PARIS — The head of the Japanese employers’ federation on Monday defended Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), owner of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, saying the state and not the company should compensate disaster victims.
Hiromasa Yonekura, chairman of the Nippon Keidanren business leaders’ body, told AFP in Paris that the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the plant and caused a major nuclear disaster could not have been predicted.
He also slammed the Japanese government for criticizing TEPCO’s response, alleging that the state was trying to shift blame onto the firm and refusing to shoulder its own responsibility towards the victims of the crisis.
“They are getting away from taking any kind of responsibility. Avoiding it,” he said, in an interview during a working visit to Europe. “So I am openly criticizing the government in respect of compensation.”
Power giant TEPCO has begun to pay compensation to people driven from their homes by the plant’s meltdown, which was triggered when a tsunami wave smashed the cooling system and caused reactors to overheat.
But Yonekura argued that, in the case of such an exceptional disaster, it was legally the government’s responsibility to take charge.
“TEPCO built this plant on the basis of a safety standard which was set by the government and they have been operating in accordance with Japanese regulations,” he said.
Yonekura argued that Japan’s Nuclear Power Generation Compensation Law has a clause exempting reactor operators from responsibility in the event of “a disaster which cannot be usually imagined.”
When the law passed, the then head of Japan’s science and technology agency, future prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, told lawmakers an “unusual disaster” would be one roughly three times worse than the 1923 Kanto earthquake.
Yonekura claimed the March 11 quake plus tsunami was orders of magnitude greater than the earlier disaster.