Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) must give a fuller account of the
Fukushima disaster and address its “institutionalised lying” before it
can expect to restart another nuclear station, the world’s largest, said
a local government official who holds an effective veto over the
utility’s revival plan.
“If they don’t do what needs to be done, if they keep skimping on
costs and manipulating information, they can never be trusted,” Niigata
Gov Hirohiko Izumida told Reuters in an interview.
Izumida must approve the embattled utility’s plans to restart the
reactors at Kashiwazaki Kariwa, the world’s biggest nuclear complex on
the Japan Sea coast.
A former economy and trade ministry bureaucrat who has emerged as a
leading critic of TEPCO, Izumida said he would launch his own commission
to investigate the causes and handling of the Fukushima crisis and
whether strengthened regulatory safeguards were sufficient to prevent a
similar disaster.
Izumida, 51, declined to provide a timetable for completing that
review - a process that could force the utility to scrap or abandon one
of the key assumptions behind its turnaround plan.
“If Tokyo Electric doesn’t cooperate closely with the prefecture nothing will be solved,” he said.
“Unless we start we won’t know,” he added when asked how long his
review could take. “If they cooperate with us, we will be able to
proceed smoothly. If not, we won’t.”
Even if Japan’s nuclear safety regulators approve TEPCO’s restart
plans for its Niigata reactors, Izumida can effectively block it because
of the utility’s need to win backing from local officials. That gives
Izumida, a political independent, a platform for calling for a wider
reform of Asia’s largest listed electricity utility, which provides
power to 29 million homes and businesses in and around Tokyo.
Izumida urged Japan’s government to strip TEPCO of responsibility for
decommissioning the wrecked Fukushima reactors, and consider putting it
through a taxpayer-funded bankruptcy similar to the process used to
restructure Japan Airlines.
Without that kind of sweeping restructuring, Izumida said, TEPCO
could be left without the resources needed to ensure the safety of its
remaining nuclear plants.
In its current form, the utility threatens to be distracted by how to
fund the dismantling of the Fukushima reactors over the next 30 years
and the more immediate problem of containing contaminated water at the
Fukushima site, Izumida said.
“Unless we create a situation where 80-90% of their thinking is
devoted to nuclear safety, I don’t think we can say they have
prioritized safety,” he said.
Izumida also called on the government to make more than 6,000 workers
involved in decommissioning at Fukushima public employees. A Reuters
investigation of working conditions at the plant found widespread
abuses, including skimmed wages and the involvement of illegal brokers.
“The workers at the plant are risking their health and giving it
their all. They are out in the rain. They are out at night,” Izumida
said. “The government needs to respect their efforts and address the
situation.”
A TEPCO spokesman said the utility would cooperate with Izumida’s
investigation. “Safety is our utmost priority and we are not acting on
an assumption of nuclear restarts,” said Yoshimi Hitotsugi. “We want to
work on this issue while gaining the understanding of the local
population and related parties.”
TEPCO has posted more than 2.7 trillion yen in losses since a massive
earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 crippled the Fukushima No. 1
nuclear plant. The disaster knocked out cooling systems, triggered
meltdowns in three reactors and a radiation release that forced more
than 150,000 people from nearby towns to evacuate.
It is behind schedule on its initial business turnaround plan, which
had called for firing up at least one reactor at Kashiwazaki Kariwa by
April.
The utility says it can return to profitability in the business year
to March without restarting the sprawling complex. But if all seven of
the Niigata reactors were operational, TEPCO says it would save $1
billion in monthly fuel costs.
The utility’s admission in July - following months of denials - that
the Fukushima plant was leaking radioactive substances into the Pacific
Ocean was evidence that TEPCO has not changed, Izumida said, adding the
utility developed a culture of “institutionalized lying.”
He said that unless the utility changes its corporate culture he
won’t be able to trust it to run the nuclear plant in the prefecture.
“There are three things required of a company that runs nuclear power
plants: don’t lie, keep your promises and fulfill your social
responsibility,” Izumida said.
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