I first saw the Chernobyl “sarcophagus” while driving in the exclusion zone on a bright spring day in May 1997. The shattered plant was an eerie, captivating presence (see “Nuclear Cleanup”), and it was chilling to spend a few days in the control room of reactor 3 (which was then still operating)—an exact double of the exploded reactor 4. The fallout from that 1986 tragedy spread so far from the plant as to inspire the conclusion that a nuclear accident anywhere is a nuclear accident everywhere. No other industrial site has spread such devastation to the environment and the lives of so many millions of people.
Many credible studies have concluded that Chernobyl’s disaster was caused by the safety culture in the Soviet nuclear industry at the time of the accident. A plant that fosters positive attitudes and practices with respect to safety encourages employees to ask questions and to apply a rigorous and prudent approach to all aspects of their job. It promotes open communication between line workers and middle and upper management. The Soviet safety culture was deficient in these respects, allowing dangerous risks to be taken.
My 25 years of research on nuclear safety in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere lead me to believe that a similar cultural failing lies behind the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. Of course, in the disaster’s wake, we should be concerned with the risks that major earthquakes and tsunamis pose to nuclear power plants anywhere. Yet it seems that in this case, the natural hazards acted as a trigger for the ensuing man-made disaster, which still affects many hundreds of thousands of people today. The root causes are lax or nonexistent regulatory oversight in Japan and an ineffective safety culture at the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).
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