Japanese Dysfunction

Sadly, the inept and incredibly slow response of the Japanese government and Tepco, the nuclear reactor operator, means that the world is getting dosed unnecessarily by radiation. Right now the amount of Cesium-137 released by Fukushima is equivalent to what was released by Chernobyl. But Chernobyl was one reactor while Fukushima is 4 reactors and 4 piles of spent fuel (more details here). Chernobyl was one bad explosion, Fukushima is a simmering situation with many small explosions and apparently no end in sight. It is a ticking timebomb slowly releasing many, many times more radioactivity than Chernobyl.

You would think that Japan's government and Tepco would be expediting everything possible to contain the leak. But they aren't. That's because of the dysfunctional Japanese culture of "saving face" and an unwillingness to admit problems or the need for help.

Here's a bit from a post by Robert X. Cringely that explains:

In this nuclear accident the situation is complicated by an extra party — Tokyo Electric Power Company — with its corporate personality and internal agendas. TEPCO is embarrassed by this accident. Embarrassment, either corporate or personal, is a huge deal in Japan. It’s not like they can just give up their corporate face for a few weeks or months while necessary things get done. I saw a similar unwillingness to squarely face reality at General Public Utilities back at Three Mile Island in 1979. In both corporate cultures there was too much emphasis on political damage control — emphasis that often comes at the expense of good engineering.

If a nuclear plant manager is worried too much about his job he isn’t worried enough about his reactor.

TEPCO just this morning announced that four of the six Daiichi reactors can never be repaired. I wrote that right here less than 24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami before the emergency batteries had even run out. It was instantly obvious to even a moderately informed observer like me, yet why did TEPCO take two weeks to come to the same conclusion? Internal politics, which can only increase public danger.

But wait, there’s more! Now we have reports of water contaminated with plutonium at the plant and possible plutonium ground water contamination. Radioactive cesium and iodine are bad enough, though that water can be stored in pools for a few months while the radiation decays then carefully diluted for disposal. But plutonium contamination is forever — at least 10,000 years.

There are right now two plutonium remediation technologies on offer to the Japanese government and TEPCO that I know about — one from Russia and one from the USA. One approach uses nanotech and the other uses biotech but both are novel and unique. Both have been offered to the Japanese through government channels and in both cases the Japanese government or TEPCO have yet to respond.

I know about these technologies because the Russian one is represented by a friend of mine and the American one comes from a Startup America company so I took it straight to the White House myself.

I think it would be smart for TEPCO to adopt both technologies in case one works better than the other. But my sense is that if an answer ever comes from Japan it will be months from now and will probably be “no thanks.”

Think about this as you read about that plutonium-contaminated water, because it is going to be in the news for years to come. If only there had been a technology available to clean up that stuff early in the crisis, the pundits will say, lives could have been saved. There was such a technology available — two of them in fact.

Sadly, 6.4 billion people are going to pay the price for the idiot social culture of "face saving" going on in Japan. Normally I would say "let each culture do its thing". But if their "thing" is to poison the world for the rest of us, then I think maybe the UN Security Council should hold a meeting and decide to send in troops and install an efficient decision process and an effective management system to deal with the crisis. The rest of the world shouldn't have to pay for the "niceties" of Japanese culture.

As Cringely points out, the leakage of plutonium is essentially "forever" since it takes over 30,000 years to reduce the radioactivity by half. Human civilization is only 10,000 years old. That is forever. And we are paying this price because of stupidity and unwillingness to get the job done by a culture which has shot itself in the foot and continues to refuse to admit it and seek the help proffered by the rest of the world. Tragic!