Scandal-ridden energy company behind Japan's nuke crisis

Source: Associated Press

March 17, 2011
Scandal-ridden energy company behind Japan's nuke crisis
Tokyo Electric Power has history of problems, obfuscation of facts from public

(AP) TOKYO - Behind Japan's escalating nuclear crisis sits a scandal-ridden energy industry in a comfy relationship with government regulators often willing to overlook safety lapses. Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalog of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all.

In one case, workers hand-mixed uranium in stainless steel buckets, instead of processing by machine, so the fuel could be reused, exposing hundreds of workers to radiation. Two later died.

"Everything is a secret," said Kei Sugaoka, a former nuclear power plant engineer in Japan who now lives in California. "There's not enough transparency in the industry."

Sugaoka worked at the same utility that runs the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant where workers are racing to prevent a full meltdown following Friday's 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami.



Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/17/501364/main20044198.shtml

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The analogy is very apt.

Obama plans to use this company to build two new nuke plants in Texas on the Gulf (with tax payer's money). Katrina and BP disaster ring a bell?

their negligence has led to catastrophe.

in place and able to supply what we need.

If you dig deeper you will find that TEPCO and its partners are involved in a planned nuclear plant in TEXAS. The plants in Japan did not meet the "SQ" test for seismic quality. I suspect this will come out shortly. We also have an exact replica of this plant in Vermont. Apparently there is a little discussed problem with regards to the amount of spend rods and where they are stored. Vermont has I believe near a hundred tons of spent rods in cooling and not very well protected. The same is true of many other plants.

Smart people spent about $30B on a project which was nixed because of irrational fears, a project which would have solved that problem. It was called "Yucca Mountain".

Unfortunate that something like this has to happen before people understand what the whole f*cking purpose of Yucca was. :grr:

of shoving the waste into a deep hole and hoping it stays there for 10,000 years.

and close to major metropolitan areas?" A no-brainer.

Tom Hartmann interviewed Greg Palast on the plan to have TEPCO build nuclear plants in the US. Palast says in the Youtube interview (link below) that the reason the US turned to TEPCO as a partner in building the new plants was because the US industry was so screwed up and untrustworthy. The hope was getting the Japanese and TEPCO involved would act as a real confidence booster that the professionals would be running the show. Are you feeling confident yet?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_wwkyvLb30&feature=player_embedded

There is no evidence the reactors didn't perform 100% to spec. They were designed for magnitude 7.5; the earthquake was 50x as strong.

Blame the regulators, blame the government, blame the corporations. Whatever you do, don't blame a once-in-a-millenium earthquake.

when they still depend for safe operation on a bunch of Homer Simpson like characters that fake safety test results and Mr Burns types that install defective backup diesel generators whose crankshaft break after a few hours of runtime (as Palast found when he was a government investigator). And who's to say that one of the US plants built on, or next to, a fault zone won't encounter an earthquake greater than what what was supposed to happen and therefore greater than it was designed to withstand.