'Nobody seems to be in charge' March 10, 2012Just four hours after a tsunami swept into the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Japan’s leaders knew the damage was so severe that the reactors could melt down, but they kept their knowledge secret for months.
Five days into the crisis, then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan voiced his fears that it could turn worse than Chernobyl.
The revelations were in documents released Friday, almost a year after the disaster. The minutes of the government’s crisis management meetings from March 11 - the day the earthquake and tsunami struck - until late December were not recorded and had to be reconstructed retroactively.
They illustrate the confusion, lack of information, delayed response and miscommunication among government, affected towns and plant officials, as some ministers expressed the
sense that nobody was in charge when the plant conditions quickly deteriorated.
The minutes quoted an unidentified official explaining that cooling functions of the reactors were kept running only by batteries that would last just eight hours.
‘‘If temperatures in the reactor cores keep rising beyond eight hours, there is a possibility of meltdown,’’ the official said during the first meeting, which started about four hours after the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami hit the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, setting off the crisis.
‘‘Who is the leader of the actual operation? I get too many requests and appeals that are incoherent,’’ Yoshihiro Katayama, internal affairs minister at the time, said at a March 15 meeting. ‘‘Nobody seems to be in charge.’’
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link to www.theage.com.au]