Tuesday, April 12, 2011

#TEPCO's President to Hold Press Conference at 3PM JST

in about an hour and a half. I'll watch if I'm not extremely tired.

TEPCO's president, Masataka Shimizu, had a press conference back in March 13, and today will be his second since the earthquake and tsunami wrecked Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

What I still don't understand, though, is the Japanese government's insistence that the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident is basically a problem that TEPCO has to solve, while interfering with TEPCO's effort to solicit help early on from foreign experts.

In the press conference of Prime Minister Kan on April 12 (in Japanese), Kan outlined his plan for "recovery and rebuilding" after the earthquake/tsunami on a 1 month (and a day) anniversary of the March 11 earthquake/tsunami; while he did mention the Fukushima I Nuke Plant, it was in the context of "stabilization". He said the government is waiting for TEPCO to submit the prospect of how the whole situation may be resolved. (Good luck with that.)

He concluded his speech by asking the citizens to "buy goods produced in the affected areas, use them, or eat them, and enjoy" so that Japan recovers.

That seems highly irresponsible for the head of the state to say that, but his way out several years down the road will be the same as Rumsfeld and Rice when they supposedly discovered that there was no WMD in Iraq: "Who could have known?"

Expect the TEPCO president to say the same: 15-meter tsunami, Magnitude 9.0 earthquake, who could have known?

2 comments:

M. Simon said...

I can't remember where I read it but TEPCO dithered for hours (when they needed to make decisions in minutes) at the start of the accident trying to come to a decision (consensus) on what to do.

Once the decision was made to bring in outside generators they found that the cable hook ups were too short. More delays.

Charlie Foxtrot all the way.

Here is the American way:

I would rather have a good plan today than a perfect plan two weeks from now. - General George S. Patton

M. Simon said...

The funny thing about WMDs is that they were not the pivotal reason for the war. Look up the Cong. resolution.

Plus the war did shut down the Iraqi WMD program. It was found in Libya. The Kahn network. You can look it up. Kdaffy didn't want the Iraq treatment. So he spilled the beans and sold out his "buddy". Evidently Bush inspired fear. The current guy? Laughter.

The Bush admin was terrible when it came to getting the word out.

What do we know of the aftermath? The Marsh Arabs are doing much better as are the Kurds and the Iraqi economy is growing robustly. It was in fact a humanitarian war. Just the kind of thing ∅ is failing at. Bush made it look easy. Fooled the new guy didn't it?

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