A few hours ago, a parliamentary inquiry into the Fukushima tragedy released its final report. It declared last year's accident was almost entirely man-made. It also suggested that the plant may have sustained considerable damage from the earthquake that led up to the tsunami.
The report, released by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, also warned that the plant may have been damaged by the earthquake on March 11, 2011, even before the arrival of a tsunami — a worrying assertion as the quake-prone country starts to bring its reactor fleet back online.
The commission challenged some of the main story lines that the government and the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has put forward to explain what went wrong in the early days of the crisis.
“It was a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented. And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response,” Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the commission’s chairman and the former head of Tokyo University’s Department of Medicine, said in the report’s introduction.
The report, viewable
here, concluded there was substantial evidence quake damage knocked out the plant's cooling system before the tsunami arrived half an hour later. It also contends that the government, nuclear regulators and plant operator Tokyo Electric failed to implement basic safety measures to guard against earthquakes. For instance, the country's Nuclear Safety Commission beefed up earthquake safety standards in 2006 and ordered extensive inspections--but Tokyo Electric didn't carry them out, and regulators didn't see to it that they did.
The report also contends that Tokyo Electric deliberately lobbied regulators to make nuclear safety rules less stringent, thus violating "the nation's right to safety from nuclear accidents." At bottom, the report said, the disaster is the product of a culture in Japan that is unwilling to tolerate challenges to authority. If not for that, the report argues, there might have been more willingness to write tougher regulations for the country's nuclear plants.
The report casts a good measure of blame on the government as well. There was no real evacuation plan in place at the time, and many residents living within six miles of the plant didn't know what had happened for 12 hours. It's not quite like Chernobyl, where no announcements were made until two days after the accident. But it's still absolutely breathtaking.
The report seems to give ammunition to citizens' groups who have called for Tokyo Electric officials to be censured or brought up on criminal charges. Commission chairman Kyoshi Kurokawa said in a press conference that criminal prosecution is outside the commission's scope, but it was definitely "a matter for others to pursue." Considering that by the looks of it, this was entirely preventable, criminal charges may not be completely out of line here.