A Japanese expert panel on July 5 issued a report claiming that the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was preventable. In the 641-page document the panel claims that the accident was not caused solely by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, but the inability of the government, regulators and the Fukushima Daiichi plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), to act quickly enough to prevent the disaster. Among the criticized was also the then-Prime Minster Naoto Kan who resigned last year after a widespread criticism of his handling of the natural disaster and Fukushima nuclear crisis. The experts claimed that regulators have failed to adopt global safety standards that could have prevented the crisis.
In June more than 1,300 people filed a criminal complaint against TEPCO for the March 2011 crisis and for the plaintiffs’ resulting radiation. The complaint named as defendants Tsunehisa Katsumata, the chairman of TEPCO, Masataka Shimizu, the former president of the company, and Haruki Madarame, the chief of the Nuclear Safety Commission, along with 30 other executives. In March, the executives of the company faced another complaint filed by a group of shareholders in the amount of $67 billion for similar claims. They claimed that the company failed to take appropriate measure to mitigate damages in the event of an earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
From Jurist, July 5. Used with permission.
See our last post on the ongoing Fukushima disaster.
Does Fukushima study help or hurt?
We are certainly rooting for the 1,300 radiation-affected Japanese who are suing TEPCO and the government, and it seems this report could give them a boost. But the notion that the disaster was “preventable” strikes us as propaganda for the nuclear industry. The simple reality is that human beings are fallible, which is why it is a really bad idea to have technology with such inherently high stakes in the event of error, laxity or corruption. Worse, it seems that Kan is being scapegoated, which strikes us as a little convenient since he just had the courage to call for Japan to abandon nuclear powerāat a time when the government was pressuring localities to accept reactors being started up again…
Fukushima radiation: worse than they want you to think
Two very ominous news clips, in quick success. First this, from BBC News, Oct. 25:
Next, a press release from Greenpeace, Oct. 23, grimly entitled “Official radiation monitoring stations in Fukushima unreliable”:
A report on Digital Journal informs us that Japan’s permissible limit for public exposure is 0.23 microsieverts per hour