TOKYO — Last year’s nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant was a “profoundly man-made disaster,” the result of poor earthquake-safety planning and faulty post-tsunami communication, a report from an independent parliamentary panel said Thursday.
The criticism of the Japanese government and the nuclear operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, provided an alternative narrative to an earlier investigation from Tepco itself, whose in-house panel concluded that the nuclear crisis was unforeseeable, spurred by a “giant tsunami beyond our imagination.”
The report released Thursday suggested that the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that triggered the tsunami might also have caused critical damage that led to the series of meltdowns. It argued that the nuclear power plants could and should have been made more quake-proof. It blamed lax safety measures on what it called the country’s powerful and “collusive” decision makers and on a conformist culture that allowed them to operate with little scrutiny.
“What must be admitted — very painfully — is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan,’ ” investigation Chairman Kiyoshi Kurokawa wrote in the introduction to the report.
