Equipo Nizkor - Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Trial Ends With Acquittals of 3 Executives.

A Japanese court on Thursday acquitted three former Tokyo Electric Power Company executives who had been accused of criminal negligence for their roles in the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The verdict makes it likely that no one will be held criminally responsible for one of the worst nuclear accidents in history -- a catastrophe that led to a global backlash against nuclear power and created environmental damage that will haunt Japan for generations to come.

Although the ruling has likely cleared it of criminal liability, the company, known as Tepco, still faces civil litigation and the burden of mitigating the continuing harm caused by the meltdown of three reactors at the Daiichi nuclear plant in Fukushima after a huge earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

The executives -- Tsunehisa Katsumata, Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro -- were the only people charged over the handling of the disaster, which forced more than 160,000 people in northeastern Japan to evacuate their homes to escape nuclear fallout that left areas surrounding the plant uninhabitable.

The quake and the tsunami killed thousands, but 44 people died in the chaos surrounding the evacuation of the area, the prosecution said. They attributed the deaths to negligence by the executives, who they said had failed to properly plan for the possibility of a nuclear accident despite previous warnings. None of the deaths were attributed to radiation-related illnesses.

The three executives argued that they could not have anticipated the damage caused by the unprecedented disaster, and the court appeared to agree on Thursday.

"It would be impossible to operate a nuclear plant if operators are obliged to predict every possibility about a tsunami and take necessary measures," said the presiding judge, Kenichi Nagafuchi, according to Kyodo News.

Mr. Katsumata was chairman of Tepco when the accident occurred. Mr. Muto and Mr. Takekuro ran the utility's nuclear division.

Joji Hara, a spokesman for the company, declined to comment on the verdict, but he said the company expressed its "sincere apologies for the great inconvenience and concern that the Tepco Fukushima nuclear accident has caused on the people of Fukushima Prefecture and society as a whole."

The company "will continue to wholeheartedly devote every effort to nuclear damage compensation, decommissioning and decontamination, while also implementing measures to enhance the safety of our nuclear power stations with unwavering determination," he said.

At the trial, the prosecution said that, three years before the accident, the executives had been presented with warnings that the plant could be hit by a tsunami as high as 15.7 meters (around 52 feet). Had they listened, the prosecution said, they would have been able to take steps to prevent the disaster, in which waves more than 30 feet high, caused by a magnitude 9 earthquake, overwhelmed the plant's protective sea wall.

But the defense argued that expert opinion on the issue had been split, that the reports had been unreliable and that the men could not have realistically anticipated that the plant would be struck by such a giant wave.

Yuichi Kaido, one of the leaders of a group of lawyers opposed to nuclear power, said Thursday that Tepco had been aware of the danger of a megatsunami since 2008 and had not acted. "They themselves had done the calculations and hid them for three years," he said.

"The only way to see this is the court has issued an unfair verdict," Mr. Kaido said.

Prosecutors had twice declined to bring charges against the executives -- in 2013 and in 2015 -- arguing that the evidence was insufficient. But former area residents and antinuclear campaigners worked together to appeal the decisions, leveraging an area of Japanese law that allows panels of private citizens to review prosecutors' decisions and order them reversed.

The panels, which consist of 11 randomly selected civilians, were put into place after World War II to put a check on the authority of the country's prosecutors, who have broad discretion in deciding whether or not to bring a case to trial.

After two such civilian committees determined that the Tepco executives should stand trial, the case was automatically handed over to a court for trial, where court-appointed attorneys stood in for government prosecutors.

Conviction rates in Japan are close to 100 percent. But the circumstances surrounding the Tepco indictment are unusual.

Before Thursday's verdict, citizen panels had overturned prosecutors' decisions only about eight times, said Hiroshi Otsuka, a law professor at Meiji University. Just two of those indictments resulted in a guilty verdict.

"They're cases where prosecutors have given up on bringing charges, so in a way it's natural that a large number of them end in acquittals," Mr. Otsuka said.

The ruling Thursday followed at least 30 lawsuits against Tepco and the Japanese government over their failure to prepare for an emergency on the scale of the 2011 disaster. In February, a civil court in Yokohama ruled that Tepco had been negligent, awarding 4.2 billion yen (about $39 million) in damages to 152 evacuees from the area around the nuclear plant. It was the eighth judgment in a civil court against Tepco, which has so far lost every action brought against it over the meltdown.

The accident at the Daiichi plant was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. It effectively ended the use of nuclear power in Japan and created a worldwide backlash against the energy source.

In the immediate aftermath of the accident, Japan shut down all of its nuclear reactors. As of this month, only a handful of its dozens of reactors have been put back online.

Tepco has pledged to decommission the Daiichi plant and return the surrounding area to its original state, but it has struggled to cope with the consequences of the disaster -- including how to handle massive amounts of irradiated waste -- which will be felt for generations.

The company has said that by 2022, it will run out of space to store contaminated water that has been used to cool melted fuel at three of the plant's reactors. As of August, almost 1.2 million cubic meters of processed water was stored in 977 tanks on the facility's grounds.

Japanese government officials have discussed the possibility of dumping the excess water into the ocean, arguing that the dilution effect would render it harmless. But the idea has met with strong objections from environmentalists and the local fishing industry.

19Sep19

Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Trial Ends With Acquittals of 3 Executives

[Source: By Ben Dooley, Eimi Yamamitsu and Makiko Inoue, The New York Times, Tokyo, 19Sep19]

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