In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust
Reuters
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, damaged by atsunami on March 11, became the site of the worst nuclear disaster sinceChernobyl, as workers successfully warded off a complete meltdown, butcould not prevent the release of considerable amounts of radioactivematerial.
TOKYO — On the evening of March 12, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclearplant’s oldest reactor had suffered a hydrogen explosion and risked acomplete meltdown. Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked aides to weigh therisks of injecting seawater into the reactor to cool it down.
Multimedia
Timeline: A Nuclear Crisis
Tokyo Electric Power Co., via Reuters
MASAO YOSHIDA The manager of thepower plant, he ignored orders to stop pumping seawater into a reactorto cool it, an act of defiance that may have prevented many deaths.
At this crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who hadbuilt his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’sindustry and bureaucracy was acting nearly in the dark. He had receiveda confusing risk analysis from the chief nuclear regulator, a ferventlypro-nuclear academic whom aides said Mr. Kan did not trust. He was alsowary of the company that operated the plant, given its history oftrying to cover up troubles.
Mr. Kan did not know that the plant manager had already begun usingseawater. Based on a guess of the mood at the prime minister’s office,the company ordered the plant manager to stop.
But the manager did something unthinkable in corporate Japan: hedisobeyed the order and secretly continued using seawater, a decisionthat experts say almost certainly prevented a more serious meltdown andhas made him an unlikely hero.
The convoluted drama has exposed the underlying rifts behind Japan’shandling of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, which eventuallyresulted in explosions at four of the plant’s six reactors. Mutuallysuspicious relations between the prime minister’s aides, governmentbureaucrats and company officials obstructed smooth decision-making.
At the drama’s heart was an outsider prime minister who saw the need forquick action but whose well-founded mistrust of a system of alliancesbetween powerful plant operators, compliant bureaucrats and sympatheticpoliticians deprived him of resources he could have used to makebetter-informed decisions.
A onetime grass-roots activist, Mr. Kan struggled to manage the nuclearcrisis because he felt he could not rely on the very mechanismsestablished by his predecessors to respond to such a crisis.
Instead, he turned at the beginning only to a handful of close,overwhelmed advisers who knew little about nuclear plants and who barelyexchanged information with the plant’s operator and nuclear regulators.Struggling to manage a humanitarian disaster caused by the tsunami, Mr.Kan improvised his government’s response to the worsening nuclearcrisis, seeming to vacillate between personally intervening at the plantand leaving it to the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, knownas Tepco.
“There were delays. First of all, we weren’t getting accurateinformation from Tepco,” said Kenichi Matsumoto, an adviser to Mr. Kan.But Mr. Matsumoto added that the prime minister’s distrust of Tepco andbureaucrats “interfered” with the overall response.
The early disarray alarmed the United States government enough that itincreasingly urged the Japanese to take more decisive action, and to bemore forthcoming in sharing information. Making matters worse was Mr.Kan’s initial reluctance to accept the help of the United States, whichoffered pump trucks, unmanned drones and the advice of American nuclear crisis experts.
“We found ourselves in a downward spiral, which hurt relations with theUnited States,” said Manabu Terada, a lawmaker who served as an aide toMr. Kan at that time. “We lost credibility with America, and Tepco lostcredibility with us.”
Lack of Experience
Even some supporters say that Mr. Kan could have moved faster and moredecisively if he had used Japan’s existing crisis management system.
The system was created in 1986 and subsequently strengthened by Japaneseleaders who had sought more power for the prime minister. Modeled oncrisis management in the White House — even down to the Situation Roomunder the prime minister’s office — the system brought togetherbureaucrats from various ministries under the direct command of theprime minister, said Atsuyuki Sassa, the head of the Cabinet SecurityAffairs Office in the late 1980s.
Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass thissystem, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted adviserswith little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked himfrom grasping the severity of the disaster sooner. Sometimes thoseadvisers did not even know all the resources available to them.
This includes the existence of a nationwide system of radiationdetectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental EmergencyDose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they didnot learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into thecrisis.
Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg News
NAOTO KAN Japan's prime minister wonsuccess as a political outsider, but his wariness of the cozyrelationships between industry and bureaucrats discouraged communicationat a crucial moment.
Pool photo by Franck Robichon
GOSHI HOSONO A trusted aide to Mr.Kan, he began monitoring operations at Tokyo Electric Power Company daysafter the disaster, which helped the government get control of thesituation.
If they had known earlier, they would have seen Speedi’s earlyprojections that radiation from the Fukushima plant would be blownnorthwest, said one critic, Hiroshi Kawauchi, a lawmaker in Mr. Kan’sown party. Mr. Kawauchi said that many of the residents around the plantwho evacuated went north, on the assumption that winds blew southduring winter in that area. That took them directly into the radioactiveplume, he said — exposing them to the very radiation that they werefleeing.
Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry ofEducation, which administers Speedi, why they did not make theinformation available to the prime minister in those first crucial days,they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them forit.
“It’s more of an emotional thing,” Mr. Matsumoto said of Mr. Kan. “He never trusts bureaucrats.”
That is a legacy from Mr. Kan’s stint as health minister in themid-1990s, when he became wildly popular after exposing his ownministry’s use of blood tainted with H.I.V., which led to hundreds ofhemophiliacs dying of AIDS. Mr. Kan found that bureaucrats andpharmaceutical company officials had long known of the tainted blood.
To Mr. Kan, the nuclear establishment — with politically connectedutilities abetted by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Economy, Trade andIndustry and compliant academics — represented the worst example of thiskind of collusion, Mr. Matsumoto said.
Ignoring Orders
The seawater example is telling.
In testimony in Parliament in late May, Mr. Kan said that he askedadvisers to weigh the risks that the seawater injection could cause“recriticality,” a phenomenon in which nuclear fission resumes in meltednuclear fuel lying on the floor of a storage pool or reactor core. Mr.Kan’s aides said they grew worried after Haruki Madarame, the chairmanof the Nuclear Safety Commission, a nuclear regulator in the primeminister’s office, warned that the chances of this happening were “notzero.”
On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, Tepco executiveshad ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But21 minutes later, they ordered the plant’s manager, Masao Yoshida, tosuspend the operation. They were relying on an account by the Tepcoliaison to the prime minister, who reported back that he seemed to beagainst it.
“Well, he said that was the atmosphere or the mood,” Sakae Muto, Tepco’sexecutive vice president, explained at a news conference.
Mr. Sassa, the former head of the Cabinet Security Affairs Office, said:“Mood? Is this a joke? Making decisions based on mood?” But Mr. Yoshidachose to ignore the order. The injections were the only way left tocool the reactor, and halting them would mean possibly causing an evenmore severe meltdown and release of radiation, experts said.
Mr. Yoshida had the authority as the plant manager to make the decision,said Junichi Matsumoto, a senior official at Tepco. And indeed,guidelines from the International Atomic Energy Agency specify thattechnical decisions should be left to plant managers because a timelyresponse is critical, said Sung Key-yong, a nuclear accident expert whoparticipated in the agency’s recent fact-finding mission to Japan.
After revealing in May that he had ignored the order, Mr. Yoshidaexplained himself to a television reporter by saying that “suspendingthe seawater could have meant death” for those at the plant.
Mr. Yoshida, 56, according to friends, is a square-jawed, hard-drinkingand sometimes rough-talking man who is a straight shooter. Apractitioner of kendo in his youth, he also quotes from Raymond Chandlerand enjoys cooking Italian food.
“In class, if a teacher didn’t explain something properly, he’d push foran explanation that satisfied him,” said Masanori Baba, a childhoodfriend.
His candor impressed Mr. Kan, who met him the day after the tsunami whenhe took a trip on a military helicopter to the plant. They shared awillingness to buck the system, as Mr. Kan had when he uncovered thetainted blood scandal. And, in a country where alumni ties are extremelyimportant, they found they had attended the same college, the TokyoInstitute of Technology.
Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg News
MASATAKA SHIMIZU Tepco's president.His request that Tepco be allowed to withdraw its employees from theplant because of the danger alerted the prime minister to the fullgravity of the disaster.
“One or two days later, Mr. Kan said Mr. Yoshida was the only one hecould trust inside Tepco,” Mr. Matsumoto, the adviser to Mr. Kan,
said.
Last week, Tepco gave Mr. Yoshida its lightest punishment of a verbal reprimand for defying the order.
Distrust and Distraction
Mr. Kan’s critics and supporters alike say his suspicions of Tepco werewell-founded. In the early days after the March 11 disaster, Tepcoshared only limited information with the prime minister’s office, tryinginstead to play down the risks at the plant, they said.
Tepco declined to make senior executives available for this article. Mr.Matsumoto, the Tepco senior official, said at a news conference thatthe company had provided information as best as it could. He declined tocomment on Mr. Kan’s reported lack of trust of Tepco.
Yet the Kan government essentially left the handling of the nuclearcrisis in the crucial first three days to Tepco, focusing instead onrelief efforts for the hundreds of thousands left homeless, Mr. Teradaand other aides said. Then on March 14, the gravity of the plant’ssituation was revealed by a second explosion, this time at Reactor No.3, and a startling request that night from Tepco’s president, MasatakaShimizu: that Tepco be allowed to withdraw its employees from the plantbecause it had become too dangerous to remain.
When he heard this, Mr. Kan flew into a rage, said aides and adviserswho were present. Abandoning the plant would mean losing control of thefour stricken reactors; the next day, explosions occurred at the tworemaining active reactors, No. 2 and No. 4.
“This is not a joke,” the prime minister yelled, according to the aides.
They said Mr. Kan convened an emergency meeting early on March 15,asking advisers what more could be done to save the reactors. Then hegave Tepco barely two hours’ warning that he planned to visit thecompany.
At 5:30 a.m., Mr. Kan marched into Tepco headquarters and stationed oneof his most trusted aides, Goshi Hosono, there to keep tabs on thecompany.
Mr. Kan gave a five-minute impromptu pep talk, said his aide, Mr. Terada.
“Withdrawing from the plant is out of the question,” Mr. Kan told them.
Advisers said the placement of Mr. Hosono in Tepco was a turning point,helping the prime minister to take direct control of damage-controlefforts at the plant. “For the first time, we knew what Tepco wasdebating, and what they knew,” said one adviser, who asked not to beidentified.
However, even Mr. Kan’s supporters acknowledge that the move came too late.
“We should have moved faster,” said Masanori Aritomi, a nuclear engineerat the Tokyo Institute of Technology and an adviser to Mr. Kan. Mr.Aritomi said that even with Mr. Hosono stationed inside Tepco, thecompany still did not disclose crucial information until mid-May,including final confirmation that three of the plant’s four activereactors had melted down.
Strains With an Ally
The poor flow of information and ad hoc decision-making also strainedJapan’s relationship with the United States, which has about 50,000military personnel stationed in Japan.
While Japan was quick to accept the American military’s offers to helpvictims of the tsunami, the perception in Washington in the early days,that it was being rebuffed and misled in the unfolding nuclear disaster,had created “a crisis in the United States-Japan alliance,” saidAkihisa Nagashima, a former vice minister of defense.
Within 48 hours of the earthquake, officials from the United StatesNuclear Regulatory Commission arrived in Tokyo, but they were unable toget information or even arrange meetings with Japanese counterparts.Meanwhile, Washington became convinced that Tokyo was understating thedamage at the plant, based on readings that the Americans were gettingaround the plant from aircraft and satellites normally used to monitorNorth Korean nuclear tests, said one American official, who asked not tobe named.
According to this official, the Obama administration made a decision “tolean on the Kan government” to share more information. On March 16,American officials, including the ambassador to Japan, John V. Roos,informed their Japanese counterparts that the United States would adviseits citizens to evacuate an area 50 miles around the plant — muchlarger than the 18-mile voluntary evacuation zone then established byJapan.
The Americans also began voluntary evacuations of nonessential personnelat their bases, and hinted at more drastic steps, even pulling out someessential military personnel, if Tokyo did not share more information,said this American official and Japanese officials, including Mr.Terada.
To show Washington and an increasingly anxious Japanese public thatutmost efforts were being made, Mr. Kan deployed military helicopters todrop water into the reactors, Mr. Terada and other Japanese adviserssaid, adding they knew this would have only a limited effect on coolingthem. On March 17, on live television, the helicopters dropped waterfrom the air, though strong winds clearly blew much of the water offcourse.
Still, Mr. Terada said that Mr. Kan personally called President Obama totell him the operation was a success. Later that day in Washington, Mr.Obama paid a visit to the Japanese Embassy to sign a book ofcondolences — a gesture seen in the prime minister’s office as a nod ofapproval by the American president.
Mr. Nagashima said the American demands to be better informed ultimatelyimproved Japan’s own response. On March 20, he brought a proposal toMr. Kan for a daily meeting between American and Japanese officials tocoordinate information and discuss responses to the nuclear accident.
The first such meeting was held a day later at the prime minister’soffice. Mr. Nagashima said the meetings lasted an hour and a half, andusually involved about 50 people, including officials from the AmericanNuclear Regulatory Commission, the United States Embassy and themilitary, as well as a far larger Japanese group made of politicalleaders, people from five ministries, from nuclear agencies and fromTepco. The meeting was led by Mr. Hosono, who by then had become theprime minister’s point man on the nuclear response.
Mr. Nagashima said that even more important was what happened before theAmericans arrived: the Japanese met an hour beforehand to discussdevelopments and to work out what they were going to tell the Americans.Mr. Nagashima said the meeting brought together the various ministriesand Tepco, with politicians setting the agenda, for the first time sincethe crisis began.
“The Japanese side needed to gather everybody in the same room,” Mr.Nagashima said. “U.S. irritation became a chance for Japan to improveits disaster management.”