TOKYO — Japan’s prime minister during last year’s nuclear crisis said at a parliamentary inquiry Monday that the country should discard nuclear power as too dangerous, saying the Fukushima accident had pushed Japan to the brink of “national collapse.”
In testimony to a panel investigating the government’s handling of the nuclear disaster, the former prime minister, Naoto Kan, also warned that the politically powerful nuclear industry was trying to push Japan back toward nuclear power despite “showing no remorse” for the accident.
Kan’s was the most closely watched testimony in the 6-month-old inquiry, which was started by lawmakers who felt an earlier internal investigation by the government had papered over problems. Kan used the appearance to criticize the relatively pro-nuclear stance of the current prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, who replaced him in August.
Noda has called for restarting Japan’s undamaged nuclear plants, which have all been idled since the accident because of public safety concerns. He said the plants are needed to avoid economically crippling power shortages. Noda has met stiff resistance from many Japanese voters, who have said the government is rushing to restart the plants without proving that they are safe or allowing time for a proper public dialogue over whether Japan actually needs nuclear power.
In his testimony, Kan said Japan’s plant safety was inadequate because the energy policy had been hijacked by the “nuclear village” - a term for the power companies and pro-nuclear regulators and researchers that worked closely together to promote the industry. He said the only way to break their grip was to form a new regulatory agency staffed with true outsiders, such as U.S.and European experts.
“Gorbachev said in his memoirs that the Chernobyl accident exposed the sicknesses of the Soviet system,” Kan said, referring to the 1986 explosion of a reactor in Ukraine, which spewed radiation across a wide swath of Europe. “The Fukushima accident did the same for Japan.”
Kan spent much of his three-hour testimony fending off criticisms of his handling of the accident, which covered a wide area in northeastern Japan with radiation.
He complained that nuclear regulators and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, kept him in the dark about crucial details in the days immediately after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing three of the plant’s reactors to melt down.
He defended his sudden visit to the plant the day after the earthquake, which has been widely criticized for distracting plant personnel at a crucial juncture in their efforts to save the overheating reactors. Kan told the panel that he wanted to get an assessment directly from the plant manager because he felt company officials in Tokyo were not giving him enough information.
Kan said nuclear officials sent from government offices and the utility to advise him were not useful, and he never received the kind of information he needed. Japan’s main regulatory body, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, was particularly incapable, he said.
Kan also said the country’s nuclear emergency preparedness law, set up in 1999 after a fatal accident at a nuclear fuel processing plant, did not address a severe accident that would require hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate, as in Fukushima.
“Everything anticipated in the law was inadequate,” he said.
At the end of his testimony, a panel member asked him if he had any advice for the current prime minister. Kan replied that the accident had brought Japan to the brink of evacuating metropolitan Tokyo and its 30 million residents. He said the loss of the capital would have paralyzed the national government, leading to “a collapse of the nation’s ability to function.”
He said the prospect of losing Tokyo made him realize that nuclear power was just too risky, the consequences of an accident too large, for Japan to accept.
“It is impossible to ensure safety sufficiently to prevent the risk of a national collapse,” Kan said. “Experiencing the accident convinced me that the best way to make nuclear plants safe is not to rely on them, but rather to get rid of them.”
Hours later, Noda indicated that he may soon make a decision on restarting the Oi nuclear plant in western Japan, which he hopes will be a first step toward turning on Japan’s other idled plants to avoid power shortages this summer.
Information for this article was contributed by Martin Fackler of The New York Times and by Mari Yamaguchi of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 05/29/2012