Abe’s
Japan Is Blind to Scary Nuclear Reality
14
August, 2013
Forget
Abenomics. Ignore Shinzo Abe’s efforts to rejuvenate Japan’s
diplomatic and military clout. Look past the quest to rewrite the
constitution. History will judge this prime minister by one thing
alone: what he did, or didn’t do, to end the worst nuclear crisis
since Chernobyl.
It’s
mind-boggling how disengaged Japan’s leaders have been since their
“BP moment” -- the March 2011 near-meltdown at the Fukushima
Dai-Ichi nuclear plant. Abe’s predecessors Naoto Kan and Yoshihiko
Noda virtually ignored the radiation leaks and spent fuel rods
sitting 135 miles (217 kilometers) from Tokyo. In December, Abe
became the third prime minister to pretend all was well at Fukushima
after a devastating earthquake and tsunami that flooded the plant.
The
official line on Fukushima is depressingly familiar: The folks at
Greenpeace International are trouble makers bent on scaring Japanese;
the alarmists at the World Health Organization should mind their own
business; the international news media needs to discover
decaffeinated coffee. Nuclear power is clean, safe and -- most
important, now that a weakened yen has driven up energy bills --
cheap.
Reality
made an inconvenient reappearance last week. Mounting evidence that
radioactive groundwater is gushing into the Pacific Ocean forced Abe
to admit that plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. Inc. isn’t up to
the task of containing the disaster. Under international pressure, he
pledged the government would “make sure there is a swift and
multifaceted approach in place” to stop the leak.
Abe’s
Seriousness
Pardon
me for doubting Abe’s seriousness. It’s not just the sketchiness
of the suggested remedy: freezing the ground around Fukushima, a
tactic scientists fear will prove inadequate. It’s not the fact
that nuclear regulators remain more focused on restarting reactors
than on neutralizing the one that’s polluting North Asia. It’s
not that no one at Tepco has gone to jail or been shamed. (BP Plc’s
former chief executive officer, Tony Hayward, was fired and sued over
the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.) Tepco is leaking something
far worse and lying through its teeth. Yet it hasn’t been
nationalized, and its executives remain in their offices.
No,
my real worry is that official Japan is still stuck on “how”
Fukushima become synonymous with Chernobyl, not “why” it happened
or “what” it means for the world.
The
“how” is the stuff of the gods, according to conventional wisdom.
The event Japanese call 3/11 was an act of the heavens that no one
could have foreseen. There was no way to plan for it, no way Tepco
could have known not to place all of its backup generators in the
same place underground, just steps away from the sea in a
tsunami-prone nation.
This
storyline ignores the “why.” Fukushima was a preventable,
man-made disaster stemming from the worst conformist tendencies of
Japan Inc. Look, if executives got together globally and created a
Hall of Shame for the greedy, corrupt and clueless along them, Tepco
would deserve its own wing. All Enron Corp. and Bernie Madoff did was
manufacture fake profits. Tepco fudged its safety record and put the
lives of tens of millions of people at risk.
But
it takes a village to breed such a corrupt and dangerous system.
Tepco got away with its negligence for years because of the cozy ties
between power companies and the regulators, bureaucrats and
researchers that champion the industry -- the “nuclear village.”
Backed by its connections, money and control of the media, Tepco has
brazenly continued to cook its radiation data for the last two and a
half years. It matters little that the government is finally
commandeering Tepco’s cleanup: The government is Tepco.
Dollar
Signs
Abe’s
Liberal Democratic Party is blinded by dollar signs. In May, Abe
visited Turkey to help close a $22 billion deal for Japan to build
nuclear power plants in that seismically active nation. That kind of
cash makes power companies virtually untouchable. And it raises
doubts about Tepco’s admission that 300 tons of water laced with
strontium and other particles is pouring into the Pacific each day.
One can’t help but wonder if the leak is of a much greater
magnitude.
It’s
time for the government to face reality and do six things:
decommission Fukushima; invite independent auditors from overseas to
assess the magnitude of the damage; admit the surrounding area might
not be safe for inhabitants, fishing or farming for decades; scour
the world for innovative solutions; break up the nuclear village; and
level with the Japanese about cleanup costs that will be in the
hundreds of billions of dollars.
That
brings us to the “what.” Fukushima is a growing embarrassment for
Japan on the international stage. Oceans don’t have boundaries.
Radioactive traces have been found in bluefin tuna -- not to mention
on secondhand cars and auto parts imported by Russia from Japan.
Another earthquake -- a live possibility -- could damage Fukushima
anew or take out another reactor between now and the 2020 Summer
Olympics that Tokyo hopes to host. The world won’t give Japan a
pass twice on what would have been a perfectly preventable disaster.
Analysts
are rating Abe on his success in cleaning up Japan’s finances.
Posterity will judge him on whether he cleaned up the mess Tepco and
the nuclear village have created
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.