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| Anti-nuclear activists protest restart of a nuclear reactor in Japan |
By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times, July 5, 2012
TOKYO — The nuclear
accident at Fukushima was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry
collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a
parliamentary inquiry concluded Thursday.
The report, released by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident
Independent Investigation Commission, challenged some of the main story lines
that the government and the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power
Plant have put forward. Most notably, the report said the plant’s crucial cooling
systems might have been damaged in the earthquake on March 11, 2011, not only
in the ensuing tsunami. That possibility raises doubts about the safety of all
the quake-prone country’s nuclear plants just as they begin to restart after a pause ordered in the
wake of the Fukushima crisis.
“It was a profoundly man-made disaster — that could and should have
been foreseen and prevented,” said Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the commission’s chairman,
in the report’s introduction. “And its effects could have been mitigated by a
more effective human response.”
While assigning widespread blame, the report avoids calling for the
censure of specific executives or officials. Some citizens’ groups have
demanded that executives of the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power
Company, or Tepco, be investigated on charges of criminal negligence, a move
that Dr. Kurokawa said Thursday was out of his panel’s purview. But criminal
prosecution “is a matter for others to pursue,” he said at a news conference
after the report’s release.
The very existence of an independent investigating commission — which
avoids reliance on self-examination by bureaucracies that might be clouded by
self-defense — is a break with precedent in Japan, but follows the pattern followed in the
United States after major failures involving combinations of private companies,
government oversight and technology issues. Those cases, which were cited by
the panel, include the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, the Columbia
and Challenger space shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003 and
the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The 641-page report criticized Tepco as being too quick to dismiss
earthquake damage as a cause of the fuel meltdowns at three of the plant’s six
reactors, which overheated when the site lost power. Tepco has contended that
the plant withstood the earthquake that rocked eastern Japan, instead placing
blame for the disaster on what some experts have called a “once in a
millennium” tsunami that followed. Such a rare calamity was beyond the scope of
contingency planning, Tepco executives have suggested, and was unlikely to pose
a threat to Japan’s other nuclear reactors in the foreseeable future.
The parliamentary report, based on more than 900 hours of hearings and
interviews with 1,167 people, suggests that Reactor No. 1, in particular, might
have suffered earthquake damage, including the possibility that pipes burst
from the shaking, leading to a loss of coolant even before the tsunami hit the
plant about 30 minutes after the initial earthquake. It emphasized that a full
assessment would require better access to the inner workings of the reactors,
which may not be possible for years.
“However,” the report said, “it is impossible to limit the direct
cause of the accident to the tsunami without substantive evidence. The
commission believes that this is an attempt to avoid responsibility by putting
all the blame on the unexpected (the tsunami),” the report continued, adding,
“and not on the more foreseeable quake.”
The report, submitted to Parliament on Thursday, also contradicted
accounts put forward by previous investigations that described the prime
minister at the time, Naoto Kan, as a decisive leader who ordered
Tepco not to abandon the plant as it spiraled out of control. There is no
evidence that the operator planned to withdraw all its employees from the
plant, the report said, and meddling from Mr. Kan, including his visit to the
plant a day after the accident, confused the initial response.
Instead, the report by the commission — which heard testimony from Mr.
Kan and a former Tepco president, Masataka Shimizu — described a breakdown in
communications between the prime minister’s office and Tepco, blaming both
sides.
“The prime minister made his way to the site to direct the workers who
were dealing with the damaged core,” the report said, an action that “diverted
the attention and time of the on-site operational staff and confused the line
of command.”
The report faulted Mr. Shimizu for an “inability to clearly report” to
the prime minister’s office “the intentions of the operators,” which deepened
the government’s misunderstanding and mistrust of Tepco’s response.
The commission also accused the government, Tepco and nuclear
regulators of failing to carry out basic safety measures despite being aware of
the risks posed by earthquakes, tsunamis and other events that might cut off
power systems. Even though the government-appointed Nuclear Safety Commission
revised earthquake resistance standards in 2006 and ordered nuclear operators
around the country to inspect their reactors, for example, Tepco did not carry
out any checks, and regulators did not follow up, the report said.
The report placed blame for the tepid response on collusion between
the company, the government and regulators, saying they had all “betrayed the
nation’s right to safety from nuclear accidents.” Tepco “manipulated its cozy
relationship with regulators to take the teeth out of regulations,” the report
said.
Dr. Kurokawa reserved his most damning language for his criticism of a
culture in Japan that suppresses dissent and outside opinion, which he said
might have prompted changes to the country’s lax nuclear controls.
“What must be admitted, very painfully, is that this was a disaster
‘Made in Japan,’ ” Dr. Kurokawa said in his introduction to the English
version of the report. “Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained
conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to
question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism;
and our insularity.” The Japanese version contained a similar criticism.
Shuya Nomura, a commission member and a professor at the Chuo Law
School, said the report had tried to “shed light on Japan’s wider structural
problems, on the pus that pervades Japanese society.”
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