In addition to paying for advertisements, the
nuclear industry has set up exhibitions at nuclear plants, like the one at the
Hokuriku plant in Shika, Japan, that aims to appeal to young people with
characters from "Alice in Wonderland." But the deliberate
effort to rally Japanese behind nuclear power can be traced to the beginning of
the atomic age, scholars and experts say.
By Norimitsu Onishi
New York Times
Published: June 24, 2011
SHIKA, Japan ~ Near a nuclear
power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large
public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with
some help from “Alice in Wonderland.”
The industry's public relations campaign extends beyond the
exhibits at plants in Shika and elsewhere. More
Photos »
“It’s terrible, just terrible,” the White Rabbit says in the first exhibit. “We’re running out of energy, Alice.”A Dodo robot figure, swiveling to address Alice and the visitors to the building, declares that there is an “ace” form of energy called nuclear power. It is clean, safe and renewable if you reprocess uranium and plutonium, the Dodo says.“Wow, you can even do that!” Alice says of nuclear power. “You could say that it’s optimal for resource-poor Japan!”
Over several decades, Japan’s nuclear establishment has devoted
vast resources to persuade the Japanese public of the safety and necessity of
nuclear power. Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations
buildings that became tourist attractions. Bureaucrats spun elaborate
advertising campaigns through a multitude of organizations established solely
to advertise the safety of nuclear plants.
Politicians pushed through the adoption of
government-mandated school textbooks with friendly views of nuclear power.
The result was the widespread adoption of the belief ~ called
the “safety myth” ~ that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe.
Japan single-mindedly pursued nuclear power even as Western nations distanced
themselves from it.
The belief helps explains why in the only nation to have been
attacked with atomic bombs, the Japanese acceptance of nuclear power was so
strong that the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl barely registered.
Even with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the reaction
against nuclear power has been much stronger in Europe and the United States
than in Japan itself.
As the Japanese continue to search for answers to the
disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, some are digging deep into the
national psyche and examining a national propensity to embrace a belief now
widely seen as irrational. Because of this widespread belief in Japanese
plants’ absolute safety, plant operators and nuclear regulators failed to adopt
proper safety measures and advances in technology, like emergency robots, experts
and government officials acknowledge.
“In Japan, we have something called the ‘safety
myth,’ ” Banri Kaieda, who runs the Ministry of
Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees the nuclear industry, said at a
news conference at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna on
Monday. “It’s a fact that there was an unreasonable overconfidence in the
technology of Japan’s nuclear power generation.”
As a result, he said, the nuclear industry’s “thinking about
safety had a poor foundation.”
Japan’s government has concentrated its propaganda and
educational efforts on creating such national beliefs in the past, most notably
during World War II. The push for nuclear power underpinned postwar Japan’s
focus on economic growth and its dream of greater energy independence. But as
the carefully fostered belief in nuclear safety has dissipated in the three
months after the March 11 disaster, Japanese are increasingly blaming the
nuclear establishment for Fukushima.
In a politically apathetic country, tens of thousands have
regularly held protests against nuclear power. Young Japanese have
used social media to organize and publicize demonstrations that have been
virtually ignored by major newspapers and television networks.
A song, “It Was Always a Lie,” has become an anthem at the
protests and a vehicle for Japanese anger on the Internet. Its author, a famous
singer named Kazuyoshi Saito, wrote it by changing the
lyrics of a love ballad, “I Always Liked You,” that he composed last year for a
commercial for Shiseido, the cosmetics giant. Mr. Saito’s performance of the
song, surreptitiously uploaded on YouTube and other sites, has gone
viral.
“If you walk across this country, you’ll find 54 nuclear
reactors/School textbooks and commercials told us they were safe,” the song
goes.
“It was always a lie, it’s been exposed after all/It was really a lie that nuclear power is safe.”
Caught Unprepared
In the days after a giant tsunami knocked out Fukushima
Daiichi’s cooling system, the prime minister’s office and the Tokyo Electric
Power Company, or Tepco, the plant’s operator, wrestled over whether to inject cooling seawater into the reactor buildings
to prevent catastrophic meltdowns, and then over how to do it.
With radiation levels too high for workers to approach the
reactors, the Japanese authorities floundered. They sent police trucks mounted
with water cannons ~equipment designed to disperse rioters ~ to spray water
into the reactor buildings. Military helicopters flew over the buildings,
dropping water that was scattered off course by strong winds, in a
“performance, a kind of circus” that was aimed more at reassuring an
increasingly alarmed Japanese population and American government, said Kenichi
Matsumoto, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan.
What became clear was that Japan lacked some of the basic
hardware to respond to a nuclear crisis and, after initial resistance, had to
look abroad for help.
For a country proud of its technology, the low point
occurred on March 31 when it had to use a 203-foot-long water pump ~ shipped
from China, an export market for Japanese nuclear technology ~ to inject 90
tons of fresh water into the No. 1 reactor building. But perhaps more than
anything else, the absence of one particular technology was deeply puzzling: emergency
robots.
Japan, after all, is the world’s leader in robotics. It has
the world’s largest force of mechanized workers. Its humanoid robots can walk
and run on two feet, sing and dance, and even play the violin. But where were
the emergency robots at Fukushima?
The answer is that the operators and nuclear regulators,
believing that accidents would never occur, steadfastly opposed the
introduction of what they regarded as unnecessary technology.
“The plant operators said that robots, which would premise
an accident, were not needed,” said Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, 77, an engineer and a
former president of the University of Tokyo, Japan’s most prestigious academic
institution. “Instead, introducing them would inspire fear, they said. That’s
why they said that robots couldn’t be introduced.”
Even before the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, Mr.
Yoshikawa, a robotics expert, and other researchers began building emergency
robots capable of responding to a nuclear accident, eventually producing a
prototype called Mooty. The robots were resistant to high levels of radiation
and capable of surmounting mounds of rubble.
But the robots never made it into production, forcing Japan,
in the aftermath of Fukushima, to rely on an emergency shipment of robots from iRobot, a
company in Bedford, Mass., more famous for manufacturing the Roomba vacuum. On
Friday, Tepco deployed the first Japanese-made robot, which was retrofitted
recently to handle nuclear accidents, but workers had to retrieve it after it
malfunctioned.
The rejection of robots, Mr. Yoshikawa said, was part of the
industry’s overall reluctance to improve maintenance and invest in new
technologies.
“That’s why the safety myth wasn’t just an empty slogan,”
said Mr. Yoshikawa, now the director general of the Center
for Research and Development Strategy at the Japan Science and Technology
Agency. “It was a kind of mind-set that rejected progress through the
introduction of new technology.”
ENTERING A NEW AGE
The deliberate effort to rally Japanese behind nuclear power
can be traced to the beginning of the atomic age, scholars and experts say.
In August 1945, Yasuhiro Nakasone, a young naval officer who
would become one of postwar Japan’s most powerful prime ministers, was
stationed in western Japan.
“I saw the nuclear mushroom cloud over Hiroshima,” Mr.
Nakasone wrote in an essay in the 1960s. “At that moment, I sensed that the
next age was the nuclear age.”
For many Japanese like Mr. Nakasone, nuclear power became a
holy grail ~ a way for Japan, whose lack of oil and other natural resources had
led to World War II and defeat, to become more energy independent. The mastery
of nuclear power would also open the possibility of eventually developing
nuclear weapons, a subject that Japan secretly studied when Mr. Nakasone was
defense minister in 1970.
It was precisely because of nuclear power’s possible link to
nuclear arms and its close ties to the United States that left-leaning
politicians, academics and intellectuals became fierce opponents. As a
countermeasure, proponents of nuclear power stressed its absolute safety, so
that each side struck extreme positions, a standoff that lasts to this day.
.
.
The Shimane plant's visitor
center also includes a model of a nuclear reactor's vessels, left.
The nuclear establishment ~ led by Tepco among the utilities and the Ministry of Economy ~ spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and educational programs emphasizing the safety of nuclear plants. The ministry’s division responsible for nuclear power has budgeted $12 million this year for those programs, said Takanobu Sugimoto, a division spokesman. Mr. Sugimoto said he “regretted” that the ministry might have “stressed only” the plants’ safety.
The nuclear establishment ~ led by Tepco among the utilities and the Ministry of Economy ~ spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and educational programs emphasizing the safety of nuclear plants. The ministry’s division responsible for nuclear power has budgeted $12 million this year for those programs, said Takanobu Sugimoto, a division spokesman. Mr. Sugimoto said he “regretted” that the ministry might have “stressed only” the plants’ safety.
The government and the utilities encouraged the creation of
many organizations that propagated the message of safety. One of the oldest,
the Japan
Atomic Energy Relations Organization, receives 40 percent of its financing
from two ministries that oversee nuclear power and 60 percent from Japan’s
plant operators. In addition to producing information promoting nuclear power,
the organization sends nuclear power experts to speak at secondary schools and
colleges, at no cost.
Mitsuhiro Yokote, 67, the executive managing director of the
organization and a former nuclear engineer at the Kansai
Electric Power Company, acknowledged that the experts conveyed the message
that nuclear plants were absolutely safe. Mr. Yokote said he “regretted” that
his organization had contributed to the safety myth.
In a country where people tend to reflexively trust the
government, assurances about the safety of Japan’s plants were enough to
reassure even those at greatest risk. In Oma, a fishing town in northern Japan where a plant
is currently under construction, Chernobyl made no impression on local
residents considering the plant back in the 1980s.
“What could we do but believe what the government told us?”
said Masaru Takahashi, 67, a member of a fishing union in Oma. “We were told
that they were absolutely safe.”
A PUBLIC RELATIONS DRIVE
After Chernobyl, the nuclear establishment made sure that
Japanese kept believing in safety.
The plant operators built or renovated the public relations
buildings ~ called “P.R. buildings” ~ attached to their plants. Before
Chernobyl, the buildings were simple facilities intended to appeal to “adult
men interested in technical matters,” said Noriya Sumihara, an
anthropologist at Tenri University who has researched the
facilities. Male guides wearing industrial uniforms took visitors around
exhibits consisting mostly of wall panels.
But after Chernobyl, the facilities were transformed into
elaborate theme parks geared toward young mothers, the group that research
showed was most worried about nuclear plants and radiation, Mr. Sumihara said.
Women of childbearing age, whose presence alone was meant to reassure the
visitors, were hired as guides.
In Higashidori, a town in northern Japan, one of the
country’s newest P.R. buildings is built on
the theme of Tonttu, a forest with resident dwarfs. The buildings also holds
events with anime characters to attract children and young parents, said
Yoshiki Oikawa, a spokesman for the Tohoku
Electric Power Company, which manages the site with Tepco.
Here in Shika, more than 100,000 guests last year visited
the P.R. building where Alice discovers the wonders of nuclear power. The
Caterpillar reassures Alice about radiation and the Cheshire Cat helps her
learn about the energy source. Instead of going down a rabbit hole, Alice
shrinks after eating a candy and enters a 1:25 scale model of the Shika nuclear
plant nearby.
Since the Fukushima disaster, visitors have started
questioning the safety of nuclear power, said Asuka Honda, 27, a guide here.
Many were pregnant women worried about the effects of radiation on their unborn
children. But the presence of Ms. Honda and other guides, mostly women in their
late 20s, seemed to reassure them.
The nuclear establishment also made sure that
government-mandated school textbooks underemphasized information that could
cast doubt on the safety of nuclear power. In Parliament, the campaign was led
by Tokio Kano, a Tepco vice president who became a
lawmaker in 1998. Mr. Kano, who declined to be interviewed for this article,
returned to Tepco as an adviser after retiring from Parliament last year.
In 2004, under the influence of Mr. Kano and other
proponents of nuclear power, education officials ordered revisions to textbooks
before endorsing them. In one junior high school social studies textbook, a
reference to the growing antinuclear movement in Europe was deleted. In
another, a reference to Chernobyl was relegated to a footnote.
.
.
The visitor center at a
plant in Shimane, left, used child-friendly characters to explain the
workings of nuclear power.
The effect could be seen in opinion polls that even after Fukushima have indicated that young Japanese are the strongest proponents of nuclear power.
The effect could be seen in opinion polls that even after Fukushima have indicated that young Japanese are the strongest proponents of nuclear power.
The nuclear establishment itself came to believe its own
safety myth and “became entangled in its own net,” said Hitoshi Yoshioka, an author of a book
on the history of Japan’s nuclear power and a member of a panel established by the
prime minister to investigate the causes of the Fukushima disaster.
He said that helped explain why, at Fukushima, Tepco failed
to carry out emergency measures in case of a complete loss of power, which is
what happened when the tsunami hit in March. Others have said that the nuclear
establishment’s embrace of the safety myth also makes it possible to understand
what, in hindsight, was the most glaring hole in the safety measures at Japan’s
nuclear plants.
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Alice's reality.
In the country that gave the world the word tsunami, few measures were taken at Fukushima Daiichi or elsewhere to protect plants against the giant waves. Neither the Dodo nor the Caterpillar makes any mention of tsunamis to Alice.
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