Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Prosecutors Request Prison Time For Executives (npr.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader reporter shared this article from NPR:
The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese prosecutors say, accusing the executives of failing to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe. Prosecutors say the TEPCO executives didn't do enough to protect the nuclear plant, despite being told in 2002 that the Fukushima facility was vulnerable to a tsunami....
"It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people." Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury....
All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.
"It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people." Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury....
All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.
Except the guys who predicted the tsunami back in 2002, when they told you the place was vulnerable to a tsunami. Which they have a lot of in Japan.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The entire Fukushima Disaster was more a disaster because it was entirely preventable. Whether is is malfeasance or nonfeasance it is plainly criminal because it is quite plainly negligence. For anyone with any doubts please refer to The official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission.
This is an ongoing disaster, the destroyed reactors are still in an earthquake and flood prone area. TEPCO has proven itself completely corrupt, incompetent and incapable. It is in the interests of all Pacific nations to resolve and this issue demands an international response to control and contain it. It is clearly worse than Chernobyl.
I hope TEPCO's board rots in jail.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'd be ok with that, provided it was in a psychiatric ward to deal with their obviously disturbed minds and to rehabilitate them to the point where they were fit to live in society.
There were plenty of predictions of the tsunami, when it was likely, how severe it was likely to be, etc. TEPCO chose to ignore those, because they were expensive, and to go with considerably cheaper predictions of a much smaller, more frequent, event. You can prove anything, if you constrict the type and date range of the evidence sufficiently. Particularly if you can make it show what is convenient for you.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.
Duh, they could not have predicted THAT particular event, BUT Tsunami's are a known and foreseeable natural event, so
they definitely could have predicted that there would be the possibility of one or more tsunami's in general (over long periods of time),
and when installing and operating a nuclear plant: you have a duty to ensure that radioactive material created and stored in/about
your plant creates does not endanger the survivors after a foreseeable natural event.
So if a particular Tsunami strength and size would not be guaranteed to kill everyone within 100 miles of your plant: your plant had better not be a threat to the public within 100 miles during/after that tsunami.
The only regret is that they waited until AFTER the event to arrest them.
There should be 3rd party reviews and audits of overall power plant designs and operations, and the capability of charging executives for crimes,
mandating jail time and/or plant shutdowns BEFORE a catastrophic tsunami, etc, actually occurs..
How is it difficult to predict tsunamis on a coastline with a history of multiple tsunamis? The same goes for earthquakes. They designed the plant to handle 7.0 despite having measured more powerful earthquakes at the very same location. The professional negligence seems to be due to not only discarding historical data, but also discarding engineering warnings presented to them even before the powerplant opened.
5 years seems like nothing compared to the predictable damage they caused. It was all about money and total neglect for safety. They should be responsible for stealing property from people considering all the houses people had to leave due to being in the exclusion zone. On top of that a lot of people are stuck with houses in areas with radiation, but not in the exclusion zone, meaning they have become unsellable. This means a lot of houses now have the value 0 due to those business men profiting from ignoring common sense regarding safety.
It isn't an accident when it's predicted and nothing is done to prevent it. For comparison you get something like 8 years of prison in the UK for causing death by drink driving.
According to the WHO and Japanese gouvernment, the direct death toll of the Fukushima disaster was: Zero.
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
The indirect results from radiation related issues and evacuation stress was not zero, but I find it hard to argue that the executives are directly responsible for the deaths of so many people. The tsunami itself caused tremendous devastation and evacuation was a given, with or without the nuclear plant there.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Senior management in the US should be held to the same standards and should go to prison for white collar crimes that they commit. Wealth and position should never be a get out of jail card.
Maybe humans are not sufficiently careful to have nuclear facilities. Errors in thinking often occur.
The desire to find someone to blame and punish them severely is human nature, but the reality is that we need to be able to trust in order to operate at all. One of the issues of making a senior manager responsible for certain issues to the point of criminal liability is that it may become impossible to get anyone to accept the responsibility if they aren't able to show that they acted reasonably in response to the information they had when making the iffy decision. Given that there is ALWAYS a trade off between safely and operating (you drive your car faster than 10 mph - therefore you choose to take the risk of hurting someone seriously if you hit them), we need to balance those. Now I agree in this case they seem to have got it wrong - although there is also a failure with the regulator who didn't force them to act on this.
that's all of japan. do you want them to give up nuclear entirely and go back to coal?
There's only a few centuries of Japanese paintings depicting massive waves, affecting Japan. It's not like the word "tsunami" is Japanese, so why should they anticipate such a remote, unfamiliar event?
The Japanese people have no experience with nuclear disasters or big waves, and this was completely unforeseeable.
What made a minor accident into a major crisis was purely the fault of bonehead management. After a current-generation reactor is scrammed because of an impending disaster, all you have to do to avoid a meltdown is keep coolant circulating through it for long enough to remove heat of decay. Even in a regional disaster that destroys the power grid, there are ways of doing this that should be prearranged, like hooking up fire trucks to the coolant system. But when they tried exactly this at Fukushima, nobody had provided compatible fittings to local fire departments. The hoses wouldn't connect.
If I ever go on a shooting rampage I hope you're a member of the jury. I'll just have my attorney explain to the court that *I* didn't kill anyone, it was the bullets from the gun that I fired.
"The number of people who died at the hands of gumpish was: Zero. The indirect results from bullet-related issues and blood loss was not zero, but I find it hard to argue that the gunman is directly responsible for the deaths of so many people."
well there you go: Another reason NOT to build nuclear reactors.
even nuclear reactors need bosses, like chair-board-people, which mostly are
old dignified and wise old people, weathered and sweet smelling.
people like this should really not go to prison; after all, prison is for
rapists, drug dealers and other scum that are a menace to society.
in this specific case, the chair-board-people are most likely reasonable people
that interface between clubberment (especially in japan), stockholders (people who vote with money to support a clubberment policy) and a army of hired people.
there's NO way, these old dignified people have any inkling about anything engineering, geophysics (earth quakes) and the sort. excellent writing and reading skills and beyond awesome bridge-building skills, including making compromises however are their daily breed and butter?
so if you don't want to send old people off to the chopping block for responsibilities that have been outsourced (by the clubberment)
then don't build and operate any more slow-mo atom splitters -aka- matter transformers.
Hi, I recall reading about how some guy working on the other set of Fukushima reactors went to extensive efforts to get that set's walls over built in height and strength because he remembered a spot further up the mountain that had the high water mark from a previous flood marked from a millennium ago and he decided to study flood maps and overbuilt the walls.
just for different reasons.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Have you noticed whenever business is booming, the execs want all the praise, but when things go awry they know absolutely nothing?
Time for executives - and owners - to be held accountable.
Large-scale problems in Japan occur primarily due to unethical behavior. The Fukushima nuclear disaster is an example.
By contrast, large-scale problems in the United States occur due to either unethical behavior or incompetence. The latter cause is often due to affirmative action (AA).
The Los Alamos National Laboratory uses AA to give preferential treatment to Africans and Hispanics in employment. According to a report by NPR, a contractor (who was likely African or Hispanic) was unaware that "organic" and "inorganic" are not synonyms. He poured organic material into a drum of nuclear waste. Consequently, the drum exploded. Plutonium dust was emitted into the atmosphere.
If you eat vegetables from farms in New Mexico, you likely have consumed trace amounts of plutonium.
There is more information about this issue.
Just do not allow limited liability corporations to own or operate nuclear power plants. Instead require ownership to be structured as a general partnership with unlimited joint and several liability of partners for any accident.
Then you would not have to worry about detailed regulations and continuing oversight of compliance issues. Just let the insurance companies and tort lawyers deal with it.
If a billionaire is going to invest his own money and be personally liable, then he will make damn sure that the thing is safe. And if nobody is willing to take the risk, then probably the reactor should not be built.