Testifying before a Diet committee, a former vice president of the operator of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant acknowledged March 14 that his company’s safety preparations before the Great East Japan Earthquake were inadequate.
Testifying before a Diet committee, a former vice president of the operator of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant acknowledged March 14 that his company’s safety preparations before the Great East Japan Earthquake were inadequate.
Sakae Muto told the Diet committee investigating the Fukushima disaster that Tokyo Electric Power Co. was partly to blame for the nuclear disaster triggered by the March 11 tsunami.
“We caused a big accident that inflicted damage that cannot be recovered. We are sorry for giving serious, long-lasting trouble and pain to people in Fukushima Prefecture and wider society,” he said.
Muto, the first TEPCO executive serving at the time of the disaster to be questioned by the committee, told the session in the Upper House members’ building that TEPCO had failed to anticipate a natural disaster on the scale of March 11.
“We should have been prepared (for possible accidents) with flexible ideas,” he said.
He was working as a vice director of TEPCO’s Nuclear Power and Plant Siting Division four years ago, when the company studied the possibility of a tsunami reaching 15.7 meters high hitting the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
But he admitted that TEPCO had subsequently failed to take sufficient safety measures to deal with such a scenario.
Muto also gave an insight into the confused initial response to the disaster, as TEPCO and the Japanese authorities struggled to coordinate decision-making in the first days of the crisis.
For instance, after TEPCO began to pump seawater to cool the plant’s No. 1 reactor, the explanations given by the company and the government of the decision changed repeatedly.
Then, on the night of March 12 last year, the prime minister’s office instructed TEPCO to suspend the operation. Muto said he thought the instruction came from Naoto Kan, who was prime minister at the time.
“I was not able to understand (why such an instruction was made). But I did not express my objection to the instruction. I thought that we had to stop pumping (the seawater) if we did not have the approval of the prime minister,” Muto said.
Masao Yoshida, the Fukushima plant head, ignored the order and continued pumping into the stricken reactor because he felt it was vital to continue cooling the core to prevent a meltdown.
Muto has subsequently admitted that Yoshida’s decision was appropriate from a technical standpoint, although it violated the chain of command.
Muto also revealed seriously strained relations between Kan and TEPCO, saying that the company’s executives were “scolded in a very harsh tone” by Kan when he visited TEPCO’s head office on March 15.
A video-conferencing system linking the head office with the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant captured footage of Kan’s tumultuous visit, but has no sound track.
Kiyoshi Kurokawa, chairman of the Diet investigation committee, said in a news conference held after Muto’s appearance: “We were able to confirm that TEPCO’s preparations for (possible) accidents were not sufficient.”