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"Fukushima Daiichi\nMore than a year has passed since a massive earthquake and a series of tsunamis triggered the worst accident at a nuclear power plant since Chernobyl in 1986, but the epic debacle at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station remains front and center in Japan, at the very core of a historic debate over the future of nuclear energy\u2014one that comes down to a fundamental question: Should nuclear power, which prior to the accident last year generated 30% of the electricity for the world\u2019s third-largest economy, have any future at all in Japan?\nOn April 13, the government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda tipped its hand. With summer approaching, and with it peak demand for electricity, the Japanese government approved the restart of two nuclear reactors in the small fishing town Oi, in Fukui prefecture on Japan\u2019s west coast.\nThe nine power companies in Japan have the legal authority to fire up the nuclear plants once they have received regulatory approval from Tokyo, in practice. But the Noda administration now must seek the assent of the local and prefectural governments affected by a restart&amp;#8211;as it will have to do for each of the other 48 reactors across the country should it seek to bring them back online in order to avoid crippling brown outs this summer.\nThat assent won\u2019t come easily. Public opposition to nuclear power now runs hot in Japan. Far from fading over the last year, opposition seems to have expanded to a solid majority of citizens nationwide, putting both Noda\u2019s government and Japan\u2019s big business community (which needs the electricity) in a very difficult spot. The reason for that is the debacle of Fukushima Daiichi\u2014the six-reactor power station owned and operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) \u2014and the many questions that still surround the terrifying events that began on March 11, 2011.\nFor the past year, through interviews with employees of TEPCO (some officially sanctioned by the company, some without its knowledge), government officials and nuclear industry experts in Japan and abroad, we\u2019ve attempted to answer two of the most fundamental issues at the heart of nuclear debate now roiling Japan: how could the accident at Fukushima Daiichi have happened\u2014and how, in particular, could it have happened in Japan, a country once known, not so long ago, for its sheer management and engineering competence?\nThe answers are bracing. The epic disaster at Fukushima Daiichi represents failure at almost every level, from how the Japanese government regulates nuclear power, to how TEPCO managed critical details of the crisis under desperate circumstances.\nMORE: Utility exec to feds: Save our tax break, or else\nAs horrific as the natural disasters that occurred on March 11, 2011 were, the Japanese government itself has concluded that the nuclear crisis effectively began more than four decades before that, when one of the world\u2019s largest electric generating stations was located at the ocean\u2019s edge, in a country in which earthquakes\u2014huge ones\u2014 are facts of life, and have been for centuries. This story recounts not only the fearful days that followed the Great Tohoku quake, but what led TEPCO, and Japan, to be in such a position of vulnerability to begin with.\nThe Darkest Hours\nIn the wee hours of the morning of March 15, 2011 TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu sat in the back of his company car, threading his way through the deserted streets of Tokyo. It had been three days since a massive earthquake\u20149.0 on the Richter scale\u2014and a series of tsunamis had utterly devastated northeastern Japan. No natural disaster had ever been greater, but for Shimizu, whose company operated the massive Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, an epic crisis had only begun.\n\n  \nMasataka Shimizu, TEPCO president\nHe had been summoned to the office of Naoto Kan, then Prime Minister of Japan. Kan was furious: As horrific as the damage from the quake and tsunami was, Japan now faced the prospect of the worst nuclear accident in human history. At TEPCO\u2019s Fukushima Daiichi power station, massive hydrogen explosions had already damaged two of the three reactors that had been operating on March 11, releasing dangerous levels of radiation into the atmosphere. (The three other reactors at the power station had offline at the time for routine maintenance.) The nuclear fuel in the three reactors that were operating appeared to be melting down.\nThe scene at the plant site, about 160 miles northeast of Tokyo, was nothing short of apocalyptic: small fires blazed at the damaged reactors, the smoke mixing with the steam that they were releasing. Radiation levels would eventually spike so high that the plant\u2019s emergency off-site center five kilometers away had to be evacuated; astonishingly, the building was not designed to withstand elevated radiation levels, even though its precise purpose was to serve as a backup operations center during a nuclear emergency.\nFor three agonizing days, conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi site had been steadily deteriorating; and TEPCO, at least in the eyes of senior government officials, had not given any sign of being able to get control of the situation.\nTo the contrary, former Prime Minister Kan (he resigned in August) tells Fortune that the TEPCO called Tokyo\u2019s minister of economy, trade and industry and told him TEPCO wanted to withdraw from the site completely\u2014a staggering admission of defeat that immediately conjured up images of an uncontained nuclear meltdown; a worst case scenario, in other words, of potentially lethal proportions.\u2028Shimizu also called Kan\u2019s chief cabinet secretary, insisting: \u201CWe cannot hold onto the site!\u201D\nAt roughly the same time, Goshi Hosono, who would become the Japanese government\u2019s point man during the nuclear crisis, called TEPCO\u2019s on site plant manager, Masao Yoshida, and asked if he too thought Fukushima Daiichi needed to be abandoned. Yoshida appeared to push back against Shimizu, his boss, saying, \u201Cwe can still hold on, but we need weapons, like a high-pressure water pump.\u201D\nMORE: Shale gas is no alternative to renewables\nKan had been increasingly frustrated by the lack of what he felt was reliable information about the state of the nuclear crisis since its onset; he compared it to \u201Cplaying the telephone game.\u201D At 4 a.m., he ordered an aide to call Shimizu back and instruct him to come to his office.\n(Shimizu, then 66, was not accustomed to being called on the carpet by government officials. He was a pillar of the conservative Japanese industrial establishment, and a TEPCO lifer. He had also been a member in good standing of the global nuclear power industry; less than a year earlier he had been elected to the board of the World Association of Nuclear Operators, a trade group ostensibly devoted to ensuring the \u201Chighest possible standards of safety.\u201D)\nKan himself wanted to hear what Shimizu was thinking, but he had already decided, after talking to his nuclear emergency team before the TEPCO president arrived, that \u201CI could not let it [an evacuation] happen. It just wasn\u2019t an option.\u201D\nTurning a Blind Eye\u2028\u2028\u2028       \nThere was no precedent for the magnitude of the quake and tsunami that wreaked havoc at Fukushima Daiichi. But the disaster wasn\u2019t unimaginable. In fact, workers periodically discussed among themselves the risks of the facility\u2019s location. \u201CI always wondered why you would build a nuclear site this size in an earthquake zone right on the ocean,\u201D said one worker, who requested anonymity because TEPCO had not granted him permission to speak to the press. Sitting in a small karaoke bar in the nearby city of Minami-soma, the worker was at the plant on March 11, 2011 and worked almost continuously through the spring, summer and autumn to try to contain the crisis.\nTEPCO\u2019s senior management and Japan\u2019s nuclear regulators wondered about the risks, too, this worker noted. When the licenses for the Fukushima Daiichi generating stations were granted in 1966 and 1972, they called for the plant to be able to withstand a wave cresting at 3.1 meters in height\u2014a figure based on the size of a tsunami in Chile in 1960.\nMORE: Asia&amp;#8217;s 25 hottest people in business\nAs recently as 2008, according to the Japanese government\u2019s interim report into the accident released at the end of last year, TEPCO reevaluated the tsunami risks at the plant. New simulations the company ran showed waves could reach as high as 15 meters\u2014chillingly, almost the exact height of the biggest wave that smashed into the coastline on the afternoon of March 11.\nTEPCO didn\u2019t believe the simulation was reliable.\n\n  \nMasao Yoshida, plant manager\nAs a Japanese government investigation into the nuclear accident concludes, in understated but withering prose: \u201CTEPCO still did not take concrete measures against the possibility of tsunami,\u201D because it didn\u2019t trust the new model that had generated that result.\nThe report is equally critical of the nuclear regulatory agencies in Japan. \u201CThe investigation committee is unable to find efforts of the regulatory organizations concerned\u201D to determine whether adequate defenses against possible tsunamis were in place.\nJapan would pay dearly for that. Two TEPCO workers, in the process of inspecting unit number four, were killed instantly when the largest of the seven waves struck the plant site. The cooling systems for the reactors that were operating and the plant\u2019s spent fuel pools were disabled when backup generators failed.\nThe ensuing chaos and confusion\u2014at TEPCO headquarters and at the plant site\u2014would lead to a series of early missteps that would eventually cause hydrogen explosions at three of the reactor units, blasts that released damaging levels of radioactive material in the atmosphere and seawater. \u201CI thought we were done,\u201D recalls Masao Yoshida, the plant manager. \u201CI thought we would lose control over the reactors completely.\u201D\nHeads in the sand\nNuclear safety in Japan historically has been predicated on making sure plants could withstand \u201Cdesign basis accidents.\u201D\u2028\u2028Translation: an accident that the plant has been designed to deal with automatically. What happened a year ago went far beyond that. The industry calls the accident at Fukushima Daiichi a station blackout, or an SBO.\nIn the United States, in the 1980s and 90s, regulatory authorities and nuclear operators began planning for the possibility of station blackouts, in which a nuclear plant loses all sources of power, just as Fukushima Daiichi did last year. They began installing what Satoshi Sato, a nuclear industry consultant in Tokyo, calls \u201Cdefense in depth,\u201D which means there are both redundant and diverse mechanisms in place intended to cope with accidents, up to and including SBOs.\nTEPCO and Japan\u2019s nuclear regulators say they did have redundant power sources in place\u2014the on site diesel generators that also eventually failed after the tsunami struck. (Despite sitting within a few hundred yards of the Pacific ocean, the generators were not designed to withstand flooding.)\nBut Japan never even tried to prepare for station blackouts. Even as the rest of the world moved on, says Sato, the feeling in Tokyo was, \u201CSBOs are not conceivable; don\u2019t even think about it.\u201D\nCritics of the industry in Japan say there is a basic reason for that. Historically, the government and the power companies spent more time and energy trying to convince the public that nuclear energy was safe than it did actually trying to make nuclear energy safe. Says Sato: \u201Cwe spent ten times more money for PR campaigns than we did for real safety measures. It\u2019s a terrible thing.\u201D\n\n  \nNaoto Kan, former Prime Minister\n\u201CA Tough Moment\u201D\u2028\nWhen Shimizu walked into Kan\u2019s office in the early hours of March 15 of last year, the Prime Minister was surrounded by the key officials from his office and various ministries trying to cope with the ongoing crisis.\nKan told the TEPCO executive that his plan to withdraw from Fukushima Daiichi was unacceptable. \u201CThere\u2019s no way you can leave the site.\u201D Shimizu, according to Kan, didn\u2019t protest. \u201CI understand,\u201D he replied. TEPCO has denied through its press spokesmen that it ever intended to pull out entirely from the plant and Shimizu has declined to talk to the press. Kan, in his interview with Fortune, was adamant in his language about what Shimizu said he wanted to do: \u201CTettai,\u201D he said in Japanese. Withdraw.\nMORE: Will gas crowd out wind and solar?\nKan said he then told the Shimizu that they needed to set up a joint nuclear task force at the company\u2019s headquarters, so lines of communication might be improved. Kan wanted to reinforce the message at TEPCO, and so he drove to the headquarters shortly after Shimizu had left.\nAt around 5:45 that morning, he addressed some 200 TEPCO employees, including Shimizu and the chairman, Tsunehisa Katsumata, and told them that he knew they faced \u201Ca tough moment.\u201D\nIn the days that followed the station blackout, many of TEPCO\u2019s on site workers went to extraordinary lengths to cope with the chaotic and deteriorating situation. They scrambled to the site\u2019s parking lots and scavenged car batteries to try to generate power to open key valves at the reactors.\nWhen the government gave the orders to vent the primary containment vessels of the operating reactors, an important step to diminish the pressure building up inside, workers popped potassium iodide tablets and were told they had only 17 minutes to work, lest they be exposed for too long to radiation levels that were dangerously high.\nThe man at the center of this, TEPCO\u2019s point man during the crisis, was Masao Yoshida, the site manager at Fukushima Daiichi. He had also been frustrated in the firstdays of the crisis by what he felt was bad information Kan and other key people in Tokyo were getting.\nYoshida understood better than anyone involved that getting water onto the reactors and into the spent fuel pools was the most important thing that needed to happen. But at one point, more than a day into crisis and\u2014after a hydrogen explosion had already damaged reactor unit one\u2014the powers that be in Tokyo got sidetracked, at least in Yoshida\u2019s view, by a discussion about \u201Cre-criticality.\u201D\nKan wanted to know whether the exposed core could still create a fissile reaction, complicating the effort to achieve a \u201Ccold shut-down\u201D (which to this day remains the ultimate end game at Fukushima Daiichi.)  According to the detailed account of an independent investigative commission led by Yoichi Funabashi, one of Japan\u2019s most respected journalists, the discussion somehow got tangled up with the question of whether to try to pump seawater into the reactors.\nYoshida, with the situation at the plant deteriorating rapidly, thought this discussion was a complete waste of time.  He was thus stunned, according to the Funabashi Commission report, when on a conference call with Shimizu and TEPCO\u2019s chief liaison with the government, Ichiro Takekuro, he was told to delay the spraying of seawater onto the exposed reactors.\nThis, in Yoshida\u2019s view, was exactly the wrong thing to do at that moment.\nSo during the call, Yoshida motioned another employee over and whispered to him that even though he would now order a halt to the seawater injections\u2014so the officials in Tokyo could hear him doing so on the phone\u2014he wanted everyone at the site to understand that they should disregard that order. Seawater needed to be sprayed onto the site\u2014or they were going to be in worse trouble than they were already.\nIn any chain of command situation anywhere, it was nothing less than insubordination. In a Japanese context, what Yoshida did is practically unthinkable. Hierarchy is everything in Japan. It literally dictates how low you should bow when meeting someone else. (In late November, Yoshida stepped down as site manager, having been hospitalized with an undisclosed illness.)\nYoshida\u2019s decision in the face of crisis speaks volumes as to just how desperate the situation was then. \u201CIt was exactly the right thing to do,\u201D says Sato, the consultant.\nInto the Fire\u2028\n\u2028In the first hours and days following the earthquake and tsunami, investigators have found TEPCO personnel made also critical mistakes\u2014a couple of which are still unexplained.\nOne involved a critical piece of equipment, known as an isolation condenser, which keeps the water level in the reactor constant even if offsite electricity is lost. On the night of March 11, TEPCO operators at the plant site belatedly recognized that the system was not functioning, and then once they did, tried and failed to open up manually a valve that had been closed.\nThe assumption that the system was working delayed the decision to \u201Cvent\u201D, or depressurize, the reactor unit, a mistake that, in the eyes of the government\u2019s interim report, led to the first huge hydrogen explosion at reactor one the afternoon of March 12.\nThe independent Funabashi report also questions why it took seven hours from the time Prime Minister Kan approved the plan to vent to the first attempt to execute it. All the while, more hydrogen was leaking into the reactor building.\nConditions inside the plant\u2014and confusion just outside of it\u2014 may have precluded swifter action.\nYoshida had ordered his team to make preparations to vent reactors one and two shortly after midnight, and Kan, the Prime Minister, approved the plan at around 1:30am.\nBut there was no procedure to operate the vent valves without power, so Yoshida\u2019s operators had to figure out on the fly how to do so manually\u2014and then take potentially fatal risks to try to make it work.\nAt the same time, the government wanted to make sure residents who still remained in the area around of the plant were evacuated. It would be several hours before that happened, in part because the residents had no idea in which direction they were to flee.\nShortly after 9 in the morning of March 12, Yoshida dispatched the two teams. Both had volunteered to go into the reactor, knowing that radiation levels were dangerously high. Each headed to different sections to open critical valves.\nThe first team succeeded and quickly withdrew. But as the second team entered, their \u201Cdose rates\u201D \u2014 their exposure to radiation\u2014immediately spiked. One of the operators was instantly exposed to 106 millisieverts of radiation, above the 100 \u201Cemergency dose limit\u201D mandated by TEPCO.\nThe team was pulled out immediately, having failed to open the necessary valves to reduce pressure in the reactor. It took until 2:30 that afternoon\u2014almost 24 hours after the earthquake \u2014for venting of reactor one to commence.\nJust over an hour later, at 3:36, the massive explosion shook the site.\nOver the next three days, two more hydrogen blasts followed, one at reactor three, and one at unit four, which had been offline at the time of the tsunami.\nIn the desperate days just after the accident, there was no single event or decision that brought the situation back from the brink. Yoshida\u2019s decision to ignore the order against spraying seawater was important. The eventual ability of the Japanese military, police and fire department units, using multiple water cannons and fire trucks, to get to the site and douse it with seawater prevented the crisis from becoming even worse.\nIf there was a making-it-up-as-they-went-along quality to the effort, it\u2019s because they were: the defense forces didn\u2019t even have a site map for Fukushima Daiichi when its personnel first arrived.\nStill, starting from about March 17, Kan told Fortune he felt \u201Cwe were creating a defense line, we were pushing back against the enemy.\u2019\u2019 Radiation levels, while still high, had stopped increasing. Days later some electricity was finally restored to the site.\nBut it would be a long time before Kan or anyone else felt any sense of relief. On July 19th, TEPCO said it believed it had stabilized the temperature inside the reactors &amp;#8212; an important step toward the goal of \u201Ccold shutdown.\u201D That was the first day, Kan says, when he could effectively exhale, when he thought \u201Cthe worst was over.\u201D\nThe Funabashi commission report points out in withering detail that the Japanese government never gave its citizens a realistic sense of just how long it would take to get control of the disabled plant, nor what the ongoing risks were as radiation continued to be emitted from the site. Arguably, it still hasn\u2019t.\nOn December 16, Kan\u2019s successor, Yoshihiko Noda, announced that the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station had reached &amp;#8220;a state of cold shutdown.\u201D Japan\u2019s worst-ever nuclear accident, the Prime Minister said, had finally been brought under control.\nThe moment was meant to be a calming milestone, psychological balm for a wounded country in the process of trying to heal. The only problem with it, as workers today at the nuclear power plant, will tell you, is this: it wasn\u2019t true then, and it\u2019s still not true today. \u201CThe coolant water is keeping the reactor temperatures at a certain level, but that\u2019s not even near the goal [of a cold shut down,]\u201D says an engineer working inside the plant. \u201CThe fact is, we still don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on inside the reactors.\u201D"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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