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.
Credit to Japan news
No comments:
Post a Comment