Archive for April, 2011

WHO: Despite Fukushima’s New Level 7 Status, Risk Assessment For Health Hasn’t Changed

Yesterday, the Japanese government announced that it had upgraded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident to level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. In response to concerns about the announcement, the World Health Organization has said the following:

“The risk assessment for health hasn’t changed outside the 40 kilometres zone… outside the 40 kilometres zone we do not believe that the risk is greater today than it was yesterday,” said Gregory Hartl, spokesman for the UN health agency.

Hartl also stressed that there is no one left in the exclusion zone, and that measures taken “appears to be enough” for the moment.

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Even After Level 7 Rating, Fukushima Is Not Another Chernobyl

The international media is having a field day. Now that Japan has decided to increase the crisis level at Fukushima from level 5 to level 7, a great many headlines have been proclaiming that Fukushima is now a “Chernobyl level” nuclear disaster.

Such headlines represent a crude and misleading presentation of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES). When an accident is deemed to be at level 7, it means that experts have determined that there was a “major” radiation release. It does not mean that all level 7 accidents are “equal to” or “the same as” other level 7 accidents. Referring to the accident as “Chernobyl level” may help sell newspapers, but it doesn’t help anyone understand the situation.

Before believing the hype about there being a new Chernobyl upon us, please read some of the following articles, which contain comparisons Fukushima Daiichi accident and Chernobyl:

• Fukushima: openness can be the only policy (The Independent) – “More than that, the situation in Japan is not worsening. The amount of emitted radiation is falling. Fukushima would only be worse than Chernobyl if 100 per cent of its radioactive material escaped. But the opposite is happening; the 10,000 terabecquerels of radiation per hour being spewed into the environment in the first hours of the accident have dropped to less than 1 terabecquerel per hour.”
• How Fukushima is and isn’t like Chernobyl (Nature.com) – “Understandably, the press has made quite a big deal out of new rating, but the reality is that Fukushima is a very different accident than Chernobyl.”
• Fukushima, Chernobyl ‘not comparable’: Watchdog (AFP) – “The accident at Fukushima has released ‘significant’ amounts of radiation but at levels and with an impact that are ‘not comparable’ to Chernobyl, France’s nuclear safety agency said on Tuesday.”
• Why Fukushima isn’t Chernobyl, despite rise in crisis level (Christian Science Monitor) – Yoshiaki Oka, a professor of nuclear engineering at Tokyo’s Waseda University, who believes even NISA’s figure is an overestimation….he believes the idea that Fukushima is as bad as the world’s worst nuclear disaster is “completely wrong” and that according to his estimates the leak of radiation, so far, from the Japanese plant is about “1/100th of that of Chernobyl.”
• Fukushima is no Chernobyl: Russian nuclear expert (Euronews) – “To begin with the threat was was obviously underestimated and now it’s obviously exaggerated. What we can see looks maybe like a level 6 on the INES scale….It’s dangerous in any case – but there’s no need to frighten the population.”
• Experts say Fukushima is no Chernobyl (Philippine Daily Inquirer) – “For all their criticism of how Tokyo Electric Power Co. and Japan’s government are handling the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, experts agree with them on one point: Fukushima is not another Chernobyl.”

The amount of radiation released by Fukushima has not even come close to the amount released by Chernobyl. The upgrade to level 7 was based on recent analysis of leaks that took place very early in the crisis. After the large leak on March 15-16, the rate of leakage has dropped. For Fukushima to equal Chernobyl in the amount of radiation released, the situation would have to take some sudden and tremendous turn for the worse. Although it will take a long time to resolve the current situation, there are few indications that it is becoming more serious.

The new analysis about the radiation leaks and the upgrade to level 7 have changed nothing about the safety outlook for people in the Kanto region. Previous radiation readings for food, water, and air in Tokyo remain valid. Local governments and anti-nuclear activists are closely monitoring radiation levels, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

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Adidas Suspected of Price Fixing in Japan

Japan’s Fair Trade Commission has raided the Tokyo offices of Adidas to investigate claims of price-fixing:

Adidas Japan was suspected of pressuring retailers to sell the product for 10,000 to 15,000 yen ($118-177), and of suspending shipments for stores that did not comply.

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Perspectives on TEPCO’s Use of Contract Workers

Those who have been following Japanese and international media accounts of the work going on at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant have probably heard that quite a few of the people working there are not employees of Tokyo Electric Power Company. Some are employees of large corporations such as Hitachi and Toshiba, while others are contract laborers who have been hired to perform manual labor.

In the past few days, two interesting articles about these non-TEPCO workers have appeared. One was in the Asahi Shimbun:

A man in his 40s, who was dispatched to Fukushima No. 1 from a partner of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), said, “I did not want to go there. But if I reject the request, I will lose my job.”

The daily pay is less than 20,000 yen ($236).

“I hear some construction workers were employed at a wage of several tens of thousands of yen per hour. But we are working on a conventional daily wage as our company has had cooperative relationships with TEPCO,” the man said.

Meanwhile, many of the man’s colleagues volunteered to go into the plant, saying, “We are the only workers (that can do the job).” Because of that gung-ho spirit, they share a sense of solidarity, the man added.

At one of the plant’s subcontractors, the president and elderly executives volunteered, hoping that they would be chosen instead of younger workers, because they were worried about the long-term health effects on them.

“Even we can do simple work, such as laying cables,” one of the elderly executives said.

Immediately after the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, the number of TEPCO employees and others from the firm’s business partners, such as Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd., at Fukushima No. 1 totaled more than 700. After an explosion took place at a building housing the No. 2 reactor on March 15, however, most of them evacuated. Only about 70 workers remained and continued the recovery work.

Their number was initially announced as 50. Because of that, foreign media labeled them the “Fukushima 50,” and the heroic tag stuck.

Today, the more accurate “Fukushima 700″ at the plant are classified into such groups as “recovery,” “information,” “medical service” and “security.”

And the other was in the New York Times. The New York times puts its focus on contract “day laborers,” describing them as examples of the “thousands of untrained, itinerant, temporary laborers who handle the bulk of the dangerous work at nuclear power plants here and in other countries”:

Collectively, these contractors were exposed to levels of radiation about 16 times as high as the levels faced by Tokyo Electric employees last year, according to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which regulates the industry. These workers remain vital to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plants.

They are emblematic of Japan’s two-tiered work force, with an elite class of highly paid employees at top companies and a subclass of laborers who work for less pay, have less job security and receive fewer benefits. Such labor practices have both endangered the health of these workers and undermined safety at Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors, critics charge.

“This is the hidden world of nuclear power,” said Yuko Fujita, a former physics professor at Keio University in Tokyo and a longtime campaigner for improved labor conditions in the nuclear industry. “Wherever there are hazardous conditions, these laborers are told to go. It is dangerous for them, and it is dangerous for nuclear safety.”

Of roughly 83,000 workers at Japan’s 18 commercial nuclear power plants, 88 percent were contract workers in the year that ended in March 2010, the nuclear agency said. At the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 89 percent of the 10,303 workers during that period were contractors.

Over at the NBR Japan-U.S. Discussion Forum, , several people have written responses to the New York Times story. Here are a few excerpts that I found particularly interesting.

Lance Gatling, on whether one needs skilled regular employees for most of the work at a nuclear plant:

“…Other than the nuclear reactors that supply the steam, the plants are pretty much bog-standard steam turbines driving electrical generators, diesel backup generators, steam pipes, water and fuel pipes, etc. And mopping up water, radioactive or not, or repairing a condenser don’t require a U. Tokyo physics degree. I’d guess the normal work on the inner containment and pressure vessels also primarily consists of using an overhead crane to move the very heavy fuel rod assemblies, again, not rocket science.

If I recall correctly, the US, and presumably other countries’ nuclear industries, use a lot of outside workers, especially manual laborers…”

Paul J. Scalise, on how international observers once praised TEPCO for cutting its personnel costs:

“…When the domestic and global neo-liberal consensus forced retail electricity liberalization on TEPCO and the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan in the late 1990s (before the California Crisis and Enron bankruptcy changed the political dynamic in Japan), TEPCO was forced to cut costs wherever it was not economically dangerous or politically damaging in order to pacify the stock market. The worry from financial analysts (myself included) was that increased competition would erode profit margins, threaten dividend payouts, and put downward pressure on TEPCO’s share price.

Shareholders certainly did not want that and neither did the electric power companies.

One popular and strategically convenient place touted by TEPCO with great fanfare from financial analysts and the Western media was personnel costs reductions.

Starting in fiscal year 2000, TEPCO would highlight their “attrition” efforts. Essentially, this meant two things. First, they would hire fewer recent college and high school graduates to replace their retiring TEPCO employees. This was different from the common Western practice of simply handing-out pink slips and firing their employees, but few cared. Second, they would outsource at considerably lower cost to the company all of the grunt work that they usually paid their full-time employees to do.

If you stop to consider that a TEPCO nuclear engineer makes, on average, ¥10 million yen a year or about ($110k) versus roughly ¥3-5 million for the day laborers, it was a logical move by a company forced to adjust itself to a politically changing environment. (I have no idea what the current overtime pay is for both categories.)

My personal view is that TEPCO is an honorable company that provided stable power to over 27 million residential and industrial customers in eight prefectures, spanning 15,254 square miles without incident for close to six decades. Blackouts in TEPCO’s service region–before this crisis–were few and modest. The average annual duration of forced outages over the past decade, for example, records slightly over four minutes per household versus 69 minutes in the USA, 73 minutes in the UK, and 45 minutes in France.

TEPCO deserves some recognition and respect for its successes and achievements. Instead, it will likely be remembered in the history books for the nuclear crisis, the nuclear power cover-ups initiated by a select few, and these popular human interest stories.

Perhaps the most ironic thing of all is that TEPCO is now demonized by the very same Western media sources and stock market commentators that once praised it for becoming “more efficient.” …

Minoru Mochizuki, comparing the use of outsourcing and contractors by TEPCO and Toyota:

“…TEPCO is essentially protected by the government as a sole supplier of electric power for an area that includes Tokyo and all neighboring industrial areas. Such being the case, TEPCO is not facing any competitions that Toyota is facing which makes the employees of TEPCO more like bureaucratic. The other thing that makes TEPCO different from Toyota is that TEPCO’s engineers do not design or manufactures anything. All their facilities, equipment, tools, and materials are purchased from outside, while Toyota’s engineers, even college graduate elite engineers, involve deeply into designing of facilities, equipment, tools, and materials, even though they are actually manufactured by the suppliers. While Toyota has a certain number of first tier suppliers who actually designs and builds to a certain level of sub-assemblies, and there are second and third tier suppliers who supply components, Toyota engineers eyes are very sharply checking all level of subassemblies and components. On the contrary, I assume TEPCO is almost totally relying on major contractors such as GE, Toshiba, Hitachi, Kajima (site and building construction), etc., as well as their contractors for construction, operation and maintenance of a nuclear power station. I wonder if this made TEPCO engineers more bookish engineers than practical engineers, if I may say so to describe their state of isolation from reality, and I suppose that made their decision making after the earthquake slower. It is said that nobody with TEPCO wanted to make quick decisions as they were afraid of taking responsibilities. This is just an opposite of military organizations, where a delay in decision making makes a difference in life and death.

As the NYT story depicted, the austere conditions of the second tier and third tier contractor’s workers were undeniable, which were also reported by the Japanese media…”

Also worth checking out: Peter Ennis of the Weekly Toyo Keizai has also made a list of what he sees as flaws in the New York Times article.

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Australian Teacher Ran From Auditorium During Earthquake

FTV shows footage of the efforts to rescue people who had been trapped under a collapsed ceiling in a Tokyo auditorium following the March 11th earthquake:

The scene was filmed by a foreign teacher who had been attending the graduation ceremony for his vocational school. FTV interviews him and a colleague, both of whom give their comments in English.

One of the two teachers has also talked to the Australian media. In a sensational March 19th article about people fleeing Tokyo, he seems to say that his decision to panic and run like hell saved his life. There was apparently an announcement asking people to stay where they were, and he believes that the Japanese cultural tendency not to “disobey authority” caused some people to be killed when the ceiling collapsed:

a 10-year resident of Tokyo, escaped death by seconds when he defied orders and ran from the Kudan Kaikan theatre during an awards ceremony. The ceiling of the auditorium collapsed just as he fled.

The woman sitting two seats to his left was killed.

He said as the building began to shake during last Friday’s earthquake, people were told to stay in their seats.

”It’s very disrespectful in Japan to disobey authority, so everybody just sat there. But my colleague and I just decided we had to get out.”

(He) has moved with his wife to Nagoya to wait out the crisis.

”I feel safer here for the moment. There are conflicting stories. Some people say Tokyo is fine, others are fleeing for their lives.

”I don’t think the government is lying. I just think perhaps they are being selective in what they tell us.

”They don’t want there to be panic, they don’t want Tokyo to get jammed up, they don’t want the economy damaged any more.”

In another article, the author goes into detail about how he shoved people out of the way so he could flee the building, and alleges that he helped with the rescue effort:

Pushing through his fellow audience members to reach the door, he was initially joined only by a few other foreigners. But as the whole theatre “began shaking like all hell” (He) was followed by a stream of Japanese and non-Japanese alike. Reaching the outside, (He) and his cohort turned to witness an exodus of patrons fleeing the stricken building.

[...]

Venturing into the building, the Australian discovered that the theatre’s massive concrete ceiling had collapsed.

“It was a big, decorated concave ceiling that dislodged and fell in one big chunk. It completely flattened the seats where 60 people were sitting,” he said.

Disregarding his own safety, (He) joined scores of men who tried to move the collapsed ceiling and reach survivors.

They worked desperately for half an hour, rescuing several trapped people, until the rescue crews arrived.

The theatre was hosting an awards ceremony for a tourism college, where (he) is employed.

At least two people were killed in the collapse of the theatre, with dozens injured, he said.

Fearful of radiation poisoning, (He) and his wife have since moved to Nagoya, 260km west of Tokyo.

“We really need help here for food and medicine. People are starving, and old people are dropping like flies,” he said.

In retrospect, (his) decision to leave his seat and run for the exit appears to have prevented him from being killed or seriously injured. However, it would be unfair to bash the Japanese audience members who stayed in their seats, especially in a way that implies that Japanese people are drones who blindly obey authority. Few people could have predicted that the ceiling would have collapsed, and most of Tokyo’s older buildings survived the March 11th quake without any serious damage.

From the CDC:

If you are in a crowded public place, do not rush for the doorways.

Others will have the same idea. Move away from display shelves containing objects that may fall. If you can, take cover and grab something to shield your head and face from falling debris and glass.

If everyone in Tokyo had followed his example of pushing, shoving, and running out of buildings, it seems likely that the resulting chaos would have hurt a lot more people.

UPDATE: Read the teacher’s version of the story here!

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Japan Charity #Quakebook Now Available on Amazon

2:46 Quakebook, a charity book prepared by a community of bloggers and Twitter users is now available via the Amazon.com Kindle store.

Here’s a CNN report about the Quakebook project and a quotation from a Wall Street Journal article about it:

Over 200 people—both Japanese and non-Japanese, but mostly living in the country—submitted their experiences and reflections to the project through written accounts and photography, while the editing and design was handled by an international Twitter-based network of bloggers, writers and designers.

“This came about as a group of us were just sitting here feeling useless and wanting to do something,” said Japan-based British blogger “Our Man In Abiko,” who first came up with the idea for the book and sent the first Twitter message calling for contributions on Friday March 18. The four-year resident of Japan declined to give his name, saying he did not want to be singled out amid the collaborative nature of the project.

“I can’t help people medically, but I know how to write and edit, so I thought we could put something together to raise money for charity,” he said.

Head over to Amazon.com and buy it now (or get it from Amazon.co.uk) ! Proceeds to go the Japan Red Cross Society.

For the latest updates on this charity project, follow the @Quakebook Twitter account.

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