It is also important to note that not only did the engineers fail to appreciate the magnitude of the tsunami, but GE built the first Mark I reactors on a turnkey contract. They took $60 million for these plants and they lost their shirt. There was enormous pressure on GE to reduce costs because they were losing money dramatically on the dozen reactors they had built on this turnkey process.
In addition, the backup diesel generators were located in the basement with no flood protection and in the path of the rising and surging waters. These were not sealed in waterproof containers and were quickly submerged, rendering them inoperable. There were emergency water pumps located on the shoreline, but they too were flooded, as were the fuel tanks that provided fuel for the generators.
When evaluating the consequences of what happened at Fukushima Daiichi, it is vital to look at a number of assumptions that its designers made. The first assumption was that the containment would maintain its integrity. There are 440 nuclear reactors in the world, and none of them have been designed to handle a detonation shock wave—a wave that travels faster than the speed of sound—because engineers dismissed it as impossible. It did, however, happen. Moreover, there were other serious flaws in the design. Nuclear Regulatory Commission administrator Chuck Casto said “that the Mark I containment is the worst one of all the containments we have,” and “in a station blackout, you are going to lose the containment. There is no doubt about it.”
Scientists in the United States in 1965 had recognized that the Mark I design had flaws, but the CEO of GE had said that they were “going to ram this nuclear thing through,” and ram it through they did. In 1966, GE met with the Atomic Energy Commission’s advisory committee on reactor safeguards, which in theory was an independent body designed to protect Americans. Dr. David Okrent, who was on the committee, said that GE made it plain in these meetings that it would not remain in the business of nuclear reactors if it had to redesign its nuclear reactors to better account for core meltdowns—in other words, unless the advisory committee approved the Mark I design. Glenn Seaborg, who was the chairman of the advisory committee at that time, said, “I don’t think we have the power to stop them.” Indeed, the U.S. government did not have the power to stop GE’s faulty design.
About the time the Fukushima Daiichi units were starting up, senior AEC official Dr. Joseph Hendrie wrote that he had serious doubts about the Mark I design, which he believed to be defective and dangerous. He felt they should be eliminated, but he was also aware that in eliminating the Mark I design, “it could well mean the end of nuclear power,” which would create “more turmoil than [he] could stand.” For forty years, we have known that the Mark I is an accident waiting to happen.
The second assumption that the designers of the reactor made concerned containment leakage. What happened inside the Fukushima Daiichi reactor was that the pressure rose so high that the bolts that held the containment together began to stretch. As a result, it began to leak hot radioactive gases and steam, as well as hydrogen. There were two sources of hydrogen: the zirconium-water reaction created by the fuel, and the meltdown, which brought the fuel into contact with the concrete so that it began to liberate hydrogen. The NRC assumes that containments leak at 1 percent a day. The NRC, however, said on March 23, 2011, that the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi were leaking at 300 percent per day. That means that a volume of gases equivalent to the volume of the containment was being released from the containment and into the environment every eight hours.
The third assumption concerned noble gases, such as xenon and krypton. Nuclear fuel is filled with noble gases, and as long as the fuel maintains its integrity, the gases are trapped inside. During the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, all the noble gases were released. People were breathing in these gases, and the Japanese government had no idea. Data indicate that the concentration of xenon over Chiba Prefecture was 400,000 times normal immediately after the accident—100,000 becquerels per cubic meter for eight days. In other words, in every cubic meter of air over Chiba, there were 1,300 disintegrations emitting radioactivity every second for eight days.
On the ground, there were four radiation detectors that continued to work after the accident. Almost all of them lost power, but a couple of them were battery powered. The normal background level on these radiation detectors was about 0.04 microsieverts. At 5 a.m. on the day after the accident, the radiation around the detectors was ten times the background level. At 6 a.m., it was sixty times the background level. At 9 a.m., it was one hundred and fifty. At 10 a.m., seven hundred. What this means is that somebody in the vicinity of these radiation detectors would have received a yearly dose of radiation in twelve hours. The vents at Fukushima Daiichi were opened after that, so this is a clear indication that the containments were leaking well beforehand. At 3 p.m., these same detectors were measuring thirty thousand times the background level—a yearly dose in ten minutes for the people in Chiba. This was where the detectors were located. It may have been worse elsewhere.
The fourth assumption concerns the decontamination of cesium. The NRC assumes that after a nuclear accident the water inside the torus—the doughnut at the bottom of the containment—removes 99 percent of the cesium. This is a decontamination factor of 100, and it is written into law. It is also said that if the water starts to boil, it is incapable of capturing the cesium and there is no decontamination. Japanese experts claim cesium was captured inside the torus, but the data show that this could not have been the case. Temperatures in the containment were above the boiling point of water, and the flooding had rendered the cooling pumps inoperable. There was no cesium retention inside the torus.
The last assumption concerns hot particles. In February of 2012, I took five samples over the course of five days from the pavements of Tokyo, or in one case a children’s park right next to a school. The samples were analyzed by Marco Kaltofen at Worcester Polytechnic. Each of the samples exceeded 7,000 becquerels per milligram, which qualifies as radioactive waste in the United States. Moreover, not only are the residents of Tokyo walking around in radioactive waste, but they are breathing in radioactive material, too. We found this out when we were sent a box of air filters from cars in Tokyo. Five feet from the box, the Geiger counter started to crackle. Kaltofen took the filters and laid them out on an X-ray plate. After the X-ray plate was left in a safe for several days, there were burn marks on the plate. People were in the cars that carried those filters—children, too. If it is in the air filters, it is in their lungs. We also found cesium on children’s shoes. Children tie their shoes; children eat with their hands; this means the cesium is in their stomachs, in their guts, in their intestines.
Three times the volume of noble gases was released at Fukushima Daiichi than at Chornobyl. There were 2.9 petabecquerels of cesium available at Chornobyl; there was almost three times that at Fukushima Daiichi Units 1, 2, and 3. One-third of the cesium was released from Chornobyl. Japanese experts have said only 1 or 2 percent of the cesium was released from Fukushima Daiichi, but that is not the case because the decontamination for cesium was zero.