A new, very heavy sentence has arrived, relating to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which took place in March 2011. A Tokyo court found the Japanese company Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power, the largest company in the country) guilty for not being able to prevent the nuclear accident that caused the dispersion of radiation in the surrounding areas following the earthquake and tsunami which caused the collapse of the structure of the nuclear power plant.
The sentence: maxi compensation of 94 billion
A Tokyo court found Tepco guilty, condemning it to pay one big compensation of 13 trillion yen, equal to approx 94,6 billion euros. The figure includes costs for the decommissioning of damaged reactors, but also compensation for local residents who have been forced to evacuate, leaving their homes.
The ruling ends a dispute that began in 2012 against former executives of the group regarding the level of reliability of an assessment of seismic activity in the area carried out by a government commission in 2002, nine years before the accident. According to the shareholders, the valuation was credible and the managers should have done more to safeguard the plant by a huge tsunami, a rare event but one that was to be expected.
The former executives, on the other hand, claim that the assessment was not reliable, therefore they could not predict the damage of a tsunami of that magnitude, and that there was in any case the time to adopt the necessary preventive measures.
What happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant
The Fukushima disaster was the worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Not surprisingly, they are the only two to have been classified as level 7 on the INES scale, i.e. the level of maximum severity of nuclear accidents.
It happened on March 11, 2011, when a quake of first earthquake and then a tsunami they hit the plant, which was not adequately protected: its anti-tsunami barriers were in fact less than ten meters high, while the tsunami wave reached fourteen metres. The tsunami destroyed the emergency generators which fed the cooling systems of reactors 1, 2 and 3, as well as the high voltage power line which connected them to reactors 5 and 6. This caused an electrical blackout and the blockage of the cooling systems in the first three reactors. In the following hours and days, the reactor buildings occurred four separate explosions, caused by hydrogen leaks, some of which destroyed the upper structures of two reactor buildings. Not only that, following the release of radioactivity in the air and the contamination of the surrounding land, the authorities ordered the evacuation of residents within a radius of 20 kilometers.
On July 5, 2012, a specially appointed commission of inquiry concluded that the circumstances leading to the disaster could have been foreseen and the accident avoided with adequate safety measures.
For the past eleven years the government has spent about 250 billion euros (32.1 trillion yen) to rebuild the tsunami-devastated region, but areas around the Fukushima plant remain closed.
