Last month, a local district court rejected a lawsuit by residents to halt production, ruling that the plant was sufficiently safe from volcanic and seismic activity under the new guidelines. The Genkai Power plant in Saga, operated by Kyūshū Electric Power Company, has also suffered a host of problems since it was reactivated in March of 2018, including steam leaks and malfunctioning cooling pumps. Last year, KEPCO’s Takahama plant had to suspend operations at two nuclear reactors after failing to build adequate counterterrorism facilities. Late last year, the Osaka District Court ruled that two reactors at its Oi nuclear plant in Fukui were vulnerable to a major earthquake despite having been approved to restart by the NRA. The Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO), which operates two of the nuclear power plants, is at the center of a corruption scandal involving massive bribes and pay-offs to and from a city official over three decades. And as a result, there will be a meltdown of the reactor core.” His prediction came true in 2011.īut today, there are still four operating nuclear reactors in four Japanese prefectures-two in Fukui, one in Saga, and one in Kagoshima-and all of them are plagued with safety issues like malfunctioning coolant pumps, steam leaks, and inadequate anti-terrorism measures.
In 2005, after retiring from the company, Kimura wrote in an article that “if the plant is hit by a tsunami, the pumps are to use sea water as a coolant and emergency power will probably be lost.
It can only be said that is not qualified in any way to be running a nuclear power plant,” said Kimura. “It’s just another example of this company, covering up misdeeds, as they always do. While the utility company had reported some of their defective equipment to the government, they had lied about the back-up systems that were supposed to correct the problem. Inspectors found 16 locations in which unauthorized entry was possible at the plant-and an attempted cover-up to boot. Last week, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) effectively banned TEPCO from restarting its Kashiwazaki plant-which is one of the largest nuclear power facilities in the world-on the Sea of Japan coast after the complex was found to be riddled with major security flaws that could make it a target for terrorists. The company he is referring to is his former employer, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO), which operated the Fukushima plant that suffered a historic nuclear meltdown in March 2011 after a huge offshore earthquake triggered a tsunami that flooded its reactors, releasing deadly radiation and forcing 160,000 people to evacuate.Ī year after the incident, an investigation by a Japanese parliamentary panel concluded that, “although triggered by these cataclysmic events,” the disaster was “profoundly manmade,” and can be attributed to “a multitude of errors and wilful negligence that left the Fukushima plant unprepared for the events.” “There is a very strong possibility that there will be another nuclear disaster in Japan, and the company running the biggest nuclear plant here cannot be trusted,” Toshio Kimura, a nuclear engineer who predicted Japan’s 2011 nuclear disaster six years before it happened, told The Daily Beast.
The man who predicted the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl sees another one looming.
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