Measures to deal with the accident could be described by no other word than primitive. Firefighters rushed to the scene after the explosion was reported, but since they had not been told that a nuclear accident had occurred they did not bring along protective suits, although their fire station had them – and they were all contaminated with radiation. In the early hours, no local hospital could be found to handle the victims even though Tokai has fifteen nuclear facilities. There was no neutron measurer in the entire city, so prefectural officials had to call in an outside agency to provide one; measurements were finally made at 5 p.m., nearly seven hours after the disaster. Those measurements showed levels of 4.5 millisieverts of neutrons per hour, when the limit for safe exposure is 1 millisievert per year, and from this officials realized for the first time that a fission reaction was still going on! Many other measurements, such as for isotope iodine 131, weren't made until as many as five days later.
The accident at Tokai came as a shock to other nuclear-energy-producing nations. The director of the China National Nuclear Corporation commented, «Improving management techniques is the key lesson China should learn from the Japan accident, since the leak happened not because of nuclear technology but because of poor management and human error.» And, indeed, poor management, combined with official denial, was at the root of the disaster. «Oh no, a serious accident can't happen here,» a top Japanese nuclear official declared some hours after the fission reaction at Tokai had taken place.
The level of sheer fiction in Japan's nuclear industry can be gauged from the story of how Donen misused most of its budget for renovation work between 1993 and 1997. The problem lay in 2,000 drums of low-level radioactive waste stored at Tokai, which began rusting in pits filled with rainwater. Records show that the problem dated to the 1970s, but only in 1993 did Donen begin to take action, asking for money to remove the drums from the pits and to build sheds for temporary storage. So far so good. Four years and ¥1 billion later, ponen still had not taken the drums out of the pits or built the sheds. Nobody knows where the money went-semipublic agencies like Donen are not required to make their budgets public – but the suspicion was that Donen secretly spent it doing patchwork waterproofing in the pits to hide evidence of radioactive leakage. There is no problem, the agency said. One official remarked, «The water level has not dropped, so radioactive material is not leaking outside.»
Donen went on to request more money for 1998, stating that renovation was going smoothly, and asking for ¥71 million to remove the sheds it had never built! It even attached drawings to show how it was reinforcing the inner walls of the storage pits. The Donen official in charge of technology to protect the environment from radioactive waste said, «It's true that the storage pits will eventually be reinforced. So I thought it would be all right if details of the project were different from what we had stated in our request for budgetary approval.»
When Donen gets money from the government to remove sheds it never built and shore up the walls of pits it never drained, we are definitely moving into the territory of Escher and Kafka. A final surreal touch is provided by an animated video produced by Donen to show children that plutonium isn't as dangerous as activists say. «A small character named Pu (the chemical symbol of plutonium), who looks like an extra from 'The Jetsons,' gives his friend a glass of plutonium water and says it's safe to drink. His friend, duly impressed, drinks no less than six cups of the substance before declaring, 'I feel refreshed!' »
There is a lesson to be learned from Donen's madness, and it is that if you disguise the truth long enough you eventually lose touch with reality yourself. This happened at MOF, which can no longer figure out the true state of bank finances, and it happened to the nuclear industry, which doesn't know the standard techniques of nuclear-plant management common elsewhere in the world. Why invest in technology when with a stroke of the pen an official can bring fires under control and make leaks dry up? At Tokai in 1997, so unconcerned were Donen officials that seven maintenance employees played golf on the day of the fire – and went back to play another round the day after.
Japan is like the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The computer Hal runs all life systems aboard the ship with benevolent wisdom, speaking to the crew through the public-address system in a resolutely calm and cheerful manner. Later, when Hal goes mad and starts murdering people, he continues to placidly assure crew members in an unwaveringly upbeat voice that all is well, wishing them a good day. In Japan, articles in magazines paid for by the bureaucrats who cement over rivers and lakes assure the public that their natural environment is still beautiful. Bureaucrats at Donen instruct children that plutonium is safe to drink. Every day in Japan we hear the soothing voice of Hal telling us not to worry. Since 1993, the government has predicted economic rebound every year, despite an ever-deepening recession. In February 1999, as the nation prepared to inject $65 billion into the banks, with the prospect of even larger bailouts ahead, Yanagisawa Hakuo, the chairman of the Financial Revitalization Committee, announced, «By the end of March, the bad loans will be completely cleared and we will have confidence at home and overseas.» Problem over, have a good day.
While it runs against the conventional wisdom that Japan is a technological leader, there is no question that Japan has fallen drastically behind in the technology of nuclear-power management and safety. Let's examine what happened at the Tokai plant in 1997 more closely. Workers checked the state of the blaze by looking in the window – they used no other monitoring devices and did not check again. A team of three people, including an untrained local fireman, entered the building with no protection and proceeded to seal it up – with duct tape! Dozens of other workers were sent into or near the site, unprotected by masks, and inhaled radioactive fumes. In the 1999 fission incident at Tokai, rescue workers were not warned to wear protective suits, neither measuring devices nor hospital care was readily available, and national authorities had no disaster plan to cope with the emergency.
What is in the manual for nuclear facilities in Japan has been duct tape or, in the case of the nuclear plant in Hamaoka, in Shizuoka Prefecture, paper towels, which were used to wipe up a hydrogen peroxide solution that had been spilled during cleaning of radioactively contaminated areas there. So many paper towels accumulated by January 1996 that they spontaneously combusted. This is reminiscent of the situations concerning waste removal after the Kobe earthquake (no shields or other safeguards), dioxin (no data), leachate from chemical waste pools (no waterproofing), and oil spills (cleaned up by women with bamboo ladles and blankets).
Since the 1970s, Japanese quality has become a byword, and many a book and article has been penned on the subject of Kaizen, «improvement,» a form of corporate culture in which employers encourage their workers to submit ideas that will polish and improve efficiency. The writers on Kaizen, however, overlooked one weakness in this approach, which seemed minor at the time but has seriously impacted Japan's technology. Kaizen's emphasis is entirely on positive recommendations; there is no mechanism to deal with negative criticism, no way to disclose faults or mistakes – and this leads to a fundamental problem of information. People keep silent about embarrassing errors, with the result that problems are never solved. Kato Hisatake, professor of ethics at Kyoto University, argues that the Tokai fission disaster came about because although people knew for years that the wrong procedures were being followed nobody said a word. In the United States, he said, "in the case of the Three-Mile Island accident, whistle-blowing helped prevent a far worse disaster."