TOKYO — Last year’s nuclear crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant
was a “profoundly man-made disaster,” the result of poor
earthquake-safety planning and faulty post-tsunami communication, a
report from an independent parliamentary panel said Thursday.
The sharp criticism of the Japanese government and the nuclear
operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) provided an alternative
narrative to an earlier investigation by Tepco, whose in-house panel
concluded that the disaster was unforeseeable, spurred by a “giant tsunami beyond our imagination.”
In contrast, the report released Thursday suggested that the
9.0-magnitude earthquake that triggered the tsunami may have caused
critical damage that led to the series of meltdowns. It argued that the
nuclear power plants should have been made more quake-proof, and blamed
lax safety measures on what it called the country’s powerful and
“collusive” decision-makers and on a conformist culture that allowed
them to operate with little scrutiny.
The nuclear bloc, while
reassuring the nation about its safe atomic plants, ignored safeguards
that would have helped strengthen the Fukushima facility against a
massive but foreseeable earthquake, the 641-page report said.
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