Approving Anti-terrorist Measures

No argument was raised against a set of anti-terrorism measures in Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Niigata, owned by Tokyo Electric Power Company, in the regular meeting of Nuclear Regulation Committee on December 6th. It paved the way for the committee to lift the order of halting operation of the plant as early as the end of this year. There still remains, however, a skepticism that the electric power company which caused historically unprecedented disaster in Fukushima can handle one of the biggest nuclear power plants in the world.

 

TEPCO stopped the operation of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant after the severe accident in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011. After the government introduced stricter standard to operate nuclear power plant, the reactors #6 and #7 in Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant passed the examination of NRC in 2017. But some troubles appeared in the plant site and the reactors have never restarted since 2012.

 

The reason why the plant could not restart its operation was insufficiency in anti-terrorism measures. In 2021, it was found that the sixteen sensors to check the intruder into the site was broken. Ten of them was wrongly replaced. And there was an incident that a worker of the plant wrongly stepped into the central control room, using an identification card of someone else’s. NRC issued TEPCO an order in April 2021 to prohibit moving nuclear fuels. NRC recognized that the anti-terrorism measures fell in too short to operate the plant, and kept on inspection in the plant.

 

NRC said that it had made the inspection for 4,268 hours. The agency found in June this year that the power of some lights for monitoring the intruders had been off for seven months. There were three cases that the workers brought smart phones into the site without permission. Nevertheless, NRC concluded that the preventive measures have been “improving” and the plant was getting rid of the situation needing the intervention of NRC.

 

NRC posed another inspection on the accountability of TEPCO as an operator of nuclear power plants. Although one of the check points was the responsibility for decommissioning of the reactors in Fukushima Daiichi plant, NRC did not check out how TEPCO was delivering information to the interested sectors. Discharging processed water into the sea was regarded as having achieved the goal. The inspectors reportedly did not inspect in Fukushima plant.

 

The inspection looked like checking only whether improvements have been made. It is still not clear why the failure in the anti-terrorism measures happened. Some failure was made by the difficulty in management of the company after it suffered from financial damage by the accident in Fukushima. As long as the government puts priority on resuming as many reactors as possible to the safety measures for the uncontrollable nuclear technology, it is difficult to achieve public approval on nuclear power. 

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