Japan government could have prevented Fukushima meltdown
A year after a huge earthquake and tsunami caused nearly catastrophic meltdowns at a nuclear plant, Japan is still grappling with a crucial question: was the accident simply the result of an unforeseeable natural disaster or something that could have been prevented?
Japan’s nuclear regulators and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, have said that the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 45-foot tsunami on March 11 that knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were far larger than anything that scientists had predicted. That conclusion has allowed the company to argue that it is not responsible for the triple meltdown, which forced the evacuation of about 90,000 people, the New York Times reported.
The CBS News however says that just four hours after a tsunami swept into the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Japan's leaders knew the damage was so severe that the reactors could melt down, but they kept their knowledge secret for months. Five days into the crisis, then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan voiced his fears that it could turn worse than Chernobyl.
The revelations were in documents released Friday, almost a year after the disaster. The minutes of the government's crisis management meetings from March 11 — the day the earthquake and tsunami struck — until late December were not recorded and had to be reconstructed retroactively.
The magnitude of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan's Pacific Coast on March 11, 2011, exceeded the risk profile built into the Fukushima plant, but it was certainly not greater than could have been anticipated, the Globe and Mail reports.
Since then, a number of studies have concluded that the extent of the accident was fundamentally an issue of human error, not an act of God.
The Globe and Mail says that the report that was released this week by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace concluded that the Fukushima accident was preventable. It resulted from a failure of Japanese officials to anticipate a worst-case earthquake and tsunami – in a country frequently rocked by these natural disasters – and to ensure the plants could withstand the impact.