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TEPCO Officials To Be Tried for Role In Fukushima Meltdown
Submitted by Andy Tully via OilPrice.com,
A Japanese citizens’ judicial committee has overruled government prosecutors and forced them to bring three former executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) to trial on charges of criminal negligence for their inability to prevent the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. But it appears unlikely that the defendants can be convicted.
The decision by the panel of 22 anonymous citizens, was reached July 17 but not announced until July 31. It overrules two previous decisions by the Tokyo prosecutors not to indict the former executives. The defendants are Tsunehisa Katsumata, 75, chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Co. at the time of the crisis, along with Sakae Muto, 65, and Ichiro Takekuro, 69, who were then vice presidents of the utility.
Decisions by the prosecutors in September 2013 and in January 2015 said they lacked sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against the three men. In response, the citizens’ panel voted twice to demand the former executives’ indictment, trumping the prosecutors’ decisions.
Such citizens’ committees became a powerful features of Japan’s judicial system after World War II in an effort to combat government abuse of power. Their members are chosen by lottery and the panelists’ identities are kept secret. While they’re powerful, these committees are seldom used.
The committee concluded that the three defendants hadn’t taken necessary steps to reinforce the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, situated on Japan’s Pacific coast and therefore vulnerable to severe damage if it were struck by a tsunami in the earthquake-prone region.
That fear was realized in March 2011 when a Pacific tsunami slammed into Japan, causing widespread destruction, including such heavy damage to three of the four reactors at Fukushima Daichi that they melted down and began leaking radiation. The accident forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from the general vicinity of the power plant.
The decision was good news for surviving victims of the disaster. “We had given up hope that there would be a criminal trial,” said Ruiko Muto, who leads the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Plaintiffs Group, which represents about 15,000 people, including residents displaced by the accident and their supporters. “We’ve finally gotten this far.”
But the victory may be merely symbolic because most legal observers say it’s unlikely the rigors that the defendants will face will go beyond giving public testimony at trial. There’s also little likelihood any of them will be convicted of a criminal charge because Japanese prosecutors, with 99 percent conviction rates, rarely bring charges unless they are virtually certain they can win the cases.
Cases imposed on them by citizens’ judicial committees are generally those in which prosecutors have concluded lack enough evidence to convict. One former prosecutor, Nobuo Gohara, told The New York Times that virtually all of such cases end in acquittals.
In the TEPCO case, for example, Gohara said the prosecutors now must prove that the defendants were guilty of criminal oversight of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant by failing to predict the huge tsunami that caused the disaster and neglecting to protect the facility sufficiently.
Further, Gohara said, it will be extremely challenging for the prosecutors to prove that the meltdowns at three of the plant’s reactors even killed anyone. Several people died while the area was being evacuated in 2011, but most were elderly who were too weak to be moved during the chaos of moment. But he stressed that no one so far has died from radiation poisoning.
“This is a very unusual case,” Gohara said. “The hurdles to conviction are high.”
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There's really only one just solution, which is to send them into the reactors to fix as much as they can before they die of radiation.
I thought that sign looked like Mickey Mouse. How appropriate.
No one died. WTF. USS Reagan anyone?
I should be happy for one small victory (however brief) against the psychopaths at TEPCO. No, really... I should. The Japanese could actually stand up to their masters even though they pretty much have never bothered throughout this whole ordeal.
Kind of like all the times when the banksters here in the U.S. are investigated. I mean - come on - there's always a chance that they're going to be convicted and sentenced to years in prison, right? It's a theoretical possibility. It might happen someday. That's why it's called the Justice Department, right? These bastards have to pay - it's inevitable.
Yeah... and monkeys might fly out of my butt someday, too.
Will the person or people who gave the Yakuza the maint contracts get in trouble or the Yakuza? I am sure nothing will happen to them. Japan is as F'ed Up as Amerika.
"...Japan is as F'ed Up as Amerika..."
Yeah, but they do it with that certain fascinating Asian flair... it's nice to see a different flavor of corruption, nepotism and psychopathy than the usual uninteresting, bland fare that America serves up day after day.
And you haven't seen anything yet. Wait until this happens and frys some heavily-populated region in the good ol' U.S. - the denials, censorship and government cover-ups will be f'king EPIC in that 'Americans are exceptional' kind of way. The Japanese will be awestruck.
TEPCO and the Yakuza will both cringe in humiliation when they see the brain-shattering evil the U.S. is capable of if we ever have a similar meltdown here.
At least they will face the public disgrace and humiliation of the damage they caused during a trial...that in itself is worse than any punishment the court could mete out in Japan.
Pathetic, they want to investigate what happened before the sunami not AFTER , dumb fucks. Lets just die and get it over with.
Damn. I wish that we could do that.
WOW.. citizens actually have a say in Japan and have the ability to circumvent the corrupt bought and paid for federal prosecuters!!
Blame it on some three people, done dealio. Whether they're "charged" or not, the real perps are outta trouble. Meanwhile the dang thing oozes out mutagen daily, and we are all busy cheering on the next transfucktard teevee star.
Yeah, they should've.... should've..... I ain't coming up with anything. Earthquake and tsumani, are these people gods?
No, they are liars. They told the world the reactors were in "cold shutdown" and there was nothing to worry about. The reality was quite different. One nuclear power plant complex released more deadly radionuclides than all of the atomic bombs ever detonated. Do some research. ......
They are rerry rerry srorry!
Are they sure the whole thing wasn't caused by some Indian dudes daytrading in their parent's basements???
yeah, he wondered what that scram button was on his fukushima trading platform
TEPCO was gifted with a faulty design for a coastal nuclear plant subject to tsunami. Hindsight of course. But if the plant layout is presented to someone, it shows the back up generators and all the needed wiring in the basement of buildings facing the sea, you start to see the problem. They assumed the sea wall was too high for a tsunami to breech. They were wrong. The earthquake trigger proper safety measures and all the reactors were shut down, with only latent heat left to cool, but no generators could pump the water, because on a coastline, subject to giant tsunami, they were placed in the basements. They could have been placed behind the rectors on the sloping hill side, they were not. Now, who signed off on that?
bean counters --aka management --you know-those guys with golden parchutes and no chips in the game
I heard that the Rothschild's owned the plant, in fact, I think they own all NPP.
Not Larry 'Pull It'?
have they found and stopped the core melt
down situation yet? if not, what good is executing
morons?
Must be strange living in Japan, with a big no go zone to the North which will be uninhabitable for decades, and a big foreign run arms base to the South stuffed with nukes.
once upon a time "they", who ever they
are, made great and
affordable automobiles; even so,
maybe still? with 50 + nuclear power plants
sneaked underneath the petroleum sucking
objects of post modern consumption,
related infrastructure and culture(life style).
.
like pre-german, germans, experimental
germans. reminds me of some sorta axis
.
there is always much more to the story.
Putting executives on trial? Positively un-American!
If this were America, the execs would be off the hook - but our lawyers would bring Mother Nature to trial for creating the tsunami and our judges would convict her!
Perhaps 3 courtroom hari-karis to show their shame and remorse?
Couple thoughts....
Tepco's logo looks like Mickey Mouse, so no wonder they acted fucking Goofy.
Second thing, why can't we sue Goldman sachs and JPM for the 2008 financial meltdown? That was a lot more foreseeable than an earthquake-Tsunami 1-2 'Act of God' punch in the gut, and a lot more costly. Truly a man made disaster.
USS Reagan even more top secret than the events involving the USS Liberty.
Didn't this whole Fukushima catastrophe start with an earthquake and a sunami? Why would individuals be responsible for what happened?
Hey.. You're right! Who was it that was really responsible for the earthquake and tsunami, anyway??
Damn you, Putin!
Want to know way they can't find the melted cores?? It's because the cores vaporized and was vented out some safety valve...I think it was SPV valve. They had no choice.
So the cores and spent fuel pools are now floating around in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere.
"...So the cores and spent fuel pools are now floating around in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere..."
Not true any more, thank God. Much of the most dangerous radiation has been rained out over the ocean and taken up and concentrated by these ingenious carbon-based radiation absorbers they use today. Almost like nature's little radionuclide vacuum cleaners. Of course, they haven't removed 100% of it, but they gobbled up one hell of a lot of the most dangerous stuff. Some of them are full and have stopped working, so that's no good.
I'm trying to remember what the call those collection devices. Hmm???
Oh, I remember now: whales, porpoise, sea lions, seals, tuna, salmon, krill...
Yes indeed.
Another symbolic fiction of justice of those gluttonous and murderous corporate types that are cancer to Japanese society and an insult to tens thousands of victims, many not found or identified yet. Lawlessness is all around us, in Japan and elsewhere when apology for killing thousands is all there is to it.
Situation at some US nuclear power plants and decommission efforts:
https://sostratusworks.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/devils-good-intentions/
and propaganda lies about renewable and nuclear energy, an excerpt from
https://sostratusworks.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/engineering-renewable-delusions/
about fallacy of the concept of peaceful application of nuclear power.
A robot that failed in Fukushima:
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-small-robot-interior-fukushima-daiichi.html...
Putting the switchgear for the back-up power in a basement at or below sea level was pretty dumb.
...as planned, remember, these are monsters we are dealing with.
They better hang the people that funded the project or I'm going to be pissed.
garbage in garbage out
.
its simple math
Anybody else notice how much the Tepco logo looks like Mickey Mouse?
... with 3 ears ...