Secret U.S. contingency plans that might have helped emergency teams trying to deal with the total power failure at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant were sat on by Japan’s Nuclear Industry Safety Agency (NISA) because its officials didn’t believe Japan would ever face such a situation.
Secret U.S. contingency plans that might have helped emergency teams trying to deal with the total power failure at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant were sat on by Japan’s Nuclear Industry Safety Agency (NISA) because its officials didn’t believe Japan would ever face such a situation.
The U.S. emergency procedure, known as B.5.b, was developed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks as a response to a hypothetical terrorist attack on a nuclear plant, but could have provided crucial guidance during the first few days of the Fukushima crisis.
NISA, part of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, admitted its officials had received detailed briefings on the U.S. procedure in 2006 and 2008, but failed to pass on the information to power companies or other parts of Japan’s nuclear safety apparatus before the Fukushima accident.
A government panel headed by Yotaro Hatamura, professor of engineering at Kogakuin University, has interviewed NISA officials as part of a probe into the agency’s failure to plan for a total power failure and plans to submit its final report in July.
Five months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), an independent body of the United States government established under Energy Reorganization Act, passed new regulations to deal with a hypothetical terrorist attack involving the deliberate crashing of an airplane into a nuclear plant.
The measure relevant to a possible total power failure at a plant, which was not revealed to the public, is commonly referred to by the article number of the administrative order used to enforce it: B.5.b.
According to guidance based on B.5.b that was prepared in 2006, all nuclear power plants in the United States must prepare for a total power failure by equipping themselves with transportable batteries and containers of compressed air; by developing procedures for manually operating vent valves and reactor-core cooling systems; by organizing instruction manuals setting out the procedures; and by training operators to implement the measures.
Former NISA officials said the agency sent its staff to the NRC in 2006 and 2008 and received detailed briefings on B.5.b. After they returned, NISA looked at ways to implement measures based on B.5.b in Japan but failed to notify power companies, the Cabinet Office’s Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC), or other concerned parties because a total power failure was not seen as an imminent threat.
On March 11, in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant experienced a total power failure after being hit by a tsunami. Reactor cooling systems stopped operating, and staff at the plant spent too much time trying to control vent valves at the facility, resulting in meltdowns at the No. 1 through No. 3 reactors and hydrogen explosions at the No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 reactors.
Bill Borchardt, the NRC’s executive director for operations, said at a public hearing that B.5.b could have been applied to the situation at the Fukushima plant.
An official in NISA’s nuclear safety regulatory standards division said: “It is true that we were provided with the information on B.5.b from the NRC, although we cannot give you details (at the request of Washington).”
The official said: “We are aware of criticism of our lack of speed in proceeding with the matter and a failure to draw on B.5.b to inform safety regulations and precautions against very severe incidents. We will use B.5.b in learning lessons to ensure that a similar incident does not occur again.”
An official of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima plant, said the B.5.b procedures might have been of crucial importance in the first hours of the Fukushima crisis.
“If we had been fully prepared, we would have not needed to discuss how to open vent valves as the first action we took.”
The official, who admitted that the company itself had not dealt with planning for a severe accident as an urgent matter, said, “If we had been given instructions on the equipment required under B.5.b, we could have taken action.”
A JAEC official, who was told by a former NRC chairman about NISA’s B.5.b briefings after the Fukushima accident, said, “NISA withheld the information and did not share it with other parties (handling nuclear accident issues within government)."
Another JAEC official said, “If we had implemented this safety measure (B.5.b), we could have prevented further deterioration of the accident.”
Mitsumasa Hirano, professor of nuclear safety engineering at Tokyo City University, said, “Since NISA took it for granted that natural disasters such as earthquakes and terror attacks would not cause a total power failure at nuclear power plants in Japan, using B.5.b as a measure in a severe nuclear incident did not fit with its mindset.”
(This article was compiled from reports by Hiroo Sunaoshi, Toshihiro Okuyama and Kentaro Uechi.)