The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is a Japanese electric utility that serves an area around Tokyo Japan. It is one of ten regional electric utilities created in 1951. The company worked on rebuilding the Japanese infrastructure destroyed in World War II and expanding energy supply to Japan's developing industries. Responding to concerns about environmental pollution and rapidly rising oil prices in the 1960s and 1970s, TEPCO built nuclear power stations. In 1976, the Fukushima Number One power plant started generating electrical energy.
During construction of the plant, TEPCO changed the design of the pipes for the isolation condensers without notifying the Japanese regulatory agencies as required by law. This may have contributed to the problems that followed the earthquake and tsunami in March of 2011.
In 1976, TEPCO was warned of design problems with the plant design by one of the lead designers from GE. There were unreported problems at the plant that may have been related to these design flaws. When TEPCO was found to have falsified safety inspection records for vital cooling system components, they were forced to temporarily shut down all of the 17 nuclear reactors that they operated.
In 1991, leaking seawater disabled one of two emergency backup generators at the Fukushima Unit 1 reactor. An engineer at Fukushima later said that he told his superiors that a tsunami could flood the generator room. TEPCO did not move the generators to a higher location but they did install a door to prevent flooding. In spite of this, the tsunami on March 11, 2011 did flood the generators room.
In 2006, a court order was issued to close a nuclear power plant in western Japan because of fears that an earthquake could damage the plant and release radioactivity. The Japanese Nuclear Safety Commission objected saying that the plant was adequately protected and was safe. The Japanese government opposed the court order.
In 2008, there was an internal study by TEPCO on plant safety that raised concerns about tsunami caused flooding at Fukushima and recommended immediate steps to prevent such flooding. TEPCO management concluded that no such action was needed because the predicted flood level was not realistic. It was later found that TEPCO had conducted tsunami simulations that indicated that the estimated flood levels were very realistic and could occur. There were plans made to address the problem in 2011.
In 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Japan's nuclear reactors were at risk from major earthquakes.
On March 7 of 2011, a report from TEPCO on the 2008 studies was delivered to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency of MITI, the Japanese Trade ministry. Three days later,. the forecast disaster struck the Fukushima power station.
Following the nuclear accident at Fukushima, investigations uncovered this decades long series of illegal, unethical and incompetent actions and inactions by TEPCO. The Japanese government has nationalized the Fukushima facility due to justified concerns about TEPCO's ability to deal with the aftermath of the accident.
Many years ago in a conversation about nuclear power, I said that while engineers might be able to design a safe nuclear power plant, we would have to rely on government and industry to be much more competent and honest than they had been in the past. The situation at Fukushima is a horrible validation of my concerns.
