(Shimizu, then 66, was not accustomed to being called on the carpet by government officials. He was a pillar of the conservative Japanese industrial establishment, and a TEPCO lifer. He had also been a member in good standing of the global nuclear power industry; less than a year earlier he had been elected to the board of the World Association of Nuclear Operators, a trade group ostensibly devoted to ensuring the "highest possible standards of safety.")
Kan himself wanted to hear what Shimizu was thinking, but he had already decided, after talking to his nuclear emergency team before the TEPCO president arrived, that "I could not let it [an evacuation] happen. It just wasn't an option."
Turning a Blind Eye
There was no precedent for the magnitude of the quake and tsunami that wreaked havoc at Fukushima Daiichi. But the disaster wasn't unimaginable. In fact, workers periodically discussed among themselves the risks of the facility's location. "I always wondered why you would build a nuclear site this size in an earthquake zone right on the ocean," said one worker, who requested anonymity because TEPCO had not granted him permission to speak to the press. Sitting in a small karaoke bar in the nearby city of Minami-soma, the worker was at the plant on March 11, 2011 and worked almost continuously through the spring, summer and autumn to try to contain the crisis.
TEPCO's senior management and Japan's nuclear regulators wondered about the risks, too, this worker noted. When the licenses for the Fukushima Daiichi generating stations were granted in 1966 and 1972, they called for the plant to be able to withstand a wave cresting at 3.1 meters in height—a figure based on the size of a tsunami in Chile in 1960.
As recently as 2008, according to the Japanese government's interim report into the accident released at the end of last year, TEPCO reevaluated the tsunami risks at the plant. New simulations the company ran showed waves could reach as high as 15 meters—chillingly, almost the exact height of the biggest wave that smashed into the coastline on the afternoon of March 11.
TEPCO didn't believe the simulation was reliable.
As a Japanese government investigation into the nuclear accident concludes, in understated but withering prose: "TEPCO still did not take concrete measures against the possibility of tsunami," because it didn't trust the new model that had generated that result.
The report is equally critical of the nuclear regulatory agencies in Japan. "The investigation committee is unable to find efforts of the regulatory organizations concerned" to determine whether adequate defenses against possible tsunamis were in place.
Japan would pay dearly for that. Two TEPCO workers, in the process of inspecting unit number four, were killed instantly when the largest of the seven waves struck the plant site. The cooling systems for the reactors that were operating and the plant's spent fuel pools were disabled when backup generators failed.
