Nuclear countries glean lessons from Japan's disaster

officials and executives said they had seen nothing in the response to suggest that mistakes on the ground had compounded the crisis that now threatens a wide swath of Japan including Tokyo’s nearly thirteen million residents.

The speed with which the crisis spun out of control, however, has exposed a fundamental flaw in the risk planning that still governs much of the nuclear industry in Japan and elsewhere.

In diplomatic cables acquired by WikiLeaks and seen by Reuters, U.S. diplomats said a top Japanese official at the International Atomic Energy Agency had neglected safety in Japan.

Tomihoro Taniguchi, a Japanese official who headed the IAEA’s department of Nuclear Safety and Security, hindered progress for years, according to a December 2009 cable to Washington from the U.S. embassy in Vienna.

“Taniguchi has been a weak manager and advocate, particularly with respect to confronting Japan’s own safety practices, and he is a particular disappointment to the United States for his unloved-step-child treatment of the Office of Nuclear Security,” said another cable, sent on 7 July 2009.

Marin Kostov, an earthquake engineering expert in Bulgaria and a member of the IAEA expert team sent to Japan after the 2007 quake that hit the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, said one of the main problems is not how plants are built but where they are built.

“Selecting where these nuclear power plants have to (be) built is a crucially important task,” he said. Nuclear engineers had too “much belief that they are going to cope with these external events with making the buildings very strong, very safe.”

“At the same time you have a situation like what has happened (in Japan) where although the building is safe — nothing has happened after the tremor, after the shaking everything is there — but then you do not have infrastructure, you do not have water, you do not have power, you have nothing.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 book The Black Swan described how the commonly held views of risk exclude the truly unexpected events that shape history and markets. The book has fueled new thinking on how to manage the risk from apparently low-probability, world-shaking events such as the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Nuclear experts have thought a lot about that over the past few years. In the wake 9/11, U.S. regulators required plant operators to develop plans to deal with potential airline attacks.

In February last year, the IAEA posted a report on its website about the