News Watch
Former TEPCO Management Not Responsible for Fukushima Nuclear Disaster? Supreme Court and Tokyo High Court Rulings
On March 5, in the trial of criminal responsibility for the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Supreme Court of Japan found Takeguro Ichiro and former Vice-President Muto Sakae of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) not guilty of manslaughter (former Chairman Katsumata Tsunehisa’s appeal was dismissed due to his death). Then, on June 6, the Tokyo High Court reversed its earlier decision in a shareholder representative lawsuit in which it had ordered four defendants (the three aforementioned former TEPCO employees plus former TEPCO President Shimizu Masataka) to pay more than 13 trillion yen in compensation to the company, and rescinded the reparation order.
The criminal trial began in 2012, with the first complaint filed in June, a year after the March 2011 accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (below “the nuclear plant”) by the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Criminal Complainants Group. The Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office decided not to prosecute any of the accused, including TEPCO officers, government officials and academics, but the Public Prosecutor’s Committee twice voted in favor of prosecuting three people, including former Chairman Katsumata. The deaths of 44 patients at a Futaba hospital in the course of being forcibly evacuated and injuries sustained by TEPCO employees from flying debris during hydrogen gas explosions were cited among the allegations that crimes of professional negligence leading to death or injury had occurred. From February 2016, a court-appointed lawyer acting as a public prosecutor forcibly prosecuted the three defendants in the Tokyo District Court.
In the district court trial, testimony from seismologists and TEPCO employees revealed that the company had failed to take measures despite the advance predictability of the possibility of a tsunami exceeding the height of the platform on which the nuclear plant was built, flooding the buildings and leading to power loss and explosions. The September 2019 ruling, however, stated that it was doubtful that the long-term evaluation by the Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion could be “considered objectively reliable.” It failed to question the responsibility of the defendants, who had delayed and rejected measures requested by the employees even though they had been approved by the Executive Committee. An appeal was filed, but the Tokyo High Court dismissed it in January 2023. The Supreme Court has confirmed the ruling and subsequent dismissal.
The shareholder representative lawsuit was launched in November 2011, when TEPCO shareholders filed a lawsuit against the company’s Audit & Supervisory Board members, seeking to recover damages suffered by the company as a result of the accident, to be paid by preceding directors, and demanding that damages be recovered for all of the victims of the accident. Since the Audit & Supervisory Board did not litigate this, the shareholders and other plaintiffs filed suit in the Tokyo District Court instead in March 2012. That court ordered a total payment of 13.321 trillion yen paid by the defendants, consisting of (1) 1.615 trillion for decommissioning, (2) 7.834 trillion for damages to the victims, and (3) 4.6226 trillion for decontamination and other measures.
Just prior to the Tokyo District Court’s ruling on that in June 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the government was not responsible in the four class-action lawsuits in which disaster victims had been seeking damages from the government along with TEPCO. In three of the four cases, a high court ruling recognizing the government’s responsibility was overturned. Of the four judges in these cases, only Judge Miura Mamoru provided detailed objections. Since then, the district court and high court have both repeatedly ruled following the Supreme Court’s precedent in damage claims related to the nuclear disaster.
Thus, the Supreme Court’s ruling on the criminal proceedings and the high court’s ruling on the shareholder representative proceedings are clearly in line with the Supreme Court’s decision three years ago in June 2022. The latter referred to Japan’s Basic Energy Plan, in which the government pretended that promoting nuclear power plants was the will of the citizens, and justified this abandonment of sensibility with the claim that if operations were halted, “Not only would it impede the supply of electricity, it would require that electricity prices be raised at some point, with a huge impact on people’s lives and corporate activities.”
TEPCO to Restart Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Unit 6 First
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc. (TEPCO) announced on June 25 that it is mapping out a new course in which instead of first starting up the Unit 7 reactor (ABWR, 1356 MW) at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station, as it had initially planned, it will start up the Unit 6 reactor (also ABWR, 1356 MW) first. They loaded nuclear fuel into the Unit 6 reactor core on June 10 to 24. Nuclear fuel that had been loaded into the Unit 7 reactor core in April 2024 was to be returned to the pool.
The reason they are postponing the resumption of Unit 7’s operation is that they expect that even if it is restarted, they will have to shut it down again by October, the deadline for installing “facilities for dealing with specific serious accidents, etc.,” which they are not expecting to meet. Of course, they knew this from early on, having announced that the completion of the facilities, which was supposed to be in February this year, was being postponed to August 2029. nearly four years after the deadline. Despite that, TEPCO kept insisting on restarting Unit 7 first, but conditions turned out not to allow the restart this summer as they had planned. Thus it seems they are using the delay in completing the facilities as their cover for not being able to restart the reactor, because they would just have to shut it down again even if they could restart it.
It is worth noting that even if the deadline for completing the facilities at Unit 6 were September 2029, giving them the needed leeway, they would not be able to restart it right away anyway. Mayor Sakurai Masahiro of Kashiwazaki City, who had agreed to the Unit 7 restart, had put conditions on agreeing to the Unit 6 restart upon ascertaining TEPCO’s approach to the decommissioning plans for units 1 through 5. Governor Hanazumi Hideyo of Niigata Prefecture has maintained a cautious stance on this as well. In response to the government’s request for his understanding about the reactor’s resumed operation, he made up his own mind and indicated, “Upon confirming the will of the prefecture’s citizens I will respond to the government’s request for our conclusion on it” A bill for a prefectural vote on the restarts that had garnered 143,196 signatures was rejected by the prefectural assembly on April 18, but meetings between the governor and mayors of the prefecture’s 30 municipalities, which began discussing this in May, will continue until August. Also, public hearings on the restarts are being held from June to August at five locations in Niigata Prefecture. The speakers at these hearings, however, all go by pseudonyms, making the choice of suitable representatives hard. Initially these hearings were audio only, but upon request, the faces of speakers are also being shown on screen or broadcasted video, but only if their permission has been obtained for that.
A prefectural opinion poll is to begin in mid-August, lasting three weeks, with the results to be announced at the end of September. The governor is expected to decide on whether or not to allow the restarts based on the results of that poll, with this decision coming as early as October.
