![]() In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese government and TEPCO were forced to face several immediate issues. No contingency planning: useful technology left unused The myth and the mindset it created in the public only exacerbated the disaster that came in March of 2011. Given the resource-short country that it is, the nuclear village saw nuclear energy as a crucial alternative that could help with Japan’s energy security. From the perspective of the interest groups, this anti-nuclear sentiment, called the “nuclear allergy,” was a barrier that needed to be overcome. In Japan, sentiment toward nuclear power has been overwhelmingly negative given the traumatic memory of the atomic bombs at the end of World War II. Yet, Japan was massively underprepared for the destruction experienced in 2011, much of it due to the “absolute safety myth.” This myth, perpetuated by the nuclear village, portrayed nuclear reactors to be “absolutely safe,” so residents around the reactors began to feel a false sense of security. The history of tsunamis and their possible destructiveness has long existed in the Japanese public memory. The Jogan tsunami flooded most of the area in the plains around Sendai in the same region the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck (渡邊偉夫「869). While large earthquakes may be accompanied by mostly minor tsunamis, Japan did experience a devastating quake and tsunami in the year 869. Japan experiences thousands of minor earthquakes every year, and over 150 earthquakes over magnitude 5 happen on the archipelago annually. Organizational inertia: the safety myth on autopilot In fact, the issues that Japan’s nuclear industry faces today are caused by the same dysfunctional organizational culture that was responsible for the Fukushima disaster, and the measures instituted by that culture to prevent a similar crisis from occurring are insufficient, even now. Since 2011, regulators have adopted a system for safety mechanisms to be consistently updated over time, but retroactive updates are costly, so companies are struggling to meet these standards. While regulations have since been improved, some critical issues remain. Looking back on the mistakes made in the days and weeks following March 11, 2011, it is clear that the factors contributing to disaster mismanagement include both organizational inertia and human errors. The organizational culture that failed to question or improve the safety systems at Fukushima created devastating consequences.īad as it was, the Fukushima incident can in some ways be seen as both a catastrophe and a “near-miss.” But for luck-among other things, winds that blew out to sea rather than towards heavily populated areas to the south, including Tokyo-the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant could have caused far greater contamination, dislocation, and loss of life than they did. Regulators failed to implement even basic protections like implementing newer foreign technology to improve safety procedures (Nuclear Regulation Authority 2013). Japan’s reactors were portrayed as being the “safest and most advanced in the world,” but this image was an illusion (Thomson 2014). Instead of having an adequate emergency response mechanism in place, interest groups-a closed community of power plant operators, regulators, nuclear industry and government officials known as “nuclear villages”-ran their plants with little accountability. They failed to plan against a worst-case scenario at the site, and division of responsibility in case of emergency was murky at best.There was in fact strong resistance to adopting newer technologies that would have made the plants safer. They overlooked the necessity to update protocols and regulations over time.They ignored the need for contingency planning in the event of a crisis involving the power plants and had created no mechanism for using relevant safety technologies in a crisis situation. ![]() They knew that over a millennium before 2011, an earthquake and resulting tsunami struck the exact same region in Tohoku, wiping out cities all along the coast.The government regulators and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the firm that operated the plants in Fukushima, were well aware of the following: It has been 12 years since the Fukushima incident-a triple disaster that devastated much of Northern Japan’s Tohoku region after an earthquake and tsunami caused nuclear meltdowns in three nuclear reactors-destroyed and paralyzed communities along the Japanese coast.Īlthough the disaster that unfolded may have appeared to be one that no one could have anticipated, in reality there were several glaring warning signs of the crisis to come, as described in a variety of investigative reports (Investigation Committee 2012 Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation 2014 Asia Pacific Initiative 2021). ![]()
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