From: "Greg Palast" <PalastReport@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2016 8:43 PM
Subject: Fukushima: They Knew - Palast on Democracy Now!
GregPalast.com (http://www.gregpalast.com/)
http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=33e4ec877eed6a43863a4a92e&id=eeebc64555&e=c894aa20a0
This is an excerpt from the "Fukushima, Texas" chapter of Vultures' Picnic:
In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters.
Fukushima: They Knew
By Greg Palast
Catch Palast and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! ---- exposing Rubio, his
Billionaire and their attacks on Argentina.
And: The Fukushima story you didn't hear on CNN.
On the Fifth Anniversary of the meltdown, the con continues
I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new
level.
Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power
plant:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated.... In fact,
the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an
earthquake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of
these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.
"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and
here is the utter failure.
The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which
I'm not supposed to have. Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the
file cabinets went down with my office building....
WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986
Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files
on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team
with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York,
power station.
The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their
careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved
thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything.
They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.
On March 12, 2011, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew: the "SQ" had been
faked. Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK. He'd flown to Japan, to suck
up the radiation and official company bullshit. The horror show was not the
fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand
only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0. Anderson must
have been in the gym when they handed out the facts. The 9.0 shake was in
the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away. It was barely a tenth of
that power at Fukushima.
I called the US Geological Survey. (Yes, Anderson, journalists are allowed
to check out facts.) The plant took a hit of 550 galileos. (The "Richter
scale" is TV talk--"galileos" measure ground movement at the danger point).
I contacted my network of engineers. Turns out, Tokyo power promised
government regulators they would raise seismic (earthquake) protection to
600 galileos. They promised. That was 2006, five years before the meltdown.
So there you have it. If TEPCO had not played the regulators, Japan would
not be suffering a slow-motion Hiroshima.
I was ready to vomit. Because I knew even more. I knew who had designed the
plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:
Shaw Construction. Shaw Construction--the latest alias of Stone & Webster,
the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the
Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.
But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the
company. I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down. I
shouldn't have done that. Too bad.
All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t supposed
to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he
directed me to these notes about the "SQ" tests.
SQ is nuclear-speak for "Seismic Qualification." A seismically qualified
nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A "seismic event" can be an
earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear
reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.
This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in
an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking)
standards required by U.S. and international rules.
Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert
Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company.
No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to
make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct
command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] "I
believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable," and then he
took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section
50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and
[they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate
paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to
report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies. Wiesel then expressed his
concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he
would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be
breaking a federal law....
The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could
imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands,
The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the
choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.
What did Wiesel do? What would you do?
Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put
the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s
always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s
owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, "Bob is a
good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob."
That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out
the company to the feds.
But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone
& Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants
in the United States.
From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She
didn’t look back.
