Japan’s worst nuclear accident has exposed the failings of its largest utility Tokyo Electric Power, with patience wearing thin after repeated blunders over the stricken Fukushima plant, say analysts.
Avoidable injuries to workers, erroneous information and a president on sick leave during the company’s biggest crisis have increased scrutiny over operator Tepco’s ability to handle the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
“Tepco has said the accident was beyond what they could have expected, but that’s what crisis management is for,” said Tomohiro Takanashi, chairman of the Crisis and Risk Management Society of Japan, an risk professionals’ group.
“They are supposed to be prepared for the unpredictable”.
Any facility would be stretched if hit by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and a 14-metre wall of water, but Tepco has been accused of ignoring warnings two years ago that its Fukushima Daiichi plant was badly exposed to a tsunami.
The government on Tuesday said the nationalisation of the stricken firm was “an option”, Japanese media reported, underlining its exasperation.
Japan’s twin disasters on March 11 knocked out the cooling systems of the Fukushima plant’s six reactors – triggering explosions and fires, releasing radiation and sparking global fears of a widening disaster.
Radiation from the plant northeast of Tokyo has wafted into the air, contaminating farm produce and drinking water, and seeped into the Pacific Ocean, although officials stress there is no imminent health threat.
One of the world’s biggest power companies, Tepco boasts 44.6 million customers – more than one- third of the population of Japan – in the Kanto region of the main island of Honshu, including Tokyo.
But its president, Masataka Shimizu, 66, has not appeared in public since March 13, and took several days off from a joint emergency taskforce with the government, secluded in his office due to sickness.
Other corporate leaders have weighed in.
“It is very unfortunate that ego and complacency plagued the organisation, which had lost strength to deal with its biggest ever crisis in an urgent manner,” Japan Airlines’ chairman Kazuo Inamori told reporters.
The quality of information Tepco has supplied to the government, the public and even those working round-the-clock at the plant in hazardous conditions has drawn criticism.
Two workers, unidentified men in their 20s and 30s employed by a Tepco subsidiary, were hospitalised last week after stepping in radioactive water that may have leaked from reactor casings or pipes, without full-length boots.
Tepco apologised for not sufficiently briefing the workers. The company said at the time it was not aware water had seeped into the usually dry area.
“The incident of the injured workers typifies the company’s problems when it comes to sharing information,” said Mr Takanashi.
Company officials have often struggled to give satisfactory answers to questions at press conferences. “We will check it,” has become a familiar mantra.
The government criticised as “absolutely unacceptable” erroneous Tepco data that radia-tion in water at the stricken site reached 10 million times the normal level, before correcting it to a still dangerously high level.