2024-02-20
As though lecturing a twelve-year-old child, GE said, “Pumping water up costs money, doesn’t it?” and went out of its way to have the hill cut down and the plant placed on lower ground.
TEPCO, acting on Japanese instinct, said it wanted to build on top of a high hill along the coastline.
February 19, 2018
The following is from this week’s installment of the column that Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, writes for Shukan Shincho.
Fawning Newspapers
Eisenhower was a good man, a rarity among Americans.
He approved World Bank loans to Japan, enabling Japan to build the Tomei and Meishin expressways, run the Shinkansen, and recover to the point of hosting the Tokyo Olympics.
Even so, he would not allow Japan to venture into nuclear power generation.
Even if it were for peaceful purposes, if Japan acquired nuclear technology, it would someday seek revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That was why he was reluctant to let Japan introduce nuclear power.
But the Japanese are clever.
If America would not agree, they would turn to Britain; they reached an agreement, introduced a graphite-moderated reactor, and began generating electricity.
Natural uranium would suffice as fuel.
Burning it would produce ample plutonium.
So much so that Russia built reactors of the same type at Chernobyl.
The American president changed course.
In exchange for giving Japan nuclear power plants, the United States would manage and oversee everything.
Thus, light-water reactors using low-enriched uranium, manufactured by Westinghouse and GE, were supplied to the nine electric utilities.
TEPCO installed GE’s boiling-water reactors.
The GE people who arrived were overbearing.
TEPCO, acting on Japanese instinct, said it wanted to build on top of a high hill along the coastline.
As though lecturing a twelve-year-old child, GE said, “Pumping water up costs money, doesn’t it?” and went out of its way to have the hill cut down and the plant placed on lower ground.
As a result, it was struck by the tsunami on March 11.
GE did not tell TEPCO about either the reactor core’s structure or its materials.
You can remain ignorant.
We will take care of you, they said, acting as though they were a colonial power.
Then, when reactor operations actually began, cracks were found in the piping, the fuel cladding was corroding, and the reactor could not even properly reach criticality.
The Japanese side did everything it could, including changing the fuel-cladding material, and finally managed to generate electricity, but when they took another look at the reactor’s structure, they found no vent for relieving pressure in the reactor core in an emergency.
When they pointed this out, GE declared, “We do not envision such a situation with a GE product. You don’t need to worry.”
That vent on which so much hope was placed during March 11 had, in fact, been installed independently by TEPCO.
Yet GE did not even thank Japan for making such defective reactors usable.
Moreover, when TEPCO’s Fukushima plant was hit by that tsunami, GE’s resident staff at the site immediately fled and flew back to the United States on orders from GE headquarters.
GE headquarters had been irresponsible all along.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an order requiring improvements: “Every nuclear power plant must have multiple backup power sources.”
This was based on experimental results showing that, even in the event of a devastating terrorist attack, multiple backup power sources could prevent the reactor core from running out of control, but GE did not even pass this on to TEPCO.
Had TEPCO known, its Fukushima plant would have been equipped with multiple backup power sources, and that situation would certainly have been avoided.
Everything was GE’s fault.
Yet Japanese newspapers continued to shield this wrongdoer.
Most newspaper reporters and correspondents are infatuated with America.
The Asahi Shimbun, in particular, reveres America almost as a matter of company policy and even concealed the fact that the Fukushima reactors were made by GE.
Editorial writer Keiji Takeuchi writes, “In Japan, vents were not installed because of the complacent assumption that a core meltdown would not occur, but they were introduced under pressure from developments overseas.”
They were not made by GE.
They were defective, domestically manufactured reactors—that is what he is saying.
Fukushima residents consequently blamed TEPCO alone and extracted compensation, but some people did not fall for Asahi’s deception.
Three Japanese individuals and several companies from the disaster-stricken areas filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Boston late last year, asserting that “GE, which built shoddy reactors and failed to maintain them properly, was the real culprit behind that accident.”
If the lawsuit is allowed to proceed, the Japanese plaintiffs can take testimony from everyone from GE’s chairman to the resident staff who fled.
They can also demand all of GE’s internal documents.
This time, the Japanese side can use the very methods that caused Japanese companies so much grief in the past.
They can expose all the sloppiness leading up to that accident, the attempts to cover it up, and, while they are at it, GE’s strategy toward Japan.
It is a delightful prospect, but Japanese correspondents pass over this story too.
They want to remain reporters who are loved by America.
What devoted souls they are.