If taxpayer money is used to deal with the contaminated water problem at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government should consider having Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant's operator, go bankrupt or nationalizing it, Sumio Mabuchi, who served as an aide to the prime minister on the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, told The Asahi Shimbun in a recent interview.
If taxpayer money is used to deal with the contaminated water problem at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government should consider having Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant's operator, go bankrupt or nationalizing it, Sumio Mabuchi, who served as an aide to the prime minister on the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, told The Asahi Shimbun in a recent interview.
Mabuchi, 53, is a lawmaker of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which was in power when the nuclear accident unfolded in March 2011 following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
The leakage of water contaminated with radioactive materials at the crippled Fukushima plant is becoming serious. To solve the problem, the government, now led by the Liberal Democratic Party, is considering measures with TEPCO, including a costly project of constructing a frozen soil wall around reactor and turbine buildings to prevent groundwater from flowing into them. Excerpts from the interview follow:
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Then, I checked the data for the years starting in 1971 when the nuclear plant started operations. As a result, I found the fact that groundwater repeatedly flowed into the buildings of the No. 1 to No. 4 reactors, and TEPCO conducted work to stop the inflow. I felt that the buildings were standing in the path of the groundwater flow. I studied four kinds of impermeable walls, and adopted one in which four sides of the area of the buildings are dug to the clay layer at a depth of 30 meters, and walls made of clay-like materials will be constructed to that depth, like a (huge) square bathtub.
Sakae Muto, then TEPCO executive vice president, told Kaieda, “Please allow us to announce that we will implement (only) research on the impermeable wall.” I accepted Muto’s proposal because he promised that TEPCO would implement (construction of the impermeable wall) without delay.