After the nuclear accident of Fukushima, I have been frequently asked about this event. So I decided to put up the following speech given by Dr. Heinonen, a former deputy director of IAEA. I think it is a good summary describing the situation. I have modified a bit with parenthesis.
The speech of Dr. Olli Heinonen
This was taken from the recording of "Interdisciplinary Symposium, Harvard for Japan" which was held in April 22, 2011. See
http://harvardforjapan.fas.harvard.edu/symposium/
The entire symposium was also broadcasted on NHK's BS1 channel in May 15, 2011.
Thank you for inviting me to talk here. Actually, I will start telling little bit about my background, because in this 27 years I spent in IAEA, most of the time I spent in Japan. And actually I was living in Japan for a while. IAEA has a small office in Tokyo at Iidabashi, and I lived myself at Shirogane, and travelled all the nuclear installations in Japan except one or two in the south. I have been in all of them - even during earthquakes, a couple of times. I think there was a big one when I was in Tokai, and I saw how well Japanese facility operators were prepared for that. When the earthquake hit, they went to the checking list, and they did not only rely on instrumentation but sent teams around the facility to make sure that everything was under control.
I agree fully that Japan will master this disaster. This is a different kind. There is an old Japanese saying that "fall down seven times but get up eight". So I am sure that the government and people will do it.
This accident or disaster is different in that sense, and this is because there is the (problems of) Fukushima. (Once) you have an earthquake, there is a lot of damages, a lot people get killed, the rescue operators take place, but then an earthquake, in a way, is over. But because of Fukushima and the troubles we have there, it's unfortunately not over. This Fukshima will be there for a while. And, I give you actually snapshots what to place, what happens next, and which are the first lessons to be learned.
What happened? We had this fairly large earthquake 9 on Richter scale. Actually these nuclear installations kind of survived that earthquake. They orderly shut down, building got damaged but no substantial amount of radioactivity escaped. What made the problems was tsunami which followed that in Fukushima, which brought the water all the way up to the reactors, killed all the electricity power supplies - power supplies were down already before, but any diesel (electrical) generator that was there in the basement got flooded by water - they were designed for that purpose. For backup battery system, once you get water to the batteries, they discharge. So, all of a sudden, they were without electricity which is important to maintain the cooling of the reactor. And that was the beginning of the disaster.
At the same time, all the infrastructure around Fukushima was broken as well. There were no bridges, there were no roads, there were no services coming. If they brought some diesel generators in place, they were able to use some of it, but they didn't have oil. They run for twenty-four hours, and then they will not be able to provide all oil, because oil refinery was broken, roads were broken, cars were not available. So, these contributed things that happened.
Nuclear power plant, this Fukushima has the biggest reactor about 1,000 megawatts. 1,000 megawatts is a big amount of energy. The reactor is roughly this size (explained by hand). This is where 1,000 megawatts comes. And 1,000 megawatts is almost like one million microwave furnishes put to this space. This one you need to cool when the reactor shuts down, since it's all metal. As the heat doesn't dissipate (by itself), you need to pump water to remove the heat. And if you don't do it, the fuel gets hot. Normally the temperature is something like 300 centigrade or almost 600 Fahrenheit. But it went in early days of this accident to 400. And then comes another phenomena because it starts to melt if there's no water. And then the temperature may go up to 3000-4000 Fahrenheit, and that's what started to happen. So, there was not enough water in the reactor, then the fuel started to melt, and when it melts, then it forms zirconium cladding and forms hydrogen. This hydrogen was the one which caused explosion which you saw on TV in three different occasions. This is one of the worst part of the accident when you come to this situation but they had no way to escape it.
So this caused then the big release of radioactives. Actually, this came more than that came immediately after (the accident). But the government could, in the beginning, evacuate people very quickly from ten-kilometre zone. They were asked, I think, to leave on the next day. And this is a huge difference if you compare to what happened to Chernobyl in Russia when the people stayed and lived there without even knowing, drinking water, drinking milk, getting, on top of that, the radiation outside. We didn't have that problem in Fukushima, and we will not have it. So I think this is a good news, and here we need to pay attribute to the emergency preparedness of Japanese government and the decisions which were done at that point of time.
But the situation is not over. Actually it's still very serious and it's fragile, because there are lots of temperature rise in place. The fuel is tried to be cooled. It's much less and around 200 centigrade, but it has to get below 100 before you can control it. But they can't do it. Why they can't do it? Because first of all whole bottom of the reactor is immersed in highly radioactive water. So they need to get water away so that they can place new pumps. That was the first plan. Now, they realised that they can't do it, they build additional pumping capacity there, bring additional pumps, and it would take this construction work about three months. During the three months they have to take the radioactive water away and purify it, so that people can start to work inside the reactor.
It may take another three months before actually the normal temperature is there. Then, we could start to think about living on those sites and the people can perhaps come closer to the place. So, this situation will continue, unfortunately, in my personal view, until the end of this year. And that will have a lot of consequences for the people. They have to do still many other things - remove the radioactive debris, find a place (for disposal). They have the problem where to put the things (irradiated).
You have seen a lot of complaints from the neighbouring countries that TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) has been pumping water to sea. Actually they did not have any other alternative. They were in a "Catch 22" situation, because you have to choose between bad and worse. You have a lot of highly radioactive water and you need to put it somewhere, and you didn't have a space. So what you do? You put this less radioactive to sea hoping that it gets diluted.
Can it still release radioactivity? Actually, yes. There are small releases but they should go away by three months time when they get this extra containments. Any powerful earthquake may cause a trouble, still. One has to be honest on that. Most likely it will not become any more to this kind of catastrophe when we had these explosions. But it will have a local impact, still.
Let's look which are the lessons we learned. And here I want to quote an essay in "Idleness" of Kenko (Yoshida), a Japanese poet in the fourteenth century: "The most precious thing in life is uncertainty". It's here that it is difficult to predict. You can't predict an earthquake, you can give an estimate that there should be, but you cannot say that in one hour time or five minutes time we have it. So we need to think the whole approach for the nuclear power, I think, somewhat differently. I agree.
Most important thing, anyway, is the communications, and I think that there was a lot of failures. There were failures, I think, on the facility operators, but I understand their hands were full. They had (accidents) at the same time on the first two days. Actually they had accidents in Fukushima Daini power plant and Daiichi power plant. In reality they had ten accidents (in different buildings) at the same time. And I'm sure the emergency preparedness was meant for one, because this is the way the engineers very often look. They didn't think there was this kind of total disaster. So they had a lot of troubles, so they didn't have time to communicate. Then, government realised (the failure) pretty much on the information as they get from the operator.
I think that IAEA also failed a little bit - I'm hard on that. The IAEA job, I think, goes beyond just transmitting information it gets from the government. IAEA in my view must add its own independent assessment, say, on which are the implications, which are the unknowns and which are the consequences of those unknowns, so that people can think better, and that the members can think what are the consequences not only to Japan but also to their own citizens who are in Japan. Plus, once they know this information they can also render better and perhaps help to rectify the situation, bring the expertises which the states might have but Japan may not have, and bring additional resources.
We have to think of these guys who are working there. They work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and month. You lose your creativity with the time when you are in this kind of situation. (The importance of second opinion is) little like in America - you get other doctor opinion. So, here you need also other opinion. I think that they were slow in getting member-state help. And the international response have started to come. The US centre team came during the first week and then the French came.
Which are the technical immediate things to be done? I think one has to look how is this emergency cooling and backup power and all these. Those need to be looked not only in Japan but all 440 reactors which are operating all over the world. We need to look the design of the reactor - do the system really work as they are supposed to work.
There is a short term thinking and there is a long term thinking. We only know at the end when the reactors will be open on what is really the consequence of earthquake. Those reactors won't be open, I think, in the next five years. It will take that long time before you really can look what is there. We need the location where this installations are, and perhaps the size, (and we need to reconsider) emergency preparedness and emergency response.
I would end up by saying that this is a crisis, but every crisis is an opportunity. This is an opportunity for nuclear industry go back to the basics and see, is this the way we are handling, can we be better. It's now up to them to prove that the nuclear energy can be used in a safe and secure manner.
Thank you.