nuclear-news

TEPCO hides nuclear information from politicians and public

Tepco fights to keep nuclear emergency procedures secret, FT.com By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo, October 4, 2011  Six months after the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station, the Japanese utility that owns the plant is fighting to keep its pre-disaster emergency-response procedures a secret from politicians and the public, arguing they contain valuable trade information. Tokyo Electric Power angered members parliamentary committee last month when it handed over manuals outlining steps that its nuclear plant operators are meant to follow in the case of accidents.

All but a few words of the texts were redacted with black ink.

The storm of controversy that followed – one newspaper columnist compared it to wartime censorship – seems not to have softened the company’s stance. This week it asked Japan’s nuclear safety regulator, which had ordered it to resubmit the manuals without redaction, to allow it to keep much of the material secret. So far only the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (Nisa), has seen the originals, which run to thousands of pages. It has not passed them on to the lawmakers who originally requested them.

Tepco has told Nisa that if the manuals are to be made public, 90 per cent of the content related to “severe accidents” such as that at Fukushima should be kept under black ink. “The manuals contain knowhow that we have built up over a long period of operation,” a company spokesman said on Tuesday…. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2dc211b0-ee78-11e0-a2ed-00144feab49a.html#axzz1a2EVqNGT

October 6, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, secrets,lies and civil liberties