F.S.

FUKUSHIMA STORY The power installations at Fukushima1 were built in 1971. I looked up the city of Fukushima in a Robert Encyclopedia fo the same period : it is actually situated a bit inland from the sea, on a small river and listed as a town of 250 000 population known for its silk industry and as a thermal spa. A kind of Japanese Pompei.

Sooooooo.1971 wasn’t so long ago. I graduated from University that year. Nuclear power was then seen as a necessary expedient - something we would do for a transition period - and the risks of accidents, while real, were mathematically not that high. Improbable. I should have done more math. In the long run, stuff happens.

I also remember the arguments against it: it is in the nature of accidents to be unforeseen; all human endeavours suffer from bureaucratic blindness and inertia; it is unreasonable to expect a nuclear priesthood to care for these stations etc. All true.

What I find most regrettable is that the opposition argued against the principle of nuclear power, the proponents built them and didn’t get the soundness of the arguments. Only now is there talk of engineers having to do work on how to deal with catastrophic situations: all the safety systems have failed, now what do we do. This is the current situation at Fukushima.

When the earthquake happened, the station shut down and went on emergency systems, as planned. It is the tsunami which did the damage, much higher than what the builders had allowed for. Today, they are piping in fresh water from an off-shore barge, and the systems to evacuate the water are not functionning: it is accumulating. There has been some melt-down in three reactors, containment breaches on two. That is the information circulating from industry sources.

Browsing the Internet, I also came across information on the human situation. Some 300 workers are on site in teams of fifty. They stay 3 days during which time they eat very little: vegetable juice and crackers for breakfast and rice and protein for dinner.That’s it.They sleep on led covers. Then they are taken far away to wash, feed themselves and recuperate. We are also told they are well-paid: 3 000 euros per day danger pay. Which sounds a lot better than the 6000 sacrificed military personnel who buried Tchernobyl.

Speaking of which, the sarcophage at that installation needs to be replaced but they are still a few hundred millon euros short of the 1billon plus bill for that operation. A nuclear station was meant to last some 30 to 40 years. Fukushima was 40. A lot of people keeps older cars: in mint condition. We have to more ruthless here: we replace them. We build them differently. We build them elsewhere. A spiral of benign neglect for unpopular installations would be insane.