Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority: What Gives?

I'd like to comment on one of the 'only in Japan' aspects of the nuclear energy issue, the kind of thinking that infects other areas of Japanese life, from education to sports to just about anything. This is the Japanese tendency towards excessive cautiousness, past the point of irrationality.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority was set up in the politically chaotic months after 3/11 as an attempt to address the perceived in adequacies of the former Japanese nuclear watchdog, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Inaugurated in Sept last year, the chairman is Shunichi Tanaka.

While the ostensible purpose of the NRA is to regulate and ensure the safety of Japan's nuclear power plants, one could be forgiven for thinking that its real intent is to prevent any of them being used ever again. Such is the slew of useless, outdated, unnecessary and downright environmentally criminal regulations drafted by the NRA.

Some of the safety measures now mandated for nuclear plants in Japan include the installation of multiple power sources near each reactor; on-site storage of multiple power-supply and fire-fighting vehicles; relocation of pumps, generators and storage tanks to high ground; and the installation of filtered venting equipment at each reactor. In addition, each power plant needs to start the construction of an emergency disaster response center that must be earthquake, tsunami and radiation proof. The list of requirements goes on and on; a more complete description can be found here.

Few people seem to be questioning the real outcome of these measures, which is the extended delay in restarting Japan's nuclear fleet. In fact, it is very possible that many plants will never restart at all, due to the tremendous costs involved in meeting all of these new standards, which have been estimated at over $100 million per reactor unit.

These measures are intended to prevent a 'disaster' like that in Fukushima ever happening again. This 'disaster' was the consequence of geological events that occur about every 800 years, and was preventable by relatively simple planning or plant modification, and which nevertheless caused no deaths or serious injuries at all.

The new NRA's new strict regulations and recommendations have generated scores of news stories on NHK news and other media. For the last several months there has been continual coverage especially of the effects of the NRA's new larger evacuation zone around a nuclear plant in case of accident. The new zone is now 30km in radius whereas the old zone was 10km. The new radius around every nuclear plant in Japan encompasses several million people across the country. Local municipalities have been thrown into a frenzy drafting up new evacuation plans for each locality, all of which of course will be completely useless in the event of a real emergency.

Rather than questioning the necessity of this new expanded evacuation zone, the media has been covering the effect it will have on local people. For example, two days ago on NHK news there was a report on the number of islands affected by the new rules...yet local authorites have yet to secure boats for 15 of the islands.

NHK even interviewed a priest at a picturesque shrine on one of the islands inside the new evacuation zone. 'There is no boat to leave the island and residents will have to find a way to evacuate on their own,' he laments. It never occurred to the priest to ask whether an ill-informed and unquestioning bureaucrat in Tokyo has the authority to order him to leave his own Shinto shrine in the event that a nuclear power plant 20km away released a puff of radiation equivalent to, say, 1% of normal background levels.

Arguably the most important outcome of this media blitz is the construction of an image of nuclear plants as troublesome, expensive and above all dangerous. To the casual viewer, nuclear power necessitates much more stringent safety measures than other kinds of industrial activity, despite the fact that in reality nuclear power is much, much safer than other forms of large-scale energy production.

These excessive regulations on the part of the NRA can be seen as an expression of the Japanese tendency towards overcaution, even paranoia. Other examples include people wearing helmets on the street during the Skylab paranoia; English language schools teaching 'Emergency English' after a tourist was shot in America when he misunderstood the word 'Freeze'; and schoolkids being prevented from making snowballs in the playground because 'one may contain a rock'.