TOKYO, March 25, 2021—This is a story about bureacracy that’s so familiar to the Japanese for too long that they forget and accept recurring mistakes by bureaucrats, politicians and their business cronies. While bureacrats generally cover up law and reg violations with prowess, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which seves as the low-end of bureaucracy and caused the Fukushima nuclear power station meltdown with safety negligence, has revealed the Japanese government’s incompetence and arrogance, according to the Japanese nuclear regulatory commission March 24.
Nuclear Regulation Authority commission chair Toyoshi Fuketa told a March 24, 2021 news conference with frustration about its findings of TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power station, which has been idled since the Fukushima accident in March 11, 2011: ‘What’s being questioned now is TEPCO’s attitude toward atomic substance safety and security.’
Effectively, anyone can sneak into the Kashiwazaki power station with little difficulty, the commission determined. For example, Fuketa said TEPCO employees entered the Kashiwazaki central control room with false IDs and that security guards knowingly let them pass through the gates. ‘TEPCO doesn’t qualify for moving ‘nuclear) fuel in Kashiwazaki-Kariwa,’ he said, and explained that the comission decided to order TEPCO not to load or unload nuclear fuel rods into the power reactors for at least 2,000 hours, meaning that it cannot reopen the station for at least a year.
He said that while TEPCO has advanced technology such as those it deployed at Fukushima, its management was fraught with arrogance and ineptitude. As a result, indequate anti-terrorism and security and safety precautions at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa were widespread, such as not fixing security alarm defects, he said.
Further, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa station general manager and TEPCO headquarters have not been aware what kind of remedial safety and security measures were taken, the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper reported March 25, quoting a NRA official as expressing disbelief that ‘TEPCO does not known the 101 of anti-terrorism policy!’
It was exactly the cause of the March 11, 2011 Fukushima meltdown. TEPCO totally ignored the tsunami risks triggered by the giant earthquake. Then-TEPCO CEO Tsunehisa Katsumarta told me in the late 1990s: ‘Our nuclear power stations are the safest power stations in the world. They can withstand earthquakes of unimaginable magnitude.’
His comments, full of arrogrance expressed with much bureaucratic hue, resonnated with TEPCO officials’s attitudes – equivalent to those of lowly bureaucrats – toward Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s safety and security precautions. Bureaucrats never learn.
(NRA’s March 24, 2021 news conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t4s_5D8WRk&t=282s)
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