Failure guru to reveal what went wrong at Fukushima
Yotaro Hatamura, an engineering professor who studies industrial accidents caused by design flaws and human error, will issue a report next week after a six-month investigation into the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
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| Yotaro Hatamura |
His 10-member team has compiled a "massive" report on what happened at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant when it was hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the response by Tokyo Electric Power Co., according to a statement from Hatamura's office.
Hatamura, 70, has said the probe will focus on what went wrong and not who is responsible.
The committee is unlikely to have had the time to get the information needed for a full investigation, especially from officials higher ranked than Tepco's onsite staff, said Shinichi Kamata, a professor of organization and strategy at the National Defense Academy of Japan, who sits on the Japan Airlines Co. safety advisory group with Hatamura.
"Even if somebody acknowledges his mistake, there is only so much he'd talk about," Kamata said earlier this week. "We don't know how much will come out of Tepco headquarters or the prime minister's office."
Newspapers have said the report includes failures such as misinterpreted data and malfunctioning cellphones that may have worsened the crisis.
Hatamura was appointed by the government in May to lead an "impartial and multifaceted" investigation into the accident.
Some managers at the nuclear plant weren't aware that the emergency water-supply system for cooling reactor No. 1 would stop working if it lost power, the Asahi Shimbun reported Sunday, citing unidentified people on Hatamura's committee.
The panel is investigating if the assumption that the emergency system was working slowed the response, the Asahi said.
The high-pressure coolant injection system at the No. 3 reactor was stopped by a worker without authority from the plant manager because he wanted to prevent the battery from running out, the Mainichi Shimbun reported. Both reactors suffered meltdowns in the disaster.
Tepco failed to improve the communications system at the plant even after the same kind of cellphones used at the utility's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear station in Niigata Prefecture didn't function when a quake hit the plant in 2007, the Nikkei financial newspaper reported, citing the committee.
About 1,000 cellphones stopped working at the Fukushima plant, except those in a quake-proof building used as an emergency headquarters after the record magnitude-9 earthquake knocked out power, according to the report.
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