Japan's nuclear regulators blast TEPCO for latest "human error" toxic leak

English>>World

Editor's Pick

Japan's nuclear regulators blast TEPCO for latest "human error" toxic leak

(Xinhua) 14:27, October 05, 2013

Email|Print|Comments

twitter

facebook

Sina Microblog

Japan's Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) on Friday blasted the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of a crippled nuclear power plant in Japan's northeast, for repeatedly failing to contain massive amounts of contaminated water from leaking into the nearby Pacific Ocean.

The Secretariat of Japan's NRA Katsuhiko Ikeda summoned TEPCO chief Naomi Hirose to attend a meeting with NRA officials at which Hirose was lambasted following the revelation of yet more leaks from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Ikeda told Hirose that the embattled utility is failing to manage the situation at the leaking plant effectively and that more measures needed to be taken.

"You're not managing the situation at the nuclear power plant properly. I'm worried this kind of leakage will occur again," Ikeda said, adding that TEPCO should better take charge of its on- site management protocols and utilize personnel from other nuclear facilities if necessary.

Ikeda insisted the utility formulate an immediate strategy to deal with the latest crisis and slammed TEPCO's management for its extremely poor organizational and practical systems that have led to human error causing irreversible radioactive damage to the environment.

Hirose apologized for the series of blunders the utility has made and conceded that the latest leak had led to radioactive materials spreading into and affecting the surrounding environment.

"I'm terribly sorry for the mistakes we have made. We mishandled the leaking wastewater and that is affecting the environment," the TEPCO chief said Friday, following revelations that some workers at the Fukushima Daiichi site had yet to learn the new methods for dealing with containing contaminated wastewater that had recently been implemented by the utility.

On Thursday, highly-radioactive water was found to be overflowing from the top of a storage tank that had been built on a slant alongside five other tanks that comprise around 1,000 hastily made units built on the complex to house the daily influx of massive amounts of radioactive water used to keep nuclear fuel rods cool in three reactor buildings decimated by the 2011 earthquake-triggered tsunami.

Workers at the plant, TEPCO admitted, had miscalculated and overfilled one of the tanks to beyond it's capacity, failing to acknowledge that the angle the tank had been built on had to be taken into consideration.

Only one of the tanks in the series of five connected by pipes, had a gauge attached to it to provide essential information to workers on the tank's angle and capacity, the embattled utility admitted.

In August, TEPCO finally admitted, following a string of denials, that 300 tons of radioactive water from tanks had leaked through splits in the storage tank's bases and through shoddy fixings and had mixed with groundwater, which flows directly to the Pacific Ocean through underwater trenches.

The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said it would do all it can to take responsibility and tackle the crisis, but TEPCO official Masayuki Ono admitted on Thursday that 430 liters of highly-radioactive water had leaked into the sea as the crisis rumbles on and shows no signs of abating despite assurances by both the central government and the utility -- with the former stating unequivocally that the situation "was under control," while the later has offered a myriad of contradictory opinions.

The latest oversight by TEPCO comes at a time when the utility is looking to restart two of its idled reactors at its Kashiwazaki- Kariwa nuclear power plant in Niigata Prefecture.

Ikeda on Friday demanded that TEPCO first prove how the utility plants will ensure the safety at the plant and submit a report within a week on the utility's plans to deal with the latest and yet very avoidable mishap at the Fukushima complex.