Fukushima disaster TEPCO fat cats waste taxpayers’ money

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Japan: Tepco has wasted Fukushima cash

Wednesday 25th March 2015

JAPANESE government auditors said yesterday that Fukushima nuclear plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) has wasted more than a third of the 190 billion yen (£1.07bn) of taxpayer money allocated for cleaning up the destroyed plant.

They also said the clean-up work has been dominated by a small group of utility, construction and electronics giants despite repeated calls for competitive bids.

Tepco spokesman Teruaki Kobayashi insisted all the equipment used had contributed to stabilising the plant.

However, the auditors drew attention to expensive failures including a 32 bn yen (£180 million) machine made by French firm Areva to remove radioactive cesium from water leaking from the wrecked reactors.

The machine lasted just three months and treated only a tiny fraction of the volume leaking every day.

They also pointed to cooling machines costing 18.4bn yen (£100.7m) from companies including Hitachi, Toshiba and Areva.

One functioned for five days and the longest lasted just six weeks.

See also here.

This punk rock music video from Japan is called FUCK TEPCO!!/SCRAP. The band Scrap consists of people who lost everything in the Fukushima disaster.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. in 2008 recognized the “indispensable” need for countermeasures against a towering tsunami at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, but it ended up doing nothing, an internal document showed: here.

KARIWA, Niigata Prefecture–The father of pro-nuclear Kariwa Mayor Hiroo Shinada is a director of a company that received contracts worth millions of yen for work at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co: here.

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