TEPCO tour falls short of expectations
I am the nuclear “expert” on this trip. By that, I mean my dad has worked in the nuclear industry my whole life so I’m more used to this jargon than the journalism students. When Nadia mentioned that we might get to tour the Fukushima Daiichi power plant during the fall semester, I immediately volunteered to go with that group. I couldn’t wait to walk around the Fukushima Daiichi power plant -- the same plant that had failed and released radioactive steam into the environment in March 2011 -- up close and personal.
But, that’s not quite what happened when we went on our tour on May 31. The TEPCO officials we talked to didn’t seem to want to talk about nuclear ins and outs with us. Instead, they talked to us about how they planned to contain the radiation that continues to seep out of the plant. They closed up the buildings that exploded and made sure to tell us it was the hydrogen not the uranium that exploded.
Fuel continues to melt down and release radiation in the plant, and our tour guide told us that preventing groundwater from becoming contaminated as it seeps under the plant is their primary concern. He talked a lot about how storing all the water that had anything to do with the reactors on site was starting to be a problem. Their strategy now is to purify the water as best they can and keep groundwater out of the reactors. They even mentioned that Reactors 1, 2, and 3 are in a state of meltdown, but if they mentioned why or how they got there or how bad a meltdown it was, it got lost in translation.
I hadn’t heard about them removing all the fuel rods from Reactor 4 before we got there. Apparently they finished that in December of 2014. When the talk was done and immediate questions answered, we all boarded a TEPCO shielded bus and went to the power plant.
The scenery was some mix of countryside and the East Coast with administrative buildings mixed between sections of green and bags of potentially contaminated soil stacked up like hay bales. TEPCO posted the radiation levels frequently outside the bus and we had a meter inside the bus as well.
Nothing I saw on our tour concerned me in the slightest. TEPCO’s measurements were in microsieverts per hour and the legal limit in America is 50,000 microsieverts per year. Japan takes a more conservative stance on radiation, making its legal limit 20,000 microsieverts per year. TEPCO was similarly conservative and allotted 100 microsieverts as the radiation limit for our hour-long tour.
Two volunteer interpreters from Iwaki city joined us on our tour. They were nervous about the radiation, but said they were more curious than they were afraid, so they volunteered to come help us. The conservative exposure limit comforted them greatly, but it also meant that I didn’t get the up close and personal tour I wanted.
Our group had provided Tepco with all the information needed to outfit us with protective hazmat suits, and so we thought we’d be able to get off the bus and walk around. We didn’t. We did get to wear dosimeters, but since they measured radiation in millisieverts it would have taken quite a bit of exposure to even registers so they weren’t very informative.
Almost everyone on the tour’s dosimeter did not show any exposure at all. There was a lot of confusion over that in the bus, when the meters inside and outside the bus had readings but the dosimeters didn’t. There was even the idea tossed around that the dosimeters might be rigged, but my dad assures me that there are too many nuclear regulatory boards in other countries watching TEPCO for them to be able to do something like that.
Although this was my first visit to a nuclear power plant, much of the tour seemed self-explanatory to me and I struggled to pay attention the last half of the tour. That’s probably my nuclear background speaking, though. It was really cool to see where some of the plant had been cleaned up from the tsunami and other bits hadn’t. The also took us to see reactors 5 and 6, which were built on higher ground than 1-4 and weren’t affected by the tsunami because of it.
One of dad’s coworkers was in Fukushima Daiichi when the tsunami hit and he said they moved away from reactors 1-4 towards reactors 5 and 6 to take shelter. Throughout the tour I felt that there was a lot more to the story than we were being told but I’m glad I got the chance to go and see what I could of it firsthand.