Naoto kan what the hell is going on japans prime

Naoto Kan: “What the hell is going on?”
Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan had every reason to ask the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power
Company (TEPCO), “What the hell is going on?” His outburst was in response to the delay of nearly an
hour by TEPCO officials to alert him about the third explosion at the Fukushima nuclear facility.
Can it be dismissed as a slip on the part of TEPCO officials, given the emergency situation at the nuclear
facility? Quite unlikely.
This is not an isolated case, and TEPCO has a dubious track record of falsification and concealing crucial
data, including safety data, of the nuclear plants.
Ticking time bomb
It has now come to light that the company has been storing 4,000 spent uranium fuel assemblies at its
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106
of
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nuclear units at Fukushima Daiichi.
This is equivalent to almost the amount of highly radioactive uranium fuel produced in six years by the
units and more than three times the amount of radioactive material present in the cores of all the six
units.
For instance, Unit-4 had some 548 still-hot fuel assemblies stored in a pool of water in the upper floor. It
was the lack of cooling water in this pool that ultimately led to an explosion of the roof of Unit-4.
More than 60 per cent of the spent fuel from the facility is stored in a separate pool built in 1997.
According to Reuters, constrained by space, TEPCO had initiated steps to increase the storage capacity of
spent fuel inside the reactor buildings by “re-racking” the pools. There were other plans for increasing
the storage capacity outside the reactor buildings.
But only the reactor buildings offered sufficient open space for any significant increase in storage
capacity. “TEPCO had the capacity to more than double the number of fuel assemblies stored in the
reactors from 3,998 at the time of the quake to 8,310 assemblies,” according to Reuters.
No safety checks
The Guardian reports that TEPCO had missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks
before the March 11 quake. For instance, the company had failed to carry out safety checks on 33 pieces
of equipment inside the plant's cooling system. The company's admission of this omission came weeks
after government regulators approved prolonging of the life of one of the six reactors.
This is not the fist time that TEPCO had violated safety norms, concealed crucial safety data, or even vital
information about geological fault structures.
Turning a blind eye
It was after the 2007 earthquake of 6.8 magnitude, which hit the seven reactors at the Kashiwazaki-
Kariwa plant in Japan's west coast that it became clear that the reactor facility was built directly on top
of a seismically active fault line.