Japan Nuclear Disaster Caps Decades Of Faked Reports, Accidents

Japan has no oil or gas reserves of its own and thus nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors, more than any other country except the United States, to power its industries, in spite of safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.

But this has come at a price to the ordinary citizens of Japan - the cover-ups, scams and the skulduggery that has been part of Japan's atomic power industry.

The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.

In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, said fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could suffer a catastrophic disaster.

“We didn’t learn anything,” Ishibashi said in a phone interview this week. “Nuclear power is national policy and there’s a real reluctance to scrutinize it."

"Regulators just rubber-stamp the utilities’ reports,” Takashi Nakata, a former Hiroshima Institute of Technology seismologist and an anti-nuclear activist, said at the time.

The chicken have finally come home to roost.

Read the damning report here....

www.bloomberg.com...

Wow, how did this thread get missed??? Now two other plants have reported porblems??? Great, now I'm going to have a sleepless night or two!