Japan’s Response to Fukushima

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regulating the Compensation for Nuclear Damage),” Law No. 147 of 1961, a nuclear plant owner would be liable for damage, limited to its assets; beyond that amount any losses would fall on its victims. The law required the operators to buy insurance from a private insurer and obtain separate insurance from the government. Both would cover liabilities up to $1.2 billion per reactor. The private insurer would cover most accidents except natural disasters, while the government would cover disasters caused by natural events, like earthquakes and tsunamis, which private insurers typically exclude. Should all this prove insufficient, the statute authorizes the government to help.

In retrospect, TEPCO was certainly aware of the possibility of a tsunami that might overwhelm the 5.7-meter seawall and the nuclear facilities on the 10-meter high site because it was warned about such possibilities many times. Certainly, if TEPCO wanted to raise the sea wall, it could have done so with a modest investment. According to Schwarz and Cochran (Schwarz, Cochran, 2012), such an accident as the 3.11 disaster could have been avoided or alleviated if certain technological safeguard measures had been taken when the plant was originally under construction. Their study points to four measures (See Table 5.3): relocating the plant 10 km inland, building a 15-meter sea wall, using a lead acid battery backup system and relocating the diesel generators to a higher site.

Schwarz and Cochran suggested that if TEPCO had implemented at least one of the four safeguards before the Fukushima disaster, it would have greatly reduced the probability of a catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdown. They argue these measures would have added $62 million to the cost of constructing a nuclear plant. This would have been a mere fraction of the cost of the Fukushima disaster.

Table 5.3 Cost of Safeguards That Could Have Alleviated the Fukushima Disaster Safeguard Effective Total Cost

Of the Safeguard ($)

Alternative site 30 million Fifteen-meter tsunami wall 30 million Lead acid batteries 1 million Alternative emergency generator site 1 million Total 62 million

Source: Schwarz and Cochran, 2012.

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in case of accidents that went beyond “design basis” (Kingston, 2013; Tolliday, 2012). In addition, the Diet instituted major changes to organizations with safety oversight authorities:

 Based on what was seen to be collusion between NISA and METI, the Diet took away METI’s responsibility for nuclear safety and established a new regulation authority focused on safety (Law 47, 27 June 2012). The law combined NISA with the Nuclear Safety

Commission, which had been based in the Cabinet Office, and established the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) reporting to the Ministry of Environment (Law 47, 27 June 2012).

 A related law on Regulation of Nuclear Source Material, Nuclear Fuel Material and Reactors (Law 82, 22 November 2013) gave the NRA authority over refining activities, fabricating and enrichment activities, interim storage activities, reprocessing activities and waste disposal activities, as well as on the installation, operation, maintenance and,

significantly, dismantlement (abolition) of reactors.

 Under the new authority, the NRA established stricter safety standards, which were enacted on 8 July 2013. The new standards reinforced the protective measures against large scale, natural and man-made disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks, and promoted defense-in-depth preparedness to prevent multiple failures, multiple core damage, containment failures, and radioactive material releases. The new standards applied

retroactively to all the existing nuclear facilities. The former regulations lacked robust measures against natural disasters and terrorist attacks and did not have the power to retroactively impose the new standards on existing facilities. These additional requirements are illustrated in Figure 5.11 (NRA, no date).

 The National Diet also established the NDF in September 2011 (Law No. 94) to ensure that compensation payouts were promptly and appropriately provided and that a stable supply of electricity could be secured. This was to be accomplished by giving the NDF the authority to grant compensation funds to nuclear plant operators if they were faced with a large-scale nuclear damage scenario. The NDF also created a Business Transformation Plan (or Special Business Plan) for TEPCO to ensure that the corporation paid compensation to those

affected by the accident.

 In August 2014, the Diet gave the NDF additional responsibilities to oversee

decommissioning of the Fukushima reactors.⁴² The NDF Act was revised yet again in May 2017, giving the NDF still more authority—this time to direct TEPCO to reserve specified funds with the NDF and “to be further involved in the project management as an

administrator/supervisor of the decommissioning.” The various responsibilities of the NDF are depicted on the left side of Figure 5.11.

42 The formal name for the NDF is now the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation. Decommissioning was added to the name in 2014.

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Figure 5.11 Regulatory Changes for Nuclear Power Plants in Japan Source: Yamada, 2013.

Under its statutory obligations the NDF prepares an annual “Technical Strategic Plan” that provides detailed technical guidance for dealing with decommissioning challenges, conducting R&D, and disseminating information regarding decommissioning efforts. Specific duties of the NDF now include:

 Determining the amount of funds to be reserved by TEPCO (with the approval of the METI minister) and held by the NDF in each fiscal year.

 Working with TEPCO and the competent minister to create a withdrawal plan by which TEPCO will spend reserved funds for decommissioning the Fukushima reactors.

 Determining R&D policy and managing R&D activities performed by the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning.

 As indicated in its Technical Strategic Plan, acting as project manager and supervising the decommissioning project.

Given its greater responsibilities, the NDF states in its Technical Strategy Plan that it will supervise an appropriate system for executing the decommissioning project and will provide support for steady work management. This includes such activities as conducting assessments of project execution by TEPCO and proposing tasks that should be included in the funding withdrawal schedule.

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Figure 5.12 Post-Fukushima Oversight: Overlapping Responsibilities of Bureaucracy

Source: Created by the authors based on analysis of organizational information from the NDF, 2017a; Oshima, 2013; IMC, 2017; NRA, no date (webpage).

While the NDF has taken on a comprehensive set of tasks to manage, this has not stopped other government entities from providing more help. At the Ministry level, for example, concern was growing in 2012-2013 that problems of contaminated water leakage around the damaged

Fukushima reactors were not getting solved. The Prime Minister activated his Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters (NERH) and directed it to convene an Inter-Ministerial Council (IMC) to tackle water and other decommissioning issues. The IMC set up a Team for Contaminated Water and Decommissioning, which led to the formulation of a plan to implement “a multi-layered set of countermeasures,” including managing contaminated water by such measures as freezing soil walls around the site to create a barrier to the flow of ground water. Many other measures were proposed in the plan, which duplicated in many ways the Technical Strategic Plan for Decommissioning put forward by the NDF.

The duties of the NDF, the NRA, and the various Inter-Ministerial teams clearly overlap in law and executive control. Both the NDF and the NRA have oversight responsibilities for decommissioning.

The NDF creates the plan for decommissioing and supervises TEPCO’s work, while the NRA has

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the legal authrority to review and approve the decommissioining plan from a safety perspective and can withdraw that approval if it doesn’t like what it sees. The IMC teams have substantial influence and control of the decommissioning plans as well because their members come from government Ministries that control the NDF and the NRA.

Figure 5.12 illustrates this tension. The Figure is a composite of selected organizational charts that have been issued by the NDF, NRA, and other oversight components of the Japanese government.

TEPCO clearly is responsible for executing decommissioning tasks, but legally it must take direction from at least three authorities: from the NDF for executing decommissioning tasks, from the NRA for maintaining appropriate safety standards, and from the Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters at the ministerial level for any issue it might identify. Ideally, TEPCO should be responsible only to a single authority. The current arrangement is almost guaranteed to result in conflicting guidance to TEPCO, giving TEPCO the opportunity to follow the guidance that it finds most congenial. There is real ambiguity with respect to who is actually in charge of the Fukushima decommissioning project, but one thing is certain: complex technical projects that lack a clear chain of command are rarely successful.