This essay, dated March 9, 2019, examines the enormous cost of dealing with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and argues that responsibility should not be limited to TEPCO alone, but must also extend to GE, which was deeply involved in the reactor’s design.
It criticizes Asahi Shimbun for obscuring GE’s design responsibility while emphasizing anti-nuclear arguments, and contends from the standpoint of product liability that GE should be held accountable and made to pay punitive damages.

2019-03-09
At this point, anyone would immediately recall the American-born product liability doctrine that if a defective product causes damage, the manufacturer bears responsibility.

This is the chapter I published on 2018-07-21 under the title, “I hate TEPCO.
It took away the fishing grounds.
So we made it pay compensation.
But if even that does not satisfy one’s anger and one simply wants to trouble TEPCO further, that is nothing more than bullying.”
Masayuki Takayama’s latest book is surely one of the very first books that should be bought at one’s nearest bookstore.
People around the world ought to read my English translation, as many of them as possible.

Exposing the irresponsibility of the GE employees who fled from TEPCO’s Fukushima plant.
The Asahi Shimbun left GE’s responsibility unquestioned, but GE should be made to pay 21 trillion yen.

Asahi hates TEPCO and turns to bullying.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced that the cost of decommissioning and other processing expenses at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant would exceed 21 trillion yen.
Given an accident of that magnitude, some such figure had been expected, but for it to amount to one quarter of the national budget is no trivial matter.
What is costing so much?
One can understand 6 trillion yen for dealing with the melted-down reactor cores and 4 trillion yen for compensation to affected residents, but then there are one trillion-yen-scale expenditures lined up one after another for the treatment of contaminated topsoil and groundwater based on the standard of 1 millisievert of annual exposure.
At the Fukushima Daiichi plant site there is a large volume of cooling water and other water heavily contaminated by radiation.
I understand the position of the local fishermen who say it must not be released into the sea.
That is why contaminated water has been stored in as many as 800 storage tanks.
That much I understand, but 400 tons of groundwater flows into this site every day.
And yet the locals say that must not be released either.
Apparently the logic is that if it passes through the contaminated area, it becomes contaminated, but in that case it ought to be possible to block it before it reaches the premises and send it to the sea by another route while it is still clean, and yet they say no to that as well.
That I do not understand.
As a result, TEPCO pumps up the groundwater that has presumably flowed in and become contaminated every day, puts it into tanks, decontaminates it anew, and then releases it into the sea.
Even so, the treatment capacity is only 20 tons per day.
In other words, it is still steadily accumulating water at a rate equivalent to filling a 25-meter swimming pool every two days, and the amount has now reached 800,000 tons.
Even then, because it cannot completely stop the groundwater, it has spent enormous sums of money constructing a frozen soil wall to prevent outflow into the sea.
And that is only in periods of continued fair weather.
Once heavy rain falls, the amount of groundwater jumps severalfold.
In fact, when a typhoon struck in September 2016, two sections of the frozen soil wall were breached.
The anti-nuclear Asahi Shimbun, as if it had seized the demon’s head, made a great uproar, shouting “It overflowed, it overflowed,” and the local side joined in.
They hate TEPCO.
It took away the fishing grounds.
So they made it pay compensation.
But if even that does not satisfy their anger and they simply want to trouble TEPCO further, that is nothing more than bullying.

They made a GE employee speak against nuclear power.

It was not until March 30, 2014, a full three years after the accident, that Asahi, however reluctantly, hinted in its pages that the reactor had been made by GE and that defects in its design lay at the root of the disaster.
Even then, it mentioned this only in a few lines within a serialized anti-nuclear feature.
There it said, “At the time of the earthquake, there were GE people at Unit 4.
They fled immediately.
And GE headquarters in the United States had them leave Japan at once.”
As for why GE employees were there in the first place, only in the installment two days earlier did it first reveal that GE had been the designer of the reactor.
And it went on, rather pompously, to report that when the Japanese side asked, for example, why there was no vent valve, the answer was always, “Because that is what GE thinks.”
The Fukushima plant site had been deliberately made low by cutting away a high hill.
It says that it was also because “GE thought so” that the reactors were built there and that the auxiliary power supplies were placed together on the seaside, where a tsunami could knock them out in a single blow.
In a paper dated December 7 of the same year, it also had Yukiteru Naka, GE’s local representative in Fukushima, say the same thing.
This man was an activist from Okinawa and a former fisherman.
He came to Fukushima and was hired by GE, but the reason he was chosen and the extent of his knowledge both remain unclear.
That representative employee was out when the earthquake struck, and once he learned of the emergency caused by the power outage, he never returned to the workplace.
It is said that an inquiry was also made to GE headquarters, but no proper answer was given.
At the end of Asahi’s interview, the way he summed up the accident was to say, “A country that has suffered atomic bombing should not possess nuclear power plants.”
Asahi, instead of questioning GE’s responsibility at all, had a GE employee speak against nuclear power.

Take punitive damages from GE.

One is appalled by Asahi’s bizarre response, but leaving that aside, it has now become clear that GE personnel at the site, including this former Okinawan activist, made no effort whatsoever to bring the situation under control, fled, and that GE headquarters, far from reproaching them, had them leave Japan immediately.
Incidentally, GE had not even conveyed to TEPCO the “B5b” directive, under which the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered that auxiliary power supplies be installed in multiple, dispersed locations.
The result is 21 trillion yen in damage, together with the stagnation of what had been an excellent nuclear industry.
At this point, anyone would immediately recall the American-born product liability doctrine that if a defective product causes damage, the manufacturer bears responsibility.
Nothing can be said about the Fukushima nuclear plant if one excludes the responsibility of GE, which “so arrogantly instructed” every aspect of its design and structure.
Trump has also appeared.
The age when one could say nothing simply because the matter involved the United States is over.
In this new year, newspapers, the government, and the people should once again demand that GE answer for its responsibility, and at the same time exact punitive damages in the true sense of the term.
(January 2017 issue)