Former bosses of Fukushima operator ordered to pay $97 billion damages:
A Tokyo court Wednesday ordered former executives from the operator of the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant to pay 13.32 trillion yen ($97 billion) for failing to prevent the disaster, plaintiffs said.
Four ex-bosses from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) were ordered to pay the damages in a suit brought by shareholders over the nuclear disaster triggered by a massive tsunami in 2011.
Plaintiffs emerged from the Tokyo court holding banners reading "shareholders win" and "responsibility recognised".
Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the ruling, and said they believed it to be the largest amount of compensation ever awarded in a civil lawsuit in Japan.
"Nuclear power plants can cause irreparable damage to human lives and the environment," the plaintiffs said in a separate statement after the ruling.
"Executives for firms that operate such nuclear plants bear enormous responsibility, which cannot compare with that of other companies."
The shareholders argued that the disaster could have been prevented if TEPCO bosses had listened to research and carried out preventative measures like placing an emergency power source on higher ground.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 16 2022, @11:23PM (11 children)
Poked around different sources, for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/japan-court-holds-ex-tepco-execs-liable-for-fukushima-crisis/2022/07/13/e8782c42-029e-11ed-8beb-2b4e481b1500_story.html [washingtonpost.com] lists the plaintiffs and bosses:
> A group of 48 TEPCO shareholders filed the suit in 2012 demanding that Katsumata and four others — former TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu, former Vice Presidents Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro, and another executive, Akio Komori, pay 22 trillion yen ($160 billion) in damages to the company to cover its costs. It maintained that they had neglected to heed experts’ tsunami predictions and failed to take adequate tsunami precautions soon enough.
But nowhere did I see that any of the the bosses have the personal funds to pay the fine.
My strong suspicion is that the fine will be appealed to some smaller amount, but maybe another 'Lentil knows more about the Japanese legal system?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @12:00AM (10 children)
It's symbolic, surely. It means the damage limitation stops at these few individuals and anyone seeking financial compensation can get in line behind the $97B judgement for theirs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday July 17 2022, @12:37AM (9 children)
Not that symbolic: when you're ordered to pay kajillions and you only have $100 on your account, they take $90 from you and leave you $10 so you can buy a few sandwiches and make it alive to next month so they can take another $90. It's a license to take everything you have short of not leaving you enough to survive, regardless of how high your future income might be.
Kind of like sentencing you to 300 years in jail: it ensures that you'll never get out, even if you live to be the oldest ever human on record.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @01:38AM
Probably a good time to join a monastery.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Reziac on Sunday July 17 2022, @02:14AM (7 children)
I know someone who got dinged that way for alimony and child support (court said he had to not only maintain the existing house, he had to buy her a new house that was just as expensive). Wound up with $38/month to live on after paying for both houses and child support.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @11:45AM
He could just work extra jobs in the gig economy and become a millionaire like everyone else.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday July 17 2022, @03:53PM (5 children)
That's why the saying goes, "Don't get the best lawyer you can afford: get the BEST DIVORCE lawyer, even if you think you can't afford them."
In the long run, getting the best WILL pay off.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @04:05PM
Cheaper still to set up a pre-nup...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 17 2022, @04:08PM (3 children)
Absolutely. Wise advice.
Unfortunately it's a bit awkward when you've got a then-scarce job in SoCal and she's got a lawyer in Seattle, and the force of fuck-him-over law behind her.
Even better advice, and more preventive, is this:
Never stick your dick in crazy.
.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday July 18 2022, @05:15PM (2 children)
Or live in a less stupid place?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday July 18 2022, @05:44PM (1 child)
Well, I reached that conclusion and departed the Excessively Stupid State, but sometimes there are other factors.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday July 18 2022, @07:47PM
That is true, sometimes it's not feasible to exfiltrate oneself and one's family. And/or sometimes family is half the problem.
As they say in the South. We don't hide our crazy people. We bring them out and show them off.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday July 17 2022, @12:32AM (2 children)
when I read the title of TFA, that they were ordered to pay back the billions the taxpayers had to front to fix the damage. But no: they lost a suit brought about by the shareholders - basically the private owners seeking to profit one last time from their unfortunate investment. Fuck that! What about Joe Public?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @01:52AM
You peasants just don't understand, do you? If you didn't want to be a peasant, you should have chosen your parents more wisely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @03:52AM
Think of the jobs they created by owning shares and taking profits, right up until the oopsie.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dltaylor on Sunday July 17 2022, @03:33AM (17 children)
May apply to the other islands as well: we have known for decades that the eastern coast of Hokkaido is subject to tsunamis, since it is the side of the island with deep trenches offshore. I don't see anything like off its west coast.
Why would anyone build a reactor in a known tsunami zone, regardless of any fantasized risk mitigations? It's like building wood-frame and clapboard-sided house in a California forest.
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Sunday July 17 2022, @03:44AM (2 children)
I was watching a documentary about Hokkaido, and It seems the name stuck in my head.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday July 17 2022, @11:19AM (1 child)
I think my neighbour has a brown belt in Hokkaido.
Or maybe it was Padlockigami [youtube.com].
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday July 17 2022, @03:56PM
I got a brown belt in sharting, once.
Hulk sad.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday July 17 2022, @04:18AM (6 children)
Because tsunami aren't that big a deal, if you know about them and protect appropriately.
You can protect against forest fire damage too with proper landscaping. Natural disasters aren't some overwhelming force we can't do anything about. But what is missed here is that such knowledge has to be learned somehow in order for those forces of nature to be anticipated and engineered against.
And here, I think the court ruling is utter bunk. Like usual hindsight is conflated with foresight. It's been eleven years since the disaster and no one has yet to explain how TEPCO decision-makers should have known to build a higher seawall or that they should do something about the vulnerability of backup power to flooding. In the real world, we routinely don't know about problems until they happen.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fraxinus-tree on Sunday July 17 2022, @10:07AM (3 children)
The power plant was engineered against the tsunami in question. The problem is, a great deal of mitigations were faked instead of built and installed. Afterwards, they repeatedly faked testing some of them. E.g. the terminals for attaching external truck-mounted generators were never connected to anything, but the plant "tested" them yearly and reported OK.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @02:31PM (1 child)
> ...faked instead of built and installed.
Sounds like my friend's experience at Three Mile Island. Some of his companies equipment was at TMI so he had an inside view of that nuclear near-disaster. For just one example, backup equipment for safety critical systems that was clearly called out in the spec was never purchased and not available on site when needed.
Sleazy operating companies are the reason we can't have nukes. And to think that for years I was convinced that the problem was the nuclear waste...how wrong I was.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday July 18 2022, @05:18PM
Those fuckers at TMI single handedly killed our best hope against climate change.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 19 2022, @03:19AM
I find it interesting that we're eleven years in and this is the first I've heard of these truck-mounted generators. Let's see some support for those claims, not just the truck-mounted generators (which I spent half an hour googling for on Google and DuckDuckGo without luck except to say that it didn't work at first and when it did work, something immediately blew up), but also the "repeatedly faked testing", and that these alleged problems were relevant to the accident in question.
First, why would the nuclear plant need to be designed to handle truck-mounted generators? We already had multiple backups - the grid, multiple on-site generators, and six reactors. With hindsight, we could have just slacked off on everything but those truck generators, right? With foresight though, why would we have needed truck-mounted generators with all these other options available?
Same goes for that testing. With hindsight we can see that TEPCO executives might have shaved a billion or two off these damages with plaintiffs having a slightly harder time. With foresight, what were those tests good for again aside from employing a bunch of paperpushers? They weren't good even as CYA material.
This is classic blame finding. TEPCO failed on some minor aspect right therefore $97 billion in damages. If it wasn't this, it'd be something else. A magnitude 9 earthquake remains lost in the noise.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Monday July 18 2022, @03:57PM (1 child)
Define appropriate:
Something that happens every 100 years? build a seawall
Something that happens every 1000 years? build a bigger seawall
Something that happens every 10000 years? build an even bigger seawall
Notice it's a cost/benefit analysis that basically assume shit's gonna go tits up eventually!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 19 2022, @03:26AM
Do the odds. The reactors were expected to operate for 40 years. A 1 in 100 event would have a 40% chance of occurring. A 1 in 1000 would have 4% and the last would have 0.4% chance. Seems reasonable to engineer against things that have a 1% or greater chance of occurring (keep in mind that there would be a lot of correlation between these extreme events and a lot of solutions can help with multiple problems.
Indeed. Now what's the cost/benefit of building a 1 in 1000 sea wall for a group of reactors, like Fukushima, that will shut down inside of ten years? Because that was the original choice when the Fukushima reactors were going to be obsoleted in the 2010s.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 17 2022, @04:32AM (6 children)
If you think about it, the entire Pacific is a tsunami zone. True, some areas are affected more frequently than others. Still, there is no place that is immune to tsunamis.
With that said, the ancients left markers in Japan to mark high water events. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnings-against-tsunamis-dot-japans-coastline-180956448/ [smithsonianmag.com]
You would think that the Japanese would have mandated that critical infrastructure such as a nuclear reactor be situated above any such markers. Instead, they opted for the easiest, most profitable way of doing things by putting the reactors close to the sea.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fraxinus-tree on Sunday July 17 2022, @10:13AM (3 children)
One can't build a nuclear plant away from the water body that is used for cooling it. You will need to use pumps and tubes that really, really don't add reliability. And when the bad things happen, add-hoc solutions for bringing water to the reactor are much easier 200m off the coast than e.g. 2km off the coast.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @02:42PM
Maybe so, but they had lots and lots of water at Fukushima, delivered courtesy of the tsunami, and that certainly didn't help them!
Perhaps there is a slightly more expensive, but safer approach? For example, locate the nuke well above any possible storm surge. Pump water up to a big enough pond to cool the reactor, with enough overcapacity in the pond for several days of operation (and time to shut down) should the pumps fail. With a little cleverness, it should be possible to recover a good chunk of the pumping power (lifting the water) by generating when the hot water runs back down to the ocean.
Has the possible advantage of leaving most of the beach or sea shore usable for recreation or other industry (assuming the inlets and outlets are underwater, well off shore).
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 17 2022, @02:45PM (1 child)
I will just disagree. Entire cities, and entire counties are served fresh potable water by way of underground pipe. The engineers know how much cooling water is needed in any type of operating conditions, ranging from daily routine, right on up to emergency conditions. Whatever maximum usage might be in the worst possible scenario, you double that to determine the capacity of the pipe, and the pumps. Then you build it twice, in case the first system fails for some crazy reason. That redundancy also allows you to take the first system offline for maintenance when appropriate.
The capacity to build 10 kilometers from the sea exists. The only reason it isn't done is the expense.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 19 2022, @03:31AM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @05:06PM (1 child)
Some did design their plant to handle such tsunamis: https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wall_saved_a_ja.html [oregonlive.com]
It came at a cost though:
And some managed to handle a plant that wasn't designed for the tsunami: https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived [hbr.org]
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g01053/ [nippon.com]
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 18 2022, @12:40AM
Nice finds. A 49 foot wall did the job. I'm afraid that I would still want to move the reactor inland. The wall had to have been an engineering feat, in and of itself. Anyone want to do the calculations for the energy contained in a 19 foot wave smashing into the wall?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Sunday July 17 2022, @01:56PM (1 child)
The check's in the mail.
C'mon, I have no idea what these people made, but this is on RIAA-lawsuit levels of ridiculous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 17 2022, @02:47PM
The TEPCO bosses were pirating music (or movies)? No wonder the company was adrift...spending all their time on Napster and Limewire, for shame!
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday July 18 2022, @08:02PM
There's not much to find, but I did find this article. They might actually have that much money.
Tepco ex-executives get golden parachute: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18550747 [bbc.co.uk]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"