Absurd Mouse

A Japanese would call it “just a mouse appeared after a big mountain rumbled.” In Latin, it must be parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus, the expression that in English is “mountain will be in labor, and an absurd mouse will be born.” Tokyo Electric Power Company announced on Wednesday that 29-hour blackout at the First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant might have caused by a short-circuit with a mouse that gnawed nylon of cable. The blackout affected nine facilities of the plant including the pools holding over six thousand used fuel rods. Tensions got high among the officers of the government and TEPCO. The mouse reminded us of that the crisis there had not gone.

The blackout revealed problems of the process of dismantling those broken reactors. The electric power resource had been provided by temporary system made to keep on cooling the reactors and nuclear fuels. If the system stops, they will be overheated leading to an unprecedented disaster. In spite of holding that risk, the distributer was set outside of building without any back-up system.

TEPCO again showed its own secretive character by delaying the report of the fact of blackout for three hours. To justify and underestimate their slow response, they kept on call the blackout “phenomenon” instead of “accident.” After information of blackout was reported, residents around the nuclear power plant were afraid of another explosion of the site. Anxiety of living in such an uncomfortable situation disturbs people who consider coming back to live in their hometown. No resident actually believes anything announced by TEPCO, anyway.

The thing is that the broken power plant is so vulnerable that a tiny mischief of a mouse can cause a huge disaster. The government of Japan and TEPCO need to fix the problem as soon as possible. Although the site is overwhelmingly unreachable because of high radiation level, it is necessary to build a sustainable system of providing electrical power to maintain the cooling system, to protect power distributer from short-circuit and to stabilize the used nuclear fuels. In terms of that we could realize that, we would say that the small mouse made a big job like one who saved a lion from hunter in one of the Aesop’s Fables.

Still, politics is hopelessly narrow-minded. According to a report of Nikkei Shimbun, lawmakers in the Liberal Democratic Party consider guarding the Fukushima site with the Self-Defense Force. Preoccupation of enthusiasm for expanding roles of the force made them hold such an idea. If the force were deployed in the site, their job may be starting with looking for wild mice. It is better for those lawmakers to go to the site and actually help build a more sustainable system in high radiation than discussing incompetent idea in Tokyo.