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.

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.