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.

Comments

No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[lgw]

Once upon a time I read Atlas Shrugged. It seemed so poorly written, as the political and industrial leaders seemed like such simple caricatures. But more and more I see examples of exactly those behaviors in real life.

Rand's cartoonishly incompetent industrial leaders would blame failures of heavy industry on the weather. "No one could have predicted that storm! We're doing all we can after the fact." Left unsaid was that bad storms (or in this case tsunamis) are certain to happen eventually, and it's your job to be ready for them.

And here we see it in real life, with these guys defending themselves with "no one could have predicted that specific tsunami, all we could do was manage the disaster afterwards". You know, when you start sounding like a villain from an Ayn Rand novel, maybe you should hire different lawyers, as it's hard to do worse than that.

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for Rand the corporate owners were not villains. The government trying to regulate and protect the citizens was the villain as well as anyone with social consciousness.
Rand glorified the dog eat dog capitalism. She was too naive to think that people can raise upon merit.

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody has been harmed by Fukushima radiation (not even the case where they 'legally' attributed a death with no medical basis

ahem

Japan has announced for the first time that a worker at the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant died after suffering radiation exposure.

The man, who was in his 50s, died from lung cancer that was diagnosed in 2016.

Japan's government had previously agreed that radiation caused illness in four workers but this is the first acknowledged death.

Funny definition of "nobody" you have there.

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[lgw]

Except for Rand the corporate owners were not villains. The government trying to regulate and protect the citizens was the villain as well as anyone with social consciousness.
Rand glorified the dog eat dog capitalism. She was too naive to think that people can raise upon merit.

If you're going to criticize, at least read the Cliff Notes, so that you can do better than being completely wrong about the work you're complaining about. Plenty of stuff to criticize in the actual books she actually wrote, without just making stuff up.

The premise of Atlas Shrugged was that there are very few competent CEOs, heads of R&D, operations managers, etc, in a sea of incompetence, and if those rare competent leaders were suddenly out of the picture, the whole economy would collapse.

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[doom]

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?

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[doom]

Claiming that "nobody" was affected by the radiation would be hard to prove, even if you excluded the workers at the plant-- on the other hand, there was an intense amount of alarmism surrounding the Fukushima incident, and that has essentially turned out to be completely wrong. Democracy Now was running "worse than Chernobyl" headlines; for years afterwards I was tyring to convince people in the SF Bay Area that they really and truly weren't going to die because of leakage in Japan...

What did kill people at Fukushima was an evacutation panic. If you're anti-nuclear, you think "well of course, nuclear is inherently scary!", if you're pro-nuclear, you wonder why no one ever holds the anti-nuclear side accountable for their fear-mongering...

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had an even rudimentary understanding of radiation risk and the types of cancers and the typical onset patterns, you'd know that this cancer was almost certainlyl not from Fukushima radiation. There are plenty of articles that explain how this was just some lawyers and politicians following a liability rule, and there were no medical professionals who made this attribution. In fact there are no doctors at all that attribute this to Fukushima radiation.

Basically, the law says anyone who worked at Fukushima and gets cancer, they will attribute it to the plant no matter what.

The foremost expert in field has explicitly explained why this was not based on science.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/06/top-scientist-says-japans-decision-to-financially-reward-fukushima-worker-is-not-based-on-science/#2d6ba6e56a55

But the public is easily misled, as are the media lemmings who copy en-masse without any thought. You can be one of them if you choose.

Re:No One Could Have Predicted the Tsunami

[Anonymous Coward]

If an electrical fault from a faulty appliance burns your house down (but nobody dies because you got out in time), your focus would be on how you don't have a house anymore, not on how nobody died. If your friend kept telling you "But nobody died!, so no big deal!", and ignored your house, you'd want to punch him in the face.

It's just very, very suspicious that all the pro-nuclear people want to talk about is how nobody died in Fukushima, but never seem to mention the 30,000 people who lost their house, business, not to mention the billions of dollars it cost.

You seem to be focusing in on all the initial over-reaction to the incident, but want to ignore the real problems here. I don't think having to abandon little chunks of the planet for 100 years when one of these things melts is really a good outcome for nuclear power. I'm not terribly comforted by how it wasn't as bad as people's worst imaginations.

It's About Time.

[MrKaos]

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.

Re:It's About Time.

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

This disaster illustrates the fatal flaw of nuclear power generation.

It isn't the plants themselves. A nuc plant can be made pretty safe. The problem is humans.

Everything that happened in Fukushima was preventable. From the siting to the design to the seawalls to the back-up system.

But we have deadlines, finances, hubris, corruption and stupidity.

My research on the disaster included a "how could this have been avoided" section. After noting the freely available historical and physical evidence was ignored, it was clear that the site beside the ocean was one of the worst siting options. Further it was possible to come up with a much better site in a few minutes. Along a river, above the historic Tsunami height lines, and therefore much safer.

Why this didn't happen, why seawalls were built that were a dead lock to be overwashed was not the fault of nuclear power, but the results of humans being in charge of it. And it is foolish to think that all nuc plants except Chernobyl and Fukushima or TMI have non-corrupt humans involved.

It all comes to a shitload of energy packed in a small space. With not only kaboom aspects, but using poisonous materials that will take a long time to mitigate if it does go kaboom.

Nuc power can be made safe. History shows us that it is impossible to make humans safe.

Re:It's About Time.

[whoever57]

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.

Re: It's About Time.

[fustakrakich]

Ah, but you can't stop there. You gotta go after anybody who buys their products from them directly, or anybody in their stock portfolio, or pays taxes to a government that protects their copyrights and patents and international trade agreements. Yes, that means you!

Five years

[jd]

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.

"The deaths of so many people"

[scsirob]

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.

Re:"The deaths of so many people"

[cirby]

I find it fascinating how people, when confronted by those silly things called "facts," respond with non-sequiturs.

The actual Fukushima death toll is still zero, no matter how much you hate capitalism.

Re:"The deaths of so many people"

[prisoner-of-enigma]

You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.

Then perhaps you'd be so good as to post a source link for your "news." Every article and news site I've read since the disaster says the death toll directly attributable to the meltdown is zero, precisely as the GP stated.

Should you present evidence from a reliable, unbiased source then I'm more than willing to accept it as fact. However, until then, all the "news" available on the accident refutes your assertion.

In the US

[DaMattster]

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.

Could not have predicted the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

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.