals, organizations, and institutions and provides technical and ethnographic background for the analysis. I participated in the NRC’s annual three-day Regulatory Information Conference (known to the community as “the RIC”) in 2012, 2015, and 2016, and I viewed much of the 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2018 conferences via webcast. The RIC has brought industry representatives and other parties together with NRC commissioners and staff annually since 1988, and it has grown to include approximately three thousand registrants. My observations indicate that this annual meeting is an important site of negotiative engagement between the industry and its regulatory authority. As James Carey has argued, communication in such settings serves more than informational functions: these essential social rituals also constitute culture and community.30 Providing additional background, in May 2016 I conducted interviews with eighteen NRC staff members at the agency’s headquarters, followed by interviews with six representatives of nongovernmental public interest groups located in the Washington, D.C., area. I have also participated in technical meetings for nuclear industry professionals (including a three-day symposium in 2012 and a five-day symposium and workshop in 2014); public events sponsored by the American Nuclear Society; nuclear engineering research seminars in the United States and Germany; events organized by critical public interest groups; state utilities commission hearings related to nuclear power in the United States; and technical tours of nuclear facilities in the United States, Germany (in 2010), and Japan (also in 2010). These activities gave me interpretive access to a community characterized by obscure technical, legal, and bureaucratic jargon and notorious barriers to public engagement. I have also monitored media coverage of nuclear safety and nuclear power since the onset of the Fukushima disaster, including traditional news sources as well as websites and listservs maintained by nuclear industry organizations, regulatory agencies, and critical public interest groups, as summarized in Table 15.2.

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Table 15.2. Nuclear-related Organizations and Online Sources Organization

Mission

US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) NRC blog US Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Institute CASEnergy Coalition American Nuclear Society (ANS) and Nuclear News Website ANS Café: All Things Nuclear World Nuclear News

Principal US nuclear safety regulator NRC public outreach Technology development and promotion Industry advocacy Industry advocacy Professional society and industry advocacy ANS blog Industry advocacy and information aggregator Industry advocacy and information aggregator Critical public interest group Critical public interest group and publication Critical regional public interest group

1 Nuclear Place Beyond Nuclear Nuclear Information and Resource Ser vice and Nuclear Monitor North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) All Things Nuclear: Insights on Science and Security Federation of American Scientists Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

Public interest group, generally critical UCS blog Public interest group, generally critical Public interest group, analysis and education

Mapping the US Nuclear Power Conversation In the period preceding the Fukushima disaster, the global nuclear power industry viewed its prospects as more positive than they had been for decades. Concerns about climate change and energy security, together with new reactor designs promoted as safer than their predecessors, warranted claims of a nuclear renaissance. In the United States, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 provided new subsidies for nuclear construction. The NRC was working to reduce the alleged regulatory burden that the industry characterizes as an impediment to growth, streamlining the licensing process for new reactors and extending lifetimes and power limits for existing reactors.31 The industry and its allies were having significant success shifting costs and risks related to decades-long construction projects from investors to customers and taxpayers.32 These factors all added credibility to the industry’s claims of a long-delayed revival and its narrative of nuclear inevitability.

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The events at the Fukushima Daiichi plant interrupted that narrative dramatically, prompting an urgent conversation about their relevance to US activities. The parties involved can be grouped into a number of categories: nuclear producers and promoters, nuclear regulators, and nuclear critics and independent analysts. Nuclear producers and promoters include energy utilities, construction firms, and consortia that build, own, and operate nuclear plants, as well as myriad vendors, suppliers, consultants, contractors, and other supporting actors. Influential industry advocates include the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), engaged in industry-wide coordination and lobbying; and the American Nuclear Society, a professional organization. Organizations including the Electric Power Research Institute and the Edison Electric Institute conduct research and analysis related to nuclear and nonnuclear electricity technologies, with the Edison Electric Institute also engaging in advocacy. The Institute for Nuclear Power Operations and its global counterpart, the World Association of Nuclear Operators, are voluntary peer review organizations that facilitate what is a substantial degree of autonomous industry self-regulation related to nuclear safety. The industry emphasizes the benefits of expertise and efficiency provided by self-regulation, while critics argue that it preempts more independent, external governance. As a major sponsor of energy research, the US Department of Energy promotes nuclear technology development and related science and engineering education. Following the reorganization of the Atomic Energy Agency into separate regulatory and promotional organizations in 1974, the Department of Energy inherited the promotional mission. Nuclear regulators include federal and state agencies that set and enforce standards related to nuclear safety and cost, typically with those two areas clearly differentiated. The NRC is the primary US nuclear safety regulator, having inherited the Atomic Energy Commission’s regulatory mission. The US Environmental Protection Agency plays a more restricted role, setting limits for radiological releases and emissions. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission maintains some authority related to nuclear energy costs, but most economic regulation occurs at the state level, in the so-called regulated states where competition is restricted and state commissions determine customer rates, or informally by way of market competition in the nonregulated states. Notably, the regulated states provide the most favorable US setting for nuclear projects, where favorable consumer rate decisions by the regulatory bodies can facilitate financing for these costly and risky proj-

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ects.33 A continuing pattern of nuclear plant closures in nonregulated states indicates that their profitability is less viable in those open markets. The Department of Homeland Security oversees some aspects of security at nuclear sites, while state and local authorities oversee some aspects of emergency preparedness and response. Institutions including the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development coordinate global standards and practices related to nuclear safety, although substantial differences in approach and effectiveness exist across national regulatory frameworks.34 Nuclear critics and independent analysts include nongovernmental groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Beyond Nuclear, and other regional and local organizations. Prominent environmental organizations including Greenpeace and the Sierra Club also engage in critiques of nuclear energy and controversies surrounding particular plants. Individual critics with expertise in engineering, economics, or public policy collaborate directly with oppositional organizations or provide materials used to argue their positions. These parties claim positions ranging from aggressively critical to informational and educational in orientation. Collectively, they provide a form of public expertise consisting of technical knowledge made available to nonexpert communities.35

Negotiating Regulatory Boundaries in Response to Fukushima A number of rhetorical boundaries have structured the US nuclear safety conversation following the Fukushima disaster. These boundaries simplify communication within the nuclear community, but they can also pose impediments to ensuring nuclear safety. At the same time, they provide potential sites of systemic reflexivity and agency. In the analysis that follows, the notes provide documentation, including the dates of meetings and NRC accession numbers for reports, formal regulatory orders, correspondence, and other materials. Documents with “ML” and “SECY” prefixes are archived permanently on the NRC website. Important boundaries evident in postFukushima US nuclear safety negotiations consist of six broad and overlapping categories: (1) an implicit but consequential membership boundary, which constrains and enables participation in the nuclear community; (2) a

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boundary separating phenomena deemed internal and external to the system, which affects how risks are addressed; (3) geographic and cultural boundaries, which affect risk evaluations; (4) boundaries governing regulatory responsibility; (5) boundaries structuring the regulatory process; and (6) boundaries between safety and economic concerns.

1: Membership Boundaries: Containing the Nuclear Community

The content of nuclear safety negotiations is largely a product of membership boundaries that serve to contain the nuclear community. Parties that participate regularly and authoritatively in nuclear safety negotiations can be distinguished from those with more limited access and influence. Although the term “stakeholders” appears regularly in NRC discourse, in practice it most often refers to the parties I have characterized above as nuclear producers and promoters.36 Registrant lists indicate that the overwhelming majority of RIC participants are industry representatives and NRC staff members, with only a small minority representing critical public interest groups. While industry and government personnel participate as part of their normal professional assignments, other parties can have difficulty finding time and funding to do so. Beyond its formal program, the conference provides a valuable business networking opportunity where members of the industry can connect with each other and with regulatory officials. Although many of the RIC sessions are now webcast, online viewing does not afford other parties the same opportunities for personal interaction. Similar constraints prevailed for the Near-Term Task Force meetings held at the NRC headquarters, which required substantial time commitments and involved highly specialized technical, administrative, and policy conversations. This metalevel participation boundary informs the topically oriented boundary negotiations within the nuclear community, to which I now turn.

2: Internal Versus External Events, Engineering Design Basis, and Mitigation Versus Prevention

Some members of the nuclear community responded to the events at Fukushima by invoking versions of the “black swan” trope popularized by Nassim Taleb, characterizing the disaster as beyond the scope of prediction and thus

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shifting responsibility to “external hazards” originating in the natural world.37 Such reasoning recognizes that nuclear safety can never be perfect and instead entails defining acceptable degrees of risk—but in doing so opens up fundamental dilemmas associated with issues of risk, precaution, and social trust.38 Assigning phenomena either to the nuclear safety system or to its environment, often on the basis of uncertain or contested risk estimates, affects both the amount and kind of attention they receive. One way the NRC and the industry enact this boundary involves a distinction between “design basis” and “beyond design basis” events.39 Plant and reactor designs are certified within specific seismic limits, corresponding to earthquakes of par ticular levels of severity in terms of expected ground motion at their sites.40 Designing new plants to withstand stronger earthquakes, or refitting existing plants to do so, involves substantial costs. Similar considerations apply to other hazards such as floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Such threats are characterized explicitly as natural hazards or external hazards, rhetorically positioning them in the system’s environment rather than in the system itself, with consequences for regulatory decision making.41 Within weeks of 3.11, the so-called natural world challenged this logic with a series of earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes affecting US nuclear plants. Tornado-related shutdowns took place at the Browns Ferry plant in Alabama and the Surry plant in Virginia in April  2011, severe storm-induced flooding threatened the Fort Calhoun plant in Nebraska in June of the same year, and precautionary measures were taken at multiple plants in 2012 in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy. Nevertheless, the industry has resisted proposals to expand the scope of design basis events as recommended in the NRC’s Near-Term Task Force report, prompting criticism from independent analysts and watchdog groups. The associated negotiations are documented in a series of NRC “request for information” and “guidance for assessment” documents, followed by responses provided in “industry-issued guidance” documents, with the negotiations often resolved in “NRC endorsements of industry’s expedited approach.” An important moment in these negotiations took place in in January 2019, when in a 3-to-2 vote the NRC commissioners approved a regulatory rule that failed to include important measures recommended by the task force.42 The negotiations have resulted in an emphasis on what the NRC describes as “mitigation strategies for beyond-design-basis external events,” rather than on more costly changes that would harden plants to withstand

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more severe events as a design requirement.43 In this regard, the industry moved more quickly than the NRC to define a broad strategy for addressing post-Fukushima safety concerns. A comment by an NEI officer illustrates this strategy: “If you don’t like what the regulator is doing, put some constructive alternatives on the table.” 44 The industry argued successfully in favor of limiting site-specific safety enhancements at individual plants, proposing instead to deploy portable remedies such as diesel generators, emergency lighting equipment, and water trucks at regional centers under a plan known as Diverse and Flexible Mitigation Capability (FLEX). By implementing significant components of that plan before the task force deliberations were concluded, the industry positioned itself to claim that there was an “emerging consensus” in support of its initiative.45

3: Geographic and Cultural Boundaries

Nuclear producers and promoters assert that geological differences make US seismic and tsunami risks less significant than those in Japan, while critics reply that such statements understate the uncertainty and incompleteness of geological knowledge.46 More fundamentally, critics argue that such distinctions miss the larger point that serious risks were systematically ignored at Fukushima, irrespective of their particular characteristics. Specific nuclear safety risks may differ across geographic settings, but fundamental epistemic limits constrain the possibilities for prediction and control in any setting.47 Demonstrating the gap between predictive aspirations and epistemic limits, at a NRC meeting regarding seismic issues, two geologists engaged in an extended disagreement about whether parts of Florida are located on the North American tectonic plate or on the Caribbean plate.48 Such (literal, in this case) boundary negotiations are critical for establishing the seismic design bases for particular plants, but even more fundamentally, disagreement about such issues challenges the underlying logic of prediction and control.49 Cultural boundaries have also been constructed and used rhetorically in the post-Fukushima negotiations. One example involves the report of the commission convened by the Japanese Diet to examine the disaster. In the preface to the report’s English-language summary, the commission’s chairman suggested that the nuclear failures were a product of regulatory deference related to “ingrained conventions of Japanese culture.”50 While frank and valuable, that statement provides a rhetorical resource for exceptionalist

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arguments that such events could never happen in the United States. Critics have challenged such assertions since shortly after the onset of the Fukushima events.51

4: Regulatory Responsibility and Public Versus Private Interests

Constance Perin has observed that most nuclear safety regulation in the United States is industry self-regulation: “NRC inspections typically cover only about 5  percent of all equipment and programs at an ‘average’ plant and about 10 percent at plants with problematic records.”52 The industry advocates strongly for self-regulation, an approach that differs substantially from arrangements in other nations such as Germany.53 The question of regulatory intrusiveness has become a key boundary in post-Fukushima negotiations between the industry and the NRC. The industry offers several rationales for self-regulation. Arguably, the regulatory task is so complex, detailed, equipment-specific, and site-specific that only local specialists have the requisite knowledge and skills to perform it. The NRC’s limited budget makes more extensive external regulation difficult, and even if funding were available, such activities and the expanded presence of inspectors arguably could complicate plant operations.54 The associated “regulatory burden,” as it is characterized by both the industry and the NRC, would add to operational costs, threatening the fragile economic viability of individual plants and the industry overall. Additionally, many aspects of plant operations are considered proprietary business information to be contained as closely as possible, articulating a contested boundary between public and private interests. The NRC has largely acceded to these arguments, as demonstrated in the outcomes of negotiations regarding its Near-Term Task Force recommendations. The agency’s increasing adoption of a language of “customer ser vice” in its relationships with the nuclear industry has the potential to further constrain regulatory activities.55

5: Regulating the Regulatory Process: Recommendation Tiers, Rules Versus Orders, and Risk Assessment

The task force sorted its recommendations into three tiers for presentation to the commissioners, primarily by assessments of urgency.56 The allocation

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of recommendations within these tiers was an intensely negotiated process, with larger questions regarding the underlying regulatory framework deferred indefinitely by placing them outside the tier system. Throughout those discussions, the industry argued that long-established activities related to operational safety should take priority over more fundamental changes to the regulatory process. Asserting that such changes would distract from the ongoing demands of safe operation, destabilizing practices that have been honed over time, the industry has sought to minimize changes to the prevailing system.57 While acknowledging that some changes may be necessary in light of the events at Fukushima, industry representatives have expressed a strong preference for regulatory rules (which are developed over long time periods with extensive negotiation between the NRC and industry) rather than orders (which the NRC has authority to issue more quickly). Rationales for this position include the need for regulatory stability, the cumulative effects of regulatory requirements over time, and the workload associated with compliance and reporting.58 Here again, a systemic preference for simplification is evident, along with a preference for stability rather than systemic change. Another simplification strategy involves an increasing emphasis on riskinformed regulation, an approach that bases regulatory priorities on quantitative estimates and modeling and that has been embraced by both the industry and the NRC.59 The NRC’s State of the Art Reactor Consequence Analysis (SOARCA), begun in 2007 and concluded in November 2012, has revised estimates of severe event probabilities, and of the consequences of such events, downward.60 Following those revisions, the industry has adopted a strategy of characterizing previous estimates as extremely conservative, arguing that some safety standards can now be relaxed.61 Critics find that proposition ironic in light of the 3.11 disaster and suggest that its implications have not been incorporated adequately into discussions of how to utilize the SOARCA results. The analysis began well before the events at Fukushima, using two operating US nuclear power plants as models, and it has not been revised in light of the empirical fact that reactor meltdowns are now statistically significantly more frequent than they had been previously.62 While the use of risk-informed regulation is in itself a simplifying operation, the exclusion of new information produces further simplification.

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6: Economics Versus Safety

The final boundary noted above involves distinctions between issues of safety and environmental protection (regarded as the domain of the NRC) and economic concerns (positioned outside the NRC system). Comments made by two commissioners during meetings reviewed for this study assert that the NRC bases its decisions solely on the criteria of safety and environmental protection, without regard to industry costs.63 Nevertheless, questions of cost have clearly been at stake throughout the post-Fukushima negotiations. As this discrepancy became increasingly evident, meetings were initiated to examine the “economic consequences of regulation,” challenging the boundary that had formerly prevailed in ways that align with industry interests.64 Nuclear producers and promoters articulate concerns about the costs of regulation, framing them as a threat to an essential energy source, while conversely critics stress the potential costs of nuclear failures. The 3.11 disaster has begun to demonstrate the scale of such economic risks and will do so further over time.65 The present regulatory approach addresses economic risks only in a limited way, and critics regard the US (and global) system of nuclear risk insurance as severely inadequate.66 Critical public interest groups have achieved some success bringing this topic into the postFukushima negotiations.67

Nuclear Safety and Reflexive Communication The rhetorical boundaries identified here are only some of those evident in the nuclear community’s post-Fukushima negotiations, but they represent some of the most contentious and consequential sites of engagement. Tropes such as “the regulatory burden,” the constructed boundary between safety and economics, regulatory organizing principles such as engineering design basis and the SOARCA risk study, and negotiated responses such as the FLEX strategy and its focus on mitigation are particularly promising sites for continued study. It is important to recognize, as well, that these boundaries do not operate independently of one another. Instead, they constitute a complex discursive formation that is itself part of a larger sociomaterial system. Although much of the rhetorical boundary work examined here seeks to simplify that

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system, a critical analysis of nuclear safety requires recognizing its complexity. This chapter provides a foundation for such analysis by mapping the broad contours of the nuclear community, identifying its key actors, and arguing for an expansion of the boundaries of the nuclear safety system to address its fragmented rationality and recalcitrant materialities. The framework developed here addresses the collective, consequential, and paradoxical aspects of a demanding sociotechnical endeavor: the assurance of safety in an inherently risky system. Nuclear producers and promoters have attempted to manage the new complexities produced by the 3.11 disaster and to reduce its consequences for the system they inhabit. Nuclear regulators, committed to preserving and enhancing the prevailing system rather than to radical change, have sought to adapt their communication processes under new levels of urgency and public scrutiny. Nuclear critics have responded to the exigence presented by Fukushima, seeking to create changes within the system and expand its boundaries of inclusion. Although post-Fukushima nuclear safety negotiations may appear to be structured primarily by economic or ideological interests, such a focus overlooks other, institutional aspects. Economic and ideological elements may motivate individual and organizational actors, but those actors also participate in a larger system that constrains and enables their actions and agency. Of the boundaries identified here, the constraints on participation in the collective nuclear safety negotiation are fundamental. Nevertheless, the present analysis suggests that while efforts to expand the participation boundary are important, they are not sufficient. There is also a need for participants in the system to engage in more reflexive forms of communication that interrogate its basic structures of simplification and control. Cultivating such insights may provide a stronger foundation for negotiating the nonnegotiable principle of nuclear safety.

CHAPTER 16

International Reactions to Fukushima Sonja D. Schmid and Başak Saraç-Lesavre

The transboundary nature of nuclear risks is widely acknowledged, but some seven decades into the nuclear age, there is still no consensus on how to handle these risks. Nuclear safety requires cooperation and coordination across geopolitical borders, as well as across regulatory, institutional, and administrative borders. Governing nuclear safety requires the integration of different sets of knowledge and expertise: technoscientific, political, legal, and so on. And despite the general agreement that further cooperation is needed, finding workable arrangements to collectively govern nuclear risks is by no means a straightforward undertaking. Most recently, the Fukushima accident of 2011 revealed the limits of existing risk regulatory regimes. It exposed differences about the notion of nuclear safety and how to best ensure it on a transnational scale. In this chapter, we follow a few international actors in the wake of the Fukushima accident, when they realized that it is not clear which of the well-proven mechanisms of the past will serve us best in an unpredictable future incident. The “culture of control” that Constance Perin has identified as definitive of nuclear safety in the United States turns out to neglect the fact that working around unexpected problems in creative and independent ways is often critical for safely operating nuclear reactors—even under normal, nonaccident conditions.1 Instructions and regulations based on experience with past events can rarely cover so-called beyond design basis accidents that, by definition, are unexpected, unpredictable, and beyond control. Here, we are concerned with the notion of control that turns out to involve much more than just technical elements. Rather, it necessarily encompasses fluid

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processes that ultimately lead to redefinitions of what constitutes nuclear risk and safety. By comparing post-Fukushima initiatives in the United States and Europe (particularly in France), we attempt to show the transformation of control from a largely technical and technocratic endeavor to one that increasingly (if still tentatively) takes into account its own cultural, epistemic, and political dimensions. We show how the acknowledgment that severe nuclear accidents are possible—an acknowledgment downplayed after Chernobyl—has pushed contemporary institutions to find new arrangements of controlling changing risks; managing these risks across regulatory, geopolitical, and epistemic boundaries; and redefining the notion of control itself.

The United States: Controlling Regulatory Authority In the United States, the Fukushima nuclear disaster triggered a series of reactions. As soon as the accident hit Japan, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staffed its Headquarters Operations Center on a 24/7 basis. The center was tasked with monitoring the tsunami’s effects on the US West Coast and supporting both domestic and international responses to the crisis. The United States had to show its support to Japan, its long-term ally, and also to ensure the safety of its citizens on Japanese soil. Finding a balance between the two turned out to be complicated, particularly as the crisis unfolded: the credibility of institutions on both sides of the Pacific Ocean evolved based on the state of a spent nuclear fuel pool.2 Following the accident, uncertainty prevailed about the state of both the reactors and the spent nuclear fuel pools. On March 16, testifying before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, Gregory Jaczko, then chairman of the NRC, publicly stated that no water remained in the spent nuclear fuel pool at reactor number four and that the radiation levels there were thought to be “extremely high.”3 Following his statement, the United States urged American citizens who lived within fifty miles (or eighty kilometers) of the accident to evacuate, indicating that Japan faced an increasingly dangerous situation. The Japanese government had limited its evacuation orders to a zone of nineteen miles (or thirty kilometers) around the accident site, leading the international media to depict the Japanese government as overly optimistic. The US government’s unilateral action destroyed the credibility of the Japanese gov-

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ernment’s response to the accident. Marking the first year of the accident, the Economist characterized the situation as “the death of trust.” 4 Once the uncertainty about the state of the spent fuel pool diminished and it became clear that the pool in question was not as dry as initially assumed, it was the credibility of the NRC and its chairman that suffered. In late March 2011, NBC News requested through the Freedom of Information Act all the emails sent and received by several NRC staff members during the first week of the crisis. Other organizations and watchdogs filed similar requests, leading the NRC to post thousands of emails in its public reading room. For NBC News, the emails showed that “the campaign to reassure the public about America’s nuclear industry came as the agency’s own experts were questioning U.S. safety standards and scrambling to determine whether new rules were needed to ensure that the meltdown occurring at the Japanese plant could not occur here.”5 In March 2014, recalling the initial days of the crisis at a symposium in Tokyo, Jaczko, no longer the NRC chairman, stated: “The key characteristic is that information is always confusing, conflicting and simply often not there. Communication is difficult and impossible. Actions and events do not transpire according to plans and drills.”6 In an email to NBC News, Eliot Brenner, formerly public affairs director at the NRC, stated, “The frustration displayed in the selected e-mails reflects more on the extreme stress our team was under at the time to assure accuracy in a context in which information from Japan was scarce to non-existent.”7 The crisis in Japan had been transformed into an institutional crisis in the United States. In April 2011, the NRC created a Near-Term Task Force to examine lessons learned from the Fukushima accident. The task force was charged with recommending modifications to the NRC’s regulatory framework. Its members were six senior NRC officials, and the group had three months to define “near-term actions” that affected US nuclear power plants and spent nuclear fuel pools, while identifying topics to be assessed in the course of a longer-term review. In its July  2011 “Recommendations for Enhancing Reactor Safety in the 21st  Century,” the task force concluded that US plants were operating safely and made a series of mainly technical and regulatory recommendations to enhance responses to natural disasters that could lead to station blackouts or the loss of the ultimate heat sink (that is, the loss of the cooling-water system).8 In May  2011, before the task force had reached its conclusions, James Ellis—a retired four-star admiral and then CEO of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO)—announced that the nuclear emergency at Fukushima affected the American industry as well, because it “laid bare some

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significant gaps in our performance and effectiveness as a global industry.” He even proposed an international organization that would provide an emergency response during accidents at nuclear energy facilities. Ellis envisioned “a robust, highly capable response team with pre-staged equipment interoperable both domestically and internationally.”9 This proposal represented a remarkable departure from INPO’s thirty-year exclusive commitment to avoiding nuclear disasters and a bold move to position a domestic, highly restricted industry organization at the center of international nuclear disaster coordination. One immediate result of Ellis’s proposition was a small domestic initiative that would demonstrate on a small national scale what an international disaster response organization might eventually look like. In June  2011, INPO, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI, a policy-oriented industry organization), and the Electric Power Research Institute (based in Palo Alto, California) copublished a short position paper titled “The Way Forward.” The contributors outlined an integrated emergency response approach, with strategic goals ranging from maintaining excellence and morale among nuclear plant workers to providing accurate, timely, and authentic information to the public.10 The implication was that these goals could be scaled up and provide the foundational mechanisms for effective international cooperation in nuclear disaster mitigation. For all its timeliness and leadership, “The Way Forward” remained grounded in a technocratic rationality that sought an effective “technical fix” for reducing the risk of a nuclear disaster to manageable proportions. This technocratic outlook misses the less obvious social expertise and improvisational skills inevitably involved in any successful disaster response.11 Furthermore, by relying exclusively on industry and private capital, the proposal may fail to function in certain contexts (for example, where nuclear plants are owned and operated by the state), and it would therefore face significant challenges at the international level. Meanwhile, the US nuclear industry moved ahead to meet impending new NRC rules by designing and implementing FLEX, a “diverse and flexible coping capability” that specifically addresses a loss of power and reactor cooling capability.12 Based on the industry’s response after 9/11, FLEX essentially consists of stationing vital emergency equipment—generators, battery packs, pumps, air compressors, and battery chargers—in multiple locations at each plant and at secure offsite locations (specifically, two regional hubs, one in Memphis, Tennessee, and one in Phoenix, Arizona), and in guiding emergency responders in adequately using these new FLEX capabilities (which involve substantial maintenance, testing, and training).

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FLEX is a result of the industry’s own gap analysis that determined potential vulnerabilities to external events and then identified possible modifications to ensure the working of a plant’s key safety functions. FLEX was in addition to the industry’s efforts in the wake of 9/11 to restrict access to sites, install additional temporary barriers, expand protective perimeters around nuclear facilities, increase on-site security personnel, and install high-tech surveillance and equipment for safeguards.13 The NEI reported that “by 2004, the nuclear energy industry has expanded its security forces by 60 percent, from 5,000 officers to approximately 8,000 officers at 64 plant sites. The industry has also spent more than $1 billion to enhance protections.”14 These changes were implemented in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, the NRC, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and local law enforcement agencies. In addition, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory had assisted the industry with cyber-security upgrades, and emergency preparedness drills at all nuclear plant sites were developed and subsequently reviewed by the NRC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.15 Like the post-9/11 safety and security upgrades and the strategies put forth in “The Way Forward,” FLEX relies on what Perin has referred to as a “culture of control”: the industry follows the rationale that the right technical and managerial mechanisms can ensure the safety and security of nuclear facilities and the people living around them. The nuclear industry advertised FLEX as the ultimate solution for responding to nuclear accidents that cross regulatory, administrative, and geographical boundaries, However, according to Edwin Lyman, a senior nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, before the NRC had the chance to develop guidelines for such a program, the industry had implemented FLEX, its own initiative that relied, for example, on commercially available equipment that might not withstand severe accidents and included ambiguous guidelines that would be difficult to enforce. For Lyman, if plans are voluntary, the NRC has no authority to review them or conclude that they are deficient. In the years since 2011, the accident has generated a jurisdictional ambiguity about the roles and responsibilities of the US nuclear industry and its regulator.16

France: Controlling Plants, Territory, and Population In France, a country that relies mainly on nuclear power for energy, the Fukushima accident also generated major concerns—not only about the future of

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nuclear energy but also about the safety of nuclear reactors. André Claude Lacoste, then chairman of the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), declared that nobody could guarantee that there would not be a nuclear accident in France, while Jacques Repussard, the director-general of the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, stated: “We have to think the unthinkable.”17 This phrase circulated widely in France and beyond, making severe nuclear accidents a reality to be reckoned with. In May 2011, following the demand of François Fillon (then the French prime minister), the ASN asked French nuclear plant operators to provide a complementary safety assessment of their facility, evaluating how it would react to extreme natural events such as earthquakes and floods that might lead to the loss of either electrical power or ultimate heat sink, or a combination of both. While the evaluation scope was defined in parallel to the European stress tests, the former also included an evaluation of the modalities used by nuclear operators to manage their contractors. The examination of the results led the ASN to adopt a series of measures. One of them was the hardened safety core measure, which relied on the adoption of a series of material and organizational provisions by all nuclear facilities to control fundamental safety functions in extreme situations beyond their original design basis. It aimed at preventing a severe accident from affecting the core of the reactor or the spent fuel pool, as well as at limiting the accident’s consequences by preserving the integrity of containment. While the hardened safety core policy mainly relied on technical improvements, its implementation required enhanced management during an emergency.18 To meet that requirement, French nuclear plant operators proposed the gradual creation of a “Nuclear Rapid Response Force” (Force d’Action Rapide du Nucléaire, or FARN), a nuclear emergency force capable of being deployed to the site of a nuclear accident in less than twenty-four hours. FARN was organized around four regional centers (Paluel in the northwest, Dampierre in the center, Bugey in the southeast, and Civaux in the west of France) and was to be coordinated by national headquarters in Levallois-Perret. Each center was staffed by a team of employees that included people specializing in plant operations, maintenance, radiation protection, and nuclear logistics. Each center team was divided into five groups of nuclear emergency responders and contained equipment that could be sent to respond to an accident, including mobile pumps, generators, trucks, barges, lifting equipment, personal protection equipment, and communica-

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tions equipment. Once deployed, a FARN team would be able to live and work autonomously on a given accident site for up to three days.19 While technical enhancement remained a priority, the ASN acknowledged in a statement of January  3, 2012, that “social, organizational and human factors” were key aspects of safety. Consequently, ASN imposed the improvement and reinforcement of operator training for emergency conditions and set up a working group named the Social, Organizational and Human Factors Steering Committee.20 By 2013, the committee had set up four working groups tasked with analyzing specific aspects of the French nuclear industry: (1) subcontracting under normal operating conditions, (2) the management of a crisis situation, (3) the articulation of the difference between regulated and managed safety, and (4) the judicial questions raised by the first three aspects. Those working groups initiated discussions of several essential notions, ranging from disaster management to organizations research and covering terms like “improvisation” and “high-reliability organizations.” In 2014, for the first time, the French government adopted a national emergency plan. The plan was developed by the secretary of defense and national security, ASN, Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, government experts and the three nuclear operators (AREVA, Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, and Electricité de France). The plan aimed at “strengthening defenses in low-frequency extreme nuclear events such as Fukushima, and at enhancing the protection of the population in the event of a nuclear emergency outside of France.”21 For Guillaume Blavette, an antinuclear activist, with its language of wartime mobilization, the plan has shifted the French government’s focus from increased radiological protection and safety to the reestablishment of control and authority over its territory and population.22 Among other things, the plan aimed at enabling the government to operate beyond the ten-kilometer local area limit if required by the event. This was a remarkable change of scale. Until then, emergency response in France had relied on two types of plans. First, each nuclear facility had an on-site emergency plan (plan d’urgence interne) which aimed at both protecting onsite employees and preventing an accident from having an impact beyond the site’s borders. The second type of plan was the specific plan of intervention (plan particulier d’intervention, or PPI). Each prefect, the government’s regional representative, oversaw the plan’s design and implementation, with the technical basis provided by the ASN. The PPI included initial protective

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measures to be put in place in case of an accident, and its perimeter of intervention was limited to ten kilometers from the site. In 2016, Ségolène Royal, then minister of the environment, announced the extension of the PPI’s perimeter to twenty kilometers.23 Even though environmental and antinuclear groups criticized this extension as still too limited, these measures marked the recognition of broader geographical impacts and the transboundary nature of nuclear accidents, as well as confirming the need to think beyond specific nuclear sites.

The European Union: Redistributing Control The Fukushima accident was a crucial test of the European Union’s capacity to act collectively.24 On March 13, the Sunday that followed the Fukushima accident, Nikolaus Berlakovich, the Austrian minister of the environment, announced in a radio broadcast that he would call for a pan-European “stress test” with the objective of checking whether nuclear power plants in Europe were “earthquake proof,” and assessing “how they perform in terms of containment and cooling.” To him, the Fukushima accident was a clear prompt for Europe to reconsider its commitment to nuclear energy. The options he proposed were simple: either safety would be reviewed or plants would be closed.25 On the following Monday, the European Union (EU) Commissioner of Energy, Günther Oettinger, told the German Press Agency that, indeed, nuclear plants “could not be switched off overnight but nothing was ‘irreplaceable,’ adding: ‘The unthinkable has occurred. Energy policy faces a fundamental new beginning.’ ”26 On Tuesday, Berlakovich made another public statement, this time in Brussels, rendering stress tests inevitable to make the European people “feel safe.” Comparing those tests to the ones conducted in the banking sector from 2009 on, he argued that, as the Wiener Zeitung reported, the EU “should agree on so-called stress tests for nuclear power plants since such a check for banks—which aimed to find out how badly financial institutes would be affected by another recession—proved to be a ‘success’ last year.”27 On the same day, Oettinger called an ad hoc coordinating meeting of representatives from the nuclear regulators of all twenty-seven member states, as well as nuclear operators and vendors in Europe, during which the conduct of “stress tests” was agreed upon without opposition. Stress tests were swiftly included in the agenda of the Council of the European Union, and discussed at meetings on March 24 and 25. This was the

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first time the EU had considered such a multilateral exercise.28 To conduct the proposed tests, all EU member states, regardless of their use of nuclear energy, first had to agree on some common criteria. Just a few days earlier, on March 22 and 23, the Western European Nuclear Regulators Association (WENRA) had held its plenary meetings in Helsinki. Created in 1999, WENRA is a nuclear regulators’ club whose members are the heads of nuclear regulatory bodies of the European countries. WENRA announced that it would provide “an independent regulatory technical definition of a stress test”29 and released a draft proposal covering the test’s potential scope, methodology, and timeframe. The document defined a stress test as “a targeted reassessment of the safety margins of nuclear power plants in the light of the events which occurred at Fukushima.”30 For WENRA, the reassessment was supposed to be based on existing safety studies and engineering judgment to evaluate the behav ior of a nuclear power plant when faced with a set of challenging situations. This first proposal underlined the fact that the licensees had the prime responsibility for safety. It was up to them to conduct those studies and up to the regulatory bodies to review them independently. Responding to a request of the European Commission, WENRA released a far more detailed draft proposal concerning the stress test specifications on April  21. Events that occurred at Fukushima were defined as “extreme natural events challenging the plant safety functions and leading to a severe accident.”31 The document clearly identified the cause of Fukushima as “extreme natural events.” According to this second proposal, reassessment now involved both an evaluation of the response of a nuclear power plant when faced with a set of extreme situations and a verification of preventive measures chosen (initiating events, consequential loss of safety functions, and severe accident management capability), following a defensein-depth logic. Initiating events were identified as earthquakes or floods exceeding the design basis and other extreme events. Consequential loss of safety functions was defined as the loss of electrical power, the ultimate heat sink, or both. Severe accident management capability was defined as the means available to a nuclear plant to avoid and manage the loss of core cooling function in the spent nuclear fuel storage pool and the loss of containment integrity. In striking contrast to the probabilistic safety assessments that are widely used to determine whether or not a nuclear power plant is safe, stress tests relied on a deterministic approach: regardless of their probability of occurrence, catastrophic accidents had to be accounted for.

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WENRA’s extended draft provided a basis for discussion about the final scope of the stress tests that the European Commission and the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group (ENSREG) would adopt. ENSREG was created in July 2007 by the European Commission, originally as the HighLevel Group on Nuclear Safety and Waste Management, aimed specifically at harmonizing European countries’ approach to the safety of nuclear installations, the management of spent fuel and radioactive waste, and the financing of the decommissioning of nuclear installations. The group later adopted the acronym ENSREG. It is an independent expert body composed of senior officials from the national nuclear safety, radioactive waste safety, or radiation protection regulatory authorities of the EU member states as well as senior civil servants with competence in these fields. Building on agreed-upon principles for ensuring nuclear safety and the safe management of radioactive waste and spent fuel (as established in the Convention on Nuclear Safety and the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management), ENSREG articulates its role as helping continuously “improve the cooperation and openness between member states on nuclear safety and radioactive waste issues; improve the overall transparency on nuclear safety and radioactive waste issues; and where appropriate, advise the European Commission on additional European rules in the fields of the safety of nuclear installations and the safety of the management of spent fuel and radioactive waste.”32 Defining the scope of stress tests was not an easy task. It required staying within the existing regulatory, jurisdictional, and geographical boundaries, while also challenging them. Before reaching a final agreement, the European Commission and ENSREG held several inconclusive meetings.33 WENRA’s proposal established the scope of the tests, but the exclusion of terrorist attacks generated controversy among the parties. As the negotiations evolved, Oettinger explicitly rearticulated his position of May 10 in front of the European Parliament: What we do have is a proposal from a body of which the Commission is not a member. In April, the Western European Nuclear Regulators Association published its preparatory work, which it was fully entitled to do. It is up to us to decide what to do with this. Without any involvement on the part of the Commission, WENRA applied its expertise and came up with a resolution that human error and human causes should not be included. I do not think this is adequate. That is why I

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will present my position on behalf of the Commission tomorrow evening to all 27 nuclear watchdog bodies, based on thorough groundwork, telling them that we need to take all risks into consideration, regardless of their origin. This applies equally to natural causes, such as earthquakes, flooding or extreme temperatures, and human causes, such as error, accident, intent or criminality. As far as I am concerned this also includes terrorist threats, cyber attacks and plane crashes. I believe that this is in the interests of the people of Europe.34 Germany and nonnuclear Austria particularly insisted on the inclusion of man-made disasters and terrorist attacks within the scope of the reviews.35 The head of the European Commission at the time, Manuel Barosso, supported that position.36 Yet regulators from several nuclear nations wanted to limit the scope of the tests to natural disasters.37 For instance, UK officials argued that safety and security had to be treated separately, and that the latter had to remain under the authority of national security experts.38 Finally, on May 24, ENSREG and the European Commission reached a consensus on the specifications, which mostly relied on WENRA’s proposal in terms of both scope and technical content.39 Parties agreed that the work on stress tests should be undertaken along two parallel tracks: on the one hand, a safety track to assess how well nuclear installations could withstand the consequences of some clearly defined extreme external events; and on the other hand, a security track to analyze security threats and incidents due to malevolent or terrorist acts. The reassessment of security was delegated to the work of the Ad Hoc Group on Nuclear Security, which was to be composed of national experts from member states. This group reported to the Permanent Representatives Committee (a key committee working directly under and for the EU Council) in June 2012 and identified and recommended thirty-two “good practices” covering the following domains: “national legal and regulatory framework, national security framework, design basis treat, nuclear security culture and contingency planning.” 40 The Parliamentary Group of the Greens in the European Parliament commissioned an expert report from an environmental consultancy firm.41 For the authors of the report, it was irrelevant to classify events as “security related” or “safety related” based on their origin: airplanes could crash into a nuclear power plant regardless of what caused the crash, and therefore they had to be considered as a relevant safety and security issue. For Greenpeace, the exclusion of “security related” events misleadingly limited the

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definition of a “stress test,” reducing it from “a comprehensive and transparent risk assessment” to a test that assessed only specific extreme natural events.42 The final definition of stress tests failed to overcome the jurisdictional boundaries that had been established over several decades and maintained the distinction between nuclear security and nuclear safety. In this environment of criticism, Oettinger described the final agreement to the EU Parliament, along with the procedure that would be followed.43 As a first step, every operator of a nuclear power plant would be asked to conduct an assessment using the agreed-upon ENSREG specifications and to submit the results to the relevant national authority. Once those evaluations had been conducted, the national regulator would review them as a second step. The third step, a peer-review process, was one that had not been proposed by WENRA. Oettinger characterized this step as the one that would enable the European Commission and other European institutions to gain insights, evaluate the situation in each country, and reach conclusions at a European level. Even though Oettinger considered this peer-review process as a way to enable the European Commission to reach its own conclusions about the safety of reactors in Europe, the process was in fact the result of a compromise. Initially, the European Commission had lobbied for the tests to take the form of an inspection.44 An assessment that relied on inspections would have established the Commission as the authority that oversees nuclear safety in Europe. It would have enabled the Commission to access original data, compare and rank the safety of operating reactors, and name and shame those that failed to meet the commonly defined criteria. In the end, the Commission did not gain such authority. Individual member states refused to sacrifice their sovereign authority to the EU institutions and retained that authority over nuclear safety. The integration of the peer-review process into the stress test initiative allowed individual member states to maintain their authority and control over the results.45 Yet the peer-review process also significantly increased the accountability of individual member states toward one another. In October 2012, the European Commission announced that the stress tests had been “a success.” 46 None of the reactors then in operation were closed as a result of the stress test initiative. Yet a series of technical weaknesses were pointed out, and member states were made accountable for remedying them. For instance, on-site seismic instruments to measure and alert personnel of possible earthquakes were either not available or had to be improved in 121

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reactors. In 81 reactors, equipment to fight severe accidents was not stored in protected places where it could be quickly retrieved. In 24 reactors, no backup emergency control room was available in case the main control room became unusable in case of an accident. Stress tests were oriented toward making continuous improvements rather than articulating differences across countries and operating nuclear power plants. Depending on the country and the plant in question, the measures recommended as a result of EU peer reviews could take years to be implemented. To follow up on stress tests, and in line with the recommendations of ENSREG, each EU member state produced a national action plan that underwent a new cycle of peer reviews organized under the supervision of ENSREG and the European Commission. And although the European stress tests did not yield legally binding obligations, as a result of the peer reviews, each member state became publicly accountable for progress. Furthermore, even though European institutions could neither directly regulate nuclear safety nor remove national boundaries, the three-stage review process that was put in place for the stress tests became an essential part of the nuclear safety directive that was adopted by the European Council in 2014. Among other things, this directive increased the independence of national regulatory authorities, defined “a high-level EU-wide safety objective,” and set up a “European system of peer reviews” that would periodically evaluate national safety assessments and on-site emergency preparedness and response arrangements.47

Conclusion The post-Fukushima nuclear safety debates in the United States and Europe fundamentally altered not only the definition of safety but also the definition of what was at stake, who was responsible, who was accountable, and what “control” meant. In the United States, the nuclear industry got a head start on the regulator by proposing and implementing its own mostly technical fix that confronted the NRC with faits accomplis that turned out to be difficult to challenge retroactively. The industry, then, effectively took control by reestablishing technical measures (such as storing more hardware at more physical locations) as the solution to nuclear safety concerns. In France, by contrast, public authorities’ ambition to reestablish control over their territory and population in case of a nuclear accident coincided with the nuclear

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industry’s ambition to keep its plants under its own control in all circumstances. While technical solutions were part of the process, they were less dominant than in the United States and overshadowed by larger organizational shuffles. The European Union as a bureaucratic institution could rely on neither the swift pragmatism of an industry consortium nor the centralized rationality of the French state. Instead, its council members, regulators, and industry representatives engaged in a drawn-out debate over the very definition of nuclear safety, who had the authority to set any kinds of standards, and who ought to enforce the fixing of manifest weaknesses. The resulting stress test initiative was a compromise that frustrated many people, yet it was perhaps the one reaction to Fukushima that included truly deliberative elements: in an effort to increase transparency, seek harmonization, and achieve compliance, if only in the long run, the initiative got to the core of what “control” meant. Not only did European bureaucrats struggle, very publicly, over setting acceptable standards for nuclear safety across the heterogeneous nuclear industries of its member states, but the stress test initiative revealed just how precarious the definition of control was. Overtly a debate over safety standards and their enforcement, the initiative put the European institutions’ ambition to control nuclear safety to the test. Fukushima finally brought about the acknowledgment that nuclear risks are transboundary and reduced the distinction between members that operate nuclear facilities and those that do not. It also produced a process—the initiative—that at once questioned fundamental assumptions about nuclear safety and started a period of European integration through the redefinition of shared control and more collaborative regulation. The transformation of control is evident in the pervasive shift from an emphasis on technical solutions alone to the acknowledgment of a distributed and diversified notion of control. It is the anticipation of the unanticipatable, or the expectation of the unexpected, that is slowly generating new ideas about nuclear risks and how to best ensure the safety of nuclear facilities. The different routes the United States, the European Union, and individual nations within it have chosen signal that there is no longer consensus on how to address these questions. A comparative perspective might help highlight the different ways nuclear risks can be conceptualized, mitigated, and prepared for, and it might show different ways of controlling such risks technically, organizationally, and epistemologically.

NOTES

Introduction 1. The editors of and authors in this volume reflect the variability of this disaster naming culture, and even the volume title reflects this variability. The editors and authors are faithful to the naming decisions of their sources. Generally, they use “Fukushima” if their interests are primarily nuclear, and use “3.11” or “ Triple Disaster” if they focus on the overlap of the different disaster events. 2. The information in this section is derived from Cleveland, 2014. 3. Ramseyer, 2011. 4. Kazama and Noda, 2012; “Japan Estimates Post-3/11 Reconstruction Costs at ¥1.5 Trillion for Fiscal 2021–25,” 2019. 5. Fukushima University, 2018. 6. Nasu, 1991. 7. Lifton, 1991: 104. 8. Ibid.: 105. 9. Beser, 2015. 10. Quoted in Fackler, 2011a. 11. Ibid. 12. Remes and Horowitz, in production 2021. 13. Knowles and Loeb, in production 2021. 14. Miwao Matsumoto, 2015. For a fuller description and analysis of “structural disaster,” see Miwao Matsumoto, 2019.

Chapter 1. What Was Learned from 3.11? 1. Knowles, 2014. Parts of this essay also appeared in a different form in Knowles, 2015. 2. Hatamura, 2012. 3. “Yotaro Hatamura,” 2012. 4. Tabuchi, 2011. 5. “Yotaro Hatamura,” 2012. 6. Murakami and Kurokawa, 2011. 7. Ibid. See also Stucky, 2013. 8. “Lessons from Fukushima,” 2012. 9. Fackler, 2011b. 10. “A Message from the President of the Rebuild Japan Foundation Initiative,” excerpted in Silverstein, 2012. For the report summary in English, see Funabashi and Kitazawa, 2012. 11. Penney, 2012.

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12. National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, n.d., chapter 5. 13. Ibid. 14. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011c. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2012. 18. American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2012: xi. 19. Wald, 2011b. 20. Lott, 2012. 21. Union of Concerned Scientists, 2012. 22. Ibid. 23. Greenpeace, 2012. 24. Ibid.: 6, 45. 25. Quoted in Wald, 2011a. 26. Quoted in Clayton, 2012. 27. Morris, 2014; see also Saito, 2011. 28. Interview with Masahiko Murata, July 9, 2015, Kobe, Japan. 29. Interview with Yoshiaki Kawata and Shingo Nagamatsu, July 9, 2015, Suita, Osaka, Japan.

Chapter 2. Unfulfilled Promises 1. Amman, von Kármán, and Woodruff, 1941. 2. Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, 1955. 3. The crash of Toa Domestic Airlines flight 63 on July 3 resulted in 68 deaths, and the airborne collision of All Nippon Airways (ANA) flight 58 on July 30 resulted in 162 deaths. At the time, the ANA crash had the world’s highest death toll for an airplane accident. 4. Bowonder, Kasperson, and Kasperson, 1994: 66. 5. Taniguchi, 2016. 6. For example, even the results of a nuclear-promoting agency’s public poll have shown that about 60 percent of people in Japan support the gradual or prompt phasing out of the use of nuclear power since the Fukushima disaster (JAERO, 2019). The same report also shows that just half of people are also against restarting power plants whose safety features have been upgraded from the technical perspective. 7. Matsumoto, 2013: 167. 8. Reason, 1997; Ikeda, 1995; Nishimura and Sato, 2013. 9. A newspaper article introduced the voices of the victim’s family. The dead cabin attendant’s husband said: “I am disappointed. Was my wife killed just because she had no luck, if they say no one has responsibility?” And her father said: “It’s an unjust judgment. I am going to let her know that it was too disappointing, at her grave.” See “Rankouge Jiko Nishin Mo Muzai: Izoku Munen Harenu Mama: 9 Nen Amari Kaimei Imada,” 2007 (translations by the author). 10. Hatamura, 2000. 11. Hatamura, 2011. 12. The two other commissions are those of TEPCO and RJIF. 13. NAIIC, 2012. 14. Ibid., 9.

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15. Ibid. 16. Strictly speaking, this may not be a part of the commission’s official statement, since these sentences are from the “Message from the Chairman” page of the executive summary of the commission’s final report. Also, this English is the original text; it appeared in the English version with no direct counterpart in the original Japa nese version. 17. “Japan’s Unsatisfying Nuclear Report,” 2012. 18. Dickie, 2012. 19. NAIIC, 2012: 10. 20. Taniguchi, 2016. 21. Matsumoto, 2013. 22. Sugawara and Juraku, 2018. 23. Ibid. 24. NRA, 2016. 25. The council system is an ad hoc and minister-level policy coordination program particularly preferred by the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to emphasize political initiatives, responding to previous criticism that the Japa nese bureaucracy is too strong and too conservative. It had not been used so often by the previous administrations. 26. Cabinet Secretariat, 2016. 27. Interviews were conducted in November 2016, January and March 2017, and October  2018, with prefectural and municipal government officials. The interviewees requested anonymity. 28. Matsumoto, 2013: 168.

Chapter 3. Fukushima Radiation Inside Out 1. Parts of this chapter are drawn from Jacobs, 2016. 2. For a formal explanation of the different types of ionizing radiation, see US Environmental Protection Agency, 2019. 3. Rosen and Clausen, 2016: 13–16. 4. See Saji, 2012. 5. Edwards, 2014. 6. Tveten, 1991. 7. “History of the ABCC/RERF,” 2018. 8. Kerr et al., 2005. 9. See Auxier, 1975. 10. For a discussion of additional problems with the interviews, see Lindee, 1994: 83–102. 11. Cullings et al., 2006. 12. Kim et al., 2016: 1–7. 13. Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 2012. The document has an addendum dated May 1, 2013, that says: “Since uploading ‘RERF’s Views on Residual Radiation’ to our website, it has been pointed out by some that the document seems to have been designed with the aim of explaining that there were no health effects due to residual radiation from the atomic bombings. The material’s actual intent, however, was to explain that in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, residual radiation levels were low when compared with doses from direct radiation. This ‘Views’ document does not intend to describe an absence of health effects due to residual radiation from the A-bombings.” 14. Siegel, Pennington, and Sacks, 2017: 2.

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15. The recent INWORKS study on the effects of long-term exposure to low levels of external radiation is an additional large-scale study that has great relevance for human health. See Leuraud et al., 2015. 16. Takahashi, 2017. 17. Leuraud et al., 2015. 18. Jacobs, 2013. 19. Brumfiel, 2013: 293. 20. Sutuo, 2016: 1.

Chapter 4. Has Japan Learned a Lesson from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident? 1. JAERO, 2019. 2. “Genpatsu Saikado, Hantai 55%, Sansei 26%, Sa Kakudai,” 2018. 3. “Shushou, Kaiken de Datsu Genpatsu no Hoko Uchisasu, Gutaisaku wa Shimesazu,” 2011. 4. Japa nese Government Cabinet Office, 2012. 5. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2014. 6. “Ikata Genpatsu, Unten Sashitome, Kosai reberu, hatsu handan,” 2017. 7. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2017. 8. Inter-Ministerial Council for Contaminated Water and Decommissioning Issues, 2017. 9. Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2012b. 10. Shinzo Abe, 2013. 11. Nihon Bengoshi Rengokai, 2014. 12. METI, Committee for Reforming TEPCO and Overcoming 1F Challenges, 2016. 13. Japan Center for Economic Research, 2019. 14. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2016. 15. Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters, 2012. 16. Tokyo Electric Power Company, 2017. 17. Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2003. 18. Office of Atomic Energy Policy, 2019. 19. Takubo and von Hippel, 2013. 20. Quoted in Kyodo Press, 2016. 21. Sakolski, 2016. 22. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, July 2018. 23. Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2018. 24. Hasegawa et al., 2017. Under Article VI of the Statute of the IAEA, member countries can make nuclear materials available to the IAEA, which can store the materials in its depots. In this way, the materials can be controlled by the IAEA, which can improve transparency of nuclear material control. 25. Science Council of Japan, 2012. 26. Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2012d. 27. Cabinet Office, 2015. 28. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2017. 29. Science Council of Japan, 2015. 30. “Kakunensaikuru Genan Hyoka Kakikae: Saishori Wo Yuri,” 2012. 31. For the twitter logs between me and two senior journalists on this issue right after the Mainichi report, see “Kakunensaikuru Genan Hyoka Kakikae: Saishori Wo Yuri,” 2012.

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32. For example, the new rules include the following: (1) meetings with more than three commissioners present should be restricted to official JAEC meetings or preparatory meetings for the official meetings, and minutes of the meetings should be kept; (2) if a commissioner meets with officials and experts for information-sharing purposes, records of the meeting should be kept; and (3) draft policy documents prepared should be kept with tracked changes shown, so the process leading to the final documents can be traced. Other rules include the processes for preparing the documents. See Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2012b. 33. Investigation Team Regarding Internal Meetings at the Subcommittee on Nuclear Power and Nuclear Fuel Cycle of Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2012. 34. Japan Atomic Energy Commission, 2012a.

Chapter 5. The Developmental State and Nuclear Power in Japan 1. World Nuclear Association, 2020. 2. Kingston, 2012c. 3. Aldrich, 2008. 4. Tanaka and Kuznick, 2011. 5. Gordon, 2002. 6. Levi-faur, 1997. 7. Okazaki and Okuno, 1999. 8. Noguchi, 1998. 9. Dower, 1999. 10. Johnson, 1982. 11. White, ed., 1988. 12. Sasada, 2013. 13. Beeson, 2009; Hall and Soskice, 2001; MacIntyre and Naughton, 2005. 14. Woodall, 2015: 101. 15. Johnson, 1982. 16. “Special Report: Nuclear Energy,” 2012. 17. Hymans, 2011. 18. Kingston, 2012c. 19. Hymans, 2011. 20. Suzuki, 2017. 21. Ibid. 22. Pekkanen, Scheiner, and Reed, 2015. 23. Kingston, 2011. 24. Kingston, 2012b. 25. Kingston, 2011. 26. Independent Investigation on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, 2014. 27. Kingston, 2012b. 28. Kingston, 2017. 29. United Nations Human Rights Council, 2017. 30. Honma, 2012. 31. Birmingham and McNeill, 2012. 32. Fackler, 2017. 33. Lochbaum and Lynam, 2015.

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34. Fackler, 2012. 35. World Nuclear Association, 2020. 36. National Security Archive, 2017; Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, 2018. In 1988 the United States granted Japan permission to reprocess plutonium from spent fuel that originated in the United States, on the understanding that this plutonium would be used to generate energy (see Tabuchi 2014). Japan is the only nation without nuclear weapons that is allowed under international law to enrich uranium and extract plutonium with minimal scrutiny. The United States pressured Japan to restart its reactors due to questions about the purpose of Japan’s large stockpiles of plutonium if the reactors were not operating—stockpiles that contain 44 tons of separated plutonium, enough for numerous atomic bombs, and some 150 tons of plutonium overall. This undermines Washington’s ostensibly tough stance on nonproliferation if Japan is not using the processed fuel in reactors and does not plan to do so. Some Japa nese favor retaining strategic flexibility—meaning the nuclear weapons option (see Taki 2014). As LDP secretary general Ishiba Shigeru argues, “Having nuclear plants shows to other nations that Japan can make nuclear weapons” (quoted in Kageyama, 2012). 37. Solomon and Inada, 2013. 38. Center for Deliberative Democracy, 2012. 39. Kingston, 2012a. 40. Kingston, 2012b. 41. Kingston, 2013a: 180–82. 42. Ramseyer, 2012. 43. Kyodo, 2017b. 44. Johnston, 2018. 45. Alexis-Martin, 2019; Matsumoto and McNeill, 2017. 46. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2014. 47. Ishida, 2017. 48. Ibid. 49. Kyodo, 2017a. 50. Johnston, 2018. 51. A court ruling in 2005 rejected scientific evidence supporting the plaintiff’s contention that the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata was sited adjacent to an active fault line. In 2007, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake shut the plant down, and later TEPCO admitted that in 2003 it had “discovered” this fault line but apparently had failed to inform authorities. 52. World Nuclear Association, 2020. 53. “Japan Should Phase out Aging Nuclear Reactors,” 2016. 54. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, 2014: 23. 55. Hymans, 2011: 159. 56. Ibid.: 160. 57. Ibid.: 180. In 2018 Toshiba sold its stake in Westinghouse, but not before losing over $6 billion and nearly going bankrupt due to delays and soaring costs on US reactor construction projects. 58. Hymans, 2011: 188. 59. Ramseyer, 2012. 60. Samuels, 2013.

Notes to Pages 97–106

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Chapter 6. The Road to Fukushima 1. This is according to the author’s phone conversations in March 2011 and February 2018 with a government official who was not authorized to discuss private talks but was familiar with the bilateral discussions on civilian nuclear power cooperation. The US-Japan talks in Tokyo occurred a few months after the deadly Tokaimura Village criticality accident. 2. “February 13, 1962, Letter from Hon. Chet Holifield to the President on the Atomic Energy Program,” 1962: 8, 17; Walker, 2000: 7, 9, 12–13, 15–16, 33–34, 41–42, 44. 3. Walker, 2000: 9–13. See also, for example, Lyman, 2016. 4. Honda, 2003: 387. 5. Ibid. 6. Cabinet Secretariat, 2011: 2–3. 7. A senior METI official’s discussion with the author, July 2011. 8. National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, 2012: 9. 9. Soeda, 2014: 148. 10. Cabinet Office, 2011: 46. 11. IAEA, 2003: 14; IAEA, 2007: 10–11. 12. Diaz, 2011: 11. 13. US Department of State, 2008. 14. TEPCO Nuclear Reform Special Task Force, 2012: 12. 15. Avenell, 2012. 16. Ibid. 17. Science Council of Japan, 2014: 11. 18. Arima, 2008: 129. 19. Stigler, 1971: 3. 20. Ramseyer, 2012: 480. 21. “Toden Fukushacho Ha Enecho Kanbu No Shiteiseki, Shiokawa Giin Shirabe. Amakudari Kinshi Ga Hitsuyo,” 2011. 22. “Dengen Ritchi Seido No Gaiyo: Chiiki No Yume Wo Sodateru,” 2010: 3. 23. Simms, 2011a. 24. Simms, 2011b. 25. Interview with Ambassador Hisahiko Okazaki (a policy planning official during the NPT deliberations), December 2014, Tokyo, Japan. 26. Arima, 2008. 27. White House Office, National Security Council Staff: Papers 1948–1961. 28. After massive losses at its Westinghouse subsidiary due to write-downs on assets at the US firm and cost overruns in a plant being constructed in South Carolina, Toshiba sold the subsidiary in April 2018. 29. Hirano, 2016: 20. 30. Ibid. 31. Kitazume, 2012. 32. “Genpatsu zero, nihon ni saiko unogasu. Bei CSIS shocho,” 2012. 33. Saruta, 2016: 54. 34. “Genpatsu zero kakugi kettei kaihi: bei, gaiatsu hihan osore kuchi dome,” 2012. 35. Saruta, 2016: 20, 48–49.

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36. “Bei, nihon no purutoniamu sakugen yokyu. kaku kakusan no kenen, seifu ha jogensei to rikai wo motomeru,” 2018. 37. “Kono Kuni No Genpatsu: Daihachibu, Jiminto Futatabi. Nenryo Saikuru No Minaoshi ‘Teigen,’ ” 2013. 38. Energy Policy Special Committee, 2012a. 39. Energy Policy Special Committee, 2012b. 40. “Kono Kuni No Genpatsu: Daihachibu, Jiminto Futatabi. Nenryo Saikuru No Minaoshi ‘Teigen,’ ” 2013. 41. Toshimitsu Motegi, press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, June 27, 2013. 42. NHK Broadcast Research Institute, 2014. 43. Freudenburg, 1993. 44. Kitada, 2013: 184. 45. Reconstruction Agency, 2020: 4. 46. Reconstruction Agency, 2020: 9. 47. Interview with Katsunobu Sakurai (former mayor of Minami Soma City), July 2018, Minami Soma City, Japan. 48. Ibid.

Chapter 7. Media Capture 1. Sources consulted for this chapter include Asahi Shimbun Special Reporting Department, 2012; Barshay, 1991; Dower, 1998a; Endo, 2012; Fackler, 2009b, 2009c, 2011, 2012, 2016b, and 2017; Jomaru, 2012; Miyamoto, 1984; Nanasawa, 2016; NHK ETV Special Reporting Team, 2012; Norimitsu and Fackler, 2011a and 2011b; Sano, 2000; Starkman, 2015; Yoshioka, 2011. 2. My profile of Sakurai ran a few days later, on the front page of the New York Times. See Fackler, 2011c. 3. We learned later that Minamisoma was not too dangerous to visit: The winds had blown in a different direction, sparing most of it from contamination. 4. This was the outer edge of zone, within 20–30 kilometers from the plant, within which the government had told residents to stay indoors. Those living within 20 kilometers had been evacuated. 5. Nanasawa, 2016: 57. 6. Ibid.: 28. 7. Endo, 2012: 125. 8. “Hoshasei Bushitsu no Kakusan Yosoku Funou,” 2011. 9. Onishi and Fackler, 2011b. 10. “SPEEDI: Yosoku Hikouhyou, ‘Hinan Katsuyou no Hassan Nashi’ Shiteki,” 2011. 11. Starkman, 2015. 12. Miyamoto, 1984. 13. Jomaru, 2012: 444–48. 14. Ibid.: 446. 15. Ibid.: 411 and 420.

Chapter 8. The Politics of Radiation Assessment in the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis 1. Higginbotham, 2019. 2. Director General for Disaster Management Cabinet Office, 2017.

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3. Stallings, 1984. 4. Hasegawa, 2013a. 5. Funabashi and Kitazawa, 2014. 6. Cleveland, 2014a. 7. Tomatsu Baba, personal communication, July 23, 2013. 8. Suami, 2015. 9. Feickert and Chanlett-Avery, 2011. 10. Casto, 2018. 11. Kurokawa, 2013. 12. Allison and Zelikow, 1999. 13. Cleveland, 2014a. 14. Lochbaum, Lynam, and Stranahan, 2014. 15. Saunier et al., 2013. 16. Cassata et al., 2012. 17. Cleveland, 2014b. 18. Neureiter et al., 2014. 19. Pascale, 2017. 20. Kindstrand, Nishimura, and Slater, 2015. 21. Gibson, 2012. 22. Amana, 2015. 23. Tanigawa et al., 2012. 24. Walker, 2005. 25. Erikson, 1991: 35. 26. Herber, 2015. 27. Musolino, DeFranco, and Schlueck, 2008. 28. Pigliucci and Boudry, 2013. 29. Porpora, 2015.

Chapter 9. Nuclear Labor, Its Invisibility, and the Dispute over Low-Dose Radiation 1. See “20 Millisieverts for Children and Kosako Toshiso’s Resignation,” 2011. 2. Hess, 2016. 3. Lindee, 1994: 256–57. 4. Lindee, 2016. 5. Suezaki, 2015; United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), 2017; Cardis et al., 2005; Leuraud et al., 2015; and interview with the authors (with Elisabeth Cardis, Barcelona, May 2012; and Klervi Leuraud, Paris, April 2016). 6. UNSCEAR, 2017. 7. Thébaud-Mony, 2011. 8. Shrader-Frechette, 2001. 9. Hecht, 2012a and 2012b. 10. Perrow, 2013: 65. 11. Jobin, 2013. 12. Yoneyama, 1999. 13. Hecht, 2013: 7. 14. Kuchinskaya, 2014. 15. Hecht, 2012c, 2014.

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16. Higuchi, 1996: 46–51; interviews with Watanabe Michiko and Higuchi Kenji, Tokyo, January 2002; interviews with Kataoka Akihiko and Murata Saburô, Osaka, April 2002. 17. Jobin, 2017. 18. Interviews with Fujita Yuko and Shimahashi Michiko (Shimahashi Nobuyuki’s mother), Tokyo, March 2002. See also Fujita, 1996; Shimahashi, 1999. 19. Reports by Watanabe Mikiko in CNIC Newsletters. Some of them are available in English on CNIC website, and see for instance Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, 2008. 20. Jobin, 2018; 2020. 21. Jobin, 2017; Kojima, 2017. 22. Interview with a source who requested anonymity, Paris, September 2011. For more elements of context, see Jobin, 2011. 23. Matsumoto, 2012; Kuchinskaya, 2014. 24. Lindee, 1994: 122–28. 25. Iida, 2016. 26. Based on my observations at several meetings arranged by Hibaku rōdō o kangaeru netto (Network to Reflect on Radiation Work) with representatives of the ministry in the period 2011–14 and regular correspondence and occasional interviews with labor activists since then. 27. Boudia, 2007; Hecht, 2012a; Kimura, 2016. 28. For an emblematic example of that literature, see Sutou, Doss, and Tanooka, 2014. On the “radiophobia” in Ukraine and Belarus, see Petryna, 2013; Kuchinskaya, 2014. 29. Kimura, 2016: 60–66. See also Kimura, 2018. 30. Interviews with Nagataki Shigenobu in Tokyo, July 25, 2011, and January 16, 2012. 31. Interview with Elisabeth Cardis at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology, Barcelona, May 2012. 32. Leuraud et al., 2015; Richardson et al., 2015. 33. Interviews with Klervi Leuraud, at Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN), Paris, in April 2016 and March 2017, and her lecture at the Citizen-Scientist International Symposium on Radiation Protection, in Fukushima, November 2016. See also Abbott, 2015. 34. Leuraud et al., 2015; Blettner, 2015. 35. Nagataki and Kasagi, 2015. 36. Doss, 2015. 37. Sutou, Doss, and Tanooka, 2014. 38. Cardis et al., 2006; World Health Organization, 2006. For many antinuclear activists, the latter item is almost a symbol of the organization’s submissiveness to the IAEA. See also The Chernobyl Forum, 2005. 39. Interview with Elisabeth Cardis, at the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), Barcelona, May 2012. 40. Cardis et al., 2006: 128 (emphasis added). 41. Cardis et al., 2005; Cardis 2007. 42. Leuraud et al., 2015; Richardson et al., 2015.

Chapter 10. Food and Water Contamination After the Fukushima Nuclear Accident 1. Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 2011. 2. “Radioactivity Exceeding the Standard Level Was Detected in Agricultural Products. Government Asked Producers to Refrain from Shipping Spinach and Milk,” 2011. 3. Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 2009.

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4. Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 2011. 5. Arita, 1996. 6. “Radioactive Iodine Was Detected in Tap Water from Five Municipalities in Fukushima,” 2011. 7. “Radioactive Substances Were Detected in Tap Water at the Kanamachi Water Purification Plant, Causing Problems with Infant Milk,” 2011, and “As Radioactive Iodine Was Detected in Tap Water, the Local Government Strengthened Its Inspection,” 2011. 8. Even in March 2012, a search for key phrases such as “water standards, radioactivity” (using a search engine such as Google) produced many results. 9. In terms of engineering and institutional safety, Japan’s nuclear facilities were originally designed to ensure that radioactive materials never leaked into the environment. If such a leakage happened, the government was supposed to protect against radiation according to the Basic Act on Disaster Control Measures of 1961. As a result of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, the Japa nese government drafted strong measures to be implemented during disasters, and the Nuclear Safety Commission circulated a notice titled “Guidelines for Disaster Prevention on the Periphery of the Nuclear Power Plant and Related Facilities,” known as the “Guidelines for Disaster Prevention.” This notice described detailed measures to be implemented in the event of a nuclear accident, such as providing emergency medicine and emergency monitoring. 10. Government of Japan, 1999. This act was passed following the Japan Nuclear Fuel Conversion Company’s accident in 1999. To be consistent with the act, the name of the earlier guideline was changed from “Guidelines for Disaster Prevention on the Periphery of the Nuclear Power Plant and Related Facilities” to “Guidelines for Nuclear Emergency Preparedness.” 11. International Atomic Energy Agency, 2011b: 43. 12. World Health Organization, 2004. 13. “Radioactivity Exceeding the Limit Was Detected in Agricultural Products in Five Prefectures, including Chiba, Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures,” 2011. 14. Provided, however, that this shall not apply to imported goods from foreign countries. If repeated problems were found with a par ticu lar product from a specific region, the minister of the MHLW could ban the products from that region, based on the Food Sanitation Act. 15. “Radioactivity Exceeding the Limit Was Detected Again in Spinach, but the Prefectural Government Said, ‘Shipping Is Possible,’ ” 2011. 16. Government of Japan, 1999: section 3, article 20. 17. “Prime Minister Naoto Kan Has Ordered the Suspension of Shipments of Spinach and Kakina Produced in Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures,” 2011. 18. “Masaru Hashimoto, Governor of Ibaraki Prefecture, Has Submitted an Urgent Request to the Central Government Asking It to Review Its Handling of the Suspension of Vegetable Shipments,” 2011. 19. The limit of exposure for the public in ordinary situations is 1 mSv per year. The impact of radioactive iodine during an emergency is determined through an evaluation of factors such as the calculated accumulation in the thyroid, which differs by age. Values close to regulatory values were detected for cesium, too. Kukitachina (another Japa nese vegetable) from Motomiya City in Fukushima Prefecture had a level of 82,000 Bq/kg, which is about 164 times higher than the regulatory limit and is equivalent to 1.31 mSv. 20. “The Kan Administration Is Expanding Restrictions on Agricultural Products, Even Though It Has Said that ‘It’s Safe,’ ” 2011.

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21. “Masaru Hashimoto, Governor of Ibaraki Prefecture, Has Submitted an Urgent Request to the Central Government Asking It to Review Its Handling of the Suspension of Vegetable Shipments,” 2011. 22. “Masaaki Osawa, the Governor of Gunma Prefecture, Asked the Government to Lift the Ban on Vegetable Shipments,” 2011. 23. Government of Japan, 2011. 24. “Korean Lettuce from Asahi City for Which Shipments Were Supposed to Have Been Restrained, Found to Be Sold in Tokyo,” 2011; “The Criteria of Voluntary Refrain Is Unclear,” 2011. 25. This is a problem caused by institutional design, not by members of the organization. Regarding institutional designs for the safety of food in Japan, see Kamisato, 2008. 26. Generally, producers seem to be ignorant of the existence of this type of asymmetry, whereas consumers find it apparent. Hence consumers will avoid suspicious products, so that they do not take the risk of becoming helpless victims. 27. In the Chiba prefectural government, radiation was monitored by the laboratory of atmosphere, noise, and vibration in the Environmental Research Center. 28. The need to restructure the roles of central and local governments in various ways was also discussed at the national government’s Reconstruction Design Council. 29. We should also point out that there is a misunderstanding of risk psychology. Many scientific experts observe that lay people tend to assess risks emotionally. These experts cite the theory of risk psychology developed by Paul Slovic, for example (Slovic, 1987). Risk psychology can provide us with beneficial insights, but it is by no means trying to educate the public by saying, “The scientifically correct way to be afraid is written in this book.” Risk psychology is based on the premises that risks—whether for citizens or experts—are socially constructed concepts, and that it is not useful to discuss which of the two groups of risk perceptions is scientifically true. Similarly, the famous psychological theory that “active risks are accepted even if relatively high” (Starr, 1969: 1233–34) is often misunderstood. This theory does not mean that humans are unreasonable. Rather, it simply clarifies the obvious fact that one can accept high risk brought about by oneself because one sees not only the risk, but also the benefits associated with it. 30. Kamisato, 2005. 31. The linear nonthreshold model holds that the risk is proportional to the dose and never becomes zero, so that there is a certain amount of risk even at low-dose exposure. In some ways, this model is a flattened hybrid of other models. Its adherents believe it will remain correct even when new scientific findings about radiation appear, and it is most widely accepted by groups such as the International Commission of Radiological Protection and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. 32. Beck, 1992: 36.

Chapter 11. Suffering the Effects of Scientific Evidence 1. This article is based on Yagi (2013), and the author revised it with accumulation of implications by current researches and translated it to English. This manuscript is supported by the JSPS and two JR West Relief Foundation research grants. 2. Since January  2010, I have been a participant in the Sorairo no Kai: JR Fukuchiyamasen jiko fushō-sha to kazoku-tō no kai (The association for those injured in the JR Fukuchiyama Line accident and their families)—a network of people injured in the Fukuchiyama

Notes to Pages 170–173

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Line accident and their families that focuses on making recommendations related to the investigation and measures for supporting the victims. My role is not to provide direct support to the victims (such as helping them negotiate compensation negotiation or get psychological counseling), but to help create a discussion forum for the various stakeholders involved. 3. While my discussion mainly concerns stories told by Ms. A, a victim of the Fukuchiyama Line accident, I also refer to data obtained from other victims (presented in quotation marks) and from my field notes. The chapter is also informed by interview data from victims of accidents such as the JAL 123 plane crash in 1985, the Shigaraki train disaster in 1991, the Minato Ward elevator accident in 2006, and other rail-crossing accidents. 4. The discussion in this chapter is based on the Fukuchiyama Line accident, employing field notes from a participant observer and data from interviews with the victims and their families (not including the bereaved). All of these subjects are referred to as “victims” in this chapter. 5. Naturally, the extent of the injuries varied. Some people were injured so severely that it was impossible for them to return to the daily life they had had before the accident, while others have resumed their pre-accident lives. Still, many who appear to have returned to their ordinary lives continue to experience significant pain, such as back and leg pain, as well as having a limited range of motion that is deemed unlikely to improve further. 6. I do not deny the validity of the study conducted in Fukushima Prefecture. First, there is no doubt it is essential to monitor the health and health management of residents of contaminated areas. Second, I believe it is necessary to consider scientific data of this sort when determining compensation. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that the feeling that causality cannot be disproved remains in the victims, suggesting that support measures should keep these factors in mind. 7. Although the terms “compensate” and “compensation” are used here, the victims in the Fukuchiyama Line accident stress that they are not necessarily demanding monetary compensation. They are asking the company at fault to cover the expenses pertaining to their attempts to return to life “before the accident” (including the various costs of complementary and alternative medicine, such as acupuncture and aromatherapy massage, which are not approved by medical insurance companies). 8. Concerns as to who would be accountable for damages if something further were to happen are common not only in the case of the Fukuchiyama Line accident but whenever nonexperts discuss scientific and technological issues. For example, Tadashi Kobayashi (2004) gives relevant details regarding a consensus conference on the subject of genet ically modified agricultural products. 9. In terms of the F-NPP accident, this point may not be entirely applicable, because news reports relating to Fukushima have increased in frequency compared to ones relating to the tsunami-stricken areas. As pointed out by Shineha and Tanaka (2017), the negative effect of the coverage of the tsunami-stricken areas being overshadowed by coverage of the F-NPP accident should not be discounted. The argument here is that applying any external scale of measurement to make a comparison is meaningless, as the injuries each victim suffered are absolute from that individual’s perspective. 10. Of course, there are cases in which people from the restricted area are relatively more fortunate than those in the low-dose radiation area, who are forced by the terms of a compensation agreement to stay there. 11. Many of those who suffered serious physical injuries were in the front part of the train, where many others were killed. Many of them say that they did not see or can hardly

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Notes to Pages 173–198

remember the disastrous scene because they lost consciousness immediately after the accident. Because their physical injuries were minor, many passengers in the rear part of the train saw or heard much more, even participating in rescue activities, and were confirmed to have symptoms of mental stress such as post-traumatic stress disorder. 12. The organization was founded on February 2, 2008, by interested individuals of the Fukuchiyama Line accident and their families. There are about twenty members, engaged in activities designed to promote satisfactory settlement negotiations (though they do not undertake group negotiation), help and cooperate with each other, communicate as a group the realization of truly safe and secure public institutions, and so on. The monthly meetings are attended by experts such as attorneys and clinical psychologists, in addition to victims and their families. 13. All other quotes from Ms. A are from the same interview. 14. From an interview conducted in the Kansai area. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Yanagida, 2011. 20. From an interview conducted in the Kansai area. 21. Tweet from @team_nakagawa, February 5, 2012.

Chapter 12. Building a Community-Based Platform for Radiation Monitoring After 3.11 1. Azby Brown et al., 2016; Murillo, 2016. 2. Tironi, 2015; Fischer, 2016; Fortun et al., 2017. 3. Scott, 2012; Marres and Lezaun, 2011. 4. Thorpe, 2007; Wynne, 2007. 5. Turner, 2003; Callon et al., 2011; Aguiton, 2015. 6. Kimura, 2016. 7. Brown et al., 2016: S85. 8. Plantin, 2014. 9. Ibid.: 69. 10. Azby Brown et al., 2016. 11. Lynch, 1985; Lynch and Woolgar, 1990; Dumit, 2004; Coopmans et al., 2014. 12. Brown, 2014a. 13. Gray et al., 2016. 14. Maharawal and McElroy, 2018. 15. Irwin, 1995; Murillo, 2016. 16. Irwin, 2015; Wylie et al., 2014; Kenny, Liboiron, and Wylie, 2019. 17. Aya H. Kimura and Kinchy, 2016; Phil Brown, 1992; Epstein, 1995. 18. Azby Brown, 2014b.

Chapter 13. The Closely Watched Case of Iitate Village 1. Gill, 2013; Nakanishi and Tanoi, 2013a. 2. “Readings of Environmental Radiation Level by Emergency Monitoring,” 2011b; “Readings of Environmental Monitoring Samples (Weed),” 2011a; US Department of Energy, 2011b; “Genpatsu no hokusei 30-kiro-nai, takai hoshasen-ryo-mai ga sora kara sokutei,” 2011; Fitzgerald, 2011; Imanaka, 2011; International Atomic Energy Agency, 2011a.

Notes to Pages 198–209

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3. “Act on Special Measures concerning the Handling of Environment Pollution by Radioactive Materials Discharged by the Nuclear Power Station Accident Associated with the Tohoku District,” 2011; Amana, 2015; Cabinet Office, 2012. 4. “Management of Off-Site Waste Contaminated with Radioactive Materials,” 2012: 11. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.; “Act on Special Measures concerning the Handling of Environment Pollution by Radioactive Materials Discharged by the Nuclear Power Station Accident Associated with the Tohoku District,” 2011. 7. Tamari et al., 2016. 8. Kurokawa, 2013; Amana, 2015. 9. Meskens, 2015: 9. 10. Jasanoff, 2004: 17. 11. “Evacuation Orders Lifted for Three More Fukushima Areas but Residents Slow to Return,” 2017. 12. “Current Evacuation Information,” 2018. 13. “Residents of Fukushima’s Iitate Village File Petition for Nuclear Damage Compensation to Restore Home Village,” 2015. 14. Private correspondence with author 2017. 15. Jasanoff, 2004: 36. 16. Holm, 2003; International Atomic Energy Agency, 2000; Amana, 2015. 17. Tamari et al., 2016. 18. Kuroda, 2017. 19. Bartlett et al., 2013. 20. “Readings of Environmental Radiation Level by Emergency Monitoring,” 2011. 21. “Extension Site of Distribution Map for Radiation Dose, Etc.,” 2018. 22. Azby Brown, 2012. 23. International Commission on Radiological Protection, 2007; Valentin, 2015. 24. Nomura et al., 2016; Naito et al., 2016; Miyazaki and Hayano, 2017. 25. “Safecast Report 2016—Linkedin SlideShare,” 2016; International Atomic Energy Agency, 2015. 26. United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2017; US Department of Energy, 2011b; Cassata et al., 2012. 27. Azby Brown et al., 2017a. 28. Funkowicz and Ravetz, 2003: 2. 29. “Ītatemura No Fukkō Ni Muketa Torikumi Ni Tsuite Hira Nari 28-Nen 6 Tsuki 12-Nichi Naikaku-Fu Genshiryoku Hisai-Sha Seikatsu Shien Chī mu Genshiryoku Saigai Genchi Taisaku Honbu Ītatemura Jū min Setsumeikai Shiryō,” 2017. 30. “Fukushima Disaster: Ongoing Nuclear Crisis: The Failure of Radioactive Decontamination in Iitate,” 2015; Greenpeace, 2016; Van Putte et al., 2017. 31. Fitzgerald, 2011. 32. Tao, 2015. 33. Azby Brown, 2016. 34. Azby Brown et al., 2017a. 35. “Joint ICTP-IAEA Workshop on Environmental Mapping: Mobilizing Trust in Measurements and Engaging Scientific Citizenry,” 2017; Azby Brown et al., 2017b; United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, 2017; Amana, 2015.

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36. Azby Brown et al., 2016; Yasuhito Abe, 2014; Hultquist and Cervone, 2018; Coletti et al., 2017; Fackler, 2016b; Makinen, 2016; Fifield and Oda, 2017. 37. Matsumoto and McNeill, 2017; Fackler, 2015; O’Reilly, 2017. 38. Lewontin, 2001.

Chapter 14. Describing and Memorializing 3.11 1. This work was supported by the Suntory Foundation, JSPS, and Seijo University. 2. Tanaka, Shineha, and Maruyama, 2013; Shineha and Tanaka, 2017. 3. Shineha and Tanaka, 2017. 4. Takano, Yoshimi, and Miura, 2012. 5. Shineha, 2013. 6. Niwa and Fujita, 2013. 7. Klein, 2007. 8. Fukushima University, 2012. 9. Fukushima University, 2018. 10. Ibid. 11. This section is based on Shineha, 2014. 12. Quoted in the memo from Toru Suto. 13. For example, Mr. Suto’s mentions were related to NHK news on the March 3, 2014. 14. Teikoku Data Bank 2015. 15. The Namie-Town Office 2014. 16. Waseda University, 2015. 17. The Namie-Town Office 2012; The Namie-Town Office 2014; The Namie-Town Office 2017. 18. Interview with Arifumi Hasegawa, March 6, 2014, Fukushima, Japan. 19. The Japa nese system of emergency radiation medicine was orga nized after the JCO critical incident at Tokai Village in 1999. See Hasegawa, 2013: 20 20. Interview with a doctor who chose to remain anonymous, April  20, 2015, Fukushima, Japan.

Chapter 15. Renegotiating Nuclear Safety After Fukushima 1. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011c. For critical overviews of the NRC review process, see Lochbaum, 2014; Union of Concerned Scientists, 2016. 2. A formal regulatory rule that took effect in September  2019 concluded some of the formal activities considered in this chapter. See US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2019a. 3. Regarding nuclear safety as nonnegotiable, see Eu ropean Nuclear Society, 2011; “Executive Summary: LINE Commission Report,” 2013; Lyons, 2008; Nuclear Energy Agency, 2010. These four examples come from a European industry advocacy group, a US state-level commission, a former NRC member, and an international nuclear development agency, respectively. For the concept of negotiated social order, see Strauss, 1978, and Schulman, 1993. 4. Kinsella 2007, 2010, and 2012. 5. Pritchard, 2012. 6. Latour, 2004: 22–23. 7. See, for example, Weinberg and Spiewak, 1984. Recognizing the challenges to this trope, the industry has moved toward less absolute terminology such as “inherently safer,” “inherent safety,” and “passive safety.”

Notes to Pages 225–233

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8. Kinsella, Andreas Collins, and Endres, 2015. 9. Kinsella, 2020. 10. LaPorte and Consolini, 1991: 19. 11. Roberts, 1990: 160. 12. LaPorte and Consolini, 1991; Roberts, 1989, 1990; Rochlin, 1993; Schulman, 1993; Weick, 1987; Weick and Roberts, 1993. 13. Beck, 1995: 67; Perrow, 1984; Kinsella, Andreas Collins, and Endres, 2015; Sagan, 1995. Perrow has characterized Fukushima as another example of “the inevitability of accidents” (2011: 44). 14. Weick and Sutcliffe, 2007; Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld, 1999. 15. Branch and Olson, 2011; International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991; Silbey, 2009; US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2013. 16. Bourrier, 2011: 18. 17. National Diet of Japan, 2012. 18. For a transinstitutional example involving nuclear power economic regulation and safety regulation, see Kinsella, Kelly, and Kittle Autry, 2013. 19. For example, a series of topic-focused online chats launched in April 2013 was suspended after five months pending further evaluation. My interviews with NRC staff members in May 2016 indicate that the tone of some online comments contributed to a conclusion that the chats were not providing a productive conversation. 20. Gieryn, 1983; Fisher, 1990; Lessl, 1988; Holmquest, 1990; Taylor, 1991 and 1994. 21. Gieryn, 1995; Kinsella, 2001; Kinsella, Kelly, and Kittle Autry, 2013. 22. Kingston, 2012a: 1; see also Aldrich, 2013; DeWit and Kaneko, 2011; Kelly, 2015 and 2017; Yoonho Kim, 2018; Kingston, 2012b and 2013b; Onitsuka, 2011; Shadrina, 2012; Sugiman, 2014. 23. Luhmann, 1990 and 2005. 24. Kinsella, Kelly, and Kittle Autry, 2013. 25. Kinsella, 2004; Kinsella and Mullen, 2007; Kinsella, 2015. Celine-Marie Pascale (2017) has used the term “vernacular epistemologies” to describe public knowledge constructed through media framing of nuclear risks. I, Kelly, and Kittle Autry have addressed other aspects of vernacular epistemology associated with communities and public interest groups that challenge official discourses and mass media representations of risk using forms of public expertise (see the items cited at the beginning of this note and Kinsella, Kelly, and Kittle Autry, 2013). 26. Callon, 1991; Latour, 2004; Law, 2012. 27. Hindmarsh, 2013; Kinsella, 2012; Pritchard, 2012. 28. Downer, 2014. 29. Kinsella, 2007, 2010, 2012, and 2020. 30. Carey, 2009. 31. Nuclear Energy Institute, 2007. 32. Cooper, 2011; Kinsella, Kelly, and Kittle Autry, 2013. 33. As of August 2019, approximately twenty-two entities were operating approximately ninety-eight nuclear power reactors at sixty sites in thirty US states. See US Nuclear Regulatory Commission 2019c; Cooper, 2011; Kinsella, Kelly, and Kittle Autry, 2013. 34. Kinsella, 2011; Kinsella, Andreas Collins, and Endres, 2015. 35. For the concept of public expertise, see Kinsella, 2004; Kinsella and Mullen, 2007.

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36. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2003. 37. For the black swan trope, see Taleb, 2010; for the external hazards trope, see Kimura and Budnitz, 1987. 38. Beck, 1995; Luhmann, 1990 and 1993. 39. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2012a, 2019a, 2019b. 40. For a discussion of post-Fukushima deliberations related to one reactor design, see US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011a (here and below, ML and SECY are NRC document categories; the documents are accessible via the agency’s online archiving system). 41. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2012c. 42. For the task force recommendations, see US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011c. For the subsequent discussions, see Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2019a, 2019b. 43. See Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2019a. For supporting materials, see US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2012c, 2018a. 44. The quote is from my notes from an NRC RIC panel session, March 13, 2013, Rockville, Maryland. 45. Regarding FLEX, see Nuclear Energy Institute, August 2012. 46. Nöggerath, Geller, and Gusiakov, 2011. 47. Kinsella, 2010 and 2012. See also US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2009. 48. The disagreement is recorded in my notes from an NRC meeting regarding seismic models, August 6, 2013. 49. Kinsella, 2020. 50. National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, 2012: 9. 51. See, for example, Von Hippel, 2011. 52. Perin, 2005: 8. See also Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1999. 53. Kinsella, 2011. 54. Federal budget politics have further limited the NRC’s capacity since the Fukushima disaster. One outcome affecting the industry’s expansion efforts was an NRC decision to delay the license review for a reactor construction project in South Carolina by three years. See US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2017. The project was later canceled by its parent corporation. 55. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011b. 56. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011c. 57. Regarding the balance between revising existing practices and making more fundamental changes, see US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011d; Nuclear Energy Institute, 2011b. Related discussions are summarized in my notes from an NRC meeting on Near-Term Task Force recommendations, October 11, 2011, Rockville, Maryland. 58. Discussions of these regulatory approaches are summarized in my notes from the NRC RIC sessions on March 13, 2013, Rockville, Maryland. 59. See US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2012b. 60. See US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2018b. 61. See Nuclear Energy Institute, February 2012. 62. Makhijani, 2011; Schneider et al., 2013. 63. The commissioners’ comments are recorded in my notes from a joint Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-NRC meeting, June  15, 2012, Rockville, Maryland, and the NRC RIC, March 12, 2013, Rockville, Maryland.

Notes to Pages 239–249

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64. Discussions of this topic are summarized in my notes from an NRC commissioner briefing on economic consequences of nuclear regulation, September  11, 2012, Rockville, Maryland. 65. Feldman and Fish, 2016; Herber, 2015. 66. Cooper, 2011 and 2012; Ramseyer, 2012. 67. See Armijo, 2012.

Chapter 16. International Reactions to Fukushima 1. Perin, 2005. See also Perin, 1998. 2. Cleveland, 2014a. 3. Quoted in Sanger, Wald, and Tabuchi, 2011. 4. “The Death of Trust,” 2012. 5. Dedman, 2014. 6. Quoted in Nagata, 2014. 7. Quoted in Dedman, 2014. For an earlier article on the NRC’s internal communication conflicts, see Mufson, 2012. 8. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2011b. 9. Quoted in Nuclear Energy Institute, 2011a. 10. Nuclear Energy Institute, Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, and Electric Power Research Institute, 2011: 4–5. 11. Kreps and Bosworth, 1993; Mendonca, Beroggi, and Wallace 2001; Perin, 1998; Weick, 1993 and 1998; Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld, 1999. 12. Nuclear Energy Institute, 2012. 13. Some of these efforts have been criticized for inadequately addressing beyond design basis threats: for example, restricting access to prevent a terrorist attack ignores one of the most common failures in complex systems, the insider threat. Protective perimeters and enhanced barriers may deter intruders, but they may also reduce first responder access to the site in case of an accident. 14. Nuclear Energy Institute, n.d. 15. Ibid.; US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 2003. 16. Lyman, 2016. 17. Le Hir, 2013. See also Bennhold and Jolly, 2011. 18. Autorité de sûreté nucléaire, 2014. 19. Ibid. 20. Comité d’orientation sur les facteurs sociaux, organisationnels et humains, 2017. 21. Secrétariat général de la défense et de la sécurité nationale, 2014. 22. Blavette, 2014. 23. “Le Périmètre d’intervention en cas d’incident élargi,” 2016. 24. Saraç-Lesavre, 2017; Saraç-Lesavre and Laurent, 2019. 25. Taylor and Dahl, 2011. 26. “EU Countries to Stress-Test Nuclear Plants,” 2011 (emphasis in the original). 27. “Berlakovich Wants Nuclear Power Plant ‘Stress Tests,’ ” 2011. 28. Jamet, 2012. 29.  WENRA Task Force, 2011. 30. European Nuclear Safety Regulator’s Group, n.d. 31. WENRA Task Force, 2011.

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32. European Nuclear Safety Regulator’s Group, 2013. The conventions were negotiated at the United Nations level. For the Convention on Nuclear Safety, see International Atomic Energy Agency, 1994. For the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, see International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997. 33. “Deux mois et demi pour les stress-tests européens ne serait pas admissible,” 2011. 34. For Gunther Oettinger’s Statement at the European Parliamentary debate hearing, see European Parliament, 2011. 35. Schwartzbrod, 2011. 36. Harrison, 2011. 37. “EU Countries Divided over Nuclear Stress Tests,” 2011. 38. Philips, 2011. 39. European Nuclear Safety Regulator’s Group, 2011. 40. Council of the European Union, 2012. 41. Renneberg, 2011. 42. Wenisch and Becker, 2012. 43. European Parliament, 2011. 44. Interview with a high-level officer of the EU Commission who requested anonymity, December 15, 2016, Luxembourg. 45. Saraç-Lesavre and Laurent, 2019. 46. European Commission, 2012. 47. Council of the European Union, 2014.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Sean Bonner is an associate professor at Keio University, in Tokyo. In 2011, he cofounded Safecast and currently serves as its global director. Azby Brown has lived in Japan since 1985. He joined the Faculty of Architecture at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 1995. His books include The Very Small Home  (2005),  Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan (2010), and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry (2014). Kyle Cleveland is an associate professor of sociology at Temple University’s Japan Campus, where he is faculty director of study abroad and honors programming. He is the founding director of the university’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, under whose auspices he has organized a series of lectures and symposia related to the Fukushima nuclear crisis. Martin Fackler has been a journalist in Asia for two decades, working most recently as assistant Asia editor at the New York Times and managing the newspaper’s coverage of China. He is the author or coauthor of eight books in Japanese, including the best-selling Credibility Lost: The Crisis in Japanese Newspaper Journalism After Fukushima (2012). In English, he was lead editor of Reinventing Japan: New Directions in Global Leadership (2018). Robert Jacobs is a professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima City University. He has published multiple books and articles, including Images of Rupture in Civilization Between East and West: The Perception of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Media (2016) and Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (2017). Paul Jobin is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan.

312

Contributors

Kohta Juraku is an associate professor of sociology at Tokyo Denki University. He is one of the coeditors of Reflections on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident: Toward Social-Scientific Literacy and Engineering Resilience (2015). Tatsuhiro Kamisato is a professor in the Graduate School of Global and Transdisciplinary Studies at Chiba University. He has also been a guest editorial writer at the Asahi Shimbun since 2014. His publications include Shokuhin Risuku: BSE to Modaniti (Food risk: BSE and modernity) (2005), Bunmei Tantei no Bouken (The adventures of a civilization detective) (2014), and Blockchain to iu Sekai Kakumei (The blockchain as a world revolution) (2019). Jeff Kingston is director of Asian Studies and a professor of history at Temple University Japan. Most recently he wrote The Politics of Religion, Nationalism and Identity (2019) and Japan (2019). William J. Kinsella is a professor of communication at North Carolina State University, where he directed the interdisciplinary program in science, technology, and society from 2009 to 2014. He is coeditor of and contributor to Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex (2008). Scott Gabriel Knowles is a professor in and head of the Department of History at Drexel University. He is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (2011). Robert Jay Lifton is a psychiatrist and writer who has taught at Yale University, Harvard University, the City University of New York, and who currently teaches at Columbia University. His books include  Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, which won a National Book Award; and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His most recent book is The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival. Luis Felipe R. Murillo is a research associate at the School of Data Science, University of Virginia, and director of librelab, a community laboratory for experimental work with free and open-source technologies. He was previously a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a technical consultant for the Research Data Alliance.

Contributors

313

Başak Saraç-Lesavre is a research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where she is working on the uses of robotic technologies for the cleaning up one of the world’s most complex sites of nuclear containment: Sellafield, United Kingdom. Sonja  D. Schmid is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. She is the author of  Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (2015). Ryuma Shineha is an associate professor in the Research Center on Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues at Osaka University. He specializes in science and technology studies. After 3.11, he started collaborative research on the media ecosystem concerning 3.11. James Simms is a freelance journalist and columnist in Tokyo, writing for publications that include Forbes and Kyodo News, and he has covered Japan’s politics and economy for over two decades. For fifteen years, he was the Tokyo correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, including serving as the Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist who analyzed business, regulatory, and economic issues in Japan and South Korea. Tatsujiro Suzuki is a professor at and vice director of the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University and a member of the Advisory Board of Parliament’s Special Committee on Nuclear Energy. In 2010–14 he was a vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission. In 1996–2009 he was an associate vice president of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Japan, and in 2005–09 he was a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Tokyo. Ekou Yagi is an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Co* Design, Osaka University. She has a background in social psychology, and her research interests include public engagement in science and technology.

INDEX

Aarhus Convention, 199 Abe, Shinzo, 65, 68, 91, 92 activism, 10, 29, 194, 197, 210, 247 activists, 153, 202 Aeon (supermarket), 166 Aircraft Accidents Investigation Commission (AAIC), 37, 39, 40 Aircraft and Railway Accidents Investigation Commission (ARAIC), 37, 40 Amagasaki City (Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan), 169 amakudari (“descent from heaven”), 101 American nuclear establishment, 29, 30 American Nuclear Society (ANS), 230–32 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), 26 antinuclear movements, 100, 139, 144, 194, 209, 210, 247, 248 Arduino, 185 Asahi City (Chiba Prefecture, Japan), 163, 165, 166 Asahi Shimbun, 21, 82, 84, 115, 118–20, 124, 125 as low as reasonably achievable principle (ALARA), 44, 143, 144, 153, 154 Association to Help Chernobyl, 205 atomic bomb, ix, x, 6, 8, 9, 31, 53, 56, 78, 146, 148, 154, 156 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), 53, 55, 146, 147, 152 atomic bomb survivors, 148, 154, 156 atomic energy, 25, 64, 68, 70, 71, 82, 83, 85, 97, 99, 104, 106, 109, 123, 124, 126, 130, 138, 139, 141, 149, 157, 162, 195, 232, 233 Atomic Energy Society of Japan, 109 Austria, 251 Autry, Meagan Kittle, 227

Baba, Tomatsu, 118, 131, 132, 133 Bank of Japan, 122 Barosso, Manuel, 251 Belarus, 149 Bento Geiger Counter, 185 Berlakovich, Nikolaus, 248 Bernstein, Carl, 114 Bettis labs for Naval reactors, 135 Birmingham, Lucy, 84 Blavette, Guillaume, 247 Blettner, Maria, 155 Bloomberg News, 43 Bonner, Sean, 183 Bourrier, Mathilde, 226 bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), 167 Bowonder, B., 38 Bradford, Peter A., 30 Brenner, Eliot, 243 Brown, Azby, 195, 197 Browns Ferry plant, 235 Brussels, 248 Budhathoki, Nama Raj, 192 Buesseler, Ken, 191 Canada, 47 Cardis, Elisabeth, 154–56 Carey, James, 230 Casto, Charles, 107 cesium (element), 159, 160, 162, 163, 178, 191, 202 Chernobyl (Nuclear Disaster), ix, 2, 5, 69, 85, 115, 124, 134, 139, 142, 149, 155, 156, 164, 179, 188, 205, 242 Chiba Prefecture (Japan), 160, 163–66 Chicago Convention, 37, 39 China, 71, 103, 104 Chubu Electric, 83 Churchill, Winston, 36

316

Index

Citizen Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), 150 citizen science, 10, 12, 141, 193, 194, 210 Cleveland, Kyle, 57, 127, 129, 132 climate change, 34, 231 Cold War, 78, 79 Columbia Accident Investigation Board, 36 Comet disaster, 35, 36 Commission on the Space Shut tle Challenger Accident (Rogers Commission), 36 Committee for Reforming Tokyo Electric Power and Overcoming 1F Challenges (TEPCO Committee), 68 Conference on Emergency and Disaster Studies, 192 Council on Energy and Environment (Japan), 65, 68 COVID-19 (pandemic), 6 Dampierre (Nuclear Power Plant), 246 debris (from disaster), 6, 7, 32, 33, 57, 63, 67, 68 decommissioning (of reactor), 66–69, 75, 76, 81, 82, 85–88, 90, 94, 178, 250 decontamination (radiation), 6, 53, 57, 68, 69, 88, 109, 110, 152, 199, 200, 219, 220 Dee Bridge disaster, 35 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 195, 196 Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), 85, 92 Dentsu, 84 denuclearization, 71 Department of Homeland Security (United States), 233, 245 Diaz, Nils, 100 disaster capitalism, 212, 222 disaster management, 6, 127, 247 Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI), 32, 33 dosimeter, 148, 149, 151, 152, 201, 203, 205 Doss, Mohan, 155 Edano, Yukio, 113, 164 Edison Electric Institute, 232 Edo River, 160 Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPC), 24 Electric Power Research Institute (California, United States), 232, 244 Endo, Kaoru, 115, 116

environmental advocacy community, 27, 29, 30 environmental monitoring, 183, 193, 206, 208 epidemiological studies, 146, 153, 156, 172 Erikson, Kai, 142 Europe, 10, 39, 193, 242, 248, 252, 253 European Atomic Energy Community, 70 European Commission, 250, 252, 253 European Commission and the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group (ENSREG), 250–53 European Union, 248, 254 evacuation zone(s), 5, 6, 89, 112, 115, 128, 129, 131, 134, 137, 138, 142, 165, 217 fallout, 52, 53, 56–60, 128, 130, 136, 137, 202 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, United States), 245 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, United States), 19, 245 Federal Works Agency (United States), 35 Fort Calhoun plant, Nebraska (United States), 235 France, 47, 71, 98, 104, 154, 242, 246, 247, 253 French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), 246 Freudenburg, William, 109 Fukuchiyama Line accident, 41, 169–73, 175–77 Fukushima Daiichi cleanup workers, 146, 147, 151, 152 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident (disaster), ix, x, 1, 5, 26, 29, 37, 41, 42, 48, 63, 64–66, 69, 73, 75, 77, 81, 83, 84, 90, 99, 101, 102, 107–9, 111, 139, 157, 158, 169, 170, 172, 173, 177, 197, 200, 203, 223, 232, 241, 243, 248 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 41, 42, 58, 66, 67, 68, 75, 89, 97, 99, 105, 112, 128, 129, 134–37, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 148, 151, 152, 153, 157, 158, 169, 177, 197, 204, 211, 212, 214, 217, 219, 220, 223, 228, 232 Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant, 111, 134, 148 Fukushima Medical University (FMU), 214, 219, 220, 221 Fukushima Prefecture (Japan), 2, 4, 5, 58, 63, 152, 158–60, 164, 169, 173, 185, 186, 197, 213, 217, 219, 220

Index Fukushima Saisei No Kai (Resurrection of Fukushima Association), 205, 206 Fukushima University, 213 Funabashi, Yoichi, 21, 22 Funkowicz, Silvio, 205 Futaba (Fukushima Prefecture, Japan), 5, 131, 217 gaiatsu (outside pressure), 106, 133 gamma radiation, 50–53, 55, 58–61 Geiger counter, 50, 52, 59, 183, 185, 188, 189, 207 genshiryoku-mura (nuclear village), 227 Germany, 160, 230, 237, 251 goyō gakusha (sponsored scholars), 153 Great Aanshin–Awaji (Kobe Earthquake), 31 Great East Japan Earthquake, 1, 7, 32, 157, 176, 179 Great Kanto Earthquake, 31 Greenpeace (organization), 29, 30, 205, 206, 233 Gronlund, Lisbeth, 30 Gunma Prefecture (Japan), 163–65 gyosei-shido (administrative advice), 163 Hamaoka power plant, 83, 150 Hamre, John, 105 Hanazumi, Hideyo, 111 Hanford Nuclear Site, 60, 188 Harrisburg Pennsylvania (United States), 142, 188 Hasegawa, Arifumi, 214, 219–21 Hashimoto, Masaru, 163, 164 Hatamura, Yotaro, 18–21, 41 Hatoyama, Yukio, 122 Hecht, Gabrielle, 148, 149 Helsinki (city), 249 hibaku rōdō o kangaeru netto (Network to Reflect on Radiation Work), 152 hibakusha (atomic bomb affected person), 6, 7, 10, 53, 54, 59, 148, 150 Hideyo Hanazumi, 111 Higashi, 211, 216 high-reliability organizations (HRO), 225, 226 Hirose, Masahito, 9 Hiroshima, ix, 2, 6–8, 53–55, 59, 61, 66, 78, 103, 123, 146, 147, 148, 152–54 Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, 146, 147, 152

317

Honma, Eichi, 31–33, 84 Horowitz, Andy, 10 Hurricane Katrina, 12, 19, 212 Hurricane Sandy, 235 Hymans, Jacques, 92, 93 Iidate Village (Fukushima Prefecture, Japan), 128, 159, 197–200, 202, 203, 206–10 Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, 246, 247 Institute of Nuclear Safety Systems, 109 International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, World Health Organization), 154, 156 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 71, 83, 99, 100, 138, 141, 149, 151, 155, 162, 195, 201, 204, 208, 233 International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), 195 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), 39 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, Japan), 39 International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP), 146, 149, 151, 153, 154, 156 International Commission on Radiological Protection, 141, 201 International Conference on Plutonium Policy, 71 International Olympic Committee, 68 Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations (ICANPS), 41, 45, 46, 49 ionizing radiation, 50, 136, 143, 147 Iraq War, 116, 212 Ishiba, Shigeru, 108 Ishinomaki (Myagi Prefecture, Japan), 31, 33 Ishinomaki High School (HIS), 214, 215 Jaczko, Gregory, 28–30, 242, 243 Japan Airlines, 39 Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC), 68, 69, 70–75, 85, 99, 101, 104, 130, 139 Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization (JAERO), 64, 82 Japan Atomic Power Company, 89, 149 Japan Center for Economic Research, 68, 86, 87

318

Index

Japa nese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 145 Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association Prize, 119 Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, 19 Japan Occupational Safety and Health Resource Center (JOSHRC), 150 Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), 128, 133, 135–37 Japan Transportation Safety Board (JTSB), 37, 40 Jasanoff, Sheila, 200, 201 Jomaru, Yoichi, 124, 125 JR Fuku-chiyamasen (jiko fushō-s ha to kazoku-t ō no kai, the association for those injured in the JR Fukuchiyama Line accident and their families), 173 Juraku, Kohta, 18, 23, 35

Koizumi, Junichiro, 111 Koriyama (Fukushima Prefecture, Japan), 6, 7, 129, 185, 203 Kosako, Toshisō, 145, 154 Kotoku, Shusui, 120 Kuchinskaya, Olga, 149, 152 Kurokawa, Kiyoshi, 20, 21, 23, 42–44 Kyodo (News Agency), 121

Kaihara, Toshitami, 32 kakina (Japa nese vegetable), 163, 164 Kaminoseki (Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan), 102 Kan, Naoto, 2, 21, 65, 82, 83, 92, 111, 128, 130, 134, 135 Kanamachi Water Purification Plant, 160 Kanno, Norio, 198 Kansai University Faculty of Safety Science, 32 Kasagi, Fumiyoshi, 155 Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, 110 Kasperson, Jeanne, and Roger, 38 Kawata, Yoshiaki, 33 Kawauchi (Fukushima Prefecture, Japan), 110 Kazuyuki, Iwasa, 149 Keio University, 150 Kelly, Ashley, 227 Kemeny Commission, 22, 36 kempeitai (military police), 122 Kimura, Aya, 193 Kimura, Shinzo, 115 Kinchy, Abby, 193 Kinsella, William J., 223 kisha clubs (press clubs), 83, 84 Klein, Dale, 107 Klein, Naomi, 212 Kobe University, 32

Macarthur, Douglas, 79 Mainichi Shimbun, 64, 119 Masataka, Shimizu, 134 Matsumoto, Miwao, 11, 48, 49, 152 McKinsey (Consulting Company), 108 Meiji era, 20, 78, 120, 123 meltdown (reactor), 1, 29, 62, 77, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 97, 98, 107, 111, 112, 117, 118, 128, 134, 136, 140, 141, 238, 243 Meskens, Gaston, 199 Mihama (Aichi Prefecture), 147 Mihama power plant, 147 Minamata disease, 178, 179 Minami Soma City (Fukushima Prefecture, Japan), 110 Ministerial Council for Nuclear Power Utilization, 47 Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), 165, 166 Ministry of Communication, 121 Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), 56, 130 Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW), 151, 152, 158–60, 165 Ministry of International Trade and Industry (METI), 66–68, 72, 77, 82–85, 87, 92, 98, 99, 102, 106, 108 Mitsuaki, Nagao, 150 Miyagi Shiryo Net (Miyagi Earthquake), 32 Miyamoto, Yoshio, 121

Lacoste, André Claude, 246 Latour, Bruno, 224 Law on Final Disposal of Specified Radioactive Waste, 71 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 77, 85, 90–92, 101, 103, 106–8, 111 Life Span Study (LSS), 53, 55–57, 59–61 Lifton, Robert Jay, 7 low-dose radiation, 145–47, 169, 172 Lyman, Edwin, 245

Index Motegi, Toshimitsu, 108 Murakami, Hiromi, 20 myeloma, 150 Nagasaki City (Nagasaki Prefecture), 8, 9, 53, 55, 59, 61, 78, 103, 123, 146, 147, 152–54 Nagasaki’s hibakusha (Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors), 148, 154 Namie (Fukushima Prefecture), 110, 118, 131–33, 214, 217, 219, 221 Nanasawa, Kiyoshi, 115 National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), 20, 22–25, 42–46 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (United States), 190 NBC News, 243 Nepal, 191, 192 Nevada (United States), 28, 60 New York Times, 19, 116, 118 NHK television, 84, 115, 131 Nihon Keizai Shimbun, 106, 121 Niigata Earthquake, 31 Nobuyuki, Shimahashi, 150 Nomura, Shuya, 44 North Korea, 71, 85 Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), 86, 91, 98, 99, 106, 115, 116 Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), 232, 236, 244, 245 nuclear energy policy, 73, 75, 76, 92, 199 Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), 24, 44, 45, 47, 66, 68, 89–91, 99, 106 nuclear safety, 19, 25, 26, 28, 29, 45, 64, 66, 86, 99, 109, 125, 223–28, 230, 232–37, 240, 241, 246, 247, 250, 252–54 nuclear village, 9, 34, 44, 77, 80–87, 92–94, 100–102, 108, 125, 227 nuclear weapons, 7, 8, 59, 70, 98, 103, 104, 191 nucleocrats, 156 Obama, Barack, 28, 85 Oettinger, Günther, 248, 250, 252 Ohtsuka, Kohei, 163 Okuma (Fukushima Prefecture), 131 Olympics, 2020 Japan, 68, 215 Omori, Junro, 115 Onagawa (Miyagi Prefecture), 3

319

OpenStreetMap, 191 Operation Tomodachi (Operation Friendship), 133 Osaka (Prefecture), 91, 149 Ozawa (Ichiro), 122 Ozawa, Ichiro, 122 Pacific War (World War II), 80, 134, 138 Palo Alto, California (United States), 244 Perin, Constance, 237, 241, 245 Perrow, Charles, 147, 225 plutonium (element), 60, 66, 69, 71, 85, 103, 106 Pritchard, Sara, 224 QuakeMaps, 192 Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), 8, 53, 147, 152 radiation-mapping, 203 radiation monitoring, 130, 138, 183–88, 192, 194–96, 203–7, 209 radioactive contamination, 159, 160, 163, 167, 198, 200, 201 radioactive waste, 71–73, 75, 87, 88, 109, 136, 250 radiophobia, 60, 153 Ramseyer, Mark, 93 Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (RIJIF), 21–23, 37, 45 Regulatory Information Conference (RIC), 230, 234 Remes, Jacob A. C., 10 Renewable Energy Institute, 87 Rogers, William, 36 Rokkasho reprocessing plant, 69–71, 88, 150 Sadako, Sasaki, 6, 7 Safecast, 141, 183–96, 205, 208 Saitama Prefecture, 160 Sakurai, Katsunobu, 110, 111, 113 Samuels, Richard, 93 Sasada, Hironori, 79 Sato, Daisuke, 31, 33 science and technology studies (STS), 11, 161, 224, 227 Science Council of Japan (SCJ), 40, 41, 72, 73, 101 Scifabric, 193 Shigaraki train disaster, 173

320 Shigenobu, Nagataki, 153 Shimahashi, Noboyuki, 150, 151 shipping ban, 165, 166 Shoriki, Matsutaro, 101, 124 Shujitsu University, School of Pharmacy of, 61 Shunichi, Tanaka, 89, 91, 155 Sierra Club (Organization), 233 slow disaster (concept), 10, 30, 31 Soviet Union (former country), 79, 103, 104 station blackout, 26, 100, 128, 136, 243 Stigler, George, 44, 102 Strategic Energy Plan, 65, 66, 71 Strauss, Anselm, 224 structural disaster (concept), 11, 48, 49, 152 Sun’ichi, Yamashita, 153, 155 Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP), 79 Suto, Toru, 214–17, 221 Sutou, Shizuyo, 61 System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI), 45–47, 49, 118, 119, 123, 130, 132, 135 Sythe, Dan, 188 Tachibana, Takashi, 114 Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 35 Ta-dashi, Kiyuna, 150 Taisho Democracy, 120 Takahagi City (Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan), 159 Takano, Akihito, 212 Takeshita, Noboru, 115 Taleb, Nassim, 234 Tama City, Tokyo (Japan), 160 Tanaka, Kakuei, 115 Tatsujiro, Suzuki, 85 Thornburgh, Richard, 142 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 2, 22, 26, 36, 37, 104, 109, 124, 130, 142, 156, 161, 188, 225 thyroid cancer, 5, 52, 147, 155 Tochigi Prefecture (Japan), 163, 164 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami, 1, 223 Tōhoku University, 31, 33 Tokaimura accident, 98–100, 147 Tokai Nuclear Power Plant, 88, 89 Tokutomi, Soho, 120

Index Tokyo, 2, 5, 21, 37, 68, 85, 89, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 117, 120, 121, 122, 126, 129, 130, 134, 139, 150, 152, 157, 160, 163, 166, 185, 215, 243 Tokyo District Prosecutor’s Office, 43 Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), 2, 18, 24, 37, 67, 83, 97, 114, 128, 148, 176, 199, 213 Tokyo Hacker Space, 185 Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 160, 163 Tomioka (Fukushima Prefecture, Japan), 131, 148 Toshiba (company), 78 Toyo (Kōchi Prefecture), 72 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 103 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 22 triple disaster (concept), 1, 9, 18, 30, 31, 183–85, 187, 193, 194 Ulrich, Beck, 168 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), 28, 231 United Kingdom (UK), 35, 39, 70, 107, 154 United States, 18, 22, 25–29, 34–37, 70, 71, 79, 80, 97, 98, 103, 104, 106, 109, 114, 116, 117, 119, 133, 135, 137, 154, 160, 187, 188, 193, 195, 223, 227, 230, 231, 237, 241–43, 253, 254 University of California, Los Angeles, 20 University of Chicago, 102 University of Tokyo, 18, 20, 41, 145, 207 uranium (element), 98, 103, 145, 147, 149 US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 25, 68, 70, 85, 97, 99, 130, 139 Ushahidi, 192 US National Transportation Safety Board, 37 US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 25–30, 100, 107, 133, 135–37, 223, 226–30, 232–39, 242–45, 253 US Pacific Command, 133, 137, 138 Vienna (Austria), 155 visualization (data), 185, 189, 190 Waseda University, 219 Washington (State), 60, 188 Washington, DC, 30, 79, 97, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 120, 230 waste disposal, 66, 71, 72, 76, 81, 82, 90

Index Water Supply Division of the Health Ser vice Bureau, 159 Western European Nuclear Regulators Association (WENRA), 249, 250, 252 West Japan Railway Company (JR West), 41, 169, 170 Wiener Zeitung, 248 Woodall, Brian, 80 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 191 World Association of Nuclear Operators, 232 World War II, 12, 20, 78, 93, 114, 123, 137

321

Yamada, Hirotami, 8 Yamamoto, Hiroshi, 115 Yamaoto (Miyagi Prefecture, Japan), 212 Yokosuka Naval Base, 137 Yomiuri Shimbun, 101, 118, 124 Yorimitsu, Takaaki, 119, 120 Yoshihiko, Noda, 85, 105 Yo-shimi, Shunya, 212 Yucca Mountain, Nevada (United States), 28 Yuko, Fujita, 150 Zaibatsu (family-owned conglomerates), 79

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

This project began when disaster scholars from around the world realized they wanted to be together, to cope, share, and learn. We organized four linked panels at the 2012 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, in Copenhagen. Many of the authors in this book met each other for the first time there or the next year in Berkeley, California, at the STS Forum on Fukishima: Building a Transnational Research Agenda and Strategy for Engagement Through a Social Scientific Understanding of Disasters and Disaster Sciences, organized by Atsushi Akera, Kim Fortun, and Cathryn L. Carson and sponsored by the National Science Foundation. These meetings were intense and honest, and the process of building a collaborative work took time. Authors and editors have traveled together—for example, the three editors visited Namie, Japan, together in 2017. We have presented drafts and shared highs and lows, and each of the editors is glad to have come together for this project, especially in time for the tenth anniversary of 3.11. The three editors wish to thank the brilliant and diverse authors in the volume and to acknowledge the fine editing chops of Edward Blum and Bucky Stanton. We offer bottomless thanks to our editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Bob Lockhart, as well as to the staff of the press and the two anonymous reviewers who provided helpful critiques. Kyle Cleveland would like to thank Maho Cavalier for her friendship, hard work, and patience in the early stage of this research; Hikari Hida, Doug Miller, Sakura Takahashi, Drew Fernando, Sarah Mortland, Max Kuroiwa, and Toshikazu Aizawa, who, as interns at Temple University Japan (TUJ), translated ethnographic research interviews; Mariko Nagai, who, as director of research at TUJ, helped fund this research; Robert Dujarric and Eriko Kawaguchi for their support through the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at TUJ; Arn Howitt, Horst Miska, Leo Bosner, David Lochbaum, Andy Pardieck, David Johnson, and Charles Casto for their technical expertise; the military guys (you know who you are) who kept this research on an

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Acknowledgments

even keel; and, most important, my wife, Kyoko, a child of Fukushima, who helped me never lose sight of the emotional reality of 3.11 in our lives. Scott Gabriel Knowles would like to thank Eichi Honma, Ms. Katsuki, Ken Kawamura, Miwao Matsumoto, John Morris, Daisuke Sato, Amy Slaton, Kerry Smith, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for financial support of research conducted in 2015, as well as Drexel University. He also wishes to thank his support staff: Mercer, Gabriel, and Julia for being the best traveling companions (Curry Shop Alps is the best!) Ryuma Shineha wishes to thank Suto Toru especially, and to acknowledge support by grant-in-aid from Seijo University (Tokubetsu-Kenkyu-Joseikin), the Suntory Foundation, and the Research Branding Project for Private Universities.