The Morning After Fukushima Disaster

The nuclear disaster at Japan’s earthquake and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has again underscored both the need for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its limited authority and resources.

It will cost billions of dollars to stabilize the plants, close them down, decommission their reactors, and mitigate the radioactive contamination. Equally important, the Japanese crisis has exposed flaws in global safety and emergency response networks, underscoring the need for urgent remedial effort.

The coming decades will likely present new safety challenges with many of the world’s aging nuclear reactors, which were built in the 1970s and 1980s, and the expected growth in the global use of nuclear power, still expected to occur despite the Japanese catastrophe.

According to the IAEA, 443 nuclear reactors are operating in 29 countries. The agency reports that already 64 new reactors are under construction, mostly in China.

In addition to the increase in the sheer volume of nuclear activities that could go wrong, the IAEA and others have expressed concern that some national safety and regulatory infrastructures, including the training of sufficient personnel and enactment of needed legislation, may not have developed sufficiently to manage the growth.

The agency made a sustained campaign to strengthen international nuclear safety following the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986, but has made few changes since then despite major environmental transformations, including the proliferation of nuclear technologies and global climate changes that in some cases have increased the frequency of severe weather events.

According to the Center for American Progress, the unprecedented extreme weather events—which can include flooding, severe winter storms, heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes—in the United States have led the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency to declare a record number of disasters last year, 81, whereas during the previous six decades the average was less than half that figure.

Boosting IAEA

At present, individual member countries are responsible for the safety of their nuclear activities. In the case of an accident, the IAEA can offer resources such as technical advice or names of foreign nuclear experts available for consultation, but the affected governments decide whether to use these assets. The IAEA has responsibility “to provide authoritative and validated information as quickly as possible,” but the agency does not even have access to independent sources of information about the disaster.

Instead, it must rely on whatever data the member countries provide, supplemented by the news media. In the case of Fukushima, the agency receives information from a variety of official Japanese sources, but these are filtered through the government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Yukiya Amano, IAEA director general, had to fly to Tokyo in an effort to induce the authorities to provide him with more data and on a faster basis.

This safety situation stands in stark contrast to that prevailing in the realm of nuclear nonproliferation, where safeguards are mandatory for those countries signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has almost universal membership. In addition, the agency has made major changes in how it enforces states’ nonproliferation obligations since the Cold War.

Amano has said that the IAEA will undertake a comprehensive review of the incident after the emergency is resolved, the data has been analyzed, and the agency’s peer review process has occurred. This April meeting of the parties to the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS), a legally binding international agreement to promote nuclear safety, safety culture, safety management, and knowledge sharing, has already initiated international consultations regarding the Japanese nuclear accident.

The convention, adopted in 1994, obliges members to submit reports regarding the safety of their civil nuclear installations for review by their peers at meetings that occur every three years. A seminar at this fifth CNS review meeting, attended by some 600 representatives of nuclear regulatory agencies and operating organizations from the 72 contracting parties to the safety convention, allowed the broader IAEA membership to discuss the implications of the crisis.

But the peer reviews appear not to have worked well in the case of Fukushima. Besides peer pressure, moreover, the CNS does not impose penalties for faulty reactors on their host countries. And the review does not extend to include on-site safety inspections. Most seriously, there is no means to force countries to close unsafe nuclear facilities or prevent them from building them.

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