Nuclear Peril Is Over but Japanese Anger Isn't

By HOWARD W. FRENCH 2 Oct 1999 © New York Times

For years, Tomi Oshiro lived practically in the shadows of this town's nuclear fuel plant, yet she, like most people in town, had no inkling of the perilous work going on inside the nondescript building.

The mystery ended abruptly on Thursday, when the fuel-reprocessing plant suffered the worst nuclear accident in Japanese history. Ms. Oshiro returned from shopping to find helicopters buzzing madly above her house. It was several hours later before she was warned of the full dimensions of the crisis.

''I am furious,'' she said, adding that ''this incident was incomparably more serious'' than previous accidents in the town, which is the home to more than a dozen nuclear research and production sites, including Japan's first nuclear power plant.

''It took place right next to people's houses,'' she said, ''and still it took a long time before people were warned or any emergency measures were taken.''

Ms. Oshiro spoke on a sidewalk less than hour after the Government declared that the danger had ended and told the 313,000 people living within a six-mile radius of the plant that they no longer needed to stay indoors.

Leaving her home for the first time in 24 hours, she expressed her profound distrust of the Government's handling of nuclear safety. But in Tokyo, some 90 miles away, senior officials labored to convey the impression of a return to normal.

''We believe that this should not lead to worries about the nation's nuclear policy,'' said Hiromu Nonaka, the chief cabinet secretary, who acknowledged the Government's slowness in handling the crisis but tried to allay concerns about the safety of nuclear power industry in Japan, anxieties held both inside and outside the country.

But with people like the townspeople here, those in civic groups around the country and independent experts in Tokyo, Government credibility had hit rock bottom, provoking cries for everything from abandoning the nuclear industry altogether to a sweeping overhaul of the industry, which provides nearly a third of Japan's electrical power.

Residents of Tokaimura interviewed by phone while barricaded in their homes, or caught on the street in the first minutes after the ban on going outside was lifted this afternoon, expressed their anger and disbelief that safety precautions could have been so lax and that the Government could have minimized the accident in the crucial first hours.

There was an accident two years ago that the town handled calmly, said Kazuko Hagiya, 52, the director of Tokai Hospital, just two miles from the plant. ''We never realized the situation was so serious this time,'' he said. ''I didn't close the windows right away. Some patients didn't know anything about the accident, and kept their windows open until they were warned, late in the afternoon.''

Yukio Hosogai, a ruddy hospital refrigerator technician who was walking his dog, Hayato, said he learned of the accident in a call from his wife around noon, but was surprised to see civilian cars driving through the area two hours later.

As he spoke, walking in an abandoned roadway, dozens of white-suited nuclear clean-up workers combed the rice fields nearby, using Geiger counters to measure radiation levels.

''Honestly speaking, I will never get rid of the anxieties that come from living here,'' he said, ''and if I could get rid of everything today and move somewhere else, I would. But I can't.''

Residents of Tokaimura once thought the town of about 33,000 inhabitants had been lucky to become the home of Japan's nuclear industry, beginning in the 1950's. Before that, it had been a poor pearl in a string of what the Japanese call company castle towns, meaning towns dominated by a single corporation, in this case Hitachi.

First came the country's first nuclear lab, then its first reactor, then its first nuclear fuel-processing plants, and finally, its first breeder reactor, which uses plutonium rather than uranium fuel and is theoretically self-sustaining.

Little by little, residents in this coastal area -- with deep green rice fields, peaked tile-roofed houses and the country's characteristic commercial sprawl -- began to realize the costs related to the new industry.

This realization took root when there was a huge leak of radioactive coolant at the breeder plant in Tokaimura in 1995, and when there was a fire at another fuel-reprocessing plant two years later that exposed 37 workers to radiation.
''A few of us tried to sound the alarms of danger from this industry starting way back,'' said Osamu Yatabe, a lawyer who once represented the district in the National Assembly.

''We were always in the minority though, because officials were able to convince people that accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island could never happen here. Japan's safety precautions were in fact perfect, they said.''

In Tokyo today, independent nuclear experts and civic groups ridiculed the Government's contention that the uncontrolled reaction, in a privately owned uranium-reprocessing plant, did not reflect on the overall safety of Japan's huge nuclear energy industry.

Even one senior official, the Minister of International Trade and Industry, Kaoru Yosano, took exception to the prevailing official line, saying he was more concerned about ''psychological damage'' to the public than any economic impact.

''I am worried that the unthinkable critical accident may throw cold water on the public trust in nuclear facilities,'' he said.

One the most critical stances, though, came from Greenpeace Japan, which said it was starting a campaign to force the Government to phase out the nuclear industry.

Others may have stopped short of a demand like that, which has little prospect of being realized, but insisted on sweeping changes and were no less scathing in their dismissal of Government explanations of the crisis.

Asked about the Government's reassurances that the incident did not reflect on the country's entire nuclear industry, Kiyoshi Sakurai, a former researcher at the state-run Atomic Energy Research Institute said: ''Nonsense. Safety management or operational management of other nuclear facilities has a lot in common with this plant -- that is, the system is designed in ways that allow workers to intervene easily in the process.''

According to most accounts of the accident, a flash of blue light and a chain reaction of nuclear fission were produced when workers inside the plant put more than five times the amount of uranium in an acid solution-filled processing container than is normally allowed. Three of those workers are among the critically injured, altogether 49 people were exposed to radiation.

The reaction was eventually contained when emergency workers managed to break a drainage pipe for the container holding the fissionable material. Later, emergency crews doused the contaminated site with radiation-absorbing chemicals.

''Many in the public say that this accident must have been caused by a procedural infractions, but I do not buy that,'' said Keiji Koyabashi, a scientist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University.

''In nuclear power matters, there should always be fail-safes,'' he said. ''Even if a mistake occurs, safety must be assured.''