Thursday, January 26, 2012

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.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Let's add re-criticality to the list.

The CTBTO monitoring site in Taksaki, Gunma Prefecture recorded several spikes of Iodine over a period of four months last year...140 miles from Fukushima. Now, Ashai has reported the same data from Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, but claims it is re-surfaced contamination the monitoring station picked up. The data is there...months of falling and rising Cesium and Iodine detection at two sites in different Prefectures...basically covering the Kanto Plain. If this was caused by multiple re-criticalities at Fukushima, then GOJ has plenty of accomplices in hiding the truth.

Anonymous said...

People should write up THEIR data and documentation during the period between 3-11 and now. Present IT as the report/truth..he who gets the information out first..wins. Bet some of the discussion was in government evacuation --nothing on how to help the victims.

HUM..were minutes kept on Tsumani issues/reports?

Anonymous said...

This business about the CTBTO sensors. Where is it documented?

Chibaguy said...

I want to add three to the rant please.

1) Notifying the US before the citizens of Japan about the risk.
2) Dumbing down the public with those cardboard drawings of a reactor on NHK.
3) Those stupid ass uniforms they wore to make every think they were in emergency mode.

Anonymous said...

CTBTO Takasaki monitoring station data:
http://www.bfs.de/de/ion/imis/ctbto_aktivitaetskonzentrationen_jod.gif

Ashai data from Tsukuba (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK):
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/analysis/AJ201201230001

These monitoring stations are in different Prefectures, but report the same tale of Iodine and Cesium spikes over a period of four months after the meltdowns.

If not re-criticality, what caused this? Ashai article reports "resurfacing" radiation from dust and wind...but does not report this happened in two different Prefectures.

Anonymous said...

The incompetence of the Japanese so called leaders is absolutely mind boggling ! Japan is a fucking disgrace ! ..

Anonymous said...

They seem competent enough at covering up things.

Anonymous said...

I mentioned this post to my wife who used to live and work in Japan. She replied that absence of minutes can probably be explained by the Disaster Response Headquaters being hungover and asleep.

Anonymous said...

If minutes were not taken, it was intentional. Anybody who has ever been to any kind of work place meeting in Japan knows this. The prime minister doesn't break wind without minutes being taken. And that's an excellent point about the tsunami damage. Any record of that discussion? If so, that proves that information on the nuclear farce was intentionally covered up.

Anonymous said...

Given these missing minutes, it is worthwhile to recall an incidence of mendacity by the bureaucracy and state during the earliest days of the Japanese nuclear power program:

Japanese electric power companies cooperated in the building of the first commercial nuclear power plant in Tokai Village, Ibaraki Prefecture in 1960 (it started operation in 1967). During construction planning in 1959, the Science and Technology Agency (Kagaku gijutsu-chō), a governmental office for the administration of science and technology policies, calculated the costs that would be incurred in the event of an accident at the Tokai Nuclear Power Plant. The agency estimated that the amount would be twice as large as the Japanese national budget at that time. However, the agency concealed this report, and denied its existence for 40 years.

From: http://japanfocus.org/-Hiroshi-Onitsuka/3677

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