Report: Gov't "collapsed" during Japan nuke crisis

The one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan is less than two weeks away, but details about the nuclear meltdown that happened that tragic day are just beginning to emerge.

On Feb. 27, a news helicopter was allowed close enough to get a good glimpse of the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant. Today, a report revealed the chaos between Japan's leaders during the crisis.

"The normal lines of authority completely collapsed," Tetsuro Fukuyama, the prime minister's adviser, told investigators.

CBS News correspondent Lucy Craft reported that in the hours after the tsunami struck the nuclear plant, Japanese officials huddled in an emergency bunker struggled to grasp the size of the catastrophe.

"As we listened to our top nuclear experts, we politicians had no idea what they were talking about. Was anyone going to suffer radiation contamination? Would this be another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? No one could give us a straight answer," Fukuyama recalled in the report.

After 300 interviews with officials and nuclear experts, the report said government was partially at fault for not having an emergency plan if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the country.

However, investigators concluded the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric, was to blame for the majority of the problems. "They were astonishingly unprepared for this nuclear accident," lead investigator Youichi Funabash told CBS News.

It seems that Tokyo Electric was unprepared for a power failure. Without electricity, the cores of the reactor couldn't stay cool, and it triggered explosions and meltdowns.

With little information from the plant, Fukuyama said that the government thought that a nuclear meltdown was impending, and feared that a massive cloud of radiation would force the evacuation of 30 million people in the Tokyo region.

As a last-ditch effort, the Japanese government discussed "suicide squad" made up of men over 65 years old to ascertain the damage first hand. Fukuyama said he would lead the group.

"Terrified doesn't begin to describe how we felt," Fukuyama told investigators months after the scare. A "no go" zone still remains around the plant because radiation levels are too high. Clean up at the plant is estimated to take 40 years.

"When we learned the reactors had in fact melted down, I was overwhelmed, by our inability," he added.

[MIO42]

Could happen Anywhere Anytime

[LtSmily]

This exposes two things:
1) Cost is the determining factor of any company's preparedness programs (or lack thereof).
2) ALL governments (including our own) are completely incapable of handling all incidents. This shows that either humans (in their arrogance)cannot contain every accident, or that governments truly are completely incompetent. Take your pick.

[credibility2]

...if this happens here, there will be mass chaos...which is probably why our government wouldn't freely report any problems...they wouldn't be able to control the civil disruptions...

[Rhotel1]

None of the US reactors are susceptible to being indunated by a tsunami. US NRC is much more effective than Japan's NISA. NRC is not in the business of promoting nuclear power; it is in the business of regulating the use of radioactive substances.

[kbbpll]

Don't expect anything other than "astonishingly unprepared" in the United States either. How many reactors in the US share the same design feature, where when power is lost, the reactor building just explodes?

[TDawg7019]

Yet this article still fails to detail the extent of the threat from this massive meltdown. Why Alaska stopped moitoring radiation levels. Why the EPA raised safe radiation level standards without telling anyone. What about the dead marine life washing ashore? what about the giant hole melted through the ground at the reactor that will eventually hit sea water. Why does it take a year to get a reality check on the worst disaster in the history of mankind? WHY?

[CMII]

Could you, the public handle the truth.

[Rhotel1]

There is no real threat from this meltdown. None of your claims is true. There is a substantial amount of fact out there - suggest that you start here - http://*******.com/SlateonFukushimaReality

[babbo0]

Does anyone else feel like "the normal lines of authority collapsed" means something very different from "the government collapsed" as suggested in the headline?

[elmgreen11]

say it with me: "clean, safe, and too cheap to meter."

[Rhotel1]

Maybe you can also say with me "rising sea level flooding coastal communities like downtown Manhattan"

[sjperino]

This is truly disconcerting to say the least. The Japanese gov't compleltey melted down in the face of the disaster.
One now has to wonder if the gov't even today has fully recovered enough to fully seek the un-varnished truth as to the full extent of the nuclear meltdown inside the reactor's cores?
Or are the gov't officals still afraid to let impartial 3rd party inspections have a look at the extent of the nuclear meltdown?
Why the US AEC/DOE isn't over there demanding full access to these reactor sites, or pressuring the IAEA inspectors to have a look is worrisome.
From the recent stories the meltdown breached the containment vessel and the nuclear material is fused to bottom of the concrete reactor structure. And cannot be removed because the technology required to remove the nuclear material is not even in existence yet? How swerious does this have to be before the Japanese gov't pulls their heads from the sand?
This is not China Syndrome..this is more like Ohio Snydrome.. When that mass of nulcear material melts its way to 50 yard line of the Cleveland Brown's field during halftime ..then I guess we should worry>?

[Overruled1]

What was discovered in other areas was that the earth starts to form a glass bubble as the material melts through the planet. As the bubble grows with the melting it slows the progress down to almost nothing eventually.

[Rhotel1]

The reactors are all at cold shutdown. That means that the decay heat is under control and that the reactors are cooling down. The "Ohio Syndrome" is not going to happen. The worst reactor accidents never resulted in the core boring through the earth, not even Chernobyl's which was substantially worse than Fukushima. The SlateonFukushimaReality link cited above is a Tiny URL to the Slate article The Fukushima Question What does the Rebuild Japan Report Tell us about the Fukushima Disaster by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger - it is well worth reading.