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Over the years, TEPCO never changed the maximum tsunami heights expected at Fukushima Dai-ichi. "We assessed and confirmed the safety of the nuclear plants," TEPCO civil engineer Makoto Takao asserted as recently as a November seismic safety conference in Japan. Kobayashi, of NISA, said his agency began getting serious about scrutinizing tsunami dangers only late last year, but that this process was still in its infancy when the March 11 disaster struck. Ishibashi noted that coastal nuclear plants need to be prepared for major typhoons and other potential disasters, and backup generators at Fukushima Dai-ichi should have been elevated and protected, not stored in basements prone to flooding, as most of them were. The generators were critical for maintaining cooling systems for reactor cores during the power outages that followed the quake. The flood that swept through the plant grounds destroyed the generators. The cores, reaching up to 2,000 degree Celsius (3600 Fahrenheit) without power, melted, spewing radiation into the sea and air. TEPCO spokesman Naoyuki Matsumoto defended the 2001 report as relying on what the company saw as the best data available, although he acknowledged that the March tsunami had been "outside the imagination." "We had done our utmost in designing the plant, using various historical data," he said. The utility now plans to build additional tsunami guards in waters near Fukushima Dai-ichi by the end of June, but has not decided how high they should be, he said.
Outrage is growing among the media, politicians and residents forced to evacuate from homes near the plant that regulators and TEPCO had not adequately assessed tsunami risks. Some criticism has focused on how the civil engineers' committee that wrote the guidelines was dominated by people with strong ties to the nuclear power industry, or 22 of the 35 committee members. In a statement this month, the Japan Society of Civil Engineers defended the guidelines as objective and scientific, relying on experts for unbiased knowledge. Nobuo Shuto, chief architect of the guidelines and the dean of tsunami research in Japan, acknowledged he did not check how exactly TEPCO applied the guidelines to Fukushima Dai-ichi. But he stuck by his work. "It's easy to complain that it was an underestimate," Shuto, honorary professor at Tohoku University, said in a March telephone interview from Miyagi Prefecture, a disaster-struck area. "The honest truth is: We just don't know."
[Associated
Press;
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