This from "The New York Times" -- still as much a "paper of record" as we have, even though it really seems to be a right wing rag. At least it's not as bad as "The Washington Post".
Please follow link to original
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/world/asia/fukushima-nuclear-crisis-a-man-made-disaster-report-says.html?_r=1
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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