À travers l’analyse de Takayama Masayuki, cet article révèle comment Asahi Shimbun a dissimulé les défauts de conception de GE dans l’accident de Fukushima et a détourné la responsabilité vers TEPCO.

The following is from pages 75 to 78 of Masayuki Takayama’s Henken Jizai: Putin, Learn from America’s Villains, published by Shinchosha.

The worst culprit in the Fukushima nuclear accident was the United States.

Two full years had passed since 3.11 when a rather surprising article appeared in the Asahi Shimbun.

It was an interview with a former representative of General Electric (GE), who had been stationed at the TEPCO Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The reason it was surprising was that from the very moment of the disaster, Asahi had consistently obscured the fact that the reactors involved were manufactured by GE.

For example, shortly after the accident, nuclear editor Keiji Takeuchi wrote an article titled “Careless Assumptions.”

“The containment vessel had no vent valve installed because in Japan it was assumed that a core meltdown would not occur. The valve that was later introduced under pressure from overseas has now become a lifeline. This shows just how careless the original accident assumptions were.”

Reading only this, one would assume that the reactor was Japanese-made and that even a gas vent valve had not been installed.

But in reality, the reactor was unquestionably manufactured by GE, and the vent valves had been installed by TEPCO after observing the Three Mile Island accident in the United States.

It was GE whose “assumptions were careless,” yet Asahi deliberately framed the issue as if it were TEPCO that had failed in its assumptions, and then used this narrative as the foundation for subsequent anti-nuclear propaganda calling for the abolition of nuclear power.

And only now, after the public furor had died down, Asahi casually admitted that the reactors were GE-made.

Perhaps they thought it was time to quietly correct their misdirection.

The content of the interview itself is astonishing.

The GE representative was a Japanese born in Okinawa who had spent his youth opposing U.S. bases, later became a sailor, and was eventually taken in by GE. Without knowing anything about fast neutrons or criticality, he became a specialist in boiling water reactors (BWRs).

One might naturally wonder whether this was reliable, but he revealed that the Fukushima reactors under his charge had experienced several abnormalities, including design flaws attributable to GE.

That was a fact, and among those problems, stress corrosion cracking was particularly severe.

High-pressure steam pipes and the shrouds surrounding the reactor cores cracked one after another, causing radioactive leaks.

Turbines for power generation also fractured, and even the fuel rod cladding failed.

In short, these were utterly defective reactors.

The reactors became inoperable, yet GE did nothing.

It was TEPCO and Japanese manufacturers such as Toshiba that cooperated to resolve the problems.

These were the very people whom Asahi derisively labels as the “nuclear village.”

They eventually identified the causes of stress corrosion as the high carbon content of the stainless steel and defective welding processes.

The turbines that cracked were replaced with solid, one-piece structures carved from single blocks using Japanese technology, instead of cast molds.

During these improvements, the gas vent valves—which later helped avert the worst possible outcome in the 3.11 disaster—were also installed.

After these modifications, the GE-model reactors, with everything except their outward appearance now made in Japan, had no further failures until the massive tsunami of 3.11.

Yet none of this was mentioned in the interview.

Instead, the reporter steered the conversation toward the question, “Aren’t nuclear power plants dangerous?” and led the GE representative to speak emotionally, as a former GE stationed engineer, about how indifferent TEPCO supposedly was to safety.

“BWRs require experienced personnel to handle. We sharpened all five senses, touched the pipes, and checked for abnormal vibrations or temperatures,” he said.

He did not mention that the pipes he had checked had long since been replaced with safe Japanese-made ones.

His manner of speaking fully reflected the habit of an American liar.

There was also another crucial point he failed to address: why GE had irresponsibly left its defects, such as stress corrosion cracking, unresolved in the first place.

(To be continued.)