NHK has learned that the operator of the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima plans to sign an agreement with a French organization to obtain the necessary technology to decommission the facilities.
Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, will initially focus on decontaminating the areas around the reactor containment vessels.
The removal of molten nuclear fuel will be the toughest challenge in the decontamination process because of the extremely high radiation levels.
TEPCO plans to obtain technical knowhow from the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, or CEA, which is funded by the French government. The French organization has expertise in dismantling aged nuclear reactors and fuel-reprocessing facilities.
Sources say that under the agreement, the CEA will help TEPCO to develop remote-controlled robots that can withstand high radiation levels.
The CEA will also help with training workers and TEPCO will provide data for the decommissioning process.
This will be TEPCO’s second agreement with a foreign organization. Last year, it signed a pact with a British company to address the buildup of contaminated water.
Japan’s reform of its energy market is proving a boon to investors in the company at the center of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant disaster.
Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s shares have surged 59 percent in the six months through Tuesday’s close, making it the best performer on the Nikkei 225 Stock Average and the 174-member Bloomberg World Utilities Index.
Tepco, owner of the wrecked plant, is seen as an early beneficiary of government-backed power reform. By April, residential power customers will be able to choose their provider for the first time. And by 2020, utilities will be required to separate their transmission, distribution and retail businesses.
“Looking towards the electricity market reform to be completed by 2020, a company the size of Tepco is an attractive investment,” Mana Nakazora, an analyst at BNP Paribas Securities (Japan) Ltd., said by email.
While the company’s stock price has surged this year, it is still less than half of where it was before the Fukushima disaster. The shares fell 3.1 percent to ¥751 at the close of Tokyo trading on Tuesday. They closed at ¥2,153 the day before Fukushima, but have increased 55 percent since Tepco announced on May 1 that it will transition to a holding company beginning in April.
Tepco was rated new overweight on Tuesday with a target price of ¥1,000 a share by Yuji Nishiyama, an analyst at JPMorgan Securities Japan Co.
Spokesman Tatsuhiro Yamagishi declined to comment on the performance of the company’s stock.
For Tepco, a more open energy market in Japan offers the opportunity for growth at a company whose survival was in question just a few years ago. The Fukushima disaster put it on the verge of default, with the head of Japan’s biggest stock market telling the company to file for bankruptcy protection. Tepco was saved by a ¥1 trillion infusion from the government in 2012, the nation’s largest bailout since the 1990s.
The power company received ¥5.61 trillion from the state-backed Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corp. to deal with payouts to victims of the Fukushima meltdown, Tepco reported last month.
Under the April reorganization, Tepco’s nuclear operations will be placed into a holding company, while debt investors will be repaid from the funds of a spun-off power grid company.
Tepco’s probability of debt nonpayment has dropped to 0.309 percent from about 1.121 percent on Oct. 16, according to the Bloomberg default-risk model, which considers factors such as share prices and debt. The probability of debt nonpayment was as high as 6.156 percent in 2012.
“The company’s default risk has disappeared,” said BNP Paribas’s Nakazora.
The government’s power reform began this year with the creation of an organization to manage the nation’s supply and demand balance. Next year’s full retail liberalization, the second stage of the reform, will allow utilities to more freely expand outside their traditional regions. The government aims to remove rate regulations by 2020.
A drop in fuel costs saw Tepco increase operating profit threefold in the quarter ended June 30. The price of liquefied natural gas imported into Japan fell to a six-year low in June, while crude oil prices are near a record low.
“Investors expected first-quarter profits to have a big increase due to the drop in oil then liquefied natural gas,” Syusaku Nishikawa, a Tokyo-based analyst at Daiwa Securities Co., said by email.
Yet challenges remain. Liabilities related to the Fukushima disaster and Tepco’s responsibilities will continue to pressure the company’s credit quality in the long term, according to Mariko Semetko, a vice president at Moody’s Japan K.K., which rates the company’s outlook as negative.
Tepco, which operates the world’s biggest nuclear plant by capacity at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility in Niigata Prefecture, has yet to restart any of its nuclear reactors. Resuming operations at the facility would boost profit by as much as ¥32 billion a month, the company has said.
“The recent improvements in profitability are definitely a plus,” Semetko said by phone. “But the company hasn’t yet started its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant and there are a lot of uncertainties around costs related to Fukushima. With all of that in mind, we haven’t been able to stabilize the outlook yet.”
IWAKI: Four and a half years after the Fukushima disaster, and as Japan tentatively restarts nuclear power elsewhere, the legal challenges are mounting for the crippled plant’s operator.They include a judge’s forced disclosure of a 2008 internal document prepared for managers at Tokyo Electric Power Co warning of a need for precautions against an unprecedented nuclear catastrophe.
Also, class actions against Tepco and the government now have more plaintiffs than any previous Japanese contamination suit and, overruling reluctant prosecutors, criminal charges have been leveled against former Tepco executives for failing to take measures to prevent the 2011 meltdowns and explosions.
Radiation from the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986 forced 160,000 people from their homes, many never to return, and destroyed businesses, fisheries and agriculture.The criminal and civil legal cases do not threaten financial ruin for Tepco, which is now backstopped by Japanese taxpayers and faces far bigger costs to decommission the Fukushima plant and clean up the surrounding areas.
Rather, the cases could further increase opposition to nuclear restarts – which consistently beats support by about two-to-one – as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government pushes to restore nuclear to Japan’s energy mix to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuel.
“The nuclear plant disaster has upended our way of life,” evacuee and former beekeeper Takahisa Ogawa, 45, testified recently in a court in Iwaki, near the Fukushima power station. “We’ve lost the support we counted on.”
Ogawa and other plaintiffs are seeking 20 million yen ($160,000) each in damages from Tepco. More than 10,000 evacuees and nearby residents have brought at least 20 lawsuits against the utility and the government over the handling of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant 220 km (130 miles) north of Tokyo.
The biggest class action, with 4,000 plaintiffs, seeks to dramatically increase Tepco’s liability by proving negligence under Japan’s civil law, rather than simply proving harm and seeking compensation, said lead attorney Izutaro Managi.
Japan recently approved increasing the amount of compensation payments through a government-run fund to 7 trillion yen ($56 billion).
Prosecutors twice declined to charge former Tepco bosses over their handling of the disaster, citing a lack of evidence, but a citizens’ panel overruled them last month. It’s unlikely the three former executives, who will be summoned to give evidence in court, will be convicted as it is hard to prove criminal acts in this type of case, said Nicholes Benes of The Board Director Training Institute of Japan.A first trial is not expected to start until next year at the earliest.
The legal actions against Tepco are “serious for the industry” as it seeks to gradually bring some of Japan’s 43 idled nuclear reactors back online, said Tom O’Sullivan, an independent energy consultant and former investment banker.
“With potentially up to 25 reactors coming online, board members of other electric power companies must be quite nervous about what could happen if something goes wrong,” he said. “Most reactors have been switched off for four years so switching them back on is going to be potentially problematic, not to mention the risk of natural disasters.”
It’s unclear what bearing the various lawsuits against Tepco might have on one another, but a common thread is that it should have anticipated the possibility of a devastating quake and tsunami and taken steps to reduce the impact.The company maintains that the severity of the 9.0 magnitude quake and 13-meter wave could not have been predicted.
But the document introduced as evidence in the shareholders’ suit after a judge forced Tepco to produce it, appears to challenge that. The “Tsunami Measures Unavoidable” report, dated September 2008, was filed with the Tokyo District Court in June, but has not been widely reported.
The unnamed authors prepared the report for a meeting attended by the head of the power station and marked the document “to be collected after discussion.” It’s not clear whether senior executives in Tokyo saw the report at the time.
The report called for Tepco to prepare for a worse tsunami than it previously assumed, based on experts’ views.
“Considering that it is difficult to completely reject the opinions given thus far of academic experts on earthquakes and tsunami, as well as the expertise of the (government’s) Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion, it is unavoidable to have tsunami countermeasures that assume a higher tsunami than at present,” says the report.
“This is prime evidence that Tepco recognized the need for tsunami measures,” said Hiroyuki Kawai, lead attorney in the shareholders’ suit. “This will have an important impact on the lawsuit.”
Tepco, in a court filing, counters that the document “does not mean there was a risk that a tsunami would strike and did not assume any specific tsunami countermeasures.”
Asked to comment further on the internal report and the range of legal problems facing the company, Tepco spokesman Kohji Sakakibara told Reuters, “We cannot answer these questions because they pertain to lawsuits and because they suppose a hypothetical determination of negligence. However, the company is making appropriate assertions in the lawsuits and expects that in the end the courts will render fair judgments.”
The shareholder lawsuit, filed in March 2012, seeks to establish responsibility for the disaster and demands 5.5 trillion yen ($44 billion) in damages from current and former executives. A verdict is not expected for at least a year.
“This is likely to become a long battle where lawsuits go on for several decades or half a century,” said Shunichi Teranishi, a professor emeritus of environmental economics at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, comparing it to the Minamata mercury poisoning disaster in the 1950s, where lawsuits continue to be filed to this day.
Tokyo Electric Power Company in Japan said it was restructuring the company, creating three businesses that continue with its 2014 separation of its nuclear businesses from its non-nuclear concerns.
As from 1 April 2016, Tepco said, the company will spin off its fuel and thermal power generation business into a company called TEPCO Fuel and Power, Incorporated. Its distribution and transmission business will become TEPCO Power Grid Incorporated. Its retail electricity business will be spun off as TEPCO Energy Partner Incorporated.
Tepco said it was making the major structural changes to survive in the post-Fukushima Daiichi reality. The new brand “signifies [the company’s] … determination to survive in the midst of competition while fulfilling its responsibilities for the Fukushima nuclear accident,” the company said.
“Japan’s electricity market is entering a period of dramatic change. Full liberalization of the electricity retail market is scheduled for April 2016, and the law requires separation of electricity transmission and distribution functions from the retail business in 2020.
“The changes in TEPCO’s company structure anticipate these changes and prepare it to succeed in the new, competitive environment, while serving its customers with a stable supply of electricity and full retention of its responsibilities not only for Fukushima but also for safety and reliability throughout its business,” the company said in a statement.
The company has already been effectively nationalized in the post-Fukushima era. The company’s 10-year plan allowed the government 51 percent of the company in exchange for $8 billion in government funding. Last year, in 2014, it restructured to form a separate division that would focus on decommissioning at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant where three reactors suffered meltdowns after a tsunami event that followed the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
Four and a half years after the Fukushima disaster, and as Japan tentatively restarts nuclear power elsewhere, the legal challenges are mounting for the crippled plant’s operator.
IWAKI, Japan: Four and a half years after the Fukushima disaster, and as Japan tentatively restarts nuclear power elsewhere, the legal challenges are mounting for the crippled plant’s operator.
They include a judge’s forced disclosure of a 2008 internal document prepared for managers at Tokyo Electric Power Co warning of a need for precautions against an unprecedented nuclear catastrophe.
Also, class actions against Tepco and the government now have more plaintiffs than any previous Japanese contamination suit and, overruling reluctant prosecutors, criminal charges have been levelled against former Tepco executives for failing to take measures to prevent the 2011 meltdowns and explosions.
Radiation from the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986 forced 160,000 people from their homes, many never to return, and destroyed businesses, fisheries and agriculture.
The criminal and civil legal cases do not threaten financial ruin for Tepco, which is now backstopped by Japanese taxpayers and faces far bigger costs to decommission the Fukushima plant and clean up the surrounding areas.
Rather, the cases could further increase opposition to nuclear restarts – which consistently beats support by about two-to-one – as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government pushes to restore nuclear to Japan’s energy mix to reduce reliance on imported fossil fuel.
“The nuclear plant disaster has upended our way of life,” evacuee and former beekeeper Takahisa Ogawa, 45, testified recently in a court in Iwaki, near the Fukushima power station. “We’ve lost the support we counted on.”
PROVING NEGLIGENCE
Ogawa and other plaintiffs are seeking 20 million yen (US$160,000) each in damages from Tepco. More than 10,000 evacuees and nearby residents have brought at least 20 lawsuits against the utility and the government over the handling of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant 220 km (130 miles) north of Tokyo.
The biggest class action, with 4,000 plaintiffs, seeks to dramatically increase Tepco’s liability by proving negligence under Japan’s civil law, rather than simply proving harm and seeking compensation, said lead attorney Izutaro Managi.
Japan recently approved increasing the amount of compensation payments through a government-run fund to 7 trillion yen (US$56 billion).
Prosecutors twice declined to charge former Tepco bosses over their handling of the disaster, citing a lack of evidence, but a citizens’ panel overruled them last month. It’s unlikely the three former executives, who will be summoned to give evidence in court, will be convicted as it is hard to prove criminal acts in this type of case, said Nicholes Benes of The Board Director Training Institute of Japan.
A first trial is not expected to start until next year at the earliest.
The legal actions against Tepco are “serious for the industry” as it seeks to gradually bring some of Japan’s 43 idled nuclear reactors back online, said Tom O’Sullivan, an independent energy consultant and former investment banker.
“With potentially up to 25 reactors coming online, board members of other electric power companies must be quite nervous about what could happen if something goes wrong,” he said. “Most reactors have been switched off for four years so switching them back on is going to be potentially problematic, not to mention the risk of natural disasters.”
“UNAVOIDABLE”
It’s unclear what bearing the various lawsuits against Tepco might have on one another, but a common thread is that it should have anticipated the possibility of a devastating quake and tsunami and taken steps to reduce the impact.
The company maintains that the severity of the 9.0 magnitude quake and 13-meter wave could not have been predicted.
But the document introduced as evidence in the shareholders’ suit after a judge forced Tepco to produce it, appears to challenge that. The “Tsunami Measures Unavoidable” report, dated September 2008, was filed with the Tokyo District Court in June, but has not been widely reported.
The unnamed authors prepared the report for a meeting attended by the head of the power station and marked the document “to be collected after discussion.” It’s not clear whether senior executives in Tokyo saw the report at the time.
The report called for Tepco to prepare for a worse tsunami than it previously assumed, based on experts’ views.
“Considering that it is difficult to completely reject the opinions given thus far of academic experts on earthquakes and tsunami, as well as the expertise of the (government’s) Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion, it is unavoidable to have tsunami countermeasures that assume a higher tsunami than at present,” says the report.
“This is prime evidence that Tepco recognised the need for tsunami measures,” said Hiroyuki Kawai, lead attorney in the shareholders’ suit. “This will have an important impact on the lawsuit.”
Tepco, in a court filing, counters that the document “does not mean there was a risk that a tsunami would strike and did not assume any specific tsunami countermeasures.”
Asked to comment further on the internal report and the range of legal problems facing the company, Tepco spokesman Kohji Sakakibara told Reuters, “We cannot answer these questions because they pertain to lawsuits and because they suppose a hypothetical determination of negligence. However, the company is making appropriate assertions in the lawsuits and expects that in the end the courts will render fair judgements.”
The shareholder lawsuit, filed in March 2012, seeks to establish responsibility for the disaster and demands 5.5 trillion yen (US$44 billion) in damages from current and former executives. A verdict is not expected for at least a year.
“This is likely to become a long battle where lawsuits go on for several decades or half a century,” said Shunichi Teranishi, a professor emeritus of environmental economics at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, comparing it to the Minamata mercury poisoning disaster in the 1950s, where lawsuits continue to be filed to this day.
For the second time, the Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution has rejected an earlier decision by prosecutors not to indict the three, setting the stage for the forced prosecution of these three individuals.
They will be accused of professional negligence resulting in the deaths of people who were in hospitals when the disaster happened and other tragedies.
A report issued by the Diet’s Fukushima nuclear accident investigation committee states, “It is clear that the accident was a man-made disaster.”
But no government officials or TEPCO employees have been punished, either politically or administratively. In other words, no one has been held accountable for the nation’s worst nuclear accident.
Many Japanese citizens still feel that justice has not been meted out with regard to that harrowing disaster. Many are also concerned that a similar accident may occur again if nobody is held responsible for what happened in 2011.
A second decision by the independent judicial panel of citizens to demand the criminal prosecution of the three former TEPCO executives should be viewed as indicative of the disturbing and disquieting feelings among many citizens.
The system of forced indictment through the judgment of citizens was introduced in 2009, along with the “saiban-in” citizen judge system. Until that time, public prosecutors monopolized the power to decide whether to indict a suspect. The new system is intended to ensure that public opinion is reflected in the process of criminal prosecution, at least to a certain degree.
In reversing public prosecutors’ decision not to indict the suspects on grounds that there is no compelling case for holding them liable for negligence, the panel of citizens made a grave decision to force trials of the three individuals.
The court should, of course, consider carefully and fairly whether the former TEPCO executives should be held liable for the misfortunes of disaster victims from the viewpoint of evidence submitted.
At the same time, one question that needs to be asked is how TEPCO implemented measures to protect the nuclear plant from a possible tsunami and ensure the plant’s safety.
Collectively, the trials will offer a great opportunity to take a fresh look into the accident from a perspective that is different from those of the investigation committees set up by the government and the Diet.
There have not been many opportunities for people to talk about the disaster in public. But the three former TEPCO executives will probably be given opportunities to speak in the courtroom. The court can also order submission of specific pieces of evidence.
Future public debate on issues concerning nuclear power generation will benefit greatly if the trials uncover unknown facts in the process, such as chronological changes in the utility’s decisions concerning safety measures for its nuclear power plants and the ways the government and other public organizations influenced the company’s policy.
The nation’s judiciary has a long history of handing down rulings related to nuclear power generation. But in most of the past cases concerning the construction and operations of nuclear power plants, the courts ruled against opposing local residents.
The question is whether all these court rulings in favor of nuclear power were influenced in any way by the perception that there is no way to stop the expansion of electricity production with atomic energy based on the government’s energy policy.
The judiciary’s attitude to nuclear power generation has also been called into question by the accident.
In considering the criminal liabilities related to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which has caused an unprecedented scale of damage, are the traditional criteria, like “specific predictability,” sufficiently effective?
The trials should prompt the judicial community to have more in-depth debate on this question.
We strongly hope the trials will be conducted in a way that lives up to people’s confidence in the judicial system.
(Left to right) Former Tepco Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata and former vice presidents Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro.
Three former top executives at Tokyo Electric Power Co. are set to be hauled into court over their alleged responsibility for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis.
The Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution voted Friday that Tsunehisa Katsumata, chairman of Tepco at the time of the disaster, and two former vice presidents, Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro, should be indicted for professional negligence resulting in death and injury.
The announcement by the panel of citizens came more than four years after the massive tsunami of March 11, 2011, knocked out the critical cooling functions at Tepco’s Fukushima No. 1 plant, leading to three of the six reactors there melting down.
Prosecutors have twice previously decided not to seek such indictments, saying Tepco could not have expected such a massive tsunami to hit the nuclear plant and cripple its critical safety systems.
But on Friday the committee overrode the prosecutors’ decisions for a second time, which will lead to a compulsory indictment of the three Tepco executives. They were all responsible for major disaster prevention planning.
Holding a news conference at the Tokyo District Court, representatives of a group of Fukushima residents and others who have filed criminal complaints against the executives said they were elated.
“I want (the Tepco executives) to tell the truth” during the upcoming trials, said Ruiko Muto.
Muto said many elderly people who evacuated from the radiation-contaminated areas have since died in shelters away from their hometowns, while numerous people still living in Fukushima are being exposed to radiation via contaminated materials from the heavily damaged plant.
Muto said many people outside the prefecture have the impression that the nuclear crisis is over.
“If who should be held responsible is not made clear, (the dead) victims won’t rest in peace,” she added.
Before the catastrophe, Tepco had conducted simulations and concluded that critical facilities at Fukushima No. 1 would be flooded and critically damaged if a major earthquake struck off the Tohoku coast and tsunami of more than 10 meters in height hit the plant.
But prosecutors concluded that it was impossible for Tepco to predict such gigantic tsunami would actually hit the plant, as opinions from quake experts were not established regarding the possibility of such a powerful quake.
The judicial review committee said the Tepco executives were obliged to prepare for a worst-case scenario even if the possibility of such a disaster was considered very small.
The simulations provided a good indication that a major crisis was possible, but the three neglected their obligation to prepare for such an eventuality, the committee concluded in a 30-page document explaining its decision.
The panel pointed out that 44 patients who were forced to evacuate from a hospital located 4.5 km from Fukushima No. 1 died after their health conditions deteriorated because of the move. The committee alleged that their deaths were caused by the meltdown crisis.
Meanwhile, no health damage has so far been confirmed to have been caused by radiation from contaminated materials released from the plant.
The committee said one person who was exposed to radiation from contaminated materials has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, but a causal link with the meltdown disaster has not been established.
The central government is preparing to allow the reactivation of some commercial reactors suspended in the wake of the Fukushima crisis.
Muto said she hopes the findings in the upcoming trials will prompt a change in the national nuclear policy and lead to the abolition of all nuclear power plants.
Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company will face mandatory indictment over the March 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
Nobody has been held criminally responsible so far for Japan’s worst nuclear accident.
The prosecution inquest panel of randomly-selected citizens voted for the indictment on Friday, disagreeing for a 2nd time with prosecutors who had dismissed the complaint filed against the officials. The prosecutors said the officials could not have predicted a quake and tsunami on the scale of the March 11th disasters.
The decision leads to the mandatory indictment of former TEPCO chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata and former vice presidents Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro for professional negligence resulting in death and injury.
Court-appointed lawyers will act as prosecutors in the trial.
In its decision, the panel said TEPCO should have taken measures to protect the plant from tsunami and flood-triggered serious accidents after it had made a projection of a 15.7-meter tsunami hitting the plant.
The panel said TEPCO could have foreseen that in a worst-case scenario, flooding would result in a massive release of radioactive substances or other severe situations. The panel said that if TEPCO had taken appropriate precautions, a serious accident like the one in March 2011 could have been avoided.
Prosecutors in 2013 dismissed the initial complaints filed by Fukushima residents and others against more than 30 former TEPCO officials for failing to take precautions against major quakes and tsunami.
The case was taken up for reconsideration by the inquest panel, which decided in July last year that the three officials should be indicted.
But prosecutors dismissed the case again in January, sending it back to the inquest panel.
Residents hail indictment decision
The leader of the residents, Ruiko Muto, has praised the panel’s decision.
Muto said she believes a court will determine who was responsible for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and give a fair judgment.
She said that 110,000 people are still unable to return to their homes. She added that having the former executives face a criminal trial will help prevent a recurrence and create a society in which people can live in peace.
The residents’ lawyer, Hiroyuki Kawai, also said that if the former officials had escaped indictment, the real cause of the accident would have been covered up forever.
He expressed hope that the trial will find out more about what caused the nuclear accident.
TEPCO declined to comment on the decision or the criminal complaint that led to it.
But it said in a statement that it wants to renew its heartfelt apology to the people of Fukushima and many others for causing trouble and concern.
The firm said it will do its utmost for compensation, plant decommissioning and decontamination, based on the principle of seeking reconstruction of Fukushima. It added that it is fully resolved to improving the safety of nuclear power plants.
Hey Tepco. You have made steady profits since 2012 when the Taxpayers bailed you out. How about you spend that money and DO something about your 3 melting reactors? Or give it to the hundreds of thousands of people whos lives you have totally destroyed. No. That would be the proper thing to do. Can’t have that.
Tepco is making steady profits since 2012 while still receiving money from the Japanese Government, shouldered by the Japanese Taxpayers:
Japan approves increase in Fukushima compensation to $57 billion
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan on Tuesday approved an increase in compensation payments for the Fukushima crisis to 7.07 trillion yen ($57.18 billion), as tens of thousands of evacuees remain in temporary housing more than four years after the disaster.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the operator of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station, will receive 950 billion yen more in public funds on top of the 6.125 trillion agreed earlier, the utility and the government said.
Tepco’s Quarterly Profit Triples as Fuel Prices Plunge
Tokyo Electric Power Co., operator of the wrecked Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, said first-quarter operating profit tripled as a drop in fuel prices helped cut costs.
Tepco, as Japan’s biggest utility is known, posted an operating profit of 228.3 billion yen ($1.85 billion) for the three months ended June 30, compared with 70.7 billion yen a year ago, the company said in a statement Wednesday.
The company benefited from a more than 45 percent plunge in liquefied natural gas prices after crude oil fell to a record low. More than a third of Tepco’s power generation capacity comes from LNG, compared with 14 percent from oil and 8 percent from coal.
Factoring in the impact of a weaker yen, the plunge in oil prices alone boosted current profit by 276 billion yen, Tepco said.
“With the drop in the price of crude and a minimization of costs, the operating profit is in the black for the second year in a row,” the company said in the statement.
Fuel Spending
Tepco spent 35 percent less on LNG purchases in the first quarter, while consumption of the fuel fell by 5 percent. The company’s spending on crude oil rose by 7.5 percent, while its use was up 25 percent, the company said.
The utility’s purchases of coal rose 4.9 percent to 1.75 million metric tons, resulting in a 3.9 percent increase in spending on the fuel.
Indonesia was Tepco’s largest crude supplier last year, while Australia was the top coal provider.
Total sales dipped 1.1 percent to 1.55 trillion yen as the company generated 6 percent less capacity in the quarter.
Japan’s power consumption dropped 1.8 percent in the quarter from a year earlier, the fifth straight quarterly decline, to 189 terawatt hours, according to industry figures. That’s the lowest quarterly use since 2000.
With Tepco struggling to win approval to restart its nuclear reactors, the drop in fuel costs provides relief.
In June, the price of LNG imported into Japan dropped to $7.60 per million British thermal units, the lowest level in two years. Power utilities with a high ratio of LNG will see an increase in profits, Syusaku Nishikawa, an analyst at Daiwa Securities Co., said by e-mail.
Tepco’s first-quarter net income was 203.3 billion yen, compared with a net loss of 173 billion yen a year ago. The company’s net income is influenced by costs related to the payout to those affected by the Fukushima nuclear accident more than four years ago.
FUKUSHIMA–Tokyo Electric Power Co. has been ordered to pay 27 million yen ($219,500) in compensation to the bereaved family of a male evacuee who committed suicide after being displaced due to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Presiding Judge Naoyuki Shiomi of the Fukushima District Court ruled on June 30 that the main reason Kiichi Isozaki, 67, from Namie, near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, killed himself was “stress related to the nuclear accident.”
It was the second time a court in Japan has deemed that the Fukushima accident was responsible for an evacuee’s suicide.
Shiomi ruled that Isozaki lost the “foundation of his life” when he had to evacuate from his hometown, where he had spent most of his life and enjoyed fishing and home gardening after retirement.
The judge concluded that the prolonged evacuation and economic insecurity about his future added to his anxiety and triggered depression.
Isozaki’s 66-year-old wife, Eiko, and two other family members sued the utility, demanding 87 million yen in compensation.
Isozaki and his family fled from their home on March 12, 2011, the day after the nuclear crisis unfolded at the plant following the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, according to a court statement.
They took refuge in a shelter set up at a high school gym in Koriyama, also in Fukushima Prefecture, about 60 kilometers from their home, on March 13.
Isozaki complained about being unable to sleep there and also lost his appetite.
About a month later, the family moved to an apartment in Nihonmatsu in the same prefecture.
Isozaki’s health began deteriorating again around the middle of June, and he often expressed a desire to return home.
His body was discovered in a river in Iitate, a village in the prefecture, in July. Police believe that he jumped from a nearby bridge.
The central issue of the lawsuit was whether his suicide was related to the nuclear accident.
“Isozaki committed suicide after developing depression while evacuating from the area of the nuclear accident,” one of the family members testified in court.
But TEPCO claimed, “Isozaki was already suffering anxiety and stress since he had diabetes.”
In the first compensation judgment, the utility was ordered to pay about 49 million yen to the family of an evacuee from Kawamata who killed herself in July 2011. The ruling was made by the same court last August.
The evacuee, 58, had set herself ablaze while on a visit back to her home.
On that occasion the utility decided not to appeal the ruling, and senior TEPCO officials apologized to the family of the deceased.
Source : Asahi Shimbun http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201506300079
Recall children’s books with dots and numbers? Children connect the dots to reveal pictures of clowns and puppies and spaceships and such.
TEPCO is essentially painting pictures using very few dots with no numbers. They keep running computer studies that put numbers almost randomly on the few dots they have to see what picture emerges. “Lo and behold” to quote a professor I had in college, different pictures emerge.
TEPCO doesn’t know when the Unit 3 core damage began
Or how much of the reactor core was damaged.
Or how and when the damaged core relocated after melting.
Or how, when, and where the molten burned through the reactor pressure vessel.
Or how it moved after it fell onto the containment’s concrete floor.
And they don’t know how much water, if any, was on the containment floor when the molten core joined it.
TEPCO fills in these information gaps with guesses. And they keep revising their results because they keep revising their guesses.
Our Takeaway
I choose not to play rate-a-guess. It would take me away from helping my nephew finish his connect-the-dots drawing. Only seven numbers remain to be connected. While it resembles a race car now, it might yet turn out to be a giraffe. Or maybe even a kitten.
Before I decide which TEPCO picture I most prefer, they are going to have to fetch more dots and put real numbers on as many of them as possible.
At some point in the next few years, TEPCO will maneuver a robot into the reactor area. That will reveal what the former reactor core looks like now. This information won’t answer all the questions, but it’ll number several more dots to support a meaningful analysis of what happened when.
Until then, TEPCO is just keeping their computer jockeys busy. They could get results of similar value using Ouija boards—and it would reduce their carbon footprint.
October 28, 2014
TEPCO has hidden the truth about the Fukushima nuclear disaster and now drip feeds information so the public can get ready for the next piece of bad news, James Corbett, editor, The Corbett report, told RT’s In the Now show.
Journalist Jun Hori has quit NHK, the Japanese state broadcaster saying that his network restricted what he could say about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and moved more slowly than others to report how far the radiation was spreading. RT:Has TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) gotten away with hiding information from the public? James Corbett: TEPCO has lied obfuscated and covered up the truth about what they knew about, or know about what is going on at sites since day one. And of course this goes back to the very beginning of the disaster when they knew within 72 hours that three of the reactors at the Fukushima No.1 plant site were in full melt down. In fact that they did not reveal to the public for almost three months after that event took place. And from there it only continues. We have cover-ups about the amount of radiation that has been released. TEPCO had to revise its original estimate up 250%. We have had cover up of the fact that there was and continues to be 300 tons of radioactive water flooding through the site. That wasn’t really revealed to the public until the summer of 2013, two years after the event took place. Cover-up after cover-up continuously being revealed and only very much later after the fact. I think TEPCO certainly has gotten away with an awful lot. Their practice seems to be, I am not sure if this is a coordinated strategy, but it certainly seems to be that it reveals information in dribs and drabs over long periods of time so that the public has time to be acclimatized to the last piece of bad news before the next one hits them.
RT:How tight is TEPCO with the Japanese government? JC: Technically TEPCO has now been nationalized with the Japanese government being the largest stakeholder. So there is a direct Japanese government stake in the company. That is obviously a situation which creates a type of direct relationship between the company and the government in which obviously the interest of the government and interest of the company are directly tied financially. It creates a very worrying situation and the government has attempted to reform the nuclear regulatory agency here in Japan and attempted to set up a separate division of TEPCO for taking care of decontamination of the sites specifically. But arm’s length institutions or agencies like that are supposed to have oversight over this process aren’t really anything more than just a buffer between what is essentially the same thing now: the Japanese government/ TEPCO which are really wedded at the hip. RT:Are you suggesting that the revelations from this disaster and the implications have not really caused tougher control over the industry? JC: They certainly haven’t it at this point. In fact, what we have seen is the shutdown of all of the other reactors in the country for maintenance and none of those reactors have been turned on as of now. What we are seeing right now is that the struggle that is taking place between protesters and the Japanese government over the restart of those reactors. What has taken place since Fukushima has been the renewal of guidelines regarding safety measures for some of these plants. But there is a lot of concern that these measures that are now being used as the guidelines for whether or not a plant is within the safe operating limits – [are] equally as flimsy as those regulations that allowed the Fukushima plant to operate in the incredibly precarious position that it was operating in. There is still a lot of concern over the nuclear regulatory agency here and the fact that a lot of the members have taken outright bribes of various sorts from the nuclear industry. It seems that the long standing ties between the nuclear industry and the Japanese government here in Japan hasn’t really been shaken and they continue to have … influence over the Japanese government’s policy on nuclear energy.
Source: RT http://rt.com/op-edge/200107-fukushima-japan-tepco-nuclear-disaster/
Onagawa town assembly member Mikiko Abe stands against the backdrop
of Tohoku Electric Power Co.’s Onagawa nuclear power plant.
October 18, 2014
POINT OF VIEW/ Mikiko Abe:
ONAGAWA, Miyagi Prefecture–As an opponent of atomic energy, I have watched this town for more than four decades–from before Tohoku Electric Power Co. began constructing the Onagawa nuclear power plant here.
It is my hope that our town can stand on its own without the massive subsidies associated with the installation of nuclear reactors and fixed asset taxes paid by the power utility. It’s not about asking if we can revert to that state of things. I believe we have to do it now.
I live in temporary housing because my home was swept away by the tsunami generated by the Great East Japan Earthquake.
I was elected to the town assembly eight months after the March 2011 disaster, which claimed the lives of some of my fellow activists. In the hope of conveying their anti-nuclear message to younger generations, I ran in the assembly election as an independent candidate.
The disaster left nearly 10 percent of Onagawa’s 10,000 population dead or missing, and nearly 90 percent of homes here were damaged. Some residents believe that a restart of the nuclear plant is essential for rebuilding the town.
Around 1970, when the Onagawa plant had yet to be built, local fishermen banded together to express opposition to the nuclear facility. Thousands took part in a protest rally held near the seashore. About 10 buses, each with 50 seats, arrived from a neighboring town to join it.
But Tohoku Electric began approaching nuclear opponents and secured agreement to engage in small talk from some people. They included, for example, owners of large fishing vessels that operated far from coastal waters. They had large crew and held senior positions in the local fishermen’s union.
There is no significant opposition movement in Onagawa now.
I studied at a university in Tokyo after I graduated from senior high school. I took an interest in the issue of Minamata disease (caused by mercury pollution) and joined a sit-in outside the head office of Chisso Corp., the chemical company responsible for the pollution. I thought the economy was being put ahead of humans–the same picture that applies to atomic power generation.
After I graduated in 1975 and returned home, I found my community polarized between nuclear opponents and proponents. I was told that residents living along the same seashore had been so estranged that they no longer even spoke to each other when they attended funerals of people in the other camp.
The opposition movement gradually cooled its heels after the fishermen’s union decided to accept financial compensation, and after construction of the No. 1 reactor of the Onagawa nuclear plant began in 1979.
Some people had relatives working for the nuclear plant, while others supplied food to the plant workers.
They could no longer openly state they were opposed, even if they felt differently in their hearts.
A sense of resignation gradually spread. In the words of Tohoku Electric: “We obtained their understanding through persistent dialogue.”
The Onagawa nuclear plant now has three reactors.
The Great East Japan Earthquake damaged part of the power supply systems at the Onagawa plant, although it was spared from being swamped directly by the tsunami triggered by the March 11, 2011, quake.
I was driving a car in the neighboring city of Ishinomaki at the time. I returned home in the evening after being caught in a traffic jam and found it had been swept away by the tsunami. I lived for some time on the second floor of a relative’s home, whose ground floor had been flooded. I listened to news about the Fukushima nuclear disaster on the radio, but somehow, the situation at the Onagawa nuclear plant never crossed my mind.
Tohoku Electric has been boasting that the Onagawa nuclear plant “withstood the quake and tsunami.” I have also been told that a gymnasium on the grounds of the plant served as an evacuation shelter for more than 300 residents for three months. Some inhabitants are thankful for that.
But I later learned that the plant grounds lay only 80 centimeters above the towering tsunami, which measured 13 meters in height, and only one of the five external power supply systems survived without damage. Perhaps it was a matter of sheer chance that a serious accident was avoided.
The town government has so far received 21 billion yen ($195 million) in subsidies associated with the installation of nuclear reactors. This is in line with three laws governing the siting of nuclear power plants. The town also has a huge revenue source as a result of fixed asset taxes paid by Tohoku Electric. Sumptuous facilities that exceed our means have popped up one after another.
In looking to the future and making decisions about the town’s finances, a key consideration is whether we should bank on cash revenue from a future restart of the Onagawa nuclear plant.
When I attended a debate session in the assembly, I raised an objection to a young man who called for community development based on coexistence with the nuclear plant. Nobody presented follow-up opinions. And that was the last time the nuclear plant issue was raised. It remains difficult to this day to speak your mind.
But some people have begun reflecting on the future of the nuclear plant, even though they don’t speak out. The president of a company that does business with the nuclear plant once blurted out, when he was alone with me, “We cannot rely on the nuclear plant forever.”
Three of the 12 members of the Onagawa town assembly are opposed to the nuclear plant. Some of the other nine are taking a wait-and-see attitude and are less than wholeheartedly pro-nuclear.
I believe that, with the nuclear plant idled in the wake of the quake and tsunami disaster, now is a good opportunity for the townspeople to discuss their own future among themselves.
* * *
Mikiko Abe, 62, operates a liquor shop and a shipping agency, which markets fish caught from outside Onagawa, with her parents. Abe has one son and four daughters.
(This article is based on an interview by Ryoma Komiyama.)
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