Disaster recovery workers inside the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

casualinfo.com 

A 45-foot wall of water overtops a 13-foot bluff at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.  The Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) call it soteigai—“beyond expectations,” according to Reuters. TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu refers to the earthquake and tsunami as “marvels of nature that we have never experienced before.”  Were they?

            No they were not, according to Koji Okumura of Hiroshima University, whose post-March 11 scientific paper, “Interplate megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis along Japan Trench offshore Northeast Japan,” available in English at the website homeofgeography.org, offers a rigorous analysis of the tsunami history at the site going back 1,142 years.  His finding:  “In Ishinomaki plain northeast of Sendai, the 869 tsunami reached 2.5 to 3.0 km inland from the coastline of that time…”  His conclusion:  “These evidence [sic] clearly indicate the inundation area of the 869 Jogan tsunami was similar to the area during March 11 tsunamis.”  A similar footprint requires a similar wave height.  Given that the feeble bluff protecting the stricken nuclear power plant was just 13 feet high according to the New York Times article “Nuclear Rules in Japan Relied on Old Science,” there is no question that the reactor’s tsunami defenses were deficit by an almost unimaginable magnitude.

            According the Times, an earthquake as small as a magnitude 7.5 “could have created a tsunami large enough to top the bluff at Fukushima.”

            Apparently, the notion of geological time, the scale of time required to understand the history of seismic activity, was unknown to the regulators of Japan, TEPCO and the Japanese economic community.  It was not, however, unknown to scientists like Hideki Nariai, working on behalf of the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization (JNES) for the 2008 Nuclear Safety Research Forum offered at Tokyo University.  Nariai reported on his work looking back to tsunami results as far back as the 1605 Keicho earthquake and ssunami.

            Nairiai reported, “We established a basic structure for a database system of traces left by past tsunamis, and registered data for traces of the Tokai and Kinki Earthquakes. This provided us with a tool to estimate tsunami wave sources that may affect the plant.” (He was referring to another Japanese reactor in his presentation.)  So, the methodology was known to a wide scientific community at the same time it was being ignored by TEPCO, just four years after the gargantuan 9.5 earthquake in Indonesia triggered a tsunami that should have served as a wake-up call to all.  And the relevant antecedent tsunamis where documented within Japan’s long scope of historical time to boot.

Japanese scientists have been quick to speak up in the wake of the disaster.  Satoru Ikeuchi, an astrophysicist at the Graduate University for Advances Studies in Japan wrote in a piece quoted in the New York Times, “It should have been foreseen that an earthquake of this magnitude might occur, and if the plant could not withstand such an event it should not have been constructed.”

            The basement-level electrical power system at the plant was inherently subject to the devastating effects of a tsunami, yet they built a reactor with its power grid in the basement anyway.  So not only were the builders of the plant derelict in building a nuclear reactor in a location that was vulnerable to a tsunami, but they built a substandard reactor that was vulnerable to a tsunami.  

The Fukushima tsunami was a Black Swan, a catastrophic event “that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and that would be extremely difficult to predict.”  The term was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former Wall Street stock trader.  But Japanese nuclear engineers willfully excluded known risks because they were inconvenient to the models of prediction they preferred.

The New York Times article buttressed by the Okumura paper referenced above reflects shocking evidence of nuclear complacency in Japan.  It is almost unthinkable that such a level of complacency would be found in the land that knows more about the effects of radiation than any other.  It represents, as all Black Swan failures do, a failure of imagination.  Catastrophic failure cascades of the type we have become almost accustomed to seeing in high-tech, high-risk industries almost always reflect a refusal to regulate in the face of knowable risks, bureaucratic paralysis and inattention to core causes.  Why?  Because everything works until it doesn’t.  And that rings just as true for the San Onofre nuclear plant as it does for Fukushima.

            The complacency is not limited to Japan.  The World Nuclear Association (“representing the people and organizations of the global nuclear profession”) states on its website:

Even for a nuclear plant situated very close to sea level, the robust sealed containment structure around the reactor itself would prevent any damage to the nuclear part from a tsunami, though other parts of the plant might be damaged. No radiological hazard would be likely. 

The association cites a September 2006 study by Japan’s own Nuclear Safety Commission as the sole evidence for this claim.  That study treats tsunamis as an exotic afterthought, phenomena worthy perhaps of perfunctory study and no urgent preventative action.

According to the Times, the Japanese approach to seismic safety with regard to tsunamis, was “deterministic” as opposed to “probabilistic,” This meant that nuclear safety engineers ignored any phenomena for which they could not assess hard probability factors based on recent empirical data.  In other words, they ignored “ancient” because it was inconvenient.  And yet…

Reuters coverage of the issue states, “[A] research paper concluded that there was a roughly 10 percent chance that a tsunami could test or overrun the defenses of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant within a 50-year span based on the most conservative assumptions.”  This, then, is the smoking gun.  Before this is over, if there is any justice in Japan, heads will roll in Tokyo.

Reuters reported Hideaki Shiroyama, a nuclear safety professor at the University of Tokyo as saying, with remarkable understatement, “It's a bit strange for me that we have officials saying this was outside expectations. Unexpected things can happen. That's the world we live in.”

Indeed they do.  Another Black Swan ignored by the pros.  Costas Synolakis, professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California was quoted by the Times saying that the Japanese refusal to consider the possibility of tsunami was “a cascade of stupid errors that led to the disaster.”  So it comes down to “stupid errors” does it?”  Just who are we trying to kid here?  Oh, right.  An enormous civilian population who just wants electricity to light their houses and run their gadgets.  In the end Japan had little choice but to use nuclear power.  But it turns out nuclear power (hello Chernobyl) is a bad fit for human nature.  And a bad fit for the exigencies of a poorly regulated capitalism.