I have often remarked in posts about Fukushima how lax the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). The Agency is entirely to friendly and forgiving of the industry that it is supposed to be regulating. This phenomena, known as "regulatory capture" is not limited to Japan. It seems to be endemic among the nations that have major nuclear industries. There have recently been several new stories about the failures of the JAEA.
I have posted articles about the problems at the Monju fast breeder reactor in Japan. Recently, the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Authority (JNRA) instructed the JAEA to keep the Monju reactor shut down because fourteen thousand pieces of equipment had not been properly inspected. The JNRA is an administrative department of the Japanese legislature. It is part of the Department of Environment and it is charged with insuring nuclear safety in Japan.
The inspection failures were found as part of an investigation into whether the Monju site was being properly secured against possible terrorist attacks. In addition to the failute to inspect the equipment that records vehicles and people who enter the Monju site, the managers of the site also failed to document the identification of people who entered especially sensitive area, failed to conduct background checks on people who entered of the Monju site, and failed to fence off restricted areas. The JNRA said that "the levels of neglect witnessed at Monju were unprecedented" and laid the blame with the JAEA.
In October the Mainichi Shimbun, a daily newspaper in Tokyo, reported that almost half of the nuclear power plant equipment exported from Japan in the last ten years was not properly inspected by the Japanese government. Apparently, exported equipment was only inspected if the exporter got a loan from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation or applied for insurance from the Nippon Export and Investment Service. About one billion dollars worth of nuclear equipment were exported to twenty three countries and territories. Only about a half a billion dollars worth of the equipment was inspected by the Japanese government. The uninspected equipment includes such critical components as reactor pressure vessels and control rod system.
Japanese Prime Minister Abe has been promoting the nuclear industry in Japan as the corner stone of his ecomonic development plans. He has been traveling around the world trying to convince other countries to purchase Japanese nuclear technology, promoting it as the safest nuclear equipment in the world. This is bad enough when Japanese nuclear technology is offered to countries with major nuclear power installations but it is almost criminal when uninspected Japanese nuclear power equipment is being offered to third world countries such as Viet Nam. To sweeten the deal, Japan offer to take the spent nuclear fuel away from Viet Nam. Considering that Japan has no permanent nuclear disposal facility and that Japanese spent fuel pools are filling up, this may not be such a good deal for Japan. When uninspected Japanese nuclear equipment is installed in third world countries that are high on the corruption index, nuclear disasters are almost guaranteed.
