http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57386266/report-govt-collapsed-during-japan-nuke-crisis/
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Report: Gov't "collapsed" during Japan nuke crisis
(CBS News)
The one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan is less than two weeks away, but details about the nuclear meltdown that happened that tragic day are just beginning to emerge.
On Feb. 27, a news helicopter was allowed close enough to get a good glimpse of the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant. Today, a report revealed the chaos between Japan's leaders during the crisis.
"The normal lines of authority completely collapsed," Tetsuro Fukuyama, the prime minister's adviser, told investigators.
CBS News correspondent Lucy Craft reported that in the hours after the tsunami struck the nuclear plant, Japanese officials huddled in an emergency bunker struggled to grasp the size of the catastrophe.
"As we listened to our top nuclear experts, we politicians had no idea what they were talking about. Was anyone going to suffer radiation contamination? Would this be another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? No one could give us a straight answer," Fukuyama recalled in the report.
After 300 interviews with officials and nuclear experts, the report said government was partially at fault for not having an emergency plan if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the country.
However, investigators concluded the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric, was to blame for the majority of the problems. "They were astonishingly unprepared for this nuclear accident," lead investigator Youichi Funabash told CBS News.
It seems that Tokyo Electric was unprepared for a power failure. Without electricity, the cores of the reactor couldn't stay cool, and it triggered explosions and meltdowns.
With little information from the plant, Fukuyama said that the government thought that a nuclear meltdown was impending, and feared that a massive cloud of radiation would force the evacuation of 30 million people in the Tokyo region.
As a last-ditch effort, the Japanese government discussed "suicide squad" made up of men over 65 years old to ascertain the damage first hand. Fukuyama said he would lead the group.
"Terrified doesn't begin to describe how we felt," Fukuyama told investigators months after the scare. A "no go" zone still remains around the plant because radiation levels are too high. Clean up at the plant is estimated to take 40 years.
"When we learned the reactors had in fact melted down, I was overwhelmed, by our inability," he added.
and.......
3 Fukushima mayors boycott meeting with gov't ministers
In this June 8, 2011 photo, residents wearing protective suits gather in a gym in Hirono, Japan, for a briefing before being escorted to their homes inside the exclusion zone to retrieve a few small items. (AP Photo/AP Photographer David Guttenfelder on assignment for National Geographic Magazine)
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A meeting between the government and municipalities located near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was cancelled Sunday after three mayors boycotted it protesting that the government had informed the media of the specifics of the meeting's agenda prior to informing them.
Futaba Mayor Katsutaka Idogawa, who absented himself, told a press conference, "I strongly mistrust the government...So I have made a momentous decision not to attend the meeting" with Environment Minister Goshi Hosono and Tatsuo Hirano, minister in charge of reconstruction from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The mayors of the towns of Hirono and Namie followed Idogawa.
In the planned meeting, the leaders of eight towns and villages, including Futaba, Hirono and Namie, were expected to discuss how to eliminate radioactive materials leaked by the plant and explore ways to construct temporary storage facilities for contaminated soil.
Idogawa complained that the media reported before the meeting that the Environment Ministry is considering purchasing temporary storage sites for soil contaminated by the Fukushima plant by taking into account the going price of land prior to the disaster.
Hosono and Hirano cancelled the meeting and instead held an informal meeting with the five other municipal leaders.
"I hope to arrange another meeting as soon as possible and give a concrete explanation" about the government's stance on the storage facilities, Hosono told reporters.
A worker pushes a wheelbarrow across a baseball diamond after helping scrape off the top layer of contaminated soil at a sports ground in Minamisoma, northeastern Japan, just outside the 20 kilometer exclusion zone around the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011. (AP Photo/ Greg Baker)
and.....
Aerial photos of Fukushima nuke plant an eerie sight
A cold eerie quietness envelops the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. There is no activity among the snow-dusted buildings, and reminders of the devastation caused by last year's Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami are everywhere.
That was the scene that greeted an Asahi Shimbun team that flew to the site on a company helicopter on Feb. 25, the day the central government scaled back the no-fly zone from 20 kilometers to 3 kilometers.
The helicopter flew north over the coastline of Fukushima Prefecture, entering the 20-km zone shortly after 4 p.m. at an altitude of 300 meters. It got within 3.6 km of the crippled facility.
A radiation meter on board recorded the highest level that afternoon, 1.4 microsieverts per hour, near Okuma, one of two towns where the plant is located, some 4 to 5 km from the stricken facility.
The helicopter traveled further north to the evacuated town of Futaba, 3.6 km from the power plant. We saw the brown town hall building below. The area was blankleted with snow, and no trace of tire tracks remained.
Snow dusted the reactor buildings, whose roofs and walls were ripped off by hydrogen explosions last March.
Because it was the weekend, there was no activity. Not one plant worker could be seen and operational equipment lay idle.
On the coastal side of the complex, waves crashed onto a breakwater that was damaged by the March 11 tsunami. Heavy oil tanks still stood at an odd angle.
Toppled trees were everywhere. Only the foundations of homes could be seen in many places.
It was an eerie sight, made bleaker by the undisturbed thin carpet of snow covering the ground.
(This article was written by Takayuki Kihara and Jin Nishikawa.)
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Snow-dusted buildings at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on Feb. 25. The large white building, center-right, is the No. 1 reactor building. (Eiji Hori)
(Mainichi Japan) February 27, 201http://enenews.com/weekends-off-at-fukushima-not-one-plant-worker-could-be-seen-operational-equipment-lay-idle-a-cold-eerie-quietness-asahi-flyover
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