Japan’s atomic power establishment is in shock following the court ruling on Friday that found the state and the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant liable for failing to take preventive measures against the tsunami that crippled the facility.
The reason for the shock is the ruling has wide-ranging implications for Japan’s entire nuclear power industry and the efforts to restart reactors throughout the country.
Judges in the Maebashi District Court in Gunma prefecture ruled that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) and the government were aware of the earthquake and tsunami risks to the Fukushima Daiichi plant prior to the 2011 triple reactor meltdown, but failed to take preventative measures.
The decision was welcomed by the 137 Fukushima citizens who filed the lawsuit in 2014. What needs to be remembered is a further 28 civil and criminal lawsuits in 18 prefectures across Japan are pending. They involve more than 10,000 citizens and include a shareholder claim seeking compensation of 5.5 trillion yen (US$49 billion).
Tepco is already a de facto bankrupt, has been effectively nationalized and now faces the unprecedented challenges of how to remove three melted reactors at the Fukushima plant.
Six years after the disaster it still faces unanswered questions about the precise causes of the accident, questions that have generated public opposition to Tepco restarting reactors at another plant in Kashiwazki-kariwa in Niigata prefecture, on the opposite coastline to Fukushima.
Beside the court ruling being yet another blow to Tepco’s efforts to recover from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the judgement will be highly disruptive to plans by the government and utilities to restart nuclear reactors in Japan.
Perhaps no surprise then that Japan’s nuclear regulator is holding an emergency session this week.
In the court ruling, the judges found that science-based evidence of major risks to the nuclear plant was “foreseen” but ignored and not acted upon by Japan’s government and Tepco.
The evidence included a 2002 government assessment that concluded there was a 20% risk of a magnitude 8 or greater earthquake off the coast of northeastern Japan within 30 years. This includes the sea bed area off the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Further, the plaintiffs cited a 2008 internal Tepco report ‘Tsunami Measures Unavoidable’ which included the likelihood of a potential 15.7 meter tsunami hitting the Fukushima nuclear site.
The court ruled that if the government had used its regulatory powers to make Tepco take countermeasures, such as installing seawalls, against such an event, the nuclear disaster could have been avoided.
While the judges in Gunma prefecture have concluded that ignoring evidence of risk can have devastating consequences, that does not seem to be the approach of the nuclear utilities or the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA).
Over the last four years, the NRA has demonstrated a tendency to ignore evidence of risks to nuclear plants that have made applications to restart reactors shut down after the Fukushima disaster, and to bend to the demands of the nuclear power companies and the government.
A total of 26 reactors have applied for NRA review, of which seven have passed and four more will likely be approved this year.
In each case, the NRA has failed to apply a robust approach to assessing risks. It has chose to screen out seismic faults that threaten nuclear plants, failed to follow recommendations from international safety guidelines, and accepted selective evidence on volcanic risks.
In the case of the three forty-year old reactors at Takahama and Mihama, the NRA approved the reactors, while granting the utility an exemption from demonstrating that the reactors primary circuit can meet the 2013 post Fukushima revised safety guidelines, until a later date.
All of these safety issues have the potential when things go wrong — see Fukushima — to lead to severe accidents, including reactor core meltdown.
The Gunma court judgement will play a significant role in challenging Japan’s current approach to nuclear safety regulation.
District courts have issued injunctions against reactor restarts in Fukui prefecture, and in a historic ruling in March 2016 a court in Shiga prefecture ordered the immediate shutdown of the Takahama 3 and 4 reactors.
An appeal court is scheduled to rule on the above in the coming weeks and while it is anticipated that the reactor owner Kansai Electric will likely win, the prospects of further legal action remains.
Next month, for example, the former deputy chair of the NRA, Kunihiko Shimazaki will testify in a lawsuit against the operation of the Ohi reactors owned by Kansai Electric in western Japan.
Shimazeki, emeritus professor of seismology at Tokyo University and the only seismologist to have been an NRA commissioner, has challenged the formulas used by the regulator in computing the scale of earthquakes, which he believes underestimates potential seismic impact by factor of 3.5.
Last July the NRA dismissed Professor Shimazeki’s evidence.
Six years after the start of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, only 3 of Japan’s reactors are currently operating out of the 54 available in 2011.
For any business that runs the risk of its principal cash-generating asset being shut down at any point and for an extended period through legal challenges, the future does not look bright — unless you are granted approval to disregard the evidence.
The utilities are hemorrhaging money and therefore run the risk of following the same path as Tepco prior to 2011 in prioritizing cost savings over safety.
Such an approach directly led to the bankruptcy of Tepco, one the worlds largest power companies, and liabilities of at least 21 trillion yen.
The nuclear industry and current government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe understand that to allow robust evidence of safety risks, in particular seismic, to determine the future of operation of reactors would mean the end of nuclear power in Japan.
Citizens from Fukushima with their lawyers and now supported by the judges, have moved Japan one step closer to that eventual scenario.
Shaun Burnie is a senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany. He has worked on nuclear issues worldwide for more than three decades, including since 1991 on Japan’s nuclear policy. sburnie@greenpeace.org
These reactors are of an older design with inherent risks, but with the benefit they can produce fissile material which can be used in nuclear weapons. It’s really quite simple isn’t it ?
The generating plants and a reasonable store of fuel could have been placed on towers sited on high ground. This is relatively inexpensive. Japanese and Americans boast a lot but have little initiative nor show responsiblity towards cleaning up this mess. Luckily Russia has offered to help now.
You cannot want to start this horror up again?!!? Are you insane Japan? You are Criminally responsible for single handedly filling the ocean with radiation…how could you?
No penalty is too high for this disaster and the Japanese government should be penalized by the world court for a crime of negligence against humanity for approving this risky technology in the first place. The consequences will affect all oceans of the world and those dependent on them for sustainability.
All of this….. to boil water
The fix is DO NOT EVACUATE when the next meltdown happens.. What an idiotic people. This appeasement of razing land and creating garbage is all b/c of LNT myth propagated by anti-nuclear theives.. Chugging a bottle of vodka is a lot worse than sipping it over a year. Same applies to Cs137. I would be delighted to buy land, cultivate and live there since anything
Corporate liability-limitation priviledge must be suspended / terminated in cases of gross negligence and fraud.
The principals and executive and directors and voting shareholders must be held personally civilly and criminally liable for corporate misconduct.
So, if …Six years after the start of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, only 3 of Japan’s reactors are currently operating out of the 54 available in 2011…then where are they getting their power from???
It’s good they’re held accountable. But there is absolutely no way to undo the damage. Money cannot fix this. It’s always too little, too late.
But we need the nuclear waste from them so we can make more nuclear weapons cause we don’t have enough to blow the planet up a million times yet only a few thousand and we need to be able to give the rich people more $ cause as we are seeing a billion or so is never enough. Go Greed Go! *sigh….
Why aren’t the utilizing Geo-electric sources from the active magma beds like Iceland? So short sighted.
Thanks to fearmongers and sensationalist mass media, Japan is burning more and more coal that is far deadlier than carbon-free nuclear power.
Fukushima was kind of disaster where no one has been killed by radiation exposure; the tsunami/earthquake is that was the real killer. It has just served to make the fossil fuel industry ever stronger because intermittent renewables(wind/solar bird-choppers/landscape-destroyers) are just a high-cost mystical placebo backed up by fossil fuels to compensate intermittencies, a fiasco in terms of CO2 reduction, e.g. Germany.
Air pollution from fossil fuels is killing thousands of people each day, millions each year.
death/TWh: coal 161.00, oil 36.00, solar 0.44, wind 0.15, hydro 0.10, nuclear 0.04
"I hope that it is not too late for the world to emulate France and make nuclear power our principal source of energy. There is at present no other safe, practical and economic substitute for the dangerous practice of burning carbon fuels." – James Lovelock(environmentalist)
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“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – Dr. James Hansen(climate scientist)
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It is time that the Global Community puts a stop to nuclear reactors for ANY reason.
No country has the right to destroy life on earth for other nations simply so they can have their nuclear power.
Time yo find new and innovative strategies, here’s your chance,,Japan!
who cares about the financial implications. have we learnt nothing? Human lives are at risk. All life on earth is at risk and we are going to award some fictional money to some people. what is the point?
Higher sea wall is not the correct fix, nor were the lack of it the culpable fault of Tepco. All of the reactors in Japan survived the tsunami and earthquake.
There were inexpensive measures that Tepco should have taken long before the earthquake. The manufacturer recommend Hydrogen combiners should have been installed. That would have prevented the Hydrogen explosions even if the next fault had been corrected. Backup generators to operate the cooling system should have been placed in high as wells as low locations. That would have prevented all three of the melt-downs.
The government made things worse by interfearing with the plant personell on scene who knew what they were doing, unlike the government. Much valuable time was lost in the efforts to save the reactors by following the earthquake protocol to stop working and assemble in the parking lot after every little aftershock.
More time was wasted by the unnecessary evacuation. Not only was work delayed because of the unreasonable doubling of the evacuation, but over a thousand of the evacuees died because of the evacuation.