International edition of the Japanese echo-news journal with exclusive in-depth reports, and summaries of what the other Japanese medias are saying.

In September 24, 2013 the former USNRC chairman Gregory Jaczko held a press conference in Tokyo. And also,orgen Johnson, Citizens’ Representative, San Diego Forum Tetsuro Tsutsui, Member, Nuclear Regulation Sub-committee,Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy (CCNE) are invited to the program as guest speakers.

The session has gone as follows.

A program host: Welcome, everybody. Today is the Ongoing Fukushima Daiichi Crisis:Ongoing Discharges and Other Current Issues.

With us today here is Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the US nuclear regulatory commission, Torgen Johnson, Citizens’ Representative of San Diego Forum, forum that was instrumental in closing down a nuclear generating station in San Diego, and the Citizens’ Commision on Nuclear Energy, CCNE, which invited both of these gentelemen here, to speak about how since then to become more acting in determining nuclear energy power seek and state of nuclear supply in Japan. We have limited time since two of our guests have to get on an airplane at 11:00. So with all regards due, if you want to know one more about this …here. First of all, speaking is Mr. Gregory Jaczko, who was the former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, followed by Johnson, and then followed by Tetsuro Tsutsui, and everyone take questions and answers. Mr. Jaczko, please go ahead.

Jaczko: Thank you. It is a real pleasure to be here to address you this morning. I had an opportunity over the last several days to visit, with a number of different people here in Japan, and hear about their concerns and issues dealing with nuclear power in the aftermath of Fukushima Daiichi accident.

One of the things that has became very clear to me (that became clear to me) after the accident began is that these kinds of nuclear accidents that have economy wide impact are simply unacceptable in Japanese society and American society, and I think really all over the world. So it gives us an opportunity to take a step back and figure out how we go forward and how we ultimately move forward in a way that eliminates the possibility of these kinds of accidents.

Then one of the keys to that certainly is the active involvement/engagement of the public. Decisions about nuclear technology, they are often controvertial. They are often very difficult involving sometimes science that has limited consensus among technical experts. So it is incumbent to fully engaged the public and be active on the part of the government, on the part of the utilities, on the part of citizens, to be active participants on this endeavor.

We know what impact of the Fukushima Daiichi accident was, it was hundred and sixty thousand people evacuated from their homes. Most of them still to the date. It’s a significant land contamination event and it’s an event that, at a minimum estimates have shown, will impact of the Japanese economy on the order of about 500 billion US dollars. I think if I do my maths right, it’s 50 trillion yen. And it’s an accident that will leave a legacy of clean up and decontamination and decommisioning that will last for decades.

There has been a lot of interests lately internationally certainly, and I’ve seen that in the United States about the efforts to deal with the water contamination at the site and the combination of problems from tanks that are storing contaminated water and ground water migrations through the site. All of these issues are extremely significant but they are just the beginning of the work that will need to be done. Over the next several months, there will be activities related to removing fuel from the unit 4’s spent fuel pool. This is also a significant activity from safety perspective.

So there is a lot of activity and there is a lot of work to be done and much of that is extremely safety significant. So that’s why it’s so important to have the public fully engaged. They will invariably be setbacks in this work, and it’s important to have a good dialogue and a good debate. Not only to be able to communicate, these setbacks as they occur, but ultimately to be able to sollicit and get the best advice and recommendations about how to move forward with many of these issues. Everytime I come to Japan, I’m amazed by the sphere in the creativity and the hard work and the ethic of hard work of the Japanese people.

And I think it’s extremely important to utilize all the existing sources in Japan to work on solving these challenges because they are often unprecedented. The accident of Fukushima Daiichi has left the legacy of contamination that is very different from any other radiological disaster that has happened in the world.

And ultimately we have to change the mindset about people believing that accidents can’t happen. Before the accident, too many people believed in that mindset and that’s the part of a challenges and a part of the important need to change as we go forward.

Fundamentally as I’ve looked at this accident and as I talked to people in communities that surround the nuclear power plants in the United States, in Japan, it’s become clear to me that we need to think about safety in a whole new way We need to think about nuclear technology being used in a way that they cannot lead to evacuations. It cannot lead to land contamination events. This is something that we would not accept in any other kind of technology. And even though these events are anticipated and expected to be extremely rare, they still can happen. And they did happen at Fukushima Daiichi.

So as we go forward, and we think about nuclear technology, and the use of nuclear technology, it’s time to completely remove the possibility of severe accidents. That means the whole new way of looking and thinking about nuclear technology, and it may mean rethinking the reactors that are currently in operation today.

So as I’ve met with people and attended public meetings of the last several days, I’ve challenged the people that have come before me to be active participants, to be actively engaged in the work that is going to be needed to be done in Japan to address the issues with Fukushima Daiichi, to address the very difficult decisions about restarting nuclear power plants in this country.

So I’m really thrilled to be here with Torgen Johnson who is from Southern California, and I met him when I was working as the chairman of the NRC. Because of the work that he was doing, to organize people in his community and to bring facts to their attention, that would help them be informed participants in the debate and discussion about the power plant in his community.

And I’m especially pleased to be here with Dr. Tsutsui, who has a tremendous background, and has ideas and thoughts about how to address and tackle the challenges of Fukushima Daiichi. These are very very difficult challenges and I think if there is any lasting message that I could leave is that to tackle these challenges the best in brightest minds from Japan and if necessary from the rest of the world would need to be brought there, to come up with solution.

And I think it’s really difficult to say that there is a right answer. There will be difficult choices and there will ultimately be sacrifices and choices that will have to be made. So I appreciate the opportunity to address all of you and I’d be happy to answer questions when we get to there. Thank you.

The program host: Next is Mr. Johnson.

Hello, thank you for this opportunity to address you. In a poetic way this trip is a full circle. It started with us watching from California the March 2011 disaster unfolding on television and wondering what this meant for Japan. Three weeks after the first explosions we’re detecting radiation in the milk we were feeding our children in our house in San Diego, that plummet and reached the west coast and that were uptaken through by bioaccumulation in the dairy industry 55 hundred miles down wind.

I think at that point my views on nuclear power had shifted from being very supportive of the technology to be more weary and wanting to know more about what these disasters mean to society. So in the process of observing and learning about Fukushima disasters, it was unfolding we turned- when I say “we” it was a number of community groups from San Clemente, California, and up to Orange County all the way to Los Angeles County down to San Diego County. It was a number of loose collaboration of concerned citizens and professionals including doctors attorneys medical experts, people in elected, official positions. All of us were starting to tune in to this issue, Fukushima. And we directed our intention to San Onofre nuclear generattion station which happens to be about 30 miles upwind of our house.

So over the course of 2 and a half years we organised the public elected officials from local level to state level all up until the federal level to take note of the public’s position on the risks and benefits of nuclear power with the public is growing weary as we were watching things spiral out of control of Fukushima. And a number of us in these coalitions based out of San Clemente, eventually put together series of city council meetings. It started to engage all officials. And what we’re sharing now in Japan is that technique of inclusion, because the public in California included a number of specialists. Some of the people that were part of our group included the men that designed the containment structures, the chief engineer designing containment structures at San Onofre. We got the people inside the power plant speaking to us we had a number of experts that became involved in this broader public discussion.

It combinated with an event on June 4th which was precipitated earlier by long and worn out, very complex legal battle that Friends of the Earth US was waging and Washington against Southern California Edison, the owner of San Onofre nuclear generating station. And as the lawsuit was unfolding we decided at the public level to organise a conference we invited former prime minister, Naoto Kan, and former chairman of the US nuclear regulatory commission, Dr. Jaczko, independent nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, past NRC commisioner Peter Bradford, to join the public and open up a public dialogue about risks and benefits of San Onofre.

That was a very successful conference. I know there were number of issues that lead to the closure of San Onofre. But one of those forces was the public getting involved in the decision making process and putting pressure on regulators, local officials, State and Federal officials, to take for public’s concerns, their concerned for their safety at heart, and really acknowledge that the public is the key stakeholders in this disaster. The public, especially right around the power plant, are the first victimes, the first ones to lose everything.

For many people, losing their homes equates the personal financial ruin. We started to raise this discussion in these meetings we were having. So the outcome after that conference was the decision by Southern California Edison three days after the conference to close the facility for good and decommission it. The Japanese we’ve been close contacting with us asked us to come to Japan and talk to them about what we did and how we organised the public. It was very professional and symbiotic kind of relationship that we had with our elected officials, and I think Japanese public wants to do the same thing here now.

They want to have a clearer voice-I think it’s a healthy thing- and planning, that’s the approach that we take, a progressive planning that you take stakeholders on the broadest sense and a wide range of diciplines and bring them to the table and let them discuss all these key issues. For instance, the release of 1000 large tanks of highly radioactive water into Northeastern Japan…fisheries… I think the fishing industry in japan needs to be at that table on that discussion. That’s a huge issue. I know that they will eventually end up in my dinner plate in Sandiego. That’s why we are here.

The program host: Thank you very much.These two gentlemen were brought here by the CSO, the Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center Gentsuikin, and the CCNE the Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy. Mr. Tetsuro Tsutsui, who is Nuclear regulation subcommittee representative here will speak briefly on the proposal that they are making to the Japanese government. Probably he will be doing that in English, and after that we will take.

Tsutsui: I would propose three points from engineering point of view. Number 1: According to this paper, establishing the project oriented task force organisation. Tepco is inappropriate organisation for dealing with this exceptional situation, so we propose formation of project oriented task force organisation to deal with the current situation. This task force would include expertise. Second from engineering and construction companies including experienced project works experts and engineers. The task force would be empowered with the broad range of activities including planning, budget control, field work, management etc.

Number 2: Underground wall to be built on hill side of tank area. Please this map…

The current METI-TEPCO plan is to build a 1.4km long frozen wall around the reactor buildings to block underground water. However, the existing storage tank area upstream of the reactor buildings is already radioactively contaminated. Morever, the frozen wall method is not yet technical proven and requires a long construction period before it can be in place.

So we propose the construction of an underground wall using different method and installation of reliable stretch tanks, the wall would be located upstream of the tank area. The tanks constructed would be 1000 tanks. Plus, reliable stretched tanks with a maximum total capacity of 800,000 ton. The advantage of building the wall upstream of tank area is that it opens up the possibilities of utilising proven technology, the mobilisation of many skilled operators of heavy equipment and less worker dose and mobilisation of many such heavy equipments imultaneously because of a large working space.

Point 3: Plans for removal of debris should be cancelled. The current METI-TEPCO road map states that the removal of debris will begin 8.5 years after the accident and be completed 20 to 25 years after the accident. We propose foreign alternative. The contaminated water problem should be resolved the water, spent fuel in the spent fuel pools should be removed as planned. Then we propose that the water cooling of the damaged reactor cores should be continued until the decade heat is reduced sufficiently for natural air circulation.

Subsequently the equipment and building areas for isolation should be covered with concrete. This propose method can avoid many uncertain difficulties which would arise in the METI-TEPCO plan including plugging uncertain number of plugs on the pressure containment vessels. The need to develop methods to break up the blocks of debris and remove the pieces of debris, the extensive radioactive dose to workers, the huge financial expenses. That’s all. Thank you.

Before we take questions, Tsutsui san, has it been submitted to the government yet, or, are you planning to submit it in the next few days?

Tsutsui: Tomorrow we will submit to the parliament members.

The program host: OK. What is to be submit to the parlliment members tomorrow, assumedly in Japanese and in English. Alright. Now we’re going to take questions and I’ll answer you. Please do not give speeches and just give questions.

Please identify yourself when you ask questions.

Q. Yes, Hello. My name is Daniel Loosinger, I am a Foreign Correspondent of Dutch Financial Daily Het Finacieele Dagblad. I’ve been based in Japan for 6 years. My question is for Mr. Jaczko. You may have been asked this before, but what do you think of the way former prime minister Naoto Kan got the nuclear accident under control. And to what extent, do you think he was a hero?

Jazcko: I have had an opportunity to meet with Mr. Kan after the accident. And I think he took a lot of significant actions during the crisis. You know, I think people who work in government, it’s their job to take the right actions in the crisis, and I don’t think that makes you a hero. And I thinkt hat’s his job. I think he did a lot of things right.

When you have a crisis like what happened in Japan, it’s a very very difficult situation. You re faced with tremendous uncertainty. The more I think I hear about what he did the more people in Japan would value the leadership that he demonstrated. Because there were a number of very significant crisis that he managed. It was not only the nuclear accident, but it was responding to the humanitarian crisis of a tsunami that had devastated a region in Japan. So I think that the more people know and learn about what he did the more they will think that he did the fine job in reacting to the accident.

You know, I’m not one to label people’s actions. You know, but I certainly… I think he dealt a lot of challenges in particular, getting information from TEPCO and kind of breaking through… well, I think the term that has been used here is “the nuclear village”, and he had to break that down. And once he did, he established some very good management from information sharing. He put minister Hoshino in charge of a kind of dealing with the immediate accident response. I think that was the tremendous leadership decision in his part. And he really put a place on formula on the mechanism from information sharing for decision making that ultimately brought the situation under control. So I’m really really impressed with what he did and how he responded in the very difficult crisis.

Q. Rudders for European.Energy Review.

Mr. Jaczko, if I heard you well, you were talking about outfacing the nuclear energy, you see possibility on midterm range to continue nuclear energy in Japan. On what condition do you see that conditions place to make that happen in a responsible way?

A. You know, well, I think ultimately… If I look… maybe I started with the wrong range and walk back. I would say, hunderd of years from now, I would certainly like to see Japan that doesn’t have to deal with nuclear energy challenges. I think given the nature of the country, this is a technology that poses significant risks.

Unless we develop a new generation of technologies from nuclear energy that meet the standard I would talk about is the elimination, not just the reduction of the risk, but the elimination of the possibility of a severe accident. You know, I see that is a technology that is not just valuable in Japan, really anywhere else in the world. I think nuclear technology is expensive. It poses these high-consequence low-probability hazard challenges which are really unnecessary.

When you look at what happened around the Fukushima Daiichi area, it’s simply unacceptable. This is a technology that was there to generate the electricity. And the impacts on the community are just astounding. I mean Imagine being removed from your home for a definite period of time. That is a personal tragedy and I don’t think any of us can fully appreciated unless we had to go through with this. So the only thing that ultimately weighs in the decisions is how you replace that power in the short term.

And I think that’s where the focus in the energy needs to be right now is coming up with ways to do that without nuclear if possible. I hope and I believe that there are ways to do that and I think that’s where I would see the Japanese people pulling their resources in their energy is on coming up with those technology if they exist deploying them, if they don’t exist developing them. I think the Japanese people have the ability to do that. They’ve shown that as they dealt with tragedy over their history.

So ideally I think you would not restart any of the reactors that may not prove practical. If any of the reactors are restarted, they need to be a thorough public debate and a public dialogue, to insure that those decisions have as much buying from the members of the public as possible. Because if they don’t, it’s not going to be successful in the short term until you can ultimately move to whatever technologies will replace it in a long-term.

Q. Par Borden from Sweden. Photographer for Politica.

I wonder can you elaborate on this technology that is planned to put Fukushima plant on ice? I’ve been listening to and watching on TV on interviews on BBC, CNN, with experts in this measures.And they say that when it has been tested before, in a much lower scale, it has only been for temporary use. Not as a permanent use. … Your ideas about this, please. Thank you.

Jazcko: I’ll say something first… and Mr. Tsuitsui wants to coment too.

I think we have to recognize there is no simple answer to the water problems in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi site. But fundamentally what has to be done is no, you have to divert the ground water away from the site, so that it doesn’t continue to flow through the reactor builting, get contaminated and flow onto the sea. Or, if you can’t devert it, you have to prevent the water from getting to the ocean, getting to the sea.

So there are numbers of proposals the icewall being one. I can’t say that I can have any particular experience with technology like that. Actually I don’t. So I can’t really say that I can pass judgement on it. My initial expectations, is that it will be extremely difficult, it will likely have challenges, have limited success, or have weaknesses, and have some degree of failure, I would expect them to be with almost any system you design and develop does. I tend to believe that the simplest solutions are often the best this one seems to be the most complicated solutions… But I think right now what has to happen is people have to put ideas on the table and those ideas have to be discussed to ultimately come up with the best approach going forward. But there won’t be a right answer, just like there was never a right answer during the accident itself from very early on, there was some technical discrepancy between NRC and the Japanese government about to what degree several of the reactors building should be flooded. There was a reasonable concern on the part of Japanese that flooding those reactor vessels and reactor buildings would lead to greater leakage in ground water. The NRC perspective was that you fundamentally had to get to the reactors under control to reduce the airborne contamination.

There was no right answer in that action. There was a choice and you dealt with the consequences. The continued use of water obviously has its consequences in that is to continued outflow from the reactor building which is mixing with ground water from the whole sites and contaminating it. So I don’t think at this point you can just really say one technology is going to work and one isn’t. I think now you really have to begin exploring every option and consider it. But this will be new whatever it’s done. And it will likely be challenging and it will not likely work as well as anticipated.

The program host:Mr. Tsutsui has a comment on this as well. Could you explain your background a little bit so people will understand what expertise you are coming from?

A. (translated) So my personal background is that I have been working for many years as a construction manager and project manager in petrochemicals or petroleum refinaries and so on. With a background in mechanical engineering. So in this aspect, while I’m not an expert in nuclear energy itself, in terms of the plants construction and so on particularly including the issue of water, this is something which is a common issue to the other plants which I’ve been working in a construction on as well. With this background I’m a member of the experts commission working on the citizen side.

In regards to the technology of the frozen wall, I can seemingly well I don’t have personal deep experience in this actual technology itself. We have a concerns in regards to this because of the fact that it has not been tested particularly on the kind of large scale or long term scale that we are talking about for this situation.

So in that respect it is not possible to say at the moment whether this will be a temporary solution or if it is something that can be considered for the long term given the current expertise with this.

And the proposals of other recommendations which I shared with you today from our commission, the basis for this is rather than using these untested methods but relying on more proven conventional methods which have been experienced in other cases and which can be implemented faster with less obstacles or challenges to put in forward and implementing these proposals. For example, we hear that in the current existing plan, the task is about bringing it near the building so there are more obstacles in the construction of this and more challenges which would have to be around. So the proposals which we are recommending to the government is based on more conventional proven methods in this respect.