Читать книгу Meltdown - Yoichi Funabashi - Страница 19

7:03 P.M. The government officially announced a state of nuclear emergency at the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi NPS. Upon doing so, the government was to establish a nuclear emergency response headquarters (NERHQ) headed by the prime minister as stipulated. The lineup was Kan Naoto as director general and Banri Kaieda as his deputy. The director general (prime minister) was empowered “when specially required” to issue the necessary directives to “the competent minister, the heads of the relevant administrative bodies, the heads of local government, and the nuclear power operator.” The NERHQ secretariat, headed by the NISA director general, was to be located in the Emergency Response Center (ERC) of METI on the third floor of its annex.²⁸

The first meeting of NERHQ was held on the fourth floor of the Kantei. It was made up of the relevant cabinet members. Many of those in attendance were thinking back to the “state of nuclear emergency” the autumn before.

8:30 A.M., OCTOBER 21, 2010. Kan was conducting the nuclear comprehensive disaster training drill for fiscal 2010 at the Kantei. It was being jointly carried out by the government, local municipalities, and Chubu Electric Power Company for a scenario where Unit 3 at the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Station in Shizuoka Prefecture had lost its cooling system and was leaking out radioactive material.

The large screen in the Kantei conference room was hooked up to Shizuoka Prefecture. Then METI Minister Akihiro Ohata stated, “It has been verified that cooling cannot be carried out due to the loss of all emergency cooling systems at Unit 3. I submit a draft for the declaration of a state of nuclear emergency.” Receiving this, Prime Minister Naoto Kan delivered “a declaration of a state of nuclear emergency.”

Everyone was reading from prepared statements. The local response team leader, the governor of Shizuoka Prefecture, and the mayor of Omaezaki read their statements in succession. Yoshihiro Katayama, minister of internal affairs and communication, listened to them, thinking angrily, What a farce! What a pointless exercise!

Katayama had joined the then Ministry of Home Affairs in 1974. He was well known as an expert on local government and later became governor of Tottori Prefecture. After the hour-or-so-long comprehensive drill, Katayama told Kan, “This serves no purpose,” but Kan did not take any special notice.

That was a mere five months earlier. Katayama was remembering, “Come to think of it, we were in the same room then.” The moment he entered the room, he had a flashback to the drill on that day. LDP Upper House member Masashi Waki questioned Kan during the budget committee meeting held on April 18, a month after the Fukushima Daiichi accident.

“On October 20 of last year … a very important event was held. Do you remember it, prime minister?”

After a momentary pause, Kan replied:

“I don’t know what you are referring to with this sudden query.”

“I am referring to the comprehensive nuclear disaster drill that took place that day … Do you remember the scenario used for the training?”

“Not in detail, but I think various kinds of earthquakes like this one were imagined.”

One of the people watching the April 18 exchange on television was Tadahiro Matsushita, senior vice minister of METI. During the training in Shizuoka last October, he had been flown into the accident site as the head of the local response team. The training, which began by watching the movie The China Syndrome, lasted around four hours, including resident evacuation from a three-kilometer radius, decontamination, and lunch. In a debriefing soon after his return to Tokyo, Matsushita raised a question.

“This training assumes that power has been somehow restored, but is that appropriate? What would happen if it couldn’t be restored? Shouldn’t we use a scenario next time where the reactor can’t be cooled and residents have to be evacuated?”

The NISA official replied:

“That would raise huge anxiety in the local area, so we can’t say that.”²⁹

In a meeting on the night of March 11, a member of cabinet stated: “After eight hours (of using the emergency diesel generators for the reactor cooling system), there is a possibility of meltdown if the temperature starts rising in the reactor core.”

“Eight hours.”

Everyone noted the figure.

“Time will be up at 12:00 midnight.”

Everyone in the crisis management center repeated this to each other.³⁰

7:30 P.M. On the release of the “declaration of a state of nuclear emergency,” Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa issued a command to dispatch the SDF to the nuclear disaster.³¹

Time was steadily passing. Already the establishment of the NERHQ had been delayed. According to Kaieda, it was “delayed an hour and a half.”³² The time was 5:42 p.m. when Kaieda went to the prime minister’s office at the Kantei seeking approval for the “declaration of a state of nuclear emergency,” based on the unfolding article 15 situation. Though Kan should have ordered the declaration’s “immediate” enforcement, the action was not completed until 7:03 p.m.

7:45 P.M. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano held a press conference.

“What I am about to say is a preventative measure, so please respond in a calm manner. It has just been verified by the Nuclear Safety Task Force that at 4:36 p.m. today an event corresponding to the provisions of article 15.1.2 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness occurred at the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which requires emergency measures to prevent the escalation of a nuclear disaster. In accordance with the stipulations of the article, a state of nuclear emergency has been declared. At present, no impact of radioactive material outside the facility has been confirmed.

“The reactor has been completely shut down. However, the reactor needs to be cooled. The situation is such that measures need to be taken for the power to cool the reactor down. We have issued the emergency declaration in order to prepare for every possibility and because of the extreme seriousness of the impact if the worst should happen.”

From the evening into the night, the television broadcast the thousands of people trying to get home in Tokyo. No trains were running in the metropolitan area, including Japan Rail. The terminus stations at Shibuya, Shinagawa, and Yokohama were overflowing with workers and students trying to get home, prompting fears of a secondary disaster.

Responding to the images, Edano began doing the rounds. In a press conference, he asked the Tokyoites, “Please don’t go home unless you are within walking distance.” He asked over and over, through a bureau chief at MLIT, “When will the trains start running?” but no information was forthcoming.

He then telephoned directly Satoshi Seino, CEO of the East Japan Railway Company. They had been at school together, where Seino was Edano’s mentor.

“Will the metropolitan trains resume running tonight?”

“I’m sorry. That’s impossible.”

“Right. Well, I’ll hold a press conference to tell everyone not to go home.”

“Please do so.”³³

Edano told Ito, “We have to do something about these people, don’t we?”

“Leave it up to the police department. It’s okay.”

“How about opening up the schools?”

There were 21 million people who worked in Tokyo each day. It was estimated that the number of stranded commuters was 6.5 million. They took hours, or even dozens of hours, to get home. They were reacting to a homing instinct of wanting to make sure their families were safe, to weather the crisis out together.³⁴

“How are things now?”

Edano was in over his head with the stranded commuter problem. On seeing him this way, the emergency team members started speaking up.

“The Tokyo commuters won’t die if you ignore them for a night.”

“In times of a crisis like this, he should be watching the affected areas, not TV.”

“The problem is in Tohoku, not Tokyo.”

Ito immediately told Edano to “leave the stranded commuters up to the police,” but Edano was working like a beaver.³⁵

In fact, the crisis was in Fukushima, not Tokyo. The situation at Fukushima Daiichi took a sudden turn for the worse. Things tensed up in the crisis management center. Someone from the emergency response team shouted out:

“When on earth are they going to get the power back?”

A NISA official replied:

“They’re making adjustments now.”

Hit by the tsunami, the emergency diesel generator was not working. They needed to get a new source of power in there somehow. They had to line up a large number of high-voltage power trucks, but there were not enough onsite. Takekuro was pleading, “Get us some trucks. Send them to Fukushima Daiichi Station.” Everyone at the Kantei from the prime minister’s office to the reception room as well as the crisis management center began searching for power trucks.

First of all, where could power trucks be found? When asked, the NISA officials were no help. NISA staff were buzzing about, going to and fro. After a while, the deputy directors and deputy director generals disappeared to be replaced by section chiefs. Someone from the emergency response team raised his voice.

“It’s no use asking NISA. Let’s ask TEPCO.”

Ito decided to summon some TEPCO staff to the crisis management center in order to get information directly from TEPCO. The staff member TEPCO sent, however, also could not be relied on.

“I haven’t heard.”

“I’ll check.”

Every time he answered, the frustration level in the room rose.³⁶

Apart from the crisis management staff, only the three top political figures (the minister, vice minister, and parliamentary secretary) were allowed in the crisis management center. Even the prime minister’s aides were not allowed unconditional access. A system was set up so that calls to staff mobile phones were transferred to landlines in the center. The politicians, however, never let their mobile phones leave their sides for a moment.

The center was divided into a staff operations room and a room for cabinet meetings. Each had a large monitor to enable them to share information, including images of the disaster area. There was also a small room on the mezzanine that could house a maximum of ten people. It was on a round-the-clock status with its own generator.

The center had been built with the thought of a military threat or crisis in mind. Accordingly, its operating manual stipulated that the prime minister would stay in the center and take command. A nuclear accident, however, was not a war. It was not as if the life of the country’s leader was under threat.

Koichi Kato, the prime minister’s aide on national strategy and the Diet, tried to enter the crisis management center after the quake, but was blocked. The center used a heartbeat authentication system. Kato had not been registered for it. When Kan headed to the center in the evening, Kato managed to slip in behind him, entering the center for the first time. The heartbeat authentication system had been introduced during the North Korean missile crisis in 2010. It checked the pulse of the middle finger. Up until then, Kato did not even know where the crisis management center was.

Kan returned to his office on the fifth floor. As he climbed to the fifth floor, the parliamentary secretary followed his lead and went up as well. Kaieda was in place in the reception room adjacent to the prime minister’s office. There were some fifty people squeezed in there. At Kaieda’s suggestion, a whiteboard had been brought to the fifth floor, and secretariat staff carried it into the prime minister’s office. (The whiteboard was later moved to the adjoining reception room.)

There was also a black phone set up to link the secretariat with the crisis management center. Each of the Kasumigaseki ministries was said to have “sent information to the Kantei” through their contact with the crisis management center. As to whether or not that information made it to the fifth floor, and to the prime minister’s ear, was another question.³⁷