Same Old Excuse from Goshi Hosono for Hiding the "Worst-Case Scenario": "We Were Afraid of a Panic in Tokyo"

Goshi Hosono, current Minister of the Environment and Minister in charge of the nuclear accident, was a special assistant to then-Prime Minister Kan when the March 11 triple whammy of earthquake/tsunami/nuke accident hit Japan last year.

He's already famously said that the small group of top officials in the Kan administration knew it was a core meltdown at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant right after the accident, but they "just didn't feel like announcing it".

Now, about the "worst-case scenario" from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency that the administration officials received on March 25 and which the administration declared it "didn't exist" after reading it, Hosono has this to say:

From Kyodo News (1/29/2012):

最悪シナリオ閲覧「数人」に限定 「混乱恐れて」と細野氏

The worst-case scenario perusal restricted to only "a handful", as "we were afraid of a panic", says Mr. Hosono

　細野原発事故担当相は２９日までに、共同通信のインタビューに応じ、最近まで公開しなかった福島第１原発事故の「最悪シナリオ」に関し、情報漏えいによる混乱を恐れて当時の菅首相はじめ閲覧を「数人」に限った経緯を明らかにした。「当時公開していたら、東京から人がいなくなった可能性があった。そうなれば事故対応は危うかった」と言明。事故対応を優先した結果、一部しか情報共有を図らなかったと説明した。

Minister in charge of the nuclear accident Hosono allowed an interview with Kyodo News by January 29, and explained that how the "worst-case scenario", whose existence was hidden until recently, was shown only to a handful of officials including then-Prime Minister Kan for the fear of a panic if the information were to leak. He said, "If the scenario had been made public, people might have fled Tokyo. Then it would have been difficult to respond to the accident". He explained that the information was shared among only a small group of people because the response to the accident was the first priority.

Ummm. Mr. Hosono, the nuclear power plant is in Fukushima Prefecture, not Tokyo. Ordinary residents of Tokyo did not, and do not, have any role in coming up with measures to deal with the Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident. You did, and so did the administration that you were part of.

It's one thing not to have disclosed the information, but it is totally another to have simply sat on it and done nothing to prepare for the worst case or to properly instruct citizens, in particular residents of Tokyo Metropolitan areas, to take precaution.

Instead, the administration that Goshi Hosono was part of launched the safety campaign for the citizens and attacked people who were telling the truth (in retrospect) about the situation in Fukushima I Nuke Plant. The administration sent radiation "experts" from Nagasaki University to Iitate-mura who told the villagers it was totally safe to play outside, eat vegetables and drink water from the well. It laughed off the IAEA survey of radiation contamination in the village, saying it had its own standard to decide the danger levels, only to order the evacuation of the entire village 11 days later on April 11, 2011.

Goshi Hosono is doubling down on his already tarnished reputation by pressing the disaster debris contaminated with radioactive materials to municipalities all over Japan, totally oblivious to the fact that there is this thing called the Internet, and the citizens now know much more about the contaminated disaster debris than the government officials who can only talk in terms of "emotion" - let's help out people of Tohoku! - while some people in Tohoku itself are wondering why the debris has to be shipped outside, instead of building the plants inside the prefectures to process the debris.

Tweet