Jacques Repussard1 (pictured) is director-general of France's Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), which provides scientific and technical support for the French nuclear regulator, the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), a hot-seat job in a country with the world's second largest fleet of nuclear reactors (after the US).
He recently returned from a trip to Japan to study the situation at the quake- and tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear plant, where the battle continues to bring a cold shutdown to the overheating reactors and to stem radioactive pollution seeping from the site (click here for more information). In this revealing interview by Sophie Dufau and Michel de Pracontal, he details what he learnt from his trip and what lessons the Fukushima disaster offers for nuclear safety standards in France.
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Mediapart: The Japanese authorities have reclassified the Fukushima accident at the same level as the Chernobyl accident on the INES scale. Even if the two catastrophes are very different in their nature and development, do you think that the local consequences in Fukushima, in the area around the plant, will be of the same order of severity as Chernobyl?
Jacques Repussard. "Level 7 is the highest level in the international scale of nuclear incidents and accidents. It is reached when the environmental consequences of [Editor's note: radioactive] releases beyond the site require serious counter-measures such as long-term evacuations of populations and restrictions on agricultural activities. That is the case at Fukushima, even if indeed the areas concerned are of a smaller size than those affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe which spread to several countries of the former Soviet Union and, concerning animal rearing, to Northern Europe."
Mediapart: You've just returned from a visit to Japan. Were you able to get close to Fukushima? What do we know about the state of the plant?
J.P.: "Nobody goes to ‘visit' Fukushima. It's a closed, highly radioactive zone and you can't go in there without the risk of high-level irradiation. The only ones on site are the workers participating in indispensible operations. Of course, it's impossible to leave the site to its own devises. We have only incomplete information on the exact state of the plant. It's very probable that the containments of reactors 2 and 3 are leaking. But where are the leaks? In the reactor vessels? In the torus located at the bottom of each reactor? In the pipes? I don't have the answer."
Mediapart: Is it normal for the operator, TEPCO, to provide so little information on the state of its plant?
J.P.: "You must understand the situation. The plant is seriously damaged. There are many areas where no one can go because [radiation] dose levels are too high. Until the electricity was restored, there was no lighting, the technicians moved around with a headlamp on their helmets. Many of the sensors were destroyed, therefore many measurements can't be monitored. No one can get near the reactors. Remember that in the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, it took six years before it could be verified that the reactor core had melted."
Mediapart: Don't you think that the Japanese are practicing information retention?
J.P.: "The term ‘retention' has an accusatory tone and implies a moral judgement to which I don't subscribe. That said, I think that TEPCO officials are not providing all the information in their possession. It's easy to understand that they are hesitant to furnish isolated data, which could be disturbing if it isn't put into the proper context. But it's also true that in Japanese culture, with its sense of personal responsibility and of hierarchy, one cannot criticise one's leaders, one's party or one's firm. At Fukushima, we know nothing of what the operators did on the first day. We don't know how long the reactors were shut down. We don't know how they used the time before anything failed - or rather, it's possible to think that the time was not well utilised. A newspaper reported that the prime minister asked to fly over the zone in a plane, and that, because, of this some emergency operations were delayed. What happened at the plant during the early hours [of the accident] which were crucial for the management of the crisis? We don't know."
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1: From 1989 to 1991, Jacques Repussard (a graduate of the elite Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées) was the deputy director of the French Association for Standards (Afnor). He then moved on to head the European Committee for Standardization. In 1997, he became deputy director of the National Institute for Industrial Environments and Risk (Ineris). He became director-general of the Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety in March 2003.
Mediapart: Are there other issues about which information is lacking?
J.P.: "It was announced that plutonium was found on the site, which could be the sign of a major core meltdown. But, according to the information available, this plutonium was found only in one spot, which is not very logical if there was core meltdown. Perhaps the plutonium was there before the accident and was only discovered recently. We don't have the information to make that call."
Mediapart: Lack of transparency again?
J.P.: "Not only. In order to communicate, you have to have the human resources to do so. TEPCO engineers are trying to battle a catastrophe that is on-going and ever-changing. That is taking up the bulk of their means. Communicating in a crisis situation is only possible if it was organised beforehand. In France there is a mechanism provided for communication in time of crisis. It has a fault, in fact. In theory, the IRSN would not be authorised to comment if there were an accident. This would be limited to the government and the nuclear regulator, the ASN [Nuclear Safety Authority]. That would pose a problem in case of a real crisis because the experts of the IRSN would obviously have to participate in communication. The directive will undoubtedly be changed. Well-organised communication is part of getting the population to carry on. It requires means and preparation."
Mediapart: What is the state of the crisis today? Can it still get worse?
J.P.: "The main problem now is dealing with the many leaks of liquids which are causing serious radioactive pollution and which have yet to be controlled. On the other hand, certain possible worst-case scenarios, such a total core meltdown through the reactor vessel, the erosion of the concrete and the possible leaching of the corium [molten core] outside of the containment building, seem to have not occurred."
Mediapart: Is there still a risk of achieving critical mass, that is, the restart of a chain reaction within the damaged fuel assemblies?
J.P.: "It's possible that there were a few fleeting episodes of this type, but in a limited manner - had it been large scale we would have of course noticed."
Mediapart: What risks remain for the population?
J.P.: "Around the plant, there is a 20-kilometre exclusion zone. The evacuation was implemented in a radius that, initially, could be considered correct. Japanese civil security functioned correctly; it evacuated the coastal region even though there were neither roads nor electricity. The situation is more complex regarding the zone in the 20- to 30-kilometre radius from the plant where residents were asked to stay indoors. I can't affirm that there are no problems in that zone. The authorities told people to stay indoors, but they didn't tell them when they could come out. In principal, such a measure is taken for 24 or 48 hours, and then it must be followed by new decisions. There, nothing seems to have been done. But life is impossible without provisions. There are supermarkets in that zone but the delivery personnel don't want to go there. We can also fear that people have eaten contaminated food because they had no other choice."
Mediapart: Shouldn't the Japanese have taken more advantage of foreign aid?
J.P.: "The Americans are very present. They furnished barges and armoured helicopters. The cooperation between Japanese and Americans is major because of defence agreements and the fight against nuclear proliferation. The United States has nuclear-fuelled ships in Japanese waters. They have a base at Okinawa. Because of all that, the Americans have more information than we do. They made many environmental radiation measurements. General Electric, which built the plant, probably has measurement data that the IRSN is not aware of. Cooperation between France and Japan concerns mostly the fuel cycle1 and not safety. The Japanese Nuclear Energy Safety Organisation (JNES) has had access to all of our calculations and simulations but they have not responded in kind. In contrast, we have had the spontaneous help of Japanese researchers in France who made themselves available to translate documents.
During a crisis, cooperation can exist efficiently only if it has been put in place beforehand. Thus, no cooperation was envisaged in case of crisis between the Japanese regulator and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Cooperation of this type only works if there were, before the crisis, agreements providing what would be done in case of an accident."
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1: French nuclear services conglomerate AREVA has provided fuel to Japanese plants since 1995. This includes MOX fuel to which plutonium is added. Four Japanese plants run on MOX including Fukushima's reactor 3. (For more on MOX click here. Spent Japanese fuel is shipped to AREVA's reprocessing plant at La Hague in north-west France. One reprocessed, the high-level waste is shipped back to Japan for final storage (click here for more). AREVA is co-operating with Japan Nuclear Fuel to build a reprocessing plant in north-east Japan, but the plant, which was to have opened in 2007, is still in the testing phase, according to AREVA (click here for more).
Mediapart: Why did the Japanese not accept France's proposal to send robots?
J.P.: "There again, in order to function properly, this must be provided for, in principal, before the crisis. French robots are remote-controlled, they must be guided which requires operators who know both the robots' capabilities and the layout of the plant. Such a mechanism is not easy to implement in the heat of the moment, during an emergency."
Mediapart: The need for the robots would have had to be anticipated?
J.P.: "Anticipation is the key word in a nuclear crisis. Unlike an accident like AZF1, a nuclear crisis is not instantaneous. Time passes and, during that time, it is possible to take action to reduce the consequences of the event, to prevent the situation from getting worse. But the chances of success are improved when an appropriate procedure has been established. The first day at Fukushima was perhaps a lost day-one not used to implement counter-measures. There was probably a lack of anticipation which was all the more damaging because the tsunami largely contributed to a breakdown in site management, especially at the human level."
Mediapart: Was not the first lack of anticipation that of building a nuclear plant insufficiently protected against earthquakes and tsunamis in that region?
J.P.: "The plant resisted the earthquake but the tsunami was underestimated so that the back-up generators were flooded and could not ensure cooling. In the minds of the Japanese engineers, that type of accident, combining a major earthquake with such a violent tsunami, was impossible. We can criticise them but I'm not sure that an equivalent event would not happen in any country that operates nuclear power plants. There is a paradox that the IRSN denounces. Regarding technical failings, risks due to human invention, we take enormous precautions, but protection against natural hazards remains the poor cousin of nuclear safety."
Mediapart: Does that comment apply to France?
J.P.: "Yes. For example, take the EPR2, emergency generators will be housed in four separate buildings in order to avoid that all four breakdown at once. That's all well and good, but what of natural hazards? In France, the main risk is flooding. We raised the issue regarding the EPR and the operator [Eléctricité de France] told us it was not applicable. But that's not true as pointed out by André-Claude Lacoste, Chair of the ASN. In 1999, at the Blayais plant in Gironde3 there was a near miss following a serious accident after part of the plant was flooded. It was then decided to raise the dykes by fifty centimetres. But that's not enough. Even if we raise it by a metre, that may still not be enough. We must also anticipate what would happen if the dyke was still not enough - to find a way to keep the generators safe. And what would happen if there were a fire at the same time as a flood? We have to organise layers of in-depth defences. Your dyke has broken, what do you do? That's anticipating."
Mediapart: Does that mean that safety standards must be reinforced?
J.P.: "From the stand point of in-depth defences, standards are not sufficient. A standard is inevitably seen by the operator as the goal to achieve. In fact, they should be the minimum standard for the hazard taken into account. We should start from the principal that the standard will be breeched. That's the idea of in-depth defence. To implement it, a discussion between the operator and an expert is necessary. The French system, in which there is an expert office, the IRSN, which leads the discussions in the area of pure scientific knowledge and a regulator, the ASN, which arbitrates, seems to me rather beneficial from this stand point, even if one can never hope to achieve absolute safety. The JNES does not have a role equivalent to the IRSN because it doesn't have its own means of research. Globally, there is still a lot of progress to be made in the area of nuclear safety at the international level. The safety goal is to reduce the probability of a serious accident to 1/100,000 per year. But today, worldwide, there have been three major accidents - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. If we include all operating plants that comes out to 14,000 reactor years [the equivalent of a reactor operating for 14,000 years]. Three accidents in 14,000 years, that's a real rate of serious accidents twenty times higher than the goal. Notably, because the probabilistic models that calculate how to achieve this goal don't take sufficient account of either natural hazards or the human factor."
Mediapart: Will this change with Fukushima?
J.P.: "We only make big steps in progress when there are hitches. It's sad to say it, but that's the way it is."
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1: The AZF chemical plant, located in Toulouse in southern France, and the scene of one of France's most devastating industrial accidents in recent decades. An explosion at the site in September 2001, so powerful it could bne heard up to 80 kilometres away, left 31 dead and some 2,500 others injured.
2: The European Power Reactor or EPR is the latest or 3rd generation reactor model designed by AREVA, which claims it is safer than existing models. Two EPRs are currently under construction, in Finland and in France, but both are beleaguered by cost overruns and construction delays. The Finnish plant was supposed to go on line in 2009.
3: The Blayais nuclear power plant is located on the estuary of the Gironde River, downriver from Bordeaux and close to the Atlantic Ocean which meets the mouth of the estuary. The flooding occurred during a storm that produced unusually strong winds.
English version: Patricia Brett
(Editing by Graham Tearse)