Japan's PM Noda: It Is "Regrettable" That There Is No Minutes of Meetings of Government Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters

None of the meetings of the Nuclear Disaster Response Headquarters has the minutes.

No record whatsoever of how decisions were made by a handful of politicians surrounding then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan (people like Yukio Edano, Banri Kaieda, and Goshi Hosono) and high-level bureaucrats at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and the Ministry of Education and Science, government experts in the Nuclear Safety Commission or the Atomic Energy Commission, and last but not least, TEPCO. We won't know who else was there, because they say they did not keep any record.

The excuse by the NISA was that they were too busy dealing with the crisis.

Well, they sure didn't act like they were dealing with crisis at that time. They were telling us everything was under control, and the Fukushima accident was only a Level 4 accident on INES event scale.

(My ranting is longer than the article.)

From Jiji Tsushin (1/26/2012):

野田佳彦首相は２６日午後の衆院本会議で、政府の原子力災害対策本部の議事録が作成されていなかった問題について「東京電力福島第１原発事故発生後の緊急事態において、昨年３月１１日から２３回にわたる議事内容が文書で随時記録されていなかったことは事実であり、誠に遺憾だ」と述べた。自民党の細田博之元幹事長への答弁。

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda commented during the Lower House session in the afternoon of January 26 on the minutes of the meetings of the Nuclear Disaster Response Headquarters that was set up by the cabinet. He answered the question from a LDP politician and said "In the emergency situation after the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident, it is a fact that there is no minutes of the 23 meetings since March 11 last year, and it is regrettable."

Decisions that they made in the meetings include (in no chronological order and on top of my head, may not be accurate but we'll never know because there is no minutes):

• Setting evacuation zones in concentric circles, as if Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant was an atomic bomb.

• (Kan) going to Fukushima I Nuke Plant less than a day after the nuclear accident because Kan thought of himself as "nuclear expert".
  

• Ignoring the nuclear emergency protocol which specifically said "Use SPEEDI".

• Introducing the "rolling blackout" to scare people into not abandoning nuclear power plants despite the horrendous accident.

• Raising the annual radiation exposure limit for the Fuku-I workers to 250 millisieverts from 50 millisieverts max per year.

• Raising the radiation exposure limit for school children in schools in Fukushima to 20 millisieverts per year.

• Creating the provisional safety standards for food and water.

• Ordering sample tests for food items out of Fukushima, which resulted in 99.9% of vegetables being sold without any testing.

• Sending nuclear experts to Fukushima to tell people everything was OK.

• Sending government-affiliated nuclear experts to TV stations to downplay the accident (remember the "Plutonium Brothers"?).

• Devising a campaign attacking journalists who wrote something "bad" about Fukushima or Fukushima I Nuke Plant accident.

• Devising a campaign to promote the idea that tasty food was safe food; performance by politicians and by celebrities eating freshly picked Fukushima vegetables.

• Dumping the contaminated water from the plant into the Pacific Ocean without telling the countries that might be affected.
  

The list is endless.

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