Bridging the News Gap, with Professor Matt Noyes

/

This week Fairewinds had the opportunity to speak with Matt Noyes, a professor at Meiji University in Tokyo and a longtime Tokyo resident. Matt talked with us about his experiences during the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, including the "news gap" that existed between Japanese and international press coverage of the accident, and the shifting nuclear movement in Japan.

Articles by Professor Matt Noyes

Tokyo Letter: After the Disaster Letter from Tokyo: In "The Zone" of Disaster

Related Content

Cleanup From Fukushima Daiichi: Technological Disaster Or Crisis In Governance? An investigative report by Art Keller TEPCO Believes Mission Accomplished & Regulators Allow Radioactive Dumping in Tokyo Bay A Fairewinds video report, 12/29/11 Tokyo 2020: A Q&A with Arnie Gundersen A Fairewinds blog post, 9/12/13

Listen

Transcript

FAIREWINDS ENERGY EDUCATION  –  Bridging the News Gap with Professor Matt Noyes (10/26/2013)

 Welcome to the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast for Thursday, September 26th.

AG:     Hi, Arnie Gundersen here. We’ve had a surprise walk-in visitor here to Fairewinds in Burlington. His name is Matt Noyes, and he’s an assistant professor at the School of Business Administration at Maji (?:17) University. We’re glad to have him here today. He’s a very knowledgeable American with a Japanese perspective on what’s happening in Japan today.

MN:    It’s nice to say I’m very happy to be here. Fairewinds has been a crucial source of in formation for me over the last few years and really invaluable. And so it’s a really tremendous pleasure to be here.

AG:     When I woke up on March 11th, the accident was already underway. It happened at 2 in the afternoon in Japan, which was in the middle of the night in America. And so I woke up, and at 8 we knew there was a big earthquake. And by 9, there was comment that the State Department was involved in getting batteries. And when I heard that, I knew that very first day that there was going to be a meltdown. And the reason is that these huge pumps that cool the plant can’t run on batteries. And that told me that the cooling pumps were wiped out and the secondary source of cooling the plant, all these remote battery-operated valves and things like that, were running out of power. I told Maggie, I said I’m going to devote today to staying on top of this. We had the New York Times call and Washington Post call and The Wall Street Journal call and all that stuff. By Monday, CNN had called and I was asked to be an expert on John King USA (?1:40). I had seen my government cover up Three Mile Island. And actually, back in the day when that happened, I was a nuclear executive and I was on television telling people there’s nothing to fear. Well, as I learned in the 1990’s, 15 years after the accident, there was something to fear, and that the government had lied to me and then I had lied to other people about the impact at TMI. So I said to Maggie, I’m not going to let that happen again. And by Monday, you could see the nuclear industry and the Japanese government all lining up. I said, I am not going to lie to the people of Japan like my government lied to the people of America. So that’s how Fairewinds started. I said to Maggie, I don’t care what this means personally, but we can’t let this get covered up like Three Mile Island was covered up. And this is much worse than Three Mile Island. And unfortunately, it’s becoming a much worse cover-up as well.

MN:    Well, I was on the street getting ready to leave. I was going to take a flight to Portland that day so I was going to take the train from Shinagawa Station to Nareta (?2:52) Airport, standing in the middle of the street. And the earthquake happened and it was bigger and longer, just shaking these concrete telephone poles and walls. Everything was just moving around us. It was bigger than anything I’d experienced, and I had lived there, I guess about 8 years at that time. We actually went home first to see if anything was damaged, and some things had fallen down, but nothing too bad. So then I went to try to go to the train station and lights were off, people were pouring out – no trains, no power. And then I tried a bus and they told me the airport was closed – again, no airplanes, no power. Everything was just shut down. I went back home and then started to get the news about what was going on. So first was just the actual tsunami news – the earthquake and then the tsunami news, which was so astonishing to see just whole villages completely wiped out. So that was bad. But then Fukushima. I don’t remember exactly how I realized – how quickly it was that the Fukushima issue came out but it was pretty quick. So I went upstairs in my house and got on line. And so I started Googling it, starting to get news. And I would – really, you’re soaking up news like crazy at that point, especially as soon as we realized that there was the meltdown possibility, at that time we were told – actually, not even the fact it was told – at the beginning, it wasn’t even likely. Not possibility, but very unlikely scenario. So I would go and then I’d be looking on the news and then periodically, I’d go downstairs where my wife was watching TV. And something would come up on TV and it would be obvious to me that this was just not true. I’d just been reading news about something different. And she’s Japanese, so she’s watching the Japanese news channels. And then later what would happen is, I would come downstairs and something would come on the news in Japan as breaking news that happened – it was news internationally a day before, two days before. A good friend of mine – this was called the news gap, is how people described this, journalist friends of mine did – so a good friend of mine who’s an excellent interpreter was asked by an Australian news team to come with them. They wanted to drive up to Fukushima. And they needed an interpreter. And so he’s in the car with them and he’s listening to the radio. And so he would tell them news just coming off the radio. And the Australians were like, of course, we know that already. Is there anything new? So he was shocked, the news gap was so distinct. So this continued for months. There was just a complete gap between the global coverage of Fukushima and the local. And some – I found that not only was the global coverage more frank or more honest, it often was just more accurate and more informed. They somehow – I don’t know exactly how but through ways that people have of – basically, a lot of it was analyzing the design of the plants, which is why your broadcasts were so great – because here we were getting information about what is the design of these reactors and what does it mean that you lose cooling in this area or that there is a steam explosion in this area. How do you read that. And then particularly, the question about detonation or a deflagration, a distinction that I learned from you. All of that information was coming from outside Japan and not from inside Japan at all. While you were doing those broadcasts, the Japanese government was telling people that the condition – things were – they didn’t say stable but they said of course there is nothing to be afraid of, there’s nothing to be worried about, there’s a very unlikely – that there would be a meltdown. That turned out to be the news well after they knew the meltdowns had happened. But the news kept – they stuck with their story that meltdowns were not going to happen. That was really one of those things that’s sort of shocking and offensive. Japan had a longstanding anti-nuclear movement. So there are a lot of people who immediately recognized what was going on. And their reaction, of course, was to be completely offended by this and outraged by what was going on. So that’s one kind of layer of people. Another layer of people were young people – a lot of young parents, in particular, who were afraid. And a lot of them were people who did have access to some sort of international news and they were picking up that there was a huge distinction between what they were being told by the government. And the news media in Japan was essentially what was being said by the government was what was reported. They would do a news conference from Tepco officials or government officials in front of this press corps. No follow-up questions. So a Tepco person could say the measurement is X and nobody could ask, well, how do you know the measurement is X; is that measurement everywhere or is it just in the one place that you measured, or what does that measurement mean, how is it – they don’t follow up anything. They just take it at face value and move on to the next question. This was going on but some people were disturbed by the kind of news gap and the problems there. They became a part of the new anti-nuclear movement, which kind of was very different than the old movement, a very different composition. And then the really difficult and frustrating part is a lot of people tried not to think about it, and that’s still going on now. It’s amazing how much people don’t want to think about, don’t want to hear about it, don’t want to talk about it.

AG:     (8:39) That’s the advantage. You put something in the air that’s going to kill you 20 years from now, you’ve got 19 years that you don’t have to worry. The cancer statistics will start to grow in the next couple of years for lung cancers and then solid tumor cancers and then other years after that. Eventually, it will get driven home that a lot of people had a very high exposure. So I’ve got a question. What I noticed when I was over there for my two tours, a lot of women involved in trying to protect their families, but also trying to push the government to be more responsive. Is that an irrational impression on my part? Or did women step up and take a different role in this?

MN:    Women have always played a big role in the anti-nuclear movement.  So that wasn’t entirely new. The main spokespeople or the main organizers in the anti-nuke movement for years – most of the people I would think of are women. It is – what it is a reflection of is that some organizations in society, for example, the labor unions, are decidedly male in terms of both the membership, but especially at the leadership level. This is true also of some nonprofit organizations, but mostly in the big – like the labor movement. The politicians overwhelmingly male in Japan. I mean by U.N. statistics, they’ve got one of the – they get a very low rating in women’s participation in government. Industry and government, certainly any kind of corporate and business is completely – and a lot of the unions are still very male. But the anti-nuke movement had women. But I think also the new kind of movement that grew coming out of this disaster is sort of nontraditional for Japan. Their way of functioning was much more spontaneous. There was a big impact of people who were consciously in favor of not having a very institutional movement. The past anti-nuke movement very much defined by its institutions. There’s this group, there’s this group. And this was more, let’s have something very open so that people who’ve never participated in any social activism at all will feel comfortable. So there’s a great video from the early days of one of the very first demonstrations that actually I went to with my son. They interviewed all the people. Not all – they interviewed many of the people as they’re walking along and the interviewers kept asking them, is this your first demonstration. All of them – oh, yeah, this is my first demonstration. None of them had been involved in any kind of activism before. So that was a really distinguishing feature of the anti-nuke movement after Fukushima.

AG:     (11:09) So I have one question I’ve got to ask is, how did you find Fairewinds?

MN:    I probably found Fairewinds at the beginning just by googling Fukushima, reactor, meltdown, etc. But the beginning, like Reuters had this – right now I think they have a firewall – a pay wall, rather, up for their news, but at the time, they put it down. So their coverage of Fukushima was all available. Reuters – that was a good source that I used a lot. The New York Times was slow but good. They would take a little while to report, but when they reported, it was generally seen to be very good and they did a lot of analysis. They gave you much richer stories than what you’d get on Reuters or whatever. But there was a huge amount of not the big mainstream, but the sort of smaller sources of information, Fairewinds being one of them. The reason that Fairewinds was so important was because in this disaster, one of the whole issues is credibility of your information. You’re watching – for example, Micheo Kaku (?12:14) was interviewed a couple of times; had some great lines about – they say it’s stable, it’s stable like someone hanging off a cliff by their fingernails is stable. There’s no information there. It’s a great kind of sound byte but in terms of trying to understand what’s actually going on in these reactors when you’re being told things that are simply not true, you really need someone who can tell you here’s what the cladding is on a fuel rod. Here’s what it looks like when it gets hot. Here’s how it breaks. Here’s what that means. And that kind of information and experience was really essential, because when you’re listening to the news and you’re trying to figure out what to do, you can’t make your judgments based on sources that don’t feel credible. You desperately need someone who you can feel like okay, I do trust this source because the person’s not trying to sell me a line or interpretation. They’re just explaining to me how this thing works. So Fairewinds was great. I would sort of hang on to your video casts. I was always waiting. When’s the next one, when’s the next one. One other source I should mention that I use today – I mean I check it on my phone all the time – is ENEnews.com, I guess it is. From the beginning, they did an incredible job of gathering all these news sources, including Fairewinds.

AG:     ENE is one I watch a couple of times a day. They’re very good. And the other one is Informable. Let’s fast forward now. You’ve got a plant that’s nowhere near stable and likely to remain a problem, God knows how big a problem, but a problem for years to come. The Abe regime has just won the Olympics. Can you talk a little bit about the politics behind the Olympics in Tokyo and what you’re opinion of that is.

MN:    Well, the push for the Olympics has been going on for a long time. It was the pet project –

AG:     Before Fukushima.

MN:    Oh, yeah, before Fukushima. It was the pet project of Ishihara Shintaro, who was the former Governor of Tokyo, who was a leading extreme right winger in Japanese politics. I mean he was really the voice for belligerence with China, for getting territorial disputes. In fact, he was the one who provoked the whole battle that’s going on with China now about those islands in the sea, because he was going to have the Tokyo government buy the islands from their owner, some guy who had the title. So he provoked this huge political crisis because he wanted to see Japan be more nationalistic, more aggressive. The Olympics were a pet project of his from the beginning, to put Tokyo on a world stage, there are huge development projects involved in holding the Olympics, new stadiums get built, which means quantities of money going to the contractors, which are the historical base of support for their party – for the right-wing parties. There’s just a lot in there – patronage, etc., that can happen. And it’s just political capital and it’s – for the nationalists, it seems like a very positive thing. So then there’s the accident. So they continue pushing. And the problem is that right after the accident, there was a big push to – there were kind of two things happening. One was a push to help the people of northern Japan after the tsunami. So this was a great thing and totally reasonable. It’s a huge disaster; tons of people have lost their lives and homes and livelihoods have been wiped out. On the other hand, what happened was a separation where people would talk about the tidal wave and not about the nuclear disaster. So they’d talk about this is terrible, we have to help people, but they wouldn’t – that conversation didn’t include helping the people who were forced out because of Fukushima or helping all of us who were potentially exposed to contamination. So there was a separation of those issues. The Olympics became part of this, let’s go Japan, we can do it, strong Japan, we can recover, this is a sign for people of a kind of recovery of Japan, it’s a morale boost. It’s all of that and yet it’s based on, again, this denial of the reality. The timing was unbelievable to me, that it would happen now, they would get the vote now, right on the heels of the exposure almost every day of new hot spots, new leaks, new, higher readings than ever recorded before. All of that is happening right in the lead-up to the Olympics. I was surprised.

AG:     The Abe regime just got voted in with majorities in both houses and an economic turnaround under Abe. So he’s feeling pretty good. Now he’s also been awarded the Olympics. Does the average Japanese realize that what he’s been telling them about the radiation fallout in Tokyo and in Japan in general is wrong? Or do they, again, just not want to worry about the details?

MN:    (16:53) I don’t know if I’m in a position to say what the average Japanese person thinks, but there’s sort of two things. I think on the one hand, there are people who just don’t want to know and don’t want to hear about it. And so if they hear anything that sounds good, that’s enough. I’ll hold onto that part. So there are a lot of people for whom the Olympics is – they’ll be like oh, good, he said it’s okay. In 7 years, it’ll be fine. I don’t need to hear any more. That takes care of my concern. On the other hand, it came out in the paper right after he spoke – there was a question in the paper – did he lie or was it just a mistake? – because he claimed that the radiation, the contamination in the sea was limited to I think 3.5 kilometers around the plant in the ocean. Nobody believes this. Nobody has said this, actually. No credible people have even claimed that this was true. So this was just something that he kind of – I don’t know where he got it – that he threw in to the Olympic Committee, saying it’s not that bad. The water, it’s just a little contamination in the ocean right near the plant. It’s contained. That’s been their line is, it’s contained. They’ve said that it’s in cold shutdown. I don’t think they’ve even said that it has changed from that status, which is astonishing.

AG:     No, they haven’t. We put a video together back in 2011 about that issue of cold shutdown. And the example was George Bush on the carrier deck saying “mission accomplished.” The mission is not accomplished at Fukushima and it won’t be for 10 or 20 years. And I just pray that there’s no big earthquake now. The tank farm was all held together with plastic pipe. So the tanks are weak enough, but the plastic pipe is going to snap if there’s a big earthquake. And then, of course, the wall that they built along the water is now pooling water behind it. So the seismic characteristics of the buildings are different. So if there’s a big earthquake, we don’t know how those buildings are going to react. And if they tilt or worse yet, topple, what little cooling is getting in is going to be jeopardized. I’ve said we could be back to 3/11, March 11, 2011, again. The site is far from stable. I don’t care what god you pray to, but pray that there’s no earthquake. That’s critical.

MN:    My impression has been that the biggest concern, the tanks are a huge concern – but the biggest one is the spent fuel pools, which are exposed, have huge quantities of material in them. They’re going to try to take the assemblies out next month or the month after. How hot is the spent fuel pool? If it loses cooling, what does that look like? Is that – is it fuel that’s depleted enough that it’s not going to do very much? Or is it the kind of thing where you can have some massive explosion and contamination?

AG:     That’s a really good question and we definitely need to answer that and we’ll do it right now. The fuel pool of unit 4 is the most critical fuel pool because they have an entire nuclear core out of the reactor and in that pool that’s still relatively hot. It’s been out now for 3 years. And you have to cool a nuclear pool in water for 5 years before it’s cool enough to be air cooled. A lot of what we call decay heat is gone. The issues of the pool evaporating over a day are no longer with us. Back when the accident happened, you could evaporate off all of the water in the pool in a day or two or three because there was enough decay heat. Now we’re 3 years out. So the evaporation from the pool probably would take a month. There’s still enough heat to do it, but in a month, human beings can do a lot, assuming the fuel pool retains its integrity. So my big issue is, if there’s a big earthquake and the pool cracks, we still are in jeopardy of that fuel getting hot enough to burn in air. It will take longer to burn in air, which gives people the opportunity to correct it, but still they’re not out of the woods yet. The other problem, though, is moving the fuel. The fuel is like cigarettes in a cigarette pack. If you pull the cigarette straight out of the pack, it doesn’t break. But if you pull the cigarette out at an angle or if the pack is distorted by your squeezing it or something, you’re going to snap the cigarette. Just like that in a nuclear fuel rod. These racks have moved, they’ve been distorted because of the earthquake and there’s junk that fell on top of them and distorted the tops. So as they pull the fuel, if they pull too hard, some of these bundles are going to snap. And when they snap, the fission gases that are still inside of unit 4 are going to be released into that envelope. They put a big cover over unit 4. The reason they put that cover on is so that if the fuel snaps, they can treat those gases through filters before they put them up those high stacks. But there’s one gas that can’t be treated and that’s Krypton 85. It’s noble gas. It goes right through. They built that envelope so that if the fuel snaps, they can catch the gases before it gets released into the environment. But at the end of the day, the Krypton 85 is still going to go up through the stack. It’s happened in the U.S. where we’ve snapped a bundle. And you have to evacuate the fuel pool area and let the gases go up but there’s really nothing you can do at that point. So about a day later, you can come back in and begin to recover. There’s one of two things that are going to happen. You’re either going to pull too hard and snap the bundle, or they’re going to be unable to pull all the fuel out of the pool. The other part of the problem is that the unit 4 fuel pool has 200 bundles of brand new fuel. And brand new fuel, while cold as a cucumber, runs the risk of starting a nuclear chain reaction. The nuclear fuel in the new portion of the pool is more likely to undergo what we call an inadvertent criticality, a nuclear chain reaction that nobody wants. And I built fuel racks so I know that the gap between the fuel is really, really critical. Like if fuel gets too close together, you will get a chain reaction. And that’s not something you want to happen in a fuel pool. So as they’re pulling this fuel out, they have to be very, very cautious that they don’t get the fuel too close together. So we can see this mark 1 design. The fuel pool is up in the air and it’s unprotected.

MN:    They had a crane snap –

AG:     Just last week –

MN:    I saw it in the news last week. That didn’t sound good.

AG:     No, it’s another indication of problems that will continue. Well, I think we’re going to wrap this up. Thank you very much for coming today. It’s really cool to get a walk-in guest from Japan. And Fairewinds appreciates all you’re doing over there.

MN:    Thanks. We’ll continue to spread the word about Fairewinds as a resource to people.

 Thanks for tuning into the Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast. If you’ve come to depend on Fairewinds for your source of unbiased nuclear news, please consider supporting our work with a contribution so that we can continue to product high quality energy education programs like this one.