Abe lied about Fukushima being safe, says ex-Japan PM
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JAPANESE Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s promise that the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant was “under control” in his successful pitch three years ago for Tokyo to host the 2020 Olympic Games “was a lie,” former premier Junichiro Koizumi said yesterday.
Koizumi, one of Japan’s most popular premiers during his 2001-2006 term, became an outspoken critic of nuclear energy after a March 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co’s (Tepco) Fukushima Daiichi plant, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
Abe gave the assurances about safety at the Fukushima plant in his September 2013 speech to the International Olympic Committee to allay concerns about awarding the Games to Tokyo. The comment met with considerable criticism at the time.
“Mr Abe’s ‘under control’ remark, that was a lie,” Koizumi, now 74 and his unruly mane of hair turned white, told a news conference in Tokyo where he repeated his opposition to nuclear power.
“It is not under control,” Koizumi added, citing as an example Tepco’s widely questioned efforts to build the world’s biggest “ice wall” to keep groundwater from flowing into the basements of the damaged reactors and getting contaminated. “They keep saying they can do it, but they can’t,” Koizumi said.
Experts say handling the nearly million tons of radioactive water stored in tanks on the Fukushima site is one of the biggest challenges.
Koizumi also said he was “ashamed” that he had believed experts who assured him that nuclear power was cheap, clean and safe and that resource-poor Japan had to rely on nuclear energy.
After the Fukushima crisis, Koizumi said, “I studied the process, reality and history of the introduction of nuclear power and became ashamed of myself for believing such lies.”
Japan’s nuclear plants, which had supplied about 30 percent of its electricity, were closed after the Fukushima disaster and utilities have struggled to get running again in the face of a sceptical public. Only three are operating now. Abe’s government has set a target for nuclear power to supply a fifth of energy generation by 2030. The meltdowns in three Fukushima reactors spewed radiation over a wide area of the countryside, contaminating water, food and air. More than 160,000 people were evacuated from nearby towns.
Several hundred American service personnel who say they became sick from radiation after participating in relief operations for the 2011 tsunami that set off the Fukushima nuclear disaster are now getting high-profile support in Japan.
Koizumi said he has set up a special fund to collect private donations for the former service members, with the goal of collecting US$1 million (100 million yen) by the end of next March, mainly to help with medical bills.
Express gratitude
“I felt I had to do something to help those who worked so hard for Japan,” he said at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. “Maybe this isn’t enough, but it will express our gratitude, that Japan is thankful.”
Koizumi was in San Diego in May to meet with 10 of the former service members, who have joined a class-action lawsuit against Tepco.
The lawsuit, filed in 2012, is ongoing, and a California judge has ruled it will proceed.
More Navy personnel and Marines are joining the suit, now numbering about 400, according to Koizumi. Some 70,000 Americans took part in Operation Tomodachi, or Friend, flying in aid from an aircraft carrier and other warships off the coast of northeastern Japan.
Since then, some servicemen and women have become sick with cancers, leukemia, thyroid ailments, brain tumors and other diseases, and they blame radiation. The ships to which they were assigned were in an area of the ocean in the direction of the radioactive plumes spewed from the Fukushima plant.
Aircraft carriers routinely use drinking water from the ocean, which the lawsuit says was contaminated with radiation, and service members showered in and ate food cooked in such water.
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