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Japan The Courts

Ex-TEPCO Officials To Be Indicted Over Fukushima 76

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-the-blame-game-for-keeps dept.
AmiMoJo writes: Three former executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company will face mandatory indictment over the March 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The prosecution inquest panel of randomly-selected citizens voted for the indictment on Friday, for professional negligence resulting in death and injury. "Tokyo prosecutors in January rejected the panel's judgment that the three should be charged, citing insufficient evidence. But the 11 unidentified citizens on the panel forced the indictment after a second vote, which makes an indictment mandatory. The three are former chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 75, and former executives Sakae Muto, 65, and Ichiro Takekuro, 69. Citizens' panels, made up of residents selected by lottery, are a rarely used but high-profile feature of Japan's legal system introduced after World War Two to curb bureaucratic overreach."
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Ex-TEPCO Officials To Be Indicted Over Fukushima More

Ex-TEPCO Officials To Be Indicted Over Fukushima

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  • better late than never (Score:3)

    by The Real Dr John ( 716876 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @08:17AM (#50222405) Homepage

    The evidence is pretty clear that a lax attitude and cozy government-corporate-regulatory environment made this disaster much worse than it had to be. I am sure that they will all get off without any significant penalties or jail time, but at least they are going to have to go through the court system.

    • Re:better late than never (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @08:58AM (#50222707) Journal

      I do kind of wonder about one thing, though... why are the engineers who designed that beast not being indicted? After all, nearly all of the vital pumps and generators were in the basements of both the Daiichi and Daini sites, with much of the critical equipment right next to the water, instead of uphill where they should have been (and at least not in basements... WTH, people?)

      The Daini site lucked out big-time, with a monumental effort by the crews there to run enough cable from the few generators they still had working to the pumps which needed the juice - something like 2 miles of cable had to be scrounged and tied together.

      BTW, props to the operators and supervisors onsite - for instance, the idea of scrounging car batteries and tying them together with inverters so that they could get the control panels back up was pretty genius. Same with having a special firefighting team from Tokyo come in to keep the storage pools full of water. At both sites they were stuck with having to come up with creative ways to avoid things from getting as bad as they could have.

      I think that with a couple of design changes (both to the reactors and to the rest of the plant) they could have survived much better off than they were.

      All that said, I don't think anyone could have predicted the size and scope of the tsunami that hit them. The TEPCO execs should still have to face a bit of music though (for instance, one site operator asking for 4,000 liters of water for a cooling pool and getting 4,000 bottles of drinking water instead? Damn, y'all...)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Thanks for the infos. More details in the following article:

        "How the Other Fukushima Plant Survived"
        https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived/ar/1

      • The plant was not designed to be underwater. It should never have been sited where it could suddenly wind up underwater. It certainly could have been designed to withstand a tsunami, but that was never a criteria. It makes much more sense just to not site it where it can be suddenly deluged to start with.

        • All nukes need to be near water. All (or almost) all sources of water can overflow their normal height. Ergo putting generators in the basement is never a good idea.

          • The emergency generators were not in the basement. They would operate just fine under the design basis flood, which is the flood level the plant was designed for. Unfortunately, they put it where it could get flooded above that level, and worse because a tsunami not only floods, but tears up whatever is in its path.

      • I do kind of wonder about one thing, though... why are the engineers who designed that beast not being indicted? After all, nearly all of the vital pumps and generators were in the basements of both the Daiichi and Daini sites,

        Yeah, now go research what area residents thought about putting generators on pylons, where they would have had to be in order to be useful in this incident. They didn't want them there. Wonder how they feel now?

        The truth is that engineers will always say "this is what we need to do" and then bean counters or executives or lawyers get involved and say "well this is what we're doing so work it out" and then you can either feed your family or quit and maintain your principles and oh by the way, about that rec

        • Emergency generators were not in the basements.

          Putting generators on pylons is a tremendous oversimplification of what would be needed to design to withstand a tsunami. Generators are useless when all the distribution and control systems are also deluged. Placing large heavy generators on pylons makes them more susceptible to earthquakes. How high do you go?

          Plants are designed for floods up to a certain level. It is up to the siting analysis to determine where you can place the plant and auxiliaries,

          • Putting generators on pylons is a tremendous oversimplification of what would be needed to design to withstand a tsunami.

            In this case, it probably would have done the job; emergency power would have been available to keep things running.

            Plants are designed for floods up to a certain level. It is up to the siting analysis to determine where you can place the plant and auxiliaries

            You know the site was actually lowered substantially to make construction cheaper, right?

            • In this case, it probably would have done the job; emergency power would have been available to keep things running.

              Like I said, you don't depend on 'probably'. And you don't know if the pylons would have held up to a tsunami if you didn't postulate it to begin with. If you did postulate it, you simply don't put the pant there.

              You know the site was actually lowered substantially to make construction cheaper, right?

              Which is part of the siting and site analysis process that failed to keep a plant that was not designed to be hit by a tsunami out of the path of a tsunami.

              • Which is part of the siting and site analysis process that failed to keep a plant that was not designed to be hit by a tsunami out of the path of a tsunami.

                It's the post-bean-counter phase of design. Engineers find a site which will work, bean counters fuck it all up, just like I said.

                • It's the post-bean-counter phase of design. Engineers find a site which will work, bean counters fuck it all up, just like I said.

                  Was it bean counters, or design engineers, or environmental engineers, or geologists, that underestimated the tsunami potential?

                  Someone said the lower elevation was safe. In the end, it came down to mischaracterization of the tsunami threat. Either way, the plant should have never been sited where it was.

      • Re:better late than never (Score:5, Informative)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@worf.ERDOSnet minus math_god> on Friday July 31, 2015 @11:02AM (#50223873)

        I do kind of wonder about one thing, though... why are the engineers who designed that beast not being indicted? After all, nearly all of the vital pumps and generators were in the basements of both the Daiichi and Daini sites, with much of the critical equipment right next to the water, instead of uphill where they should have been (and at least not in basements... WTH, people?)

        Actually, the generators being under was not the problem. You can run generators underwater, provided you have a source for fuel and air above water and can keep it reasonably water tight.

        The real problem was the distribution gear got flooded.

        As in the electrical panels. Once the tsunami flooded the panels, they shorted out. The generators were running just fine with the water level, and even then, the generators were a backup to a backup.

        The first thing is if the reactors go offline, the power station draws power from the grid to run the equipment. And the plant was doing that since there was still power going in. That's the first backup. The second backup is if the grid power goes offline, then you have local generators.

        All of which means diddly when your electrical distribution panels get soaked and short out your switchgear, taking with it BOTH backup mechanisms. So now it doesn't matter that the generators or grid power was available - the panel's shorted out and you can't use either system.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Even with the loss of the generators and distribution panels there was still a backup option. They used pump trucks to inject water into the system for emergency cooling. They were in place and operating in time to avert a major disaster, but a critical valve was in the wrong position so the pumped water ended up in storage tanks instead of the reactor cooling system. The valve could not be checked because the monitoring equipment was damaged, and damage to the plant made physical inspection difficult.

          The r

        • Even if you can technically run generators underwater if all the stars are aligned, it's hardly what you want to plan for is it? How do you do repairs on a generator underwater?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by kesj ( 87284 )

        The answer to your question is simple. The plant rode out the initial event (earthquake) with no problem. The site's diesel generators did, in fact, start on loss of off-site power and picked up load. All systems functioned as designed post-trip. The diesels and the pumps they powered ran until the diesels were submerged and their combustion air cut off by the tsunami flood. Additionally, not only was the AC power lost when the diesels flooded but the vital DC power was also lost as the 125V DC barttery ban

  • Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fire_Wraith ( 1460385 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @08:29AM (#50222481)
    The part that interests me is how this seems to differ quite radically from grand juries in the U.S., where the citizens on the Grand Jury are largely window dressing. If the prosecutor wants an indictment, they'll get it, and if they don't, they'll make sure the grand jury won't deliver one.

    Here, though, it's clear the prosecutors didn't want an indictment, and the citizens forced one anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CODiNE ( 27417 )

      Sweet, in addition I nominate going after bosses who shush security holes in their products and insist on adding new features instead.

    • Well, it is likely connected to the fact that Japan has an insanely high conviction rate, over 99% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate [wikipedia.org]. Part of this is due to the fact that prosecutors in Japan only bring cases if they are very confident of a conviction (probably part of why the prosecutors did not want to prosecute in this case) but also cultural issues where once a person is prosecuted, the default assumption in terms of how people treat it is that the person is guilty.
    • Typically the prosecutor has an advantage since he controls the presentation and can frame it however he likes. But if a grand jury wanted to indict anyway, why couldn't they? It seems like the same holds true in Japan, the grand jury delivered the verdict the prosecutor wanted just like in the US. But the interesting part is, there is a third party (article didn't detail where it comes from or who is a member) that can appeal the grand jury decision.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ejasons ( 205408 )

        I would suspect that the problem is that jurors are selected not to know anything about the case. Then, if the prosecutor doesn't present any compelling evidence, how can there be a conviction?

    • Of course, given that the prosecutors didn't want an indictment in the first place and given that the prosecutors are the ones in charge of trying to convict the defendants, one wonders what the chances of actually getting a conviction are...

  • All this really does is cause these poor guys to face charges that prosecutors now must try to prove. Given that all the other methods of getting an indictment on these guys failed, one can easily infer that the chances they get convicted of anything is next to nil.

    This is basically a political witch hunt by some PR hounds who want to make it look like the accused are somehow guilty of gross negligence because it was their plant (which satisfied the government's safety requirements) blew up and made a mes

    • Lying, Sheer Incompetence and Disregard for life (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      All this really does is cause these poor guys to face charges that prosecutors now must try to prove. Given that all the other methods of getting an indictment on these guys failed, one can easily infer that the chances they get convicted of anything is next to nil.

      This is basically a political witch hunt by some PR hounds who want to make it look like the accused are somehow guilty of gross negligence because it was their plant (which satisfied the government's safety requirements) blew up and made a mess after some natural disaster that nobody foresaw or even considered possible happened. It's like holding the tornado shelter installer criminally liable for not protecting the occupants of the shelter from earthquake damage and chemical attacks.

      Do some research [nytimes.com] before commenting. Corporate TEPCO repeatedly lied to the public and the government, was incompetent (sending water needed to cool the reactor in drinking water bottles) and obstructive to the point of disregarding human life (ordering sea-water injection to be shut off based on how the prime minister's "mood").

  • This is an embarrassing process. It's the justice of the mob.
  • ...as seen here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... [telegraph.co.uk] BUT they did this to us too, and the rest of the world... "A news report says Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant was so unprepared for the disaster that workers had to bring protective gear and instruction manuals from elsewhere and borrow equipment from a contractor. The report, released by operator Tokyo Electric Co, is based on interviews of workers and plant data. It portrays chaos in a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful battle to protect the Fuku

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