JAPAN: Japan's nuclear power industry, already reeling from a string of scandals, is again coming under fire following a deadly plant accident yesterday that killed four workers and injured seven.
The workers, employed by a subcontracting firm responsible for maintenance, were hit with steam vented from a hole in a pipe inside the No 3 reactor at the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant in Fukui Prefecture. The reactor is almost 30 years old and the plant had experienced another serious accident in 1991.
Japanese television showed pictures last night of the burst and rusted pipe, which carried water at high pressure heated to over 200 degrees Celsius from the reactor turbine. The 11 casualties appear to have suffered from scalds and lung problems rather than radioactive burns when steam from the ruptured pipe filled the second floor of the reactor building at about 3.30 p.m. local time.
Kyodo News quoted a canteen worker at the plant who said: "Staff rushed into the canteen, screaming. I put in a container all the ice I could find and gave it to them. I don't know what exactly happened. This is the first time an incident like this has happened in my 14 years of work here."
The government's Nuclear and Industry Safety Agency quickly organised a press conference to reassure worried residents in Mihama Town, about 200 miles west of Tokyo, that the radioactivity had been contained and evacuations would not be necessary.
The plant management has been trying to play down the incident in the local media, arguing that the steam leak was "not unique to nuclear plants".
Mr Fuji Yosaku, president of Kansai Electric Power Company which built the plant, last night publicly bowed and apologised for the accident and offered his condolences to the families of the four dead men, who were named as Hiroya Takatori (29), Kazutoshi Nakagawa (41), Tomoki Iseki (30) and Eiji Taoka (46).
Mr Yosaku said he would "work hard" to find out the causes of the burst pipe to avoid future problems. But the incident, and reports in the Japanese press last night that Kansai Power officials could not recall when they had last inspected the pipe, has again raised concerns about the safety of the industry and Japan's growing reliance on nuclear power.
With few resources of its own, and heavily dependent on oil from the volatile Middle-East region, Japan is bucking a global trend of freezing or cancelling nuclear power projects. The country's 52 mostly light-water reactors, including the world's largest at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa on the west coast, already provide nearly 35 per cent of it's electricity, and the government aims to push this to 40 per cent by 2010 in a bid to meet its commitments to the Kyoto Protocol.
Many of the plants are ageing and have been built on active earthquake faults in one of the world's most seismically dangerous regions and many face increasing local opposition.
Yesterday's incident comes less than five years after an accident at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, 90 miles northeast of Tokyo, in September 1999, which killed two people, exposed more than 600 others to radiation and forced the evacuation of the surrounding area.
A subsequent investigation found that poorly trained workers had been mixing uranium in buckets.
In 2002, the industry weathered its worst ever scandal when the government ordered a shutdown of 17 reactors run by Japan's other nuclear giant, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) after it admitted concealing problems and obstructing inspections.
The cover-up forced the resignation of Tepco's top management and led to enormous debate about the future of the industry.
The reactors only began to come back into service last spring after the government warned that the shutdowns would cause blackouts during the summer months.
Ms Aileen Mioko Smith, director of Japanese environmental group Green Action, said recent liberalisation of the industry was making the situation more dangerous.
"The authorities and the plant operators are trying to lengthen the time between plant inspections because the more you inspect the more time the plants are down and the more money they lose. They have been cutting down on inspections a lot," she said.