THE TSUNAMI AND JAPAN'S NUCLEAR PROBLEMS: Why was the nuclear power station closest to the epicenter OK?

Here is a private email from Hiroki Takeuchi, a political scientist who did his PhD at UCLA and is now Assistant Professor of Political Science and a Fellow of the John G. Tower Center at Southern Methodist University. Given the importance of the issues at stake, he kindly gave me permission to publish his personal views.

He writes: "I want to add one aspect to the current debate about the future of nuclear energy given the current accident in Japan. The accident occurred in one particular power plant: Fukushima Daiichi Power Station. Conventional wisdom is that it occurred because of the unexpected scale of earthquake and tsunami. It is probably not true. The nuclear power station located closest to epicenter, Onagawa Power Station, had no damage and stopped with no problem after the earthquake. Onagawa was exposed bigger earthquake and bigger tsunami than Fukushima Daiichi. So this is not a problem of nuclear energy against earthquake and tsunami but a problem of Fukushima Daiichi Power Station. Also, Fukushima Daini Power Station, located in the neighborhood of Fukushima Daiichi, had no problem, either.

Fukushima Daiichi's potential problem has been raised since 2006 when the problem was discussed in the Diet (raised by a lawmaker from the Japanese Communist Party). Tokyo Electric Power promised to fix the problem, but it has never fixed the problem. Fukushima Daiichi's intake of sea water was fragile against tsunami, so it would not draw water once exposed with tsunami. It is what happened. No other nuclear power stations had a similar problem, that is why Onagawa and others stopped with no problem, while they could draw water to cool down reactors.

Tokyo Electric is notorious about collusion with the government. So this is not an issue of nuclear technology, but an issue of producer-regulator collusion or corruption."

I don't know enough about the particulars of the situation to verify what he says, but if he is right, it raises serious issues for the nuclear programs in some other countries, such as China.

Sources
For those who read Japanese, Hiroki has provided the following link:
http://www.fsight.jp/article/10319
It's from the Japanese online magazine Foresight, and refers to the Diet discussion he mentions.