Greenpeace Report Issued: Lessons from Fukushima
Fairewinds
was retained by Greenpeace to write a chapter of their newly released
report entitled "The Echo Chamber: Regulatory Capture and the Fukushima
Daiichi Disaster".
Fairewinds
concludes that Fukushima Daiichi was not just a nuclear accident;
rather, for decades it was a nuclear accident waiting to happen. Flaws
in the GE Mark 1 containment design were well known for four decades.
The likelihood of seismic/tsunami events far worse than the Fukushima
Units were designed to withstand were well understood for more than 20
years.
Against
this prophetic backdrop, Tokyo Electric, Japanese regulators, and
international nuclear organizations turned a blind eye toward these
obvious warnings and continued to operate the reactors. Indeed, Japanese
regulators relicensed Fukushima Unit 1 to operate beyond its initial 40
year design life one month before the accident while ignoring
seismic/tsunami warnings.
Fukushima
Daiichi is not unique. These same nuclear regulatory institutions
oversee other reactors in Japan, and indeed worldwide. Fairewinds
concludes that truly independent worldwide nuclear reactor regulatory
institutions do not exist, setting the stage for similar accidents
somewhere else in the world.
Read Report Now
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