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Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Prosecutors Request Prison Time For Executives (npr.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the jail-sentences dept.

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.

5 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Five years by jd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)
  2. "The deaths of so many people" by scsirob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  3. You must place trust SOMEWHERE by Bruce66423 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:It's About Time. by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't think the seawalls were the ultimate problem.

    I think the ultimate problem was the siting of the backup generators. Had they been positioned higher, and continued to operate, the meltdown would have been avoided. They actually put some of the backup generators in a basement. This was an issue that was known about well before the disaster. There was no deadline issue involved in moving the generators to a safer location.

    Perhaps it's time to stop blaming the disaster on technical issues and blame greed instead. That's why it is right that some people should go to jail.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  5. Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami by doom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You skipped the fact that there's another nuclear plant in the same region of Japan that came through okay because their backup generators were placed up on higher ground.

    I don't know enough about the social situation in Japan to pin blame (was it TEPCO, was it the regulatory body?) but off hand I don't have any objections to going after management on this one, and I'm pretty strongly pro-nuclear.

    If there's no penalty for a screw-up of this magnitude, then what's the incentive to keep management from rolling the dice again?