Fukushima: 2. Emergency
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Previously on Fukushima... This is Yoshida. Cover your head and stay down. Do not try to leave the building. Is the isolation condenser initiated? Yes, sir. We are going to need it to cool the reactor. Seconds count.

External power lost. The Quaker has severed the grid. What's going on? This is bad. We've got no power. Do you know why we have no power? Water. Everywhere. In the building? The basement. Generators, backup, battery panels, DC power systems. It's all underwater. This is Fukushima Daiichi, plant manager Masao Yoshida. We are in a nuclear emergency. Fukushima Episode 2

Parent Manager Yoshida has invoked Article 15, which means that as of this moment, we are in special measures. I know there is a lot happening with the flooding and the quake, but there is no greater threat we face at this time than the one unfolding in Fukushima Daiichi.

Priority is establishing the Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters on the satellite link. Ministry of Defence. Yes, Prime Minister, sir. The Self Defence Forces were caught short during the '95 quake. We're not going to make that mistake again. We need 20,000 SDF personnel and there's going to be more. Yes, Prime Minister. Tepco, where are you? Sir. Daiichi needs power. Nothing else is more critical. They're going to need battery trucks. The trucks need a police escort.

The roads are damaged. I understand you've encountered some red tape. I'll call them myself. Parental Manager Yoshida has also said he needs fire trucks. He wants to use them to pump water into the core. Tell him he has my support and I will look into it personally. Yes, Prime Minister. I have a press conference in one hour. I need all the information you have. Please follow me after this meeting. Yes, sir. Where's Nisa? Sir? Why is Terasaka-san not here?

I don't know who you are. I need to speak to Terasaka-san. Get a message to him to come to my office immediately. Yes, Prime Minister. Anything else right now? Good. Tepco, you're with me. Thank you.

Japan's Nuclear Preparedness Act was established in December 1999 as a means of coordinating a cross-departmental response to a national nuclear emergency. When Article 15 is invoked, the government's response is run from the Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters in a room located within the Prime Minister's complex. Its leadership is made up of the Prime Minister and his advisers, the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency.

The aim of the Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters is to coordinate a real-time national response with an emphasis on information being gathered on a local level at the off-site centre. The government is in charge of all things civic, such as evacuations and the deployment of the emergency services, but it also has broad powers regarding the use of the military and coordinating foreign assistance.

Though conceived as a bottom-up approach, the authority for final decision-making falls to the Prime Minister alone. Prime Minister Khan had been in power for just over a year, Akiko-san. Nobody liked him. Tepco suddenly didn't trust him and he'd barely been briefed on the protocols.

Nobody had. Why are you there? My daughter tells me footage of the emergency response headquarters exists somewhere on YouTube. Apparently, I'm one of the blurry figures on the left of the typical screen, wearing a fetching red vest. What was your job?

I was on a small team charged with relations strategy issues. Relations with whom? The public. Calibrating and characterizing information and data we were receiving. Reframing the complicated nature of that data into more consumable products. Wow. We were improvising. It was all theoretical, dreamed up by analysts whose job it was to imagine the unimaginable.

For it to work, plant manager Yoshida had to trust that his superiors in Tokyo would coordinate and provide the equipment he needed. They had to trust Yoshida would do as he was told. And Prime Minister Kan had to trust that the information he was receiving was current and accurate. It wasn't? Well, in hindsight, perhaps the analysts made some understandable yet unrealistic assumptions.

At 5pm on the 11th of March, just over two hours after the earthquake, Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan appears at a press conference in which he mentions neither Yoshida's nuclear emergency declaration nor the invocation of Article 15, opting instead to emphasise that the reactors shut down successfully and that there has been little reported radiation.

He will later claim it was for fear of mischaracterizing the limited information he was receiving from the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and that he had been forced to liaise with lower-level employees with little decision-making authority because the whereabouts of TEPCO's president and chairman were still unknown.

One hour after the press conference, aware that it didn't go well, Prime Minister Khan heads back to his office with Special Advisor and long-time confidant, Goshi Hosono. Tepco is a private company, Prime Minister, with private employees. You can't just yell at them like that. They sent me out there with nothing, Hosono. They said there was no radioactive leak. That's not nothing. You really think they'd have the first idea if there was?

And you're missing the point. I don't want to have to double-check everything they say. I have to trust them. So this is why you're calling the police escort for the battery trucks yourself? Looking into the fire trucks personally?

A little too hands-on, isn't it? I have no confidence in them. And you of all people should understand why. We built a campaign on it, remember? And who decided coordinating a disaster response remotely from four different locations was a good idea? The NPA says the off-site centre in Okuma is the hub. So what do we do when the ground swallows Okuma? Is that in the manual?

Doesn't matter. The principle is information flows from the ground up, not the top down.

The Nuclear Preparedness Act is a work of supreme genius. But only if you're in one emergency, Hosono. Not three. It says nothing about curators in the middle of roads or runways under three meters of water. It doesn't mention power grids going down or helicopters fishing babies out of the sea. I just watched a boat go clean through someone's living room. You're right. This is a nightmare, Hosono. Hosono.

I haven't had time. I was going to reform all of this if this had happened just two years from now. This is the hand we've been dealt. This is the hand we play. Yes. Thank you. Send him in. It's Terasaka from Nisa. Fifty reactors in this country. And no single department to deal with nuclear accidents. What do you think that is? Old ideas, Hosono. Old, tired ideas.

Prime Minister. Tadoussaka-san, please, come in, have a seat.

As you know, Terasaka-san, plant manager Yoshida has requested fire trucks. I will be calling the special defense force after this meeting. Fire trucks? At the Daiichi plant. Is there a fire? No. To cool the reactors, Terasaka-san. To inject water into reactors one, two and three. There are six reactors in Daiichi, Prime Minister. Yes, I know that. But only three were running. Yes, sir.

Now, I'm unsure the trucks will be carrying enough water for the job. And given everything else they have on their hands, they may not have many to spare. So we are considering the possibility of using seawater. But obviously, this would involve salt deposits in the reactors. I wanted your opinion on the question of recriticality. I will find out for you, sir. You're going to find out your opinion?

I believe this question is certainly something to be considered when injecting seawater. You are at the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency, are you not? Yes, Prime Minister. Yet you don't have the first idea what I'm talking about, do you? I'm sorry, sir. Forgive me. Are you a nuclear engineer? No, sir. Do you have any background in nuclear physics? No, sir. Please forgive me. It's a good thing I do, then.

Where did you study? I trained at the Tokyo Institute of Economics, sir. Thank you, Tarasaka-san. That will be all. Sir. I need to see Yoshida. If you go to Fukushima Daiichi now, it's going to require helicopters, an entourage, security. Yoshida will waste precious time with protocols. Did you see what I just saw? I'm not putting the future of Japan in the hands of the Tokyo Institute of Economics.

If Yoshida's the only person I can get a straight answer from, it doesn't matter how it'll play out later. At least there will be a later. Prime Minister Kan once told me that of all the dreadful moments during those first five days, it was that meeting with Terasaka from Nisa which gave him the deepest chills. But that's not actually...

True, is it? That conversation... That conversation happened. A NISA director didn't know anything about nuclear reactors. At that level, nuclear energy is not something to be necessarily understood. Just managed. At director level, you mean? Terasaka could have been the director of anything. Water, gas, oil, microchip, fuel...

frozen pizza. Suto-san, that's insane. Why? We grew up with nuclear power. It was magic. When the first plant opened in Japan, I was 15. Tokai, 1966. It was near where I grew up. My high school took a day trip there. They used to come and visit my school. Of course they did.

They've been doing it for years. Nuclear power was clean, and we didn't depend on the Middle East. A great deal of work went into the narrative. Japan needed a future after the war, and nuclear energy provided it. It's like that sign. Do you remember? They took it down recently, the one you used to have to pass under as you drove into Futaba.

Atomic energy for a bright future. Exactly. You know what I thought when I passed under the sign for the first time after the disaster, when Futaba was all torn gardens, abandoned shops, upturned tractors and twisted metal? I thought, that sign is Japan's Arbeit Macht Frei. That's a little sensational. Would you say so? Nazi concentration camps. Yes, I would. Why? Why?

Years ago, I watched a documentary about the liberation of Auschwitz-Bergenau. It upset my daughter greatly. I admit, I didn't realize it was going to be quite so graphic.

She was only 13 or so. Yoko, my wife, was furious with me. I thought it would be educational. Well, she probably hasn't forgotten it. Yoko and I had a terrible fight after a very complicated bedtime. And I took a whiskey out onto the porch.

Of all the images I had seen, one thing kept coming back. It wasn't the corpses piled up. It wasn't the emaciated prisoners. It was the interviews with the local residents of the nearby village who claimed to have no knowledge of what was happening just a few kilometers away, a level of dissonance that was almost impossible to comprehend.

You could smell the camp from these villages. Ash would drift over them, land on cars, on school playgrounds. You think that's Japan today? I think we are talking about a profound bias that stretches back decades. One simply shuts out what one doesn't want to believe.

And that goes for the residents and the whole industry. The reason there was no single agency to deal with nuclear disasters is because nuclear disasters did not and could not occur. I once spent two hours in a meeting debating whether or not the word repairs could be used in our press releases.

A maintenance team had performed an inspection of a containment building and found small cracks. It wasn't serious. It wasn't even the first time, but it was cracked, so it merited a meeting. What happened? The executive Nakamura kept asking, Is it defective? To which the strict answer was, No.

It was small fissures in the suppression pool casing, but the pool itself was functioning perfectly well. So there's nothing to repair, he said. Nakamura tabled the motion that the word repairs be removed from the minutes and all further communication. Someone seconded it, and he left. So saying something needed repairing was admitting that something was wrong? No, no, no. It's much worse than that.

actually repairing something was admitting there was something wrong.

So the repairs just didn't happen? Oh, I'm sure some did. I had no idea it was that bad. It never struck you as strange that the government agency in charge of making nuclear power safe was overseen by the agency charged with promoting it? The regulators were run by the people they were regulating. Chosen half the time.

The entire management of the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency was made up of old Korea bureaucrats from the Ministry of Trade and Industry, not a nuclear engineer to be seen. Hence, our Terasaka from the Tokyo Institute of Economics. And the government encouraged this? They are government. No, I'm talking about the Prime Minister. Akiko-san.

Until Naotokan arrived, the Liberal Democratic Party had been in power since 1955. The only time they ever lost was when they ran against themselves in the early 90s. 54 years of the same party. There's a lot of bad habits. There's a lot of shortcuts. Yoshida knew all this.

He spent most of his life seeing his own maintenance reports vanished into thin air. He trusted no one. So why did they promote him that far? Keep your enemies close, perhaps. I'm speculating. I don't know.

But I do know that by the time he joined in the late 70s and suddenly by the 80s, there was little distinction between TEPCO and the government agencies he was affiliated with. Yoshida was not a politician. He was an engineer, a practical man. I remember Kahn's election. I was 16. Ah, it was monumental, a genuine existential threat.

Did you vote for him? Of course not. So you see what Naoto Kan was facing. Reality falling short of theory. Dysfunction on almost every level. And that's why Prime Minister Kan flew to Daiichi to see Yoshida on March the 12th. He saw no other way.

Everything Special Advisor Hosono told him was true, of course. He was accused of wasting precious time with his hands-on approach. And yes, going to the plant was the one decision that would see him out of office within a year. But I suspect he knew that before he left. ♪

At 7pm, three hours after Yoshida invoked Article 15, Prime Minister Naoto Kan acknowledges the nuclear emergency in a second press conference. And though this should have triggered an evacuation procedure, the government asks people to stay indoors and wait. Two hours later, frustrated by the government response, the Prefectural Council of Fukushima declares a two-kilometre evacuation zone around the plant,

Continually suspicious that he is not receiving the information he requires, the Prime Minister decides to travel to the Daiichi plant. His helicopter touches down a little after five o'clock on the morning of March the 12th.

We could have done this on the phone, Prime Minister. Perhaps, perhaps not. I don't know. It requires the resources I don't have to prepare for your arrival. My men need sleep, not to be rolling out the red carpet for visiting dignitaries. I understand. Did your battery trucks arrive? Yes. Thank you for insisting. So you have power? No.

Why not? I asked head office for cables. They sent one that was too short. I asked them for longer ones. They sent longer ones in the wrong plants. I asked for adapters. They told me there were some in the Onagawa plants, but the roads were impossible. They're working on a solution. Well, they were before they went to bed.

With the alternative power sources, we managed to get some readings, but it's intermittent. What alternative sources? Car batteries. Car batteries? You're running this plant on car batteries? I wouldn't call it running. I asked every employee to donate their car battery. It took a long time. Most people didn't know if their car was upside down underwater somewhere or at the bottom of a heap.

We managed to hook some up to the control panels. We're using them sparingly and only on priority systems. And what are they telling you? I'm sorry, sir, but I told this to Tipco. Tell me! I need to know what's going to happen. I'm going for a cigarette. You're free to join me. I haven't had one in an hour. I can get very grumpy. I have one here. I don't think we're at that stage just yet. It'll be bad for... What's the word you politicians use? Optics?

Do you smoke, Prime Minister? I will today. I'm sorry if my manners are inappropriate. I'm tired, sir. Your manners are a welcome relief, Yoshida-san. Tell me about Reactor One. The water in Reactor One dropped below active fuel. We think at about midnight last night, so it's been melting down for six or so hours.

Hydrogen is building up in the containment vessel of Unit 1, and the temperature and pressure are mounting by the minute. What is the pressure in the reactor? 700 kPa, for reference. Normal levels are supposed to be... At 450, I know. It's worse than I thought. Reactors 2 and 3 are going the same way. The tsunami knocked out 13 of our 14 backup power systems.

The remaining one is powering the high-pressure coolant injection system, but it has only a battery life of 30 hours. You ask me what's going to happen. I don't know. I can tell you what could happen. Please. The fuel in reactor 1 continues to melt. It will slop to the base of the reactor pressure vessel. It will then melt through that. Everyone will immediately be exposed to an open reactor core. It will render units 2 and 3 unapproachable.

They will then melt and their coal will be exposed. Fukushima Dai-2 will be evacuated, of course, and their coal will also melt. The store-filled rock pools in Unit 4 will drain out or boil away and pump out enough radiation for another six reactors. Radiation levels will be on a par with Chernobyl, Prime Minister. There are 700 people stay on this plant. Most have no idea where their relatives are.

Do what you have to do. TEPCO are stalling on venting the reactors to release pressure, but I see no other course of action. There is none. But you have no power. We could do it manually. Prepare suicide teams to go down into the bowls of the containment buildings. Open the vents. Suicide teams? That's what you call them? No, that's what they are. Will there be radiation? Some.

And will the hydrogen combine with the oxygen? Yes. So? So, an explosion is a possibility. Certainty, actually. Anything else? Seawater. Head office won't listen, but our reservoirs are full of it. We need to utilize it while it's still there.

We use fire tracks. We have identified the route that water can take direct to the cause. No obstructions. No water wasted. We're studying the issue of recriticality. What for? We're weighing up the dangers of saltwater... I know what recriticality is, Prime Minister. I'm just wondering how it could be in any way relevant.

You think we're reusing these reactors after this? Can you please just hold on the seawater injections until I've managed to convince them? Of course. I have initiated an evacuation of 10 kilometers. Okay. Is it enough? Prime Minister, I've got my job. You've got yours. Have you finished? Yes. Let's go in. It's cold. Get this venting team together. There's coffee. Still think we could have done this on the phone?

Have you ever worn a radiation suit, Akiko-san? I tried one on ones. They're thick and heavy. The gloves make manipulation of the simplest dials extremely difficult. Condensation runs down the inside of the mask. Your breath becomes short. But above all, they're hot.

In the bowels of the containment buildings, with the hissing pipes and groaning tanks, temperatures reached nearly 40 degrees. No lights. Damaged stairwells draped in seaweed. Fish lying in small pools on the floor. Two men. One hour to find two pressure-venting valves out of the hundreds in that labyrinth, using only instructions written on the back of a globe.

And they did it with 15 minutes to spare. I was watching the grainy NHK helicopter news footage of the plant, trying to picture them in there, praying for their safe return, like Apollo 13 on the dark side of the moon. Then word came back, venting successful. Some cheered, some even cried. 3.36 in the afternoon, March the 12th,

I watched the plant on the television overcome with relief. And then...

in the next episode of Fukushima. Does Tepco know if it was the core or the building which exploded? We don't know at this time, Prime Minister. Tell President Shimizu I want him in my office in 20 minutes with every speck of information you have. The President and Chairman are still not here, sir. What the hell is going on over there? We lose the Daiichi plant, then the Daini plant, then...

Then we lose Tokyo, then Honshu, then Japan as we know it. Yoshida-san! Yes, Matsui-san. You had no right to commence seawater injections. Prime Minister Kan says yes. You've just said yes. Your insubordination has been noted. You are to cease seawater injections immediately. Yes, sir.

The most important question isn't if Unit 3 is going to explode, but how. If those fuel rod pools are compromised, Yoshi, it's over. We need to start sending people home.

And the narrator is Romula Garai.

Fukushima is written by Adrian Penketh. Sound design is by Peter Ringrose. The director is Sasha Yevtushenko and the producer is Toby Swift. Fukushima from the BBC World Service is a BBC Audio production.