Chronicle of an announced catastrophe
March 15, 2011
In 2006
a Japanese expert, member of a commission tasked with reviewing safety measures for Japanese nuclear power plants (the one recently struck was built 40 years ago), resigned from the commission, stating that his repeated warnings had been ignored due to the irresponsibility of the private company managing the sites and the government bodies involved; for the sake of "plant profitability."
Now, the jackpot has been hit: no matter what happens, the affected reactors, to which seawater has been injected, will never be operational again.
"Unless radical measures are taken to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear plants to earthquakes, Japan could experience a real nuclear catastrophe in the near future."
"Unless radical measures are taken to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear plants to earthquakes, Japan could experience a real nuclear catastrophe in the near future." This warning comes from an article published on August 11, 2007, in the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun (the article in English and its French translation by Turiya). Its author is seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko, professor at Kobe University (his biography can be read here).
Ishibashi Katsuhiko.
Ishibashi Katsuhiko was part of the expert committee responsible for establishing seismic safety standards for Japanese nuclear power plants. He resigned in protest against the committee's stance.
He believed the recommendations set by the committee were far too lenient.
In other words, Professor Katsuhiko had predicted exactly what is now happening at the Fukushima plant. He had warned Japanese authorities that Japanese nuclear plants suffered from a "fundamental vulnerability" to earthquakes.
But his warnings were ignored by both the government and Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company), the world's largest private electricity producer, which operates one-third of Japan’s nuclear power plants, including Fukushima.
Katsuhiko raised his alarm in 2006, the same year Japan strengthened its anti-seismic safety standards.
According to the seismologist, this reinforcement was still grossly insufficient.
The facts proved him right the very next year. On July 16, 2007, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake caused serious incidents at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, the world’s largest nuclear power station. This plant is located on Honshu, Japan’s main island, as are almost all Japanese nuclear power plants, which surround the country’s three largest cities—Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka.
Before the July 2007 quake, another had struck in August 2005, affecting the Onagawa plant, north of Fukushima; another in March 2007, with its epicenter just 16 kilometers from the Shika plant. And the following year, a magnitude 6.8 tremor hit east of Honshu, near Onagawa and Fukushima. Although there was no major damage, Tepco reported three radioactive liquid leaks at Fukushima Daini.
Thus, the accident that has just occurred at Fukushima cannot truly be considered a surprise, even though it caught the plant operators and authorities off guard.
This accident is a far more severe repetition of events that have occurred at least since 2005.
Ishibashi Katsuhiko had analyzed the risk, explaining that in each case, "the ground surface movement caused by the earthquake exceeded the maximum values anticipated in the plant’s design."
During the quake affecting the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, the peak seismic acceleration was more than double the value the plant was designed to withstand. "What happened at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa should not be described as unexpected," the seismologist wrote.