Ready to die for TEPCO?

The series of major nuclear accidents at the Fukushima Number One Nuclear Power Plant that began with the earthquake and tsunami on the afternoon of 11 March this year is, at the time of writing twelve weeks later, unending and uncontrolled. In mid-May the owner and operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), finally admitted that the nuclear fuel cores of three of the six reactors at Fukushima No. 1 had indeed melted down. This was followed by the resignation of the company’s hapless president, an announcement of the largest corporate loss in Japanese history, and the downgrading of TEPCO shares to junk status by international credit rating agencies. After months of confusion, prevarication, obfuscation and provision of outright misinformation to both the public and government of Japan, TEPCO’s most serious collision with the physics and engineering of reality came at the end of May when the company conceded that its previous statement that it would achieve ‘cold shutdown’ of the three reactors by the end of the year was simply not possible. This amounted to a nuclear industry admission of the most fundamental fears of its critics – that a foreseeable and predicted sequence of accidents at nuclear power plants could result in a threat to human security that approached the limits of effective control.