Fallout from Fukushima by Richard Broinowski

In the aftermath of Chernobyl it is hard not to see nuclear disaster as the muse of abject horror. The degree of uncertainty surrounding life after catastrophe – genetic mutation, contaminated food supplies, mass displacement of townships – is unfathomable for governments and citizens alike. At a time when the need for accurate information is at its greatest, misinformation spreads quickly, sometimes deliberately. Reflexive distrust can be a handy survival mechanism to have during a national crisis. Trust issues and the reliability of information on nuclear power figure heavily in former diplomat Richard Broinowski’s Fallout from Fukushima, as he heads back to the site of Japan’s worst nuclear accident, the world’s second worst since Chernobyl. Throughout the book, Broinowski delves into the nuclear power narrative and its malcontents: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Combining meticulous research, somewhat polemical analysis, and interviews with people on the ground, Broinowski has written an accessible and passionate analysis of Fukushima and its ramifications for the future of nuclear energy in Japan and beyond. In March 2011, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.03 – one of the most powerful earthquakes since recording began in 1900 – shook the coast of Tohoku in the east of Japan. It triggered a tsunami that hit the coast of the Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures. Those two events – which were devastating enough – then unleashed the unthinkable: a series of nuclear meltdowns and equipment failures, and releases of radioactive material at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. With the reactor perched on an ‘active geological fault line where two tectonic plates collide’, the event seemed inevitable. A Japanese National Police Agency report confirmed the enormous toll: 15,870 deaths; 6114 injuries; and 2814 missing. The World Bank’s estimated economic cost of the disaster was $US235 billion, making it history’s most expensive natural disaster. There is perhaps no better place to start than from the irradiated zone of Fukushima, which is where Broinowski begins his analysis. He interviews Australian student Darren Gubbins, who had found that ‘getting information became as much of a struggle as trying to survive’, and who stayed in his town despite Australian government warnings to evacuate. Broinowski devotes several pages to the experience of Naoto Matsumura, a farmer and self-described ‘loner in a toxic desert’, who refused to leave his home in Tomioka, thirteen kilometres from the Fukushima reactors. Matsumura rails against TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company), saying that ‘they have more power than the national parliament, because they control the supply of electricity, and they have power over the media through advertising’. Matsumura is not the only one suspicious of the information provided by the government and TEPCO: Broinowski reports that there has been a ‘run on personal Geiger counters and dosimeters from the electronic district of Akihabara’, as Tokyo residents fear that they have not been warned of the full extent of their exposure to radioactive isotopes. The fact that local government officials ‘appear reluctant to impose stringent radiation testing’ on consumables such as beef, rice, fish, and seaweed has done little to assuage concerns. Broinowski establishes a one-sided approach to nuclear energy early on in the book, which makes its presence felt with suggestive, insistent syntax. Providing alternative viewpoints – if only so that they can be repudiated with empirical evidence – would have given Broinowski’s rhetoric some much-needed nuance. His meeting with Professor Hisashi Sato, for example, resembles a courtroom procedural where a defence lawyer is made to cross-examine a hostile witness. But because Broinowski includes dialogue so sparingly throughout the book, the reader is left only with the gist of his conversations. He reflects on his meeting with the professor, wondering if ‘his clinic, even perhaps the whole medical university, may be financed by TEPCO’, without providing any sort of evidence, and before informing readers that ‘Professor Sato aggressively defends the safety of the Fukushima environment, and denies it will be subject to long-term damage’. Broinowski could be right about the origins of Sato’s bias, but casting assertions without proof detracts from his argument. A sort of historical revisionism regarding the effects of radiation, Broinowski notes, has a storied history that dates back to the discovery of radium by Marie Skłodowska-Curie in the late 1890s, and continued apace after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, when the US government steadfastly denied that the bombings would render any significant biological, psychological, or environmental effect on civilians. Gathering reliable data on the severity of radiactive fallout remains, as Broinowski acknowledges, a difficult task. There was no ‘internationally coordinated, well-funded, prospective case-controlled study’ of the Chernobyl disaster, and data collection was complicated by the fact that radiogenic solid-cancers take more than two decades to develop. History has repeated itself in Japan. The ‘absence of conclusive studies’ only gives more ammunition to pro-nuclear lobbyists, who are keen to gloss over the dangers. Broinowski presents seven major analyses of the fallout from Chernobyl, all of which paint a grim outlook for Fukushima. The chapter on Australia’s response to Japan’s triple disaster is Broinowski’s most compelling. While the Australian government was quick to provide immediate sympathy and support for the victims, uranium miners – particularly our largest exporters, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton – were noticeably nervous about the future of their exports. (Japan is the second-largest market for Australian uranium, which accounts for forty per cent of global deposits.) Australian media coverage of Fukushima, according to Broinowski, was skewed by the proliferation of pro-nuclear advocates on Op-Ed pages. Leading the academic cheer squad were nuclear physicist Professor Aidan Byrne and Dr Ziggy Switkowski, former head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation; joining the chorus were a slew of journalists including the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt, The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan, and contributing editor Peter van Onselen. In July 2011, Sheridan, writing with typical bombast, played the environmental card, arguing that ‘unless you are Greens/Taliban fundamentalist seeking to deindustrialise the West, you are not serious about climate change if you oppose nuclear energy’. Broinowski laments that in an ‘energy hungry world’, both sides of politics have continued to encourage the expansion of uranium mines, such as Olympic Dam in South Australia. Broinowski concludes by speculating on the future of nuclear energy in Japan. He retains his optimism that ‘there are strong indications that the industry is in terminal decline’, as distrust of the nuclear sector among the public runs high. But the election of the pro-nuclear Liberal Democratic Party and its leader, Shinzo Abe, may prove the greatest test for Japan’s future energy mix. On the day of Abe’s victory speech – where he blasted the opposition party’s objectives of a nuclear-free future as ‘unrealistic and irresponsible’– TEPCO shares rose by thirty-three per cent.

Gillian Terzis

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