The international reaction to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has been diverse and widespread. Many inter-governmental agencies responded to the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, often on an ad hoc basis. Responders included International Atomic Energy Agency, World Meteorological Organization and the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which has radiation detection equipment deployed around the world.
In September 2011, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said the Japanese nuclear disaster "caused deep public anxiety throughout the world and damaged confidence in nuclear power". Many countries have advised their nationals to leave Tokyo, citing the risk associated with the nuclear plants' ongoing accident. Nonetheless, estimates of radioactivity leakage into the Pacific Ocean remain modest with National Geographic reporting the leakage of approximately 0.3 Tbq per month of both 137Cs and 134Cs. 0.3 TBq is equal to 1/40th of the natural radiation in one km3 of seawater and 1/50000000000th of the total natural radioactivity in the oceans. Following the Fukushima I accidents, The Economist reported that the International Energy Agency halved its estimate of additional nuclear generating capacity to be built by 2035.
Germany accelerated plans to close all of its old nuclear power reactors and to phase the rest out entirely by 2022. The policy is controversial leading to electricity twice the price of that in neighbouring France. Der Spiegel reported that German Economy and Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel admitted that "exiting nuclear and coal-fired power generation at the same time would not be possible". In Italy there was a national referendum, in which 94 percent voted against the governments plan to build new nuclear power plants.
Elsewhere in the world, nuclear power continues to be discussed in Malaysia, and plans are well-advanced in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Bangladesh. China briefly paused its nuclear development program, but has since restarted it. China plans to triple its nuclear capacity to at least 58 GWe by 2020, then some 150 GWe by 2030, and much more by 2050.
Nuclear industry According to Areva's Southeast Asia and Oceania director, Selena Ng, Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster is "a huge wake-up call for a nuclear industry that hasn't always been sufficiently transparent about safety issues". She said "There was a sort of complacency before Fukushima and I don't think we can afford to have that complacency now".
In September 2011, German engineering giant Siemens announced it will withdraw entirely from the nuclear industry, as a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and said that it would no longer build nuclear power plants anywhere in the world. The company's chairman, Peter Löscher, said that "Siemens was ending plans to cooperate with Rosatom, the Russian state-controlled nuclear power company, in the construction of dozens of nuclear plants throughout Russia over the coming two decades". Siemens is to boost its work in the renewable energy sector.
Regulatory agencies Many inter-governmental agencies are responding, often on an ad hoc basis. Responders include International Atomic Energy Agency, World Meteorological Organization and the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, which has radiation detection equipment deployed around the world.
Some scientists say that the 2011 Japanese nuclear accidents have revealed that the nuclear industry lacks sufficient oversight, leading to renewed calls to redefine the mandate of the IAEA so that it can better police nuclear power plants worldwide. There are several problems with the IAEA says Najmedin Meshkati of University of Southern California: It recommends safety standards, but member states are not required to comply; it promotes nuclear energy, but it also monitors nuclear use; it is the sole global organization overseeing the nuclear energy industry, yet it is also weighed down by checking compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The journal Nature has reported that the IAEA response to the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan was "sluggish and sometimes confusing", drawing calls for the agency to "take a more proactive role in nuclear safety". But nuclear experts say that the agency's complicated mandate and the constraints imposed by its member states mean that reforms will not happen quickly or easily, although its INES "emergency scale is very likely to be revisited" given the confusing way in which it was used in Japan.
Russian nuclear opponent Iouli Andreev was critical of the response to Fukushima, and says that the IAEA did not learn from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. He has accused the IAEA and corporations of "wilfully ignoring lessons from the world's worst nuclear accident 25 years ago to protect the industry's expansion". The IAEA's role "as an advocate for nuclear power has made it a target for protests".
One of the IAEA statutory functions is to establish safety standards to protect the health, life and property in the use of nuclear power. When reports of the damaged nuclear power plants at Fukushima emerged, many countries looked immediately to the IAEA for more information. But its initial reports provided scant and at times contradictory information from Japanese sources and it took a week for the IAEA to dispatch a team to Japan to gather more facts on the ground. While the IAEA has stated that it was hampered by lack of official information from Japan, this "has nonetheless prompted analysts to question the efficacy of the Agency". Olli Heinonen has said that "Fukushima should be a wake-up call to re-evaluate and strengthen the role of the IAEA in boosting nuclear safety, including its response mechanism".
On 28 March 2011, at a special briefing on the Fukushima nuclear accidents held for IAEA Member States, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano announced that a high-level IAEA Conference on Nuclear Safety should take place in Vienna.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japan "underestimated the danger of tsunamis and failed to prepare adequate backup systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant". This repeated a widely held criticism in Japan that "collusive ties between regulators and industry led to weak oversight and a failure to ensure adequate safety levels at the plant". The IAEA also said that the Fukushima disaster exposed the lack of adequate backup systems at the plant. Once power was completely lost, critical functions like the cooling system shut down. Three of the reactors "quickly overheated, causing meltdowns that eventually led to explosions, which hurled large amounts of radioactive material into the air".
On 30 March, Denis Flory, IAEA deputy director general and head of the agency's nuclear safety and security department, said readings from soil samples collected in Iitate indicate that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded there. On 31 March, In response to the IAEA, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Thursday the government may implement measures, if necessary, such as urging people living in the area to evacuate, if it is found that the contaminated soil will have a long-term effect on human health. Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told a press conference in the afternoon that the agency's rough estimates have shown there is no need for people in Iitate to evacuate immediately under criteria set by the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan. The Japanese government declined recommendation of IAEA.
In April 2011, representatives from dozens of countries met in Austria to scrutinize safety at each other's power plants with the aim of avoiding accidents such as the Japanese nuclear crisis. The meeting was hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency and focused on the Convention on Nuclear Safety that came into being in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident and Chernobyl disaster.
On 12 April 2011, the IAEA reported that the nuclear accident at Fukushima I is now rated as a Level 7 "major accident" on the INES scale. Level 7 is the most serious level on INES and is used to describe an event consisting of "a major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures." Over the previous month, some scientists in the United States and the head of France's Nuclear Safety Authority argued that the accident was, at that time, already worse than the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania, which was rated a 5.
Following the Fukushima I accidents, the International Energy Agency halved its estimate of additional nuclear generating capacity to be built by 2035.
In September 2011, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said the Japanese nuclear disaster "caused deep public anxiety throughout the world and damaged confidence in nuclear power".
Non-government organizations Linda Gunter of Beyond Nuclear spoke to the World Socialist Web Site on 19 March 2011. Gunter stated that the disaster could not be called an accident because it was the outcome of a "gamble [that] has been going on since the dawn of the nuclear age". She also voiced concern over Fukushima-style reactors operating in the United States. Beyond Nuclear began a campaign to shut these reactors down on 13 April 2011.
The World Future Council issued a "Statement on the Japanese Nuclear Disaster" on 29 March 2011, supported by many Right Livelihood Award Laureates. It said that the disaster in Japan has demonstrated the limits of human capability to keep dangerous technologies free from accidents with catastrophic results: The conclusion we draw from the nuclear power plant accident in Japan is that the human community, acting for itself and as trustees for future generations, must exercise a far higher level of care globally in dealing with technologies capable of causing mass annihilation, and should phase out, abolish and replace such technologies with alternatives that do not threaten present and future generations. This applies to nuclear weapons as well as to nuclear power reactors.
Citing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, environmental activists at a U.N. meeting in April 2011 "urged bolder steps to tap renewable energy so the world doesn't have to choose between the dangers of nuclear power and the ravages of climate change".
Some shipping lines restricted their ships from calling on the Tokyo Bay ports of Tokyo and Yokohama over radiation concerns. Vessels risk facing extra delays for checks at subsequent destinations if they pick up even trace contamination.
Greenpeace Greenpeace sent radiology experts to the villages of Iitate and Tsushima in the Fukushima Prefecture. They found levels up to 100 μSv/h in the village of Iitate, and based on that, recommended that the government widen the 20 km no-go zone, which Iitate lies outside of, to at least 30 km. An official of the NSA said that high radioactivity levels detected by the NGO could not be considered reliable, although some members of Greenpeace stressed that their numbers corresponded in other areas. The New York Times called the reporting by Greenpeace (with a well-known anti-nuclear position) a "guarded endorsement to the radiation data published by the Japanese government", due to the general correspondence between the numbers. Members of Greenpeace stressed that there has been distrust of the official data, and that their contention was not the radiation levels, but the action that was taken.
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