The crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant was “a profoundly man-made disaster," a Japanese parliamentary panel said on Thursday in its final report on the catastrophe. The six-reactor Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, operated by Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), was badly damaged after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems to reactors, leading to meltdowns and the release of radioactivity. Tens of thousands of residents were evacuated from an exclusion zone around the plant as the government battled to bring reactors under control. The “accident was a result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties," the report by the Diet's Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission. “They effectively betrayed the nation's right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly ‘man-made.' “We believe that the root causes were the organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationales for decisions and actions, rather than issues relating to the competency of any specific individual." But as for a direct cause of the accident, the report said the investigating body could not “definitely say any devices that were important for safety were not damaged by the earthquake." “We cannot rule out the possibility that a small-scale LOCA (loss-of-coolant accident) occurred at the reactor No. 1 in particular." Although many scientists and activists have questioned the dominant narrative that cooling systems were knocked out by the rising waters, the government and TEPCO have been unwilling to say the reactors could have been damaged by the initial earthquake. The probe is the third of its kind in Japan since the world's worst nuclear crisis in a generation. An independent group of scholars and journalists, who reported their findings in February, said TEPCO could and should have done more. It also said that had the company had its way, its staff would have been evacuated from the crippled plant and the catastrophe could have spiraled even further out of control. The findings published on Thursday call for further investigation into the impact of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake – as opposed to the towering tsunami – on the reactors at Fukushima. Tectonically-volatile Japan has a network of nuclear reactors that, until Fukushima, had supplied around a third of the nation's electricity. The nuclear industry has long boasted of its many safeguards against earthquakes, but much recent public opposition to atomic power has focused on plants' vulnerability, especially those that sit near seismic faults.
