Stanford Security Studies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. xi, 219 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8047-9735-1.
The March 11, 2011 compounded disasters in Tohoku, Japan took some 18,451 lives, destroyed 125,000 homes and businesses, and caused US$235 billion in damages. After the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Futaba, Japan, nearly half a million people became refugees. Some tens of thousands of people from across the region remain in shelters to this day while up to 15,000 may not be able to return to their homes in towns like Futaba, Ōkuma, and Namie for years because of radioactive contamination. Japanese newspapers continue to cover the fallout from the events, including the failure of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to safely maintain the hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water on site at Fukushima. TEPCO has used containment measures such as ad hoc steel tanks for storage of the contaminated water and an underground “ice wall” which has so far failed to stop water from flowing into groundwater supplies and the ocean. The ongoing nuclear disaster—rated a seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the same as Chernobyl, despite lower levels of contamination—had political repercussions as far away as Europe. There, a number of countries, including Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, used Fukushima as a policy window during which to examine their own nuclear energy policies.
Following a major natural-technological disaster like Fukushima, experts and policy makers alike scramble to engage in the work they do best: policy makers and politicians assign blame for failures or take credit for successes (Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell, and Paul Hart, Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability, and Learning, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Local politicians in the Tohoku area, for example, changed their political behaviour, depending on the disaster’s impact in their community, to reach out to politicians at the local, regional, and national level for assistance and demonstrate their competence to constituents (Daniel P. Aldrich and Yoshikuni Ono, “Local politicians as linking social capital,” Natural Hazards 2016). Subject matter experts, in contrast, hope to find patterns of behaviour linked to the event that can be avoided elsewhere (see Thomas Birkland, Lessons of Disaster, Georgetown University Press, 2006). This book, edited by Blandford and Sagan, brings together experts from a variety of institutions and disciplines (including nuclear engineering, environmental history, political science, public policy, and risk assessment) from Japan and the United States to analyze the events leading up to and following this man-made catastrophe.
It follows in the tradition of several other books which have sought to put the 3/11 events in Japan in context, such as Koichi Hasegawa’s Beyond Fukushima (Melbourne: TransPacific Press, 2015) and Naoto Kan’s My
Nuclear Nightmare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). Chapters in Learning from a Disastercover topics ranging from the engineering and design basis for nuclear power plant construction through the security implications of and political leadership and organizational learning during the disaster. A concluding chapter by Edward Blandford and Michael May brings together many of the lessons found within the individual chapters and may be suitable as stand-alone reading for undergraduate and graduate courses looking for a quick summary of the findings.
Some of the book’s findings are well known at this point thanks to a plethora of Japanese- and English-language reports: this includes Japan’s Diet, think tanks, and newspapers such as the Japan Times, and groups such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the American Nuclear Society. Three findings stood out in this edited volume. First, there was miscommunication and mistrust between TEPCO and the prime minister when they sought to govern and communicate about the disaster as it unfolded. An unorthodox use of an ad hoc command and control structure temporarily improved information flow between the two institutions (87). Next, the ex-regulator of nuclear energy, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) sought to manage the disaster through its inflexible use of radiation reference levels (such as the guideline of
20 mSv per hour as a safe level of exposure). That measurement was reached through political compromise and not through decision making based on science. Finally, despite various attempts to provide lessons learned from past disasters, including the 9/11 disaster in the United States, Japanese authorities did not learn lessons from past disasters and failed to adopt new practices which could have minimized risk during the Fukushima meltdowns (137). As such, a weak regulator, insufficient training for the plant operators, and the wide acceptance of the safety myth kept Japan from adopting strong accident mitigation measures (188).
One of the strongest chapters in the book investigates if Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants were uniquely vulnerable in comparison with other plants in Japan and around the world. Using an original dataset of the tsunami exposure and disaster countermeasures of nearly ninety nuclear power plants from Japan, Europe, and Asia, Phillip Lipscy, Kenji Kushida, and Trevor Incerti show that Japan was “relatively unprepared for a tsunami disaster in international comparison” but that there was “considerable variation within Japan” (158). While observers may believe that smaller utilities and nuclear operators within Japan would be the most vulnerable, in fact “measures indicate that inadequate preparedness in Japan is concentrated among the largest utilities” (170). Those larger utilities include TEPCO, which serves nearly one-third of Japanese consumers, and Kansai Electric Power Company, which serves another significant percentage of the nation.
This book provides an easy-to-read reference guide to the disaster which will be of interest to graduate students and advanced undergraduates seeking summaries about Fukushima. Despite the book’s title, as past research and bitter experience have shown, it is unlikely it will assist regulators in preventing future disasters.
Daniel P. Aldrich
Northeastern University, Boston, USA
pp. 579-581