A Diet investigative panel concluded that Tokyo Electric Power Co. never planned to withdraw all workers at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
A Diet investigative panel concluded that Tokyo Electric Power Co. never planned to withdraw all workers at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.A key question for the Diet’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission was whether TEPCO wanted to abandon the nuclear plant during a critical stage of the disaster.A number of politicians, including former Prime Minister Naoto Kan, had told the commission that only political intervention prevented TEPCO from carrying out its plan to have all workers flee soon after the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami set the nation’s worst nuclear crisis in motion.However, Masataka Shimizu, who was TEPCO president at the time, vehemently denied on June 8 that the company intended to pull out all its workers when he called government officials on March 14-15.“The basic premise was that we will leave a number of people,” Shimizu told the panel.The Diet commission sided with Shimizu’s argument.“Workers at the plant were battling to contain the crisis,” said Kiyoshi Kurokawa, chairman of the commission. “Not only Shimizu’s accounts, but also our past investigations showed that the electric utility was not considering a full withdrawal.”However, the hearing on June 8 revealed exchanges on the teleconferencing system between TEPCO’s main office in Tokyo and the crippled Fukushima plant on March 14 and March 15 that showed the company was in the process of giving up the recovery efforts and abandoning the plant.At that time, nuclear fuel was melting and hydrogen explosions had caused damage to the buildings housing the reactors.According to the exchanges around 8 p.m. on March 14, someone asked: “Around what time will evacuation of all workers from the site be ready?”Another person sought confirmation of evacuating to TEPCO’s Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant, which was also hit by the tsunami but had shut down properly.“All workers will evacuate to the visitor hall of the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear power plant, is that correct?” the person asked.Shimizu responded in the teleconference, “We have yet to finalize the evacuation.” He also said, “We are in the middle of the process of confirming with the appropriate authority.”Shuya Nomura, a lawyer and member of the Diet investigative panel, asked Shimizu if government officials misunderstood the meaning of “evacuation of all.”“I am afraid so,” Shimizu said.However, The Asahi Shimbun has found that during the exchanges between TEPCO officials, Shimizu himself repeatedly tried to contact Banri Kaieda, then industry minister, over the phone.The newspaper also learned that Tetsuro Ito, deputy chief Cabinet secretary for crisis management and former chief of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department, was told directly by a TEPCO official at the prime minister’s office that the utility wanted to “abandon” the Fukushima No. 1 plant and “eventually withdraw” from the Fukushima No. 2 plant.The Diet’s investigative panel revealed in the June 8 hearing that Shimizu on March 14 ordered officials to come up with a worst-case scenario.TEPCO officials at the Fukushima plant were considering keeping around 10 people there in a worst-case situation.An estimated 700 people were working at the plant at that time, making it extremely difficult or even impossible for a team of around 10 to handle multiple meltdowns at a plant with six reactors.Kaieda briefed Kan about TEPCO’s plan to pull out. After 3 a.m. on March 15, Kan set up a government-TEPCO task force to respond to the accident and stormed into the utility’s headquarters, berating executives and demanding they continue the battle to bring the crisis under control.Kan intended to spearhead the operation by deploying the Self-Defense Forces, police and firefighters to spray water on the reactor buildings.The Diet panel was established to examine if Kan’s approach to the accident was appropriate. However, the panel spent much of the time focused on the expressions "full" or "partial" as well as "withdrawal" or "evacuation."The panel cited a lack of communication between the prime minister’s office and TEPCO for the discrepancies in their statements on whether the company was planning a full or partial withdrawal from the plant.* * *Hideaki Kimura is an Asahi Shimbun staff writer who wrote "