Ex-TEPCO Officials To Be Indicted Over Fukushima

AmiMoJo writes: Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company will face mandatory indictment over the March 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The prosecution inquest panel of randomly-selected citizens voted for the indictment on Friday, for professional negligence resulting in death and injury. "Tokyo prosecutors in January rejected the panel's judgment that the three should be charged, citing insufficient evidence. But the 11 unidentified citizens on the panel forced the indictment after a second vote, which makes an indictment mandatory. The three are former chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 75, and former executives Sakae Muto, 65, and Ichiro Takekuro, 69. Citizens' panels, made up of residents selected by lottery, are a rarely used but high-profile feature of Japan's legal system introduced after World War Two to curb bureaucratic overreach."

Comments

better late than never

[The Real Dr John]

The evidence is pretty clear that a lax attitude and cozy government-corporate-regulatory environment made this disaster much worse than it had to be. I am sure that they will all get off without any significant penalties or jail time, but at least they are going to have to go through the court system.

Re:better late than never

[Penguinisto]

I do kind of wonder about one thing, though... why are the engineers who designed that beast not being indicted? After all, nearly all of the vital pumps and generators were in the basements of both the Daiichi and Daini sites, with much of the critical equipment right next to the water, instead of uphill where they should have been (and at least not in basements... WTH, people?)

The Daini site lucked out big-time, with a monumental effort by the crews there to run enough cable from the few generators they still had working to the pumps which needed the juice - something like 2 miles of cable had to be scrounged and tied together.

BTW, props to the operators and supervisors onsite - for instance, the idea of scrounging car batteries and tying them together with inverters so that they could get the control panels back up was pretty genius. Same with having a special firefighting team from Tokyo come in to keep the storage pools full of water. At both sites they were stuck with having to come up with creative ways to avoid things from getting as bad as they could have.

I think that with a couple of design changes (both to the reactors and to the rest of the plant) they could have survived much better off than they were.

All that said, I don't think anyone could have predicted the size and scope of the tsunami that hit them. The TEPCO execs should still have to face a bit of music though (for instance, one site operator asking for 4,000 liters of water for a cooling pool and getting 4,000 bottles of drinking water instead? Damn, y'all...)

Re:better late than never

[Penguinisto]

You gonna charge them with crating a Tsunami? One that exceeded estimates by Government Officials?

Seems they have Witch Hunts in Japan too...

The idea isn't to charge them with the cause of the disaster, but with more than a little incompetence that they displayed afterwards - not to mention the often blatant lies they told to the public during the aftermath. Examples include publicly chewing out the Daiichi site supervisor for using seawater to keep the surviving reactors cooled down when that was pretty much all he had to use (given the alternative? Yeah, I'd piss on the things if it helped). Other examples include sending needed cooling water to the Daini site... in drinking water bottles. There's a whole host of other bork-ups, and the blame for the vast majority of them lies squarely on the execs in Tokyo.

Besides, I do respect one thing about the Japanese - when the shit hits the fan, the leaders are the first to take blame, and go out of their way to not pass the blame downhill unnecessarily. Up and down the chain, folks take responsibility for what they do (or don't do). Wouldn't hurt to see some of that attitude on this side of the Pacific...

Re:better late than never

[ACE209]

From the second linked article:

When Japanese prosecutors bring charges on their own initiative, they win convictions more than 99 percent of the time, but cases forced on them by citizens’ review panels are different. Almost by definition, they involve charges that prosecutors saw little hope of proving.

Re:better late than never

[Mr D from 63]

Emergency generators were not in the basements.

Putting generators on pylons is a tremendous oversimplification of what would be needed to design to withstand a tsunami. Generators are useless when all the distribution and control systems are also deluged. Placing large heavy generators on pylons makes them more susceptible to earthquakes. How high do you go?

Plants are designed for floods up to a certain level. It is up to the siting analysis to determine where you can place the plant and auxiliaries, and you don't place it where it can be deluged by a tsunami, because it is not designed for a tsunami to begin with. While placing a few auxiliaries higher up may possibly have had some benefit in the aftermath, you can't depend on maybes. You avoid the maybes by not placing the plant there to start with.

Re:better late than never

[blue9steel]

How do you prosecute people for not forseeing a double-whammy overcoming triple redundancy?

Japan is known for both earthquakes and tsunami, I hardly think the event was unanticipated. They merely decided that a lower level of protection was cheaper and they'd probably be long gone from that organization before any negative events occurred. Hurrah for focusing on quarterly profits over safety!

Re:better late than never

[tlhIngan]

I do kind of wonder about one thing, though... why are the engineers who designed that beast not being indicted? After all, nearly all of the vital pumps and generators were in the basements of both the Daiichi and Daini sites, with much of the critical equipment right next to the water, instead of uphill where they should have been (and at least not in basements... WTH, people?)

Actually, the generators being under was not the problem. You can run generators underwater, provided you have a source for fuel and air above water and can keep it reasonably water tight.

The real problem was the distribution gear got flooded.

As in the electrical panels. Once the tsunami flooded the panels, they shorted out. The generators were running just fine with the water level, and even then, the generators were a backup to a backup.

The first thing is if the reactors go offline, the power station draws power from the grid to run the equipment. And the plant was doing that since there was still power going in. That's the first backup. The second backup is if the grid power goes offline, then you have local generators.

All of which means diddly when your electrical distribution panels get soaked and short out your switchgear, taking with it BOTH backup mechanisms. So now it doesn't matter that the generators or grid power was available - the panel's shorted out and you can't use either system.

Re:better late than never

[Kagetsuki]

Actually the points of contention here are:
1. Emergency pumps were marked as checked, but were not actually checked.
2. Diesel backup generators were probably not checked as they experienced a cascade failure when powered on.
3. Post could have been dealt with better (though this is likely more the fault of former P.M. Kann).
4. Company may have mis-used disaster management emergency funds / officials did not act in a responsible manner (EG officials did not take pay cuts / officials did not start working extra hours / generally officials did not show enough responsibility).

Particularly #4 should be looked at as there have been accidents at nuclear plants before - all previous cases had officials immediately responding to the issues ON SITE and seeing the solutions to completion personally. Companies like Touhoku Electric and Chubu Electric have shown extremely responsible oversight to the point of their CEO's taking extreme personal risks to remedy any problems and constantly going beyond government requirements for all safety measures. TEPCO on the other hand seems to be run by greedy d-bags.

Interesting

[Fire_Wraith]

The part that interests me is how this seems to differ quite radically from grand juries in the U.S., where the citizens on the Grand Jury are largely window dressing. If the prosecutor wants an indictment, they'll get it, and if they don't, they'll make sure the grand jury won't deliver one.

Here, though, it's clear the prosecutors didn't want an indictment, and the citizens forced one anyway.

Lying, Sheer Incompetence and Disregard for life

[Anonymous Coward]

All this really does is cause these poor guys to face charges that prosecutors now must try to prove. Given that all the other methods of getting an indictment on these guys failed, one can easily infer that the chances they get convicted of anything is next to nil.

This is basically a political witch hunt by some PR hounds who want to make it look like the accused are somehow guilty of gross negligence because it was their plant (which satisfied the government's safety requirements) blew up and made a mess after some natural disaster that nobody foresaw or even considered possible happened. It's like holding the tornado shelter installer criminally liable for not protecting the occupants of the shelter from earthquake damage and chemical attacks.

Do some research before commenting. Corporate TEPCO repeatedly lied to the public and the government, was incompetent (sending water needed to cool the reactor in drinking water bottles) and obstructive to the point of disregarding human life (ordering sea-water injection to be shut off based on how the prime minister's "mood").