Nuclear Crisis

Nuclear crisis highlights history of 'cover-ups'

A documentary filmmaker who has spent much of his career focusing on the Japanese nuclear industry says it has a long history of cover-ups.

All eyes are on the industry after Friday's deadly earthquake and tsunami affected the cooling systems of several Japanese reactors, with two explosions at one plant in Fukushima.

Tony Barrell told PM while it appears authorities are being transparent in this latest crisis, their record is tarnished.

"It's not been good. This recent occasion is an example of the new regime if you like, of actually telling people in a blow-by-blow way of what's going on," he said.

"Well they had to really, because that wave and the earthquake were so obviously threatening nuclear power plants on the east coast of Japan that they couldn't very well pretend they weren't. "Whereas that has been the case on many occasions, including [by] the company that operates those plants."

He says in 2003 reactors across the country had to be shut down after it emerged the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had hid accidents.

"They had to shut down 17 plants in 2003 because they'd been falsifying the records about what had been happening at them," he said.

"Now the accidents weren't of a major nature. They weren't anything like what's going on in Fukushima.

"But they were serious in the sense that lives were threatened, systems broke down, there were failures to report and there were cover-ups. People pretended things hadn't happened."

He says while this is the largest incident the industry has had to deal with, there have been several other major events.

"Well it depends how you define major. It's the first partial meltdown. That's fair enough. But there have been serious accidents where people have been killed and injured," he said.

"Maybe one of the most spectacular was the collapse of the cooling system of Japan's first commercial fast breeder reactor which is on the coast, on the opposite coast to the Pacific coast over on the Japan Sea side.

"A place called Monju, which in 1995 sprang a leak in its liquid sodium cooling system which made the whole thing absolutely red hot and had to be shut down immediately and stayed shut down until the beginning of last year - 15 years."

Local opposition

Mr Barrell says the latest crisis will continue to fuel local opposition to the plants.

"I think because the proliferation of nuclear power plants has been sort of so gradual and extensive that it's taken a long time for people to realise just how many of these places there are," he said.

"They're all built in remote areas, often in multiples as in Fukushima. There's six in one complex and four in another.

"Now that's the sort of accumulation of anxiety which has driven a very grassroots kind of movement to say, 'well wait a minute, we don't want one in our backyard'.

"But in fact the backyard is always somewhere remote where people actually have little to say in what really happens to them. And it's very occasionally you get a grassroots movement that gets together enough support to actually stop something happening."

He says the unfolding emergency will also raise questions over the role of nuclear power in combating climate change.

"There has in the last few years been quite a strong movement to suggest that nuclear power is the answer to global warming or climate change, whatever you want to call it," he said.

"And the Japanese government has actually come out in favour of that as a strategy. So that's a bit up in the air now."

But Mr Barrell says whatever happens in the future, it is clear several plants will have to be closed as a direct result of the crisis.

"I suppose it depends on how many of them actually do go down, because although they're saying there's no explosion and no danger of a really huge disaster, the plants that are affected could be terminally - I mean one of them is definitely finished once it starts melting down," he said.

"It should have been shut down years ago because it's 40 years old this month."