A Foundation Acts Fast to Help Researchers Study Japan’s Disaster

Ken Buesseler was stunned to learn that no coordinated effort was in the works to study radioactive materials that had leaked into the Pacific Ocean following the partial meltdown of nuclear reactors in Japan after the country was struck by a catastrophic tsunami.

Mr. Buesseler, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, knew that the window for studying the radiation was short because the dangerous materials were slowly washing farther and farther out to sea. His concern prompted a mad sprint to set up a research expedition, locate a ship, and find the money to cover the cost of the trip.

Barely a month after he discovered nothing was in the works, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation made a $3.7-million gift to cover a 15-day research cruise led by Mr. Buesseler. The team of international scientists completed the expedition last week, after collecting more than 1,000 samples from roughly 30 locations that will provide an important baseline for studying the unprecedented release of radiation into the ocean. The levels of some radioactive contaminants in the waters adjacent to the Fukushima Daiichi plant were 10 to 100 times higher than those in the Black Sea following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Some experts say the Moore foundation’s quick response to a complicated problem could serve as a case study for other foundations.

“It was a case of being strategically opportunistic,” says Thomas J. Tierney, the co-founder of the Bridgespan Group, a Boston consulting firm, and a co-author of Give Smart: Philanthropy That Gets Results. “The Moore foundation was able to take advantage of an opportunity to add enormous benefit to society.”

Steven J. McCormick, the Moore foundation’s president, says private foundations are well known for providing “patient capital” for long-term and sometimes high-risk projects or studies that government agencies may not be willing to support. But Mr. McCormick, who formerly headed the Nature Conservancy, believes foundations should also play “on the other end of that spectrum” by pouncing on unanticipated but important projects that need money immediately.

Imperfect Information

As Woods Hole scrambled to nail down logistics for the research expedition, the Moore foundation had an equally wild couple of weeks to make the foundation equivalent of a snap decision.

Some foundations quickly make grants for humanitarian relief following disasters, but this project, focused on basic science and featuring the political sensitivities that come with a U.S.-led study of a Japanese disaster, “had a much higher degree of complexity,” Mr. Tierney says. The foundation had to confirm that the research was worth doing and that no one else was in a position to pay for it and win approval of the grant from its full board.

“With something like this, even though you do the due diligence, you inevitably have less-than-perfect information,” Mr. McCormick says. “Events are moving rapidly. Various players may not be lined up at the right times. It requires a different mind-set—it’s like rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time. But it’s important for foundations to be able to do both kinds of grant making.”

Unconventional Timeline

Japanese scientists have been studying waters in a 30-kilometer area near the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant since shortly after the leaks, but Mr. Buesseler wanted to study a much wider area, up to 200 kilometers offshore, to determine the levels of radioactive materials and how they were being dispersed.

Woods Hole, a research organization on Cape Cod focused on marine science, receives more than 80 percent of its budget from the federal government. Yet it quickly became clear to Mr. Buesseler and fund raisers at the institution that neither the U.S. nor Japanese governments would provide the $3-million to $5-million required for the study. Japan was still preoccupied with its humanitarian response to the disaster, and U.S. agencies that support science were only able to offer much smaller sums outside their normal grant-making processes, which can take up to a year. (The National Science Foundation did provide a $155,000 grant in May to support Mr. Buesseler’s research.) As Woods Hole began to look elsewhere, it identified the Moore foundation as a possible source of quick and significant support.

Roughly 80 percent of Moore’s $247-million in annual grant making is distributed through its conservation and science programs, and Moore had provided Woods Hole with grants totaling $6.5-million since 2006.

But Woods Hole officials knew the conventional timeline for winning a grant from a private foundation would be far too slow: With each passing day, the radioactive materials in the Pacific were becoming increasingly dispersed.

Susan Avery, president of the institution, turned to Mr. Tierney, a board member, for help.

Mr. Tierney called Mr. McCormick—an old friend—on a Saturday morning in mid-April to provide details about Woods Hole’s plans and its urgent need for a grant.

Ms. Avery had previously made plans to visit the Moore foundation’s offices in Palo Alto the following week for another purpose altogether. But Mr. Tierney’s call helped turn the routine visit into an opportunity for Ms. Avery to pitch the idea of an immediate grant to cover the full cost of the Japanese research.

Vicki Chandler, who heads Moore’s science program, grilled Ms. Avery on details of the project and ran the same questions past officials at federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation. Was the research worth doing? Would any of the government agencies support it? Had the window of opportunity for assessing contamination already passed?

Ms. Chandler says the scientific importance of the mission quickly became obvious—the Woods Hole-led expedition would obtain the baseline data that could empower studies of the radioactive material over the next decade.

“We saw an opportunity to do something that was incredibly important that would not have happened without our stepping in,” she says.

No Ship, No ‘Fire Drill’

Foundation officials estimated the research expedition could cost $4-million or more. Any Moore grant over $2.5-million requires full board approval.

The foundation threw together a three-page synopsis of the grant opportunity by the end of the week and sent it to Gordon Moore, the billionaire co-founder of the Intel Corporation, who spends much of the year at his Japanese-style home in Hawaii.

“If it was absolutely no go for him for whatever reason, we would have let it drop,” Mr. McCormick says.

Mr. Moore, who declined to be interviewed, immediately agreed that the money was worth spending, provided that Woods Hole could quickly locate a ship to carry out the mission. That proved to be one of the most challenging aspects of coordinating the trip. But Mr. Buesseler finally secured the Ka’imikai-o-Kanaloa, a research vessel at the University of Hawaii.

The Moore foundation waited until the ship had been identified to schedule a phone-based board meeting for the sole purpose of approving the grant. “We weren’t going to do the fire drill if there was no ship,” Mr. McCormick says.

The board unanimously approved the $3.7-million grant, but there were still other hurdles for Woods Hole to overcome.

The expedition did not receive approval from the Japanese government to sample waters up to 200 miles off its shores until days before the ship set sail from Hawaii in mid-May. The research team did not receive approval to sample within 50 miles of the Fukushima reactor until after the fully loaded expedition launched from Yokohama, Japan, on June 4.

The radioactive material in the water provides little direct threat to humans, Mr. Buesseler says. Even 15 miles offshore, the level of contaminants is not far above drinking-water standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

But some of the materials could eventually concentrate in higher levels in sediment or marine life.

The expedition, which included scientists from England, Japan, Monaco, Slovakia, the University of Hawaii, and elsewhere, captured plankton and small animals like squid and sardines to establish baseline levels of contamination in marine life. A Woods Hole expert on ocean currents, meanwhile, tried to figure out how the radioactive materials would disperse over time.

“The long-term impact is a pretty open question,” Mr. Buesseler says.

Fast and Agile

Mr. Tierney, the Bridgespan co-founder, notes that much of the current talk of collaboration between philanthropists and government emphasizes narrowly defined roles, with foundations providing seed money for new approaches and then turning to the government for continuing support of programs that prove their worth.

But there is also a role for foundations to simply move quickly in response to unexpected events when governments cannot, Mr. Tierney says.

“This is an example of private philanthropy stepping in for government because Moore could move faster and more aggressively,” he says. “Down the road, hopefully government can do its part to carry on the research.”