Fail-Safe Fails: Japan's Nuclear Policy and the Danger of Systemic Optimism

Grief for the dead, concern for the survivors, worries about global impact on an already shaky global economy. Out of this short list of emotional responses, questions have begun to emerge about why the impact of the quake and tsunami have been so devastating in a country that had so carefully planned for this eventuality. Among the most troubling of these questions concerns why, given the knowledge that Japan sits on active fault-lines and has experienced so many devastating quakes in the past, the Japanese authorities located so many nuclear plants along their vulnerable east coast. And given that fore-knowledge, why the so-called redundent, fail-safe back-up systems put in place ALL appeared to have failed more or less simultaneously?

One of the worst mistakes policy planners can make is to accept their own most optimistic assumptions. The pressures to do so are enormous: the costs associated with building to meet worst-case scenarios are much higher; overcoming local opposition to secure permits is more difficult; and residual resentment of the politicians who push the process may continue to haunt them even if the likelihood of an incident is statistically insignificant. However, the situation now unfolding in Japan before the world's eyes bears mute testimony to the dangers of understating risks. Noriko Hama comments in the Financial Times:


"I just happened to be working from home last Friday when the earthquake struck. Everyone was home, which was great. What was not so great was that a lot of things shut down immediately, including the gas supply; the emergency lockdown had kicked in. This too was great of course. But we did have to work out a way to get the supply back on after the immediate tremors had abated, and nobody knew how.

Eventually my mother managed to conjure up images of a device lurking somewhere in our toolshed. She was also able to unearth a flimsy manual on how to operate the device. Armed with the booklet my mother and I ventured into the darkness. There the device was, with a black button that looked more or less but not quite like the one in the booklet. Pushing it would unlock the emergency shutdown, or so one supposed. What if it triggered off something else? What if there were other precautions we ought to have taken before activating the process? It was not quite like making up one’s mind about which wire to cut, the red or the blue, but it felt close enough. I pushed. After a tense three minutes or so, the gas came back on.

It was the combination of my mother’s presence of mind and my devil-may-care activism which did the job: her wits and my guts, in other words.

As we watch and experience this horrific disaster, it increasingly seems to me that wits and guts are very much what it is all about. The people who have been most directly hit are showing remarkable ability on both counts. They have the wits to make their presence known to rescue crews in the most imaginative ways such as makeshift flags and colourfully eye-catching devices concocted out of God knows what. They have the guts to stick it out with patience and calm.

Things start to look a little different when we turn our eyes on the policymakers. In fairness, the government has so far been doing a reasonably good job in communicating with the public and steering the rescue effort. Given the exasperation we were all feeling with their witlessness and gutlessness before the disaster, maybe it is just low expectations that make them look better than they actually are. All the same, they have been looking sort of in control up to now.

The true test comes hereafter, however, now that the nuclear power plant damage has come into play. The government needs all the wits at its disposal to ask the right questions of the experts. It needs more than its customary show of guts to tell the story as it is to the public. Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, sounds as if he is trying to do the questioning in an intelligent way. The guts are a trickier matter. Panic should be avoided, but shadows of doubt about the forthrightness of people in charge always provoke the worst response, not least in the media.

From a historical perspective it seems on reflection that Japan’s nuclear energy policy has been conducted these past years on the principle of all guts and no wits. Otherwise, how could it be that there are so many nuclear power plants dotted around the country all so close to the coastlines?

How is it that, if the relevant authorities had had their wits about them, the supposedly multilayered mechanisms of protection surrounding the reactors seem not to have worked but actually to have failed all at once? What is the point of having different voices in the choir if they all sing out of tune in unison? It must have taken guts to promote such witless systems as the future way forward for Japanese energy policy.

For the witless gutsiness of past policies, it should be noted that the current major opposition party, the Liberal Democratic party, is very much answerable. LDP politicians should have the guts to admit to their witlessness, or at least to show a willingness to review the policy framework alongside the current government. Alas, televised debates and the like among the political parties do not show either the LDP or others in the opposition camp in very good light in this regard. Political point-scoring is the last thing we want to see in this moment of crisis. All concerned should have the wits to see that and the guts to act accordingly.