The appalling track record of Japan's nuclear industry - Moneyweek (UK) [View All]

http://www.moneyweek.com/blog/the-appalling-track-record-of-japans-nuclear-industry-00336

------------excerpt
But there is one section of Japan that really is working all too well to type. The nuclear industry. In 1995, there was a major leak at Monju, a fast breeder reactor. The authorities (as represented by Donen which managed Japan's nuclear programme) said it was "minimal." It wasn't. Instead it was the largest accident of its type ever. In the world.

Still as Alex Kerr points out in his excellent Dogs and Demons that was nothing that couldn’t be dealt with by "hiding the evidence." Donen staff edited the film of the accident, taking out the 15 minutes that showed the actual damage and releasing only five minutes of very innocuous material.

However this level of secrecy was nothing next to what happened in 1997. Then drums filled with nuclear waste exploded at the Tokai plant just north of Tokyo. This was – or should have been – a particular worry given that only three years earlier it had been discovered that 70kgs of plutonium (enough for 20 bombs) had been lost in the plant's pipes at some point.

Yet Donen simply pretended everything was fine. Managers pressurized workers to say the fire was under control when it was not and mis-stated the amount of material leaked by a factor of 20. But that's not all. Incredibly, says Kerr, "on the day of the explosion, 64 people including science and engineering students and foreign trainees toured the complex… and no one ever informed them of the accident."

The list of the madness is almost endless. There was the later accident at the Tokai plant which degenerated into uncontrolled fission (something it took the authorities seven hours to figure out as they couldn't find a neutron measurer) and revealed that for years workers had been disposing of nuclear materials with buckets (rather than dissolution cylinders).