Former Japanese official denies pressuring power company not to use the word ‘meltdown’ during Fukushima disaster
Utility had used less serious phrase ‘core damage’ for two months after accident
A Japanese opposition leader who was a senior official during the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant crisis denied on Friday that he or the prime minister at the time pressured the president of Tokyo Electric Power Company not to use the term “meltdown”.
Democratic Party Secretary-General Yukio Edano called a special news conference to refute a finding in a new report that TEPCO president at the time Masataka Shimizu apparently came under political pressure not to use the word. The report did not find direct evidence of that.
“The fact that I or then-Prime Minister [Naoto] Kan ordered or requested then-President Shimizu to avoid using the term ‘meltdown’ under any circumstance does not exist,” Edano said. He said the timing of the report was suspicious ahead of an Upper House election next month.
The report released on Thursday by a team of three lawyers appointed by TEPCO found that an instruction from Shimizu to avoid using the term “meltdown” delayed full public disclosure of the status of the nuclear plant, which suffered three reactor meltdowns after a major earthquake and tsunami hit the northeastern Japanese coast on March 11, 2011.
The utility used the less serious phrase “core damage” for two months after the disaster.
