The Fukushima Coverup, Fifteen Years On

Sooner or later, in any foolproof system, the fools are going to exceed the proofs.^[1]

I awoke on the Friday morning of March 11, 2011, to a peaceful, sunny, relatively warm early spring day in Vermont. While I was sleeping, an earthquake and tsunami had decimated the Pacific coast of Japan. More than a dozen Japanese nuclear plants took their cooling water from the Pacific Ocean. It was obvious to me by 8 AM that three of the six nukes at Fukushima were already melting down and the remaining reactors in Eastern Japan were also in jeopardy. I knew a catastrophe was unfolding at Tokyo Electric’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Daiich Reactors.

As the United States was waking up that Friday morning, the US nuclear industry spin doctors were already circling the wagons and framing the developing catastrophe as being of little consequence. At 8 AM Pacific time on March 11, in Washington State, Dr. James Conca, the Laboratory Director of the Hanford (Washington) Laboratory, site of the nation’s largest nuclear dump, said:

After representatives of the nuke industry touted the industry’s safety record— working at a nuclear plant is  “safer than working at Toys ‘R’ Us,” Hanford lab director Jim Conca told the committee—committee members asked the industry reps whether they were confident that all the safety systems they’d just praised would hold up in Japan.

Conca added:  “I’m very happy that Japan has 26 percent nuclear because those will not be the problems. When you see the pictures things burning [in Japan], it won’t be nuclear, it’ll be the gas-fired power plants and things like that. Nuclear is no problem at all.”^[2]

That same morning, the Public Relations Director of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Nuclear Industry’s Lobbying, Campaign Financing, Public Relations and Marketing organization, chimed in as well, adding:

Asked specifically about the nuclear situation in Japan,  Nuclear Energy Institute public affairs director Jim Colgary reassured Rep. Deb Eddy (D-48) that the safety systems in place at the nuclear reactors “absolutely” would come through. “It’s a conservative safety system,” Colgary said. … Yes, I’m adequately sure that the safety systems in place work. ”

Those remarks by NEI didn’t age well, but they were never expected to be correct. From my training forty years earlier in the Northeast Utilities Speakers Bureau, I could see the nuclear spin already at work, trying to strike first, to capture the headline. That’s why framing a discussion as early as possible is so important. I wasn’t the only person who witnessed the nuclear spin doctors trying to change the narrative while Fukushima was melting down. In his book, even the former Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Greg Jaczko, identified the immediate desire of the nuclear lobby to minimize the Fukushima meltdowns on the weekend after the meltdowns began!

“… that ignores the unwritten laws of nuclear politics. Regulators are there to ensure safety, but they must always balance that need against the imperative that the industry survive … we said very little during the first weekend [March 12/13], despite tremendous pressure from nuclear industry proponents who wanted us to speak out. The message they wanted us to deliver was that everything was fine. I was not convinced it was… Vivid images that resembled a Hollywood disaster movie were circulating, and soon the press, the environmental community, and Congress would ask what the Fukushima accident meant to the United States. I knew the nuclear industry would have an answer ready: “This is a Japanese problem. American plants are safe.”^[3]

Many tried to dismiss Fukushima as a result of Japanese unwillingness to challenge authority… But that same obeisance to the powerful is exactly what I saw at home at the NRC. American politicians had long ago been lead to believe that these kinds of calamities were no longer possible…In hindsight, the Fukushima accident reveled what has long been the sad truth about nuclear safety: the nuclear power industry has developed too much control over the NRC and Congress. … because the industry relies too much on controlling its own regulation, the continued use of nuclear power will lead to catastrophe…. That is a truth we all must confront.^[4]

The efforts to quickly frame nuclear power as safe and to minimize the impact of the Fukushima meltdowns extended to Europe as well as the US and Japan. But in Europe, the UK government was pushing the nuclear industry, not the other way around! According to the UK’s Guardian Newspaper:

British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and before the extent of the radiation leak was known. Internal emails seen by the Guardian show how the business and energy departments worked closely behind the scenes with the multinational companies EDF Energy, Areva, and Westinghouse to try to ensure the accident did not derail their plans for a new generation of nuclear stations in the UK.

“This has the potential to set the nuclear industry back globally,” wrote one official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), whose name has been redacted. “We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear.”

The business department emailed the nuclear firms and their representative body, the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), on 13 March, two days after the disaster knocked out nuclear plants and their backup safety systems at Fukushima. The department argued it was not as bad as the “dramatic” TV pictures made it look, even though the consequences of the accident were still unfolding and two major explosions at reactors on site were yet to happen.

“Radiation released has been controlled – the reactor has been protected,” said the BIS official, whose name has been blacked out. “It is all part of the safety systems to control and manage a situation like this.”

The official suggested that if companies sent in their comments, they could be incorporated into briefs to ministers and government statements. “We need to all be working from the same material to get the message through to the media and the public. “Anti-nuclear people across Europe have wasted no time blurring this all into Chernobyl and the works,” the official told Areva. “We need to quash any stories trying to compare this to Chernobyl.”^[5]

Some Japanese scientists became quickly aware of the danger from the radioactive clouds that were enveloping Toyko. As recently as 2025, the Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists published a previously untold story stating:

Japanese radiochemist Satoshi Utsunomiya found that air samples from March 15, 2011, in Tokyo contained a very high concentration of insoluble cesium microparticles. He immediately realized the implications of the findings for public safety, but his study was kept from publication for years….The controversy surrounding his attempts to publish his findings nearly cost him his career and prevented his results from being widely known by the Japanese public ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo^[6]

What was unfolding on the other side of the world was not a “Japanese problem.” The Fukushima Daiichi reactors that were most in jeopardy were designed in the mid-1960s by a US company (GE) and constructed by a US company (EBASCO) and there were more than 20 reactors with the similar design in the United States, with still others in Germany, Sweden, Spain and Mexico! The worldwide nuclear industry and NEI were singing Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, while at the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and at the four similar Fukushima Dainni reactors several miles to the south, chaos and courage reigned.

Notes

1. Quote created by the author first spoken in California in 1994 ↑

2. (source: https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2011/3/17/nuclear-is-no-problem-at-all ) ↑

3. Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator, by Gregory B. Jaczko, Simon & Shuster, 2019, pages 68, 77 and 80. ISBN 978-1-4767-5576-2 ↑

4. IBID pages 21 and 22. ↑

5. The Guardian: Revealed: British government’s plan to play down Fukushima, June 30, 2011 By Rob Edwards ↑

6. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-01/how-fukushimas-radioactive-fallout-in-tokyo-was-concealed-from-the-public/#post-heading ↑

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