DPJ leaders deny urging cover-up of Fukushima meltdown

[bananas]

Source: Asahi Shimbun

Former government leaders vehemently rejected suggestions in a report that they were pulling the strings behind a suspected meltdown cover-up when the Fukushima nuclear disaster was unfolding in 2011.

The report, compiled by an investigation panel commissioned by Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the crippled nuclear power plant, said Masataka Shimizu, who was TEPCO president at the time of the accident, instructed employees not to use the term “meltdown,” leading to a delay in the official announcement.

But the report also implied that Shimizu was acting on orders from high up in the government.

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TEPCO declared the meltdown at three reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 plant in May 2011, two months after it occurred.

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Read more: http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201606170063.html

[bananas]

1. EDITORIAL: Extent of TEPCO cover-up over meltdown must be clarified

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201606180026.html

EDITORIAL: Extent of TEPCO cover-up over meltdown must be clarified
June 18, 2016 at 14:30 JST

A panel investigating Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s response to the triple meltdown during the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster revealed an unpardonable breach of trust by the operator of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

But there is still a lot more work to be done by the panel to uncover the full scope of the utility’s apparent meltdown cover-up.

Immediately after the catastrophic accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, then TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu instructed employees not to use the term “meltdown,” leading to a delay in the official announcement, according to a report compiled by the investigation panel commissioned by the company.

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For four long years, TEPCO kept giving false explanations about the delay in the announcement of the reactor meltdowns to Niigata Prefecture, which was demanding the truth of what happened. The company claimed it did not have the criteria for defining and determining a meltdown. The firm also said no in-house instruction was given to employees telling them not to use the term.

In February this year, however, the company said it had “found” an in-house manual that spelled out such criteria and set up the third-party panel of legal experts to get to the truth about the delayed announcement of the meltdowns.

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What is particularly baffling is the opinion about the president’s instruction voiced by Yasuhisa Tanaka, the former president of the Sendai High Court who headed the investigation. “We cannot say for certain that there was a deliberate cover-up by the company,” Tanaka said during a news conference.

At the time of the accident, a reactor meltdown was defined by the nuclear disaster special measures law as an emergency situation that must be reported. The conditions of the reactors at the Fukushima plant fulfilled TEPCO’s criteria, which say a meltdown means that 5 percent or more of the core of a reactor has been damaged.

But the utility initially denied that a meltdown was happening, while the president instructed employees not to use the term. If this was not a cover-up, what was it?

Also questionable is the panel’s suggestion that the TEPCO chief was probably acting on requests from the prime minister’s office in giving the instruction. The panel interviewed about 60 former and current TEPCO officials, but no government officials or bureaucrats who were involved in dealing with the crisis.

In explaining the panel’s failure to interview key government officials, Tanaka said, “Our authority to investigate is limited, and it is difficult (to uncover the entire truth) in such a short time.” But the panel didn’t even request interviews with them.

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[maindawg]

2. Ofcourse not

Its not that big of a deal, so I am told. Just a festering infected sore on the planet. It's not going to go away. It will continue to spread , everyday forever. It's only the Pacific ocean, we still have the Atlantic so it's not like we are out of oceans. It's just the one. When the radiation has spread to our own west coast , we don't know for sure what will happen then, so why worry ?
Yesterday I read an article explaining that the run off from corn farming creates a dead zone in the Mississippi Delta as big as Connecticut.There is more plastic in the ocean than fish apparently. I don't fish anymore, there are no fish in the creeks where I used to fish, farming run off killed them. Or maybe it was the acid rain is a run off, or the chemical factory run off or the sewage run off.
Extinction baby , it's the next big thing.