After a year of studying the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, NPRE Adjunct Prof. David Miller concludes plant workers were “heroes,” but that Japanese politics interfered with the workers' efforts.
“The TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) workers during the first days after the catastrophe were real heroes in doing their best to stabilize the reactors and spent fuel pools of the Fukushima nuclear complex,” Miller maintains. He added, “The Japanese government by law allowed the prime minister (Naoto Kan) to overrule the site plant manager in the early days, which created a greater dispersion of the radionuclides. He wouldn’t let (workers) properly vent the reactor building or bring seawater in at a critical time.”
Kan resigned his position in September 2011 amid criticism of his handling of the crisis. He has become one of Japan’s most vocal opponents of nuclear power since then, and has blamed ineffective communications with Japanese nuclear officials for the disaster’s severity.
Fukushima Daiichi, the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986, was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns and radioactive material releases following a devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the east coast of Japan in March 2011.
As the regional director of the North American Technical Center (NATC) Information System on Occupational Exposure (ISOE), Miller has been traveling the world meeting with experts and officials since the disaster to monitor radiation levels and to determine what lessons can be learned.
He and his colleagues have concluded “it is very important to eventually have alternate sources of emergency power and fresh water to continue cooling” during emergency situations. Securing those resources is stressed in U.S. emergency response and operator training.
Miller also sees a near-term need to continue monitoring food and water supplies to assure radioactive levels resulting from the disaster fall below international limits for human consumption. Since Fukushima, cesium- 134 and -137 have been detected in tuna caught off this country’s West Coast, but Miller noted levels have been below consumption limits.
The Asian Technical Center ISOE requested the help of Miller and others within the first week after the Fukushima disaster. Miller joined with an expert group of nuclear utility radiation inspection managers from Canada and the United States. Some of the work has involved reviewing information gathered from the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident to use as a technical resource for dose management techniques. Information exchanges also have resulted in a major Tokyo newspaper reporter traveling to Idaho National Laboratory to interview nuclear scientists about how TMI’s damaged core was studied and ultimately buried at the Idaho lab.
NATC supplied U.S. experts to speak on the TMI accident for the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineering in late November. Speakers included Miller, who told about the United States’ experience with decommissioning nuclear plants and Fukushima’s preliminary impact on U.S. nuclear plants; Harold Denton, special spokesman for President Jimmy Carter during the TMI crisis; and Roger Shaw, accident recovery radiation protection manager for TMI.
“The meeting was well attended,” Miller said. “The conclusion was that we agreed that the University of Illinois, NPRE and Tokyo University would set up centers of excellence archiving severe accident radiological engineering databases to facilitate the planning of worker activities in high radiation and contamination areas.”
On January 9, 2012, NATC sponsored the 2012 International ISOE ALARA Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Mizumachi of the Asian Technical Center traveled to the United States with his wife to deliver the keynote speech.