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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 October 1999 Issue No. 450 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 October 1999 Issue No. 450
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Interview Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Buckets!
By Gamal NkrumahLast Thursday, workers at a uranium processing plant mistakenly set off a nuclear fission reaction, thus causing quantities of radioactive gases to be spewed into the air over Tokaimura, a remote coastal village of 33,000 people about 110 km north-east of Tokyo.
"You can't just blame this accident on the workers," fumed one outraged Japanese commentator on the NHK television channel. "There are much more fundamental problems that must be addressed."
He certainly has a valid point. The Tokaimura disaster could have been averted, had the nuclear reactor's managers insisted on the use of readily available state-of-the-art technology to perform certain highly technical tasks. Instead, they economised, resorting to sub-contracted manual labour. Japan -- and the world -- learned with horror that the workers used buckets to transfer uranium solution to a mixing tank. Because the transfer was performed manually, instead of using the proper apparatus, human error could creep in. Last week, 35 pounds of uranium thus came to be erroneously loaded into a container -- 80 times the normal amount.
You would think that Tokaimura's managers would have known better. Not only did they grossly miscalculate the margin of human error (which was immense), but in their lust for higher profits they actually sub-contracted inexperienced labourers to do what ought to be a highly skilled job. That such practices occur in a highly industrialised and technologically-sophisticated country like Japan is at once a marvel and a revelation.
"Everyone thinks the nuclear industry is high-tech, but there are many low-tech aspects," one technical expert explained.
The Tokaimura incident is Japan's worst nuclear accident to date. About 55 people, mainly workers and emergency personnel who were called out, were exposed to radiation. Three are in a critical condition, and their chances of survival are reported to be slim. About 150 people who lived in the vicinity of the plant had to be evacuated. Barriers of aluminium and sandbags were erected around the site, and soil, people, livestock and plants have all been tested. Frightened villagers meanwhile flocked to their nearest health and community centres to demand medical check-ups.
As we race towards the new millennium, it seems to have become unfashionable to care, to bother over the issues of life and death. One sign of this is the ominous, fatalistic irreverence that is gripping the nuclear industry worldwide. The ramifications of this generalised disdain are horrendous -- if such disasters can happen in Japan, what can we expect from the poorer and less advanced economies of Eastern Europe and South Asia? We are learning the hard way what we should have known all along -- that nuclear technology is too complicated for ordinary mortals to handle. Let us only hope that we can learn it fast enough.
The Japanese authorities have long been accustomed to dealing with protest movements over nuclear issues. But public opinion is growing increasingly impatient with the lackadaisical, almost cynical official attitude to the recent spate of nuclear mishaps. This week again, angry demonstrations erupted all over Japan. The tension was palpable. "If one worker's error leads to a serious accident, the safety system itself must be regarded as flawed," wrote an indignant editorialist in the Asahi, one of the country's leading newspapers. "This is Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
The government response was contrite, but unbowed. "Unfortunately we must admit that we were behind in dealing with this accident," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiromu Nonaka conceded to reporters in Tokyo last Friday. "We admit that in deciding how serious the accident was, our assessment was inadequate."
However, Nonaka also stressed that the accident would not lead to a rethink of the government's nuclear policy for Japan. Over a third of all the country's electricity needs are generated by nuclear power. Despite the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resource-poor Japan, with little coal and no oil to fall back upon, was compelled to become a world pioneer in the atomic energy industry, in order to compete with Europe and the US in the great post-War development race.
When last week's disaster first hit the headlines, few outside Japan realised that this was merely the latest incident in a seemingly endless chapter of nuclear mishaps. Yet the Japanese nuclear industry had been dogged in recent years by a series of serious accidents and attempted cover-ups.
In December 1995, in Monju, western Japan, a reactor at a state-run Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC) plant leaked three tonnes of sodium coolant. Then, in March 1997, a fire at another PNC reprocessing plant, this one in Tokaimura, exposed 37 workers to radiation, leading to the shutting down of the nuclear waste treatment facility which reprocessed 12 per cent of the country's spent fuel.
Barely a week later, another of PNC's production plants, also at Tokaimura, had to be shut down following a false alarm that a reaction had reached critical mass -- the danger point at which a nuclear reaction becomes self-sustaining. The following month, PNC disclosed that there had also been an accident just the day before at the Fugen thermal reactor in western Japan, during which quantities of radioactive tritium were leaked. Widely criticised for gross mismanagement, the PNC was investigated and finally shut down itself -- only to be relaunched in October 1998 under the new and inspiring name of the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute (JNC).
Nor is this spate of disasters something which is peculiar to Japan. In 1979, an accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania rocked America. And of course, there was also Chernobyl, the world's worst ever nuclear catastrophe, whose full environmental and health impacts are still poorly understood and doubtless grossly underestimated. Linking all these disasters is an underlying trend: nuclear reactors are being sold off by the state to private corporations. In the effort to cut costs and raise profits, the new managers are skimping on safety procedures, as well as resorting extensively to subcontracted unskilled labourers to carry out some of the most dangerous jobs.
The Tokaimura disaster has come just as the Japanese government is churning out full-volume propaganda campaigns to try and improve its citizens' "understanding" of nuclear power, and thus persuade them to trust both the technology and the system. Moreover, Japan is playing an increasing role in the provision of technical assistance and information to Asian and East European countries. Japanese specialists are sent overseas to train local scientists, while more and more engineers, supervisors and students from around the world are travelling to Japan to learn their trade.
But can even the most learned specialist devise a solution to the problem of nuclear waste? Three days after the Tokaimura disaster, two ships loaded with MOX (a deadly mixture of recycled uranium and plutonium) docked in Fukui, northern Japan. Greenpeace warned that the shipments contained enough material to make 60 nuclear bombs, had they been hijacked at sea.
For those who respond to more occult coincidences, the Tokaimura disaster came only days after the announcement that a leading member of the Aum Shinrikyo, or Supreme Truth Cult, was sentenced to death in a Japanese court for releasing poisoned gas into the Tokyo subway four years ago.
So what is to be done? The problem that confronts not just the Japanese, but all nuclear states is one that can no longer be solved by greater investment in disaster preparedness. The lesson that must be drawn from Tokaimura is that humans must stop playing with their costly nuclear toys, for these are deadly games indeed. It might sound callow, but the world has no need of nuclear power, neither for war nor for peace. Why governments around the world continue to act as if going nuclear were a mark of distinction defies understanding. There is no such thing as nuclear power for "peaceful" purposes.
The standard knee-jerk reactions to such accidents are no longer enough to reassure. It is time to stop the nuclear madness. In this respect, South Africa deserves special praise for the post-apartheid decision to dismantle its nuclear facilities. It is high time that other countries began to follow in its footsteps.
The Tokaimura incident reminds of this need at a particularly perilous time. Pentagon officials are currently trying to frighten Congress with horror stories about the threat to Russian nuclear systems posed by the millennium bug. Washington is racing against the clock to provide Moscow with Y2K-compliant software and computers to resolve the problem. Many experts, however, doubt that the commercial software currently available will be adequate to the problem.
Between them, the sole superpower and its former rival still keep more than 2,500 nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at one another. Russia's nuclear stockpiles are another serious cause for concern. The capacity of the Russian authorities to monitor and maintain the country's 50 main nuclear storage sites between December and March 2000 is now widely considered doubtful, to say the very least. Meanwhile, America's nuclear umbrella over Japan features strongly in the new Japan-US Defence Cooperation Guidelines.
The nuclear business is booming. It is one of the world's fastest growing industries. But in most countries, the protests against it have dwindled to a trickle, in a way that would have seemed improbable as recently as a decade ago, and which would have been inconceivable for our parents' generation.
In Chernobyl, work on two new nuclear reactors to replace those which malfunctioned so memorably barely a decade ago is well underway. This week, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) intensified pressure on Ukraine to privatise its nuclear industry, making this step a key condition for a $1.75 billion loan earmarked for the construction of Khmelnitsky-2 and Rivne-4 (K2R4). The EBRD believes that K2R4 could boost its cash revenues by selling excess power to foreign strategic investors.
As the Japanese experience shows, there is not much difference between the safety records of state and private nuclear enterprises. As economic conditions in Russia and the Ukraine deteriorate, there are growing fears about nuclear safety in the two countries. Tokaimura is no Chernobyl. Indeed, it does not even come near the scale of Three Mile Island. But that is no reason for complacency. We should not wait for the next nuclear accident, before we tell governments to cease their madness. By then, it may very well be too late.
