The Unsung

Transcript

I am what you'd call a patient media-consumer. Right now, I'm sneaking my way through Fallout 4 and I just finished watching Lost in 2019. But I had the good sense to watch the HBO series Chernobyl shortly after it released. In Chernobyl, and no spoilers here, the villain is radiation. It's an evil that is frightening not just because of it's capacity for pain, but because of how inescapable and unrelenting it is as a poison. Its ghost is everywhere in the series. When you can't see it, your brain imagines it in thin air. When there is a pause in the dialogue, you can feel it hum in the silence. Even when you know that everything is fine on screen, you feel a weight in your chest, because you can sense decay, and it makes you keenly aware of your own mortality. [intro music] I'm happy to present to you The Unsung, a podcast about the lesser-known people and events that have quietly shaped our world. DAIICHI In March 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, on the coast 264 kilometers north-east of Tokyo, was hit by a Tsunami. 3 of the 6 reactor cores went into meltdown. 100,000 people were evacuated, and a 40-km wide exclusion zone was enforced. There's a video of the Tsunami hitting Miyako harbor in Northeast Japan. Cars, boats and buildings are swept away in a surreal transposition of land and water. The sea is awesome, in the biblical sense. Can you imagine the forces involved in an event like this? The earthquake that caused this tsunami was called a megathrust earthquake. 650 kilometers (400 miles) of seabed suddenly slipped under a neighboring tectonic plate. The entire country of Japan moved a few meters east. The Fukushima coastline dropped by one-and-a-half feet. At a magnitude 9.1, this was, and is, the fourth-most powerful earthquake on record. The energy released was the equivalent of detonating a Tsar Bomba, the most powerful atomic weapon ever developed, on the sea bed. That's 1500 times the energy in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. It caused tsunamis that reached up to 133 feet above sea level, and waves that travelled at speeds of 700 kmph (435 mph). The tsunami killed 19,000 people, many of them at evacuation points. It had travelled 10 km inland. The Japanese Prime Minister at the time, Naoto Kan, said "In the 65 years after the end of World War II, this is the most difficult crisis for Japan." 2011, March 11, the day of this earthquake. At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, automated systems sensed the tremor and shut down all fission reactions, a process with the very cool name of SCRAMing. Even in shutdown, there is spent nuclear fuel that emits ridiculous amounts of heat, and a cooling system needs to be run for a few days until the reactor reaches a state of cold shutdown. In the absence of this cooling, nuclear material will get hot enough to melt, escape its enclosure and enter the environment, a failure state known to us as nuclear meltdown. Since the power plant needs to keep cool even after the reactors have stopped running, the plant had emergency diesel generators that run massive pumps to bring cool seawater in continuously. On this day, they kicked in, as intended. 3 hours after the quake, the tsunami hit Fukushima Daiichi. At 46 feet high, the tidal wave easily breached the 19-foot high protective seawall and flooded the nuclear power plant. [stop, audio flashback] 18 years before this, in 1993, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owned and operated the plant, learnt about the likelihood of a large earthquake near Fukushima. They ignored this information. In 2000, an in-house report recommended that measures be taken against a potential 50-foot tsunami. Again, it was ignored by TEPCO. In 2008, another in-house study identified "an immediate need to better protect the facility from flooding by seawater". They foresaw a 33-foot high tsunami. TEPCO ignored the report. [resume] At this moment in 2011, human arrogance collapsed under the weight of thousands of tons of uncaring seawater. The pumps running the cooling system, and the generators supplying power to those pumps, were submerged or washed away. All that remained was a solitary air-cooled generator that was installed at a height. Remember, the spent fuel in the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi needed to be cooled for several days still. How could you keep it from overheating when your infrastructure was reduced to flotsam and your country was in a state of emergency? This was the problem Masao Yoshida, the general manager at Fukushima Daiichi, had to solve. Acting decisively, Yoshida tells workers to manually direct seawater into what he thinks is the most immediate threat - Reactor 1. They work with the remaining generator and whatever smaller emergency pumps they have at hand. Barely half an hour after they start, he gets orders from TEPCO to stop. Why? Because they had a "feeling" that the Prime Minister's office might not like it. Masao Yoshida is a manager in corporate Japan, steeped in a culture of hierarchy, where unflinching loyalty and obedience are expected, and stepping out of line is nearly unthinkable. But Yoshida disobeys. In secret, he and his workers continue pouring seawater into the reactor core to prevent meltdown. Later that night, orders from the Prime Minister's office are relayed: use seawater to cool the reactors. TEPCO's "feelings" were wrong. Despite hours of efforts by workers, Reactor 1 melts down on the 12th of March, followed by Reactor 3. As 3 melts, it causes an explosion that disrupts the water supply to Reactor 2. Dominos fall, culminating in the meltdown of 3 of the 6 cores at Fukushima Daiichi. At one point, TEPCO even admitted a possibility of a critical nuclear fission reaction starting at reactor 4's fuel rod storage facilities. If you didn't understand that, that's TEPCO saying they haven't ruled out a nuclear explosion. As you now know, that didn't happen. The same water that caused this mess was used to relieve it. Workers were brought in and rotated, cranes, trucks, helicopters, and barges were deployed, and water was poured, sprayed and dropped wherever possible. Even though the cores went into meltdown, leakage into the environment was minimized and a catastrophe far worse was averted. Nuclear physicist, Michio Kaku, said this about Yoshida's defiance of orders: Newsclip: "If they didn't put that seawater in at the right moment, we would have lost Northern Japan." Despite experts considering it the second worst nuclear disaster after Chernobyl, there is currently only one death that is directly attributed to radiation, a worker that died years later, in 2018, from lung cancer. Fears of radioactive water contamination have also died down. Studies of Tuna in the water around Fukushima found that they are within Food Safety standards. In 2018, tours of the exclusion zone began. There are more than 1 million tons of radiation-contaminated water, right now, that no one knows what to do about. One option that is being considered is to dump it into the ocean, the long-suffering victim of our missteps as a species. It's also chilling to consider the incompetence shown by TEPCO. They had multiple occasions to prevent it, but they didn't. Later investigations threw up more errors in judgement - The emergency generators - they were housed in basements, and therefore susceptible to flooding. In a plant constructed next to the sea. During construction, contractors brought this up, but were ignored. The plant was constructed at a lower height than initially designed to save money - because less power would be used to pump seawater up to cool the reactors. TEPCO's instructions to stop pumping seawater would have been one last, disastrous, mistake, a mistake Yoshida prevented. Fukushima could have played out worse than Chernobyl. On the other hand, if conditions were marginally different, all of this never had to happen. And it didn't. In a different Fukushima power plant. FUKUSHIMA DAINI Fukushima Daini is the sister plant to Fukushima Daiichi, located 15 kilometers to the south. Ichi in Japanese is One, and Ni is Two. 2011, March 11th, the day of the earthquake, sensors detected and shut down the four nuclear reactors, the same way they did in Daiichi. Shortly after that, a tsunami rose over the seawall, the same way that it did in Daiichi. The flood of water destroyed the coolant pumps, the same way it did in Daiichi. Of 4 boiling water reactors, 3 were now in danger of meltdown, just like they were in Daiichi. Here we meet plant supervisor Naohiro Masuda. Unlike Daiichi though, Daini still had access to auxiliary power - one high voltage line from the grid still worked, and gave them a fighting chance. Control rooms were running and workers could monitor water levels and temperatures. Masuda was now responsible for two things - assessing and controlling the damage to the reactors, and managing his 200 employees in this moment of crisis. 200 workers that were, at that moment, unsure if their families had survived the earthquake and tsunami. Masuda had been following crisis management protocols from the moment the earthquake struck right up until the tsunami hit. But once the emergency generators died, he was in uncharted territory. Masuda recognized that he needed to decide whether it was safe to go out. He made charts of the aftershocks and used the waning intensity to convince people that the danger of tsunamis was now past. He later said, "It was not convincing at all," in an interview with Harvard Business Review, "but I needed them to be convinced." He did something that seems impossibly patient given the situation - he gave them the most information he could gather, and then he gave them time to process that information. His trust paid off. When he asked them to form groups and survey the reactors, no one refused. From there, Masuda took stock of what needed to be done, and what resources were available to them. His first priority was to get the pumps working again. That involved installing 9 km of new cables. These aren't your everyday cables either, They weigh a ton per 200 meter section. That's a literal ton, not figurative. The cables would normally have taken 20 people a month to install. The 200 workers at Fukushima Daini laid 45 tons of cabling in one day. Masuda made plans on a whiteboard, and constantly changed and shared them with the workers. Some would interpret this transparency as unwise, but it worked. There were many instances where he had to modify plans at the last minute because of changing conditions in the plant, but no one complained. At one point, workers had spent hours routing the cables I previously mentioned to reactor 2. They had worked long without sleep, and news was now filtering in, that members of their families had died, and that some of them had lost their homes. At this point, Masuda's engineers determined that reactor 1 was heating up, and needed water more urgently than reactor 2. Masuda asked workers to undo the hours of excruciating work they had put in and re-lay the cables to reactor 1. He says there was confusion, but no drama, and the task was done. Most of what I recount is from the story in the Harvard Business Review. They talk about how this is a story of sensemaking, a term coined by organizational theorist Karl Weick. As I understand it, Masuda took information in this overwhelming moment, broke it down and disseminated it to the people around him. As a leader, he trusted the intelligence of the people he worked with, and that built trust back. Contrast this with TEPCO's approach, that treated information as a resource to be hoarded, and authority as a tight leash. In Fukushima Daiichi, manager Yoshida had to respond to opaqueness with secrecy. Here in Daini, workers responded to transparency with efficiency. Everyone had a common goal, but everyone had created it for themselves. 4 days after the tsunami, on March 15th, all four reactors at Fukushima Daini had reached cold shutdown, and were no longer an immediate concern. Japanese man: Just before two hours [...] venting from the PCV That's Masuda speaking. He was later made chairman of TEPCO's decommissioning unit. In the fallout of these two incidents, TEPCO was criticized, by international and national agencies, for lazy practices and a failure to communicate both upwards and downwards in the hierarchy. Prime Minister Kan admitted that government was to blame as well, and took an increasingly anti-nuclear stand as his term went on. That debate is still raging. TEPCO president Naomi Hirose admitted that they acted in bad faith. He said "I would say it was a cover-up... It's extremely regrettable." Daini's story ended with a safe shutdown, and is what Daichi could have been, if luck was on their side. But why leave anything to luck? ONAGAWA [man talking over the phone] Ben: Hi, my name is Ben McDonald. I'm a mechanical engineer, [did] my professional engineering certification. Narration: Engineers in Canada wear an Iron Ring on their working hand. Its origin story is generally accepted to be a myth, but that doesn't make it any less real. Ben: What I kind of remember, the story that was told, is that there was a bridge in Quebec made of iron, and it was designed poorly, I'm not sure if the engineer cut corners, or if they cut costs in some way, but they'd done something poorly, and the bridge collapsed. [..] Ben: You go through a ceremony to receive an Iron Ring, and it is worn on the pinky of the writing hand of the Engineer. So I'm right-handed, I wear my Iron Ring on my right hand, and my wife; she's a chemical engineer; she would wear her Iron Ring on her left hand. The reason you wear the Iron Ring on the pinky of your writing hand, is to be an extra reminder, that as an engineer, no matter what kind of financial interests, or business interests, are at play on any decisions you're making, before we stamp off or sign off on any engineering design, because it's on our writing hand, we drag our Iron Ring through the signature to say, "Is what I'm doing now in the best interest of society?" [end] Yanosuke Hirai is a young boy in Iwanuma, a small town far north of Tokyo. He's visiting a local Shinto shrine. Legend has it that this shrine, in the year 869, was hit by a dreadful tsunami. The funny thing is, the shrine is 7 kilometers inland. Yanosuke will never forget this. He was so affected, in fact, that as he grew older and trained as a civil engineer, he was obsessed with designing his structures in anticipation of earthquakes and tsunamis. Post WW2, as Japan entered its remarkable growth phase, he became a board member of Tohoku Electric Power Company. This is the story of a third nuclear plant, Onagawa power plant. Onagawa is located even closer to the earthquake that caused the tsunamis at Fukushima 1 and 2. It's only 90 km away from the epicenter, while Fukushima is at almost twice the distance. 2011, March 11th, day of the earthquake. Sensors at Onagawa nuclear plant detected the tremors and automated systems shut down the three boiling water reactors. The same as they did in Fukushima daiichi and daini. Cooling pumps are necessary over the next few days until the fuel reaches cold shutdown. Backup diesel generators come online. The same as Fukushima. Half an hour after the earthquake, a 46-foot high tsunami hits Onagawa. The same height that will hit Fukushima Daiichi in a few minutes. [audio flashback] On this day of the Great Earthquake, Yanosuke Hirai, the young boy that could never forget the tsunami in the Shinto shrine, has been dead for 25 years. But during his life, he had designed Onagawa plant, the third house that big bad tsunami is threatening to huff and puff and blow down. During the design meetings, in 1968, he had argued for a seawall 5 times higher than the tsunamis that were expected. Colleagues tried to bargain with him by proposing a 12m seawall, saying that it would be more than enough, and would save money. Hirai was adamant that it be 14.8m. These 2.8 meters he was not willing to give. It's excessive, they say. But he stays firm. 14.8 meters. The president of the Tohoku Power Company reluctantly agrees, but says he will have to resign to take responsibility for the resultant increase in power costs. Hirai doesn't soften. 14.8 meters. [resume] The tsunami that hits Onagawa power plant on March 11th, 2011 is 14 meters high. The seawall holds, the generators and the pumps keep functioning, Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant proceeds to an uneventful cold shutdown. The Onagawa plant went on to serve as a refugee shelter for three months, housing people from the nearby fishing village who had lost their homes. Many people know about Fukushima Daiichi, it was in the news cycle for months. Few know about Fukushima Daiini. Fewer still about Onagawa. The people around Chernobyl's event horizon knew they were going to die. But they still worked. They knew their government would not listen to them, but they still spoke. And when you watch them, you find yourself caught in the undercurrent of their purpose. You don't have to ask if what they're doing is right, or intellectualize their motives, because you can feel it in your bones. Chernobyl shows us that, more than hope, purpose defines us as people. Masao Yoshida, Naohiro Masuda and his 200 people, and Yanosuke Hirai inspire not because they show us how to hope, but because they show us how to create a nobler purpose. Enough to fuel us for a few hours of secret defiance, a few days of sleepless perseverance, and sometimes, for a lifetime of being a human Iron Ring. [pause] Ben: The ring itself is like any ring, smooth on the inside, but the outside of it has a bit of a corrugated texture, but as an engineer if they wear it for thirty-forty years, it'll become more rounded and seasoned. [outro music] Thank you for listening to this, the first episode of The Unsung. This podcast was written, narrated, and edited by me, Abhijit Shylanath. Original music was composed by me as mudeth. Past and present tenses were and are and will be mangled for dramatic effect. More information and references can be found at unsung.mudeth.org. If you enjoyed listening to it, please send me a message, or leave a rating. Goodbye. Thanks: Shreya Dasgupta Ben McDonald Ryan Gibson Ashok VA Shivalika Shylanath