Fukushima plant president resigns over handling of crisis

THE PRESIDENT of Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the embattled operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, has quit following months of withering criticism over his handling of the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Bowing in front of a packed press conference, Masataka Shimizu apologised yesterday before announcing his widely expected resignation.

“I will step down to take managerial responsibility for undermining confidence in nuclear power and causing trouble for society,” he said as his successor, Toshio Nishizawa, looked on.

Mr Nishizawa, a managing director, will officially take over in June.

Mr Shimizu was flanked by Tepco’s board of directors, all wearing the same identical blue utility suits they donned after the crisis erupted in March, when the Fukushima plant was battered by a huge earthquake and tsunami.

Last week, the company admitted for the first time that one of the plant’s reactors went into meltdown hours later.

Announcing a record corporate loss of 1.25 trillion yen (€11.2 billion) for the past financial year, the managers said they would cancel dividends, waive board fees and impose a 20 per cent pay cut on the entire regular workforce.

Some analysts expect Tepco’s eventual losses to be 10 times that amount as it calculates the cost of bringing the crippled plant safely to cold shutdown and compensating nearly 100,000 nuclear refugees forced to evacuate their homes.

Japan’s government sparked anger last week after announcing a plan to bail out the hugely indebted utility to stop it going bankrupt.

Chief government spokesman Yukio Edano also said banks might have to waive some of the roughly $24 billion (€17 billion) in outstanding loans extended to the company before March. “Japanese people will not support using tax money otherwise,” he said.

Japan’s largest utility, Tepco is also now its most unpopular after a string of blunders and cover-ups at the Fukushima plant, which has been leaking radiation for over two months. Many experts suspect the company knew the uranium fuel in reactor one had melted 24 hours after the March 11th quake struck, but chose not to reveal it. Its decision to cool leaking reactors with seawater has washed over 10 million litres of toxic water into the sea.

The mystery about the first tense days after the quake and tsunami struck deepened yesterday, with Mr Edano’s revelation that his government had not received computer-generated estimates of radiation dispersal on March 12th.