Another story from Fukushima

First of all, a little background. In 1979, at the time of the nuclear accident at the TMI (Three Mile Island) power station in the United States, all I could think about was Michel Platini and Johnny Rep, two extraordinary players for the Saint-Etienne Greens. Sébastien Travadel was 3 years old. 1986, the year I turned 20, was also the year of the terrible nuclear accident at the Soviet power station at Chernobyl, and here again my interests were far removed from nuclear accidents. Sébastien, at the age of 10, obviously had other preoccupations too. It was when I arrived at the Ecole des Mines de Paris in the early 90s that I learnt about the history of industrial accidents and, more specifically, those in the nuclear sector. The lessons I learnt about the latter led to a wide ranging and rich research on the human factor (TMI) and then on the safety culture (Chernobyl).

The documents from the hearing of Masao Yoshida, director of the power station at the time, were not immediately made public. When did you collect your first sources and how did you approach the various protagonists? Did you encounter any reluctance to speak with you? Were you able to talk afterwards with the head of the plant and with those who were on the ground at the time?

In 2011, as head of a laboratory at the school specialising in risk prevention and crisis management, I couldn't ignore such an event, so I had to commit as many of our resources as possible to studying it. Imagine, ten nuclear reactors down. Six at Fukushima Daiichi and four at Fukushima Daini. Until September 2014, Sébastien and I spent time studying in detail the investigation reports from the operator Tepco, the Japanese government and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), not forgetting the studies conducted by IRSN and the major work undertaken by EDF, following a series of stress tests, to increase the safety level of our power plants.

I also followed the Japanese press, in particular to keep abreast of ongoing legal proceedings. The Asahi Shimbun, an immensely well-known newspaper in Japan, published an article revealing that the operators of the Fukushima Daiichi power station, at the height of the nuclear crisis, had decided to abandon the plant to its fate, with consequences that we can scarcely imagine today. The information was quickly and actively contested by the operator, Tepco, and the Japanese government, who, to prove their good faith, made public the hearings of the plant manager, Masao Yoshida. This was unprecedented material! 28 hours of testimony, in Japanese of course. No matter, I decided to commit our laboratory's own resources to defining and funding an ambitious bi-national research programme, France-Japan, which led me to lead an interdisciplinary team who, for more than ten years, investigated the height of the crisis, between 11 and 15 March 2011 - five days you would hardly believe. With the support of colleagues from the University of Tokyo and a Japanese doctoral student, Yuki Kobayashi, it was not difficult to make contact with the operator TEPCO, visit the sites of the Daiichi and Daini plants that had crashed, meet the operators of the two plants, sometimes on condition of anonymity, and meet the then Prime Minister Naoto Kan. Maso Yoshida died on 9 July 2013, so unfortunately, I was unable to meet him. But I did speak at length with his counterpoint at Daini, Naohiro Masuda, and his close associates, who told me about his nickname, Oyabun, the term used to describe the Yakuza gang leader... A nickname not to be taken at face value, even if it does raise questions...

Your story reinstates the human sense of honour. We read of the director's dilemma when he has to decide whether to keep his men under cover or send them out on a fire mission to avoid disaster in a highly irradiated environment. We read of his intention to commit hara-kiri when he believes that several of his colleagues have been killed by an explosion in one of the reactor buildings. It also shows the healthy strength of the group, which protects its young people by prioritising, by age, those who will be working outside in a contaminated environment, from the most to the least advanced. Does such an experience seem unique to you? Could something similar have happened in France? What is the current state of play on the issue of nuclear plant safety in France? Please reassure us...

The experience of those at Fukushima is unique in that it concerns them directly. They were faced with an extreme situation. However, this is not a unique situation, as facing an extreme situation can happen to anyone, and there is no shortage of examples in the past. This type of situation, extreme in the sense that the very existence of an individual or group of individuals is threatened, involves confronting the unimaginable and the indescribable. It also means undergoing a profound transformation of values, norms, benchmarks and references, resulting in a serious and often sudden attack on physical, psychological and/or symbolic integrity. Finally, it means adopting resilience strategies, sometimes paradoxical, which aim not only to survive, but above all to preserve psychological integrity by dissociating oneself from the traumatic experience. This is what happened at Fukushima, and it was also the case on 13 October 1972, when a plane carrying young rugby players on their way from Uruguay to Chile crashed in the Andes mountains. Isolated from the rest of the world, the survivors had to spend 72 days in abominable conditions and were forced to resort to cannibalism to survive. In the end, sixteen of the forty-five passengers managed to survive the ordeal. I've often been asked what would have happened in France if an event similar to Fukushima had taken place. Essentially, the underlying question seems to be: would the French have reacted in the same way as the Japanese? To be perfectly honest, I don't know. What I do know is that France has already experienced nuclear accidents in the past. The most critical nuclear incidents in France, classified at level 4 on a scale from 0 to 7 - Chernobyl and Fukushima at level 7 - occurred at the Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux power station (Loir-et-Cher) in October 1969 and March 1980. On both occasions, a fuel meltdown occurred in one of the plant's reactors. Other power plants have also come close to disasters on a similar scale. On 12 May 1998, a reactor at Civaux (Vienne) suffered a loss of coolant following a pipe rupture. During the storm of December 1999, the Blayais nuclear power plant (Gironde) had to be shut down in emergency when its safety systems were submerged, the protective dykes having given way under the force of the winds. Finally, during the heatwave of 2003, the Fessenheim power station (Alsace) experienced critical overheating, necessitating an emergency shutdown.

Following the Fukushima accident in 2011, France strengthened the safety of its nuclear power plants, in collaboration with the Nuclear Safety Authority and operators such as EDF. Additional assessments tested the resilience of the plants to extreme scenarios, leading to improvements in safety systems, particularly for emergency power supply and cooling. The creation of the Nuclear Rapid Action Force (FARN) by EDF was a key step, enabling rapid intervention in the event of a nuclear emergency in France and Europe. Protection against the risk of flooding has been reinforced, and emergency management has been optimised through improved procedures and staff training. Significant investments have been made to acquire mobile emergency equipment, and a special effort has been made to improve the safety culture within the organisations, with an emphasis on continuous training and assessment of practices. These actions are designed to improve the ability of French nuclear facilities to cope with accidents and minimise the risks associated with natural disasters or other unforeseen events.

By taking the disaster as your point of entry, you put human capital - the plant's staff - at the heart of the solution. More than 10 years later, in terms of industrial safety, is this still the case?

Yes, and how can we doubt it? Disasters are closely linked to our very essence, being both the fruit of our existence and an essential driver of our evolution, our ability to adapt and our way of perceiving the world. In the absence of human beings, the very concept of catastrophe would not exist. In a universe governed by machines, as is already the case today, accidents are inevitable and sometimes lead to crises. These crises are resolved, in part, by the intervention of other machines, sometimes bordering on the DIY, as was the case at Fukushima, designed and supervised, naturally, by humans. I also remain sceptical about the idea of artificial intelligence that is sufficiently advanced to become independent and therefore a threat. All the more so as this independence has already largely been acquired by machines with no real intelligence, as long as we have no control over them. We can hardly lend any form of intelligence to a machine used to boil water.