TEPCO Escapes Decontamination Payment

Mostly ignoring who caused the severe accident in First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant five years ago, the government of Japan keeps on pouring public money into recovering Fukushima. To clean up radioactively contaminated land, it is going to save ¥30 billion for next year’s budget. Although the cost for decontamination has been invoiced to Tokyo Electric Power Company, the government changes its policy to request Japanese people share for responsibility of the nuclear failure.

Cabinet led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is going to decide basic policy for decontamination on Tuesday, which will not request the cost for building “recovery hubs” in Fukushima. Special Measure Law for Atomic Disaster determines that atomic business entity is responsible for recovery from atomic disaster. Now, the government decides to pay for decontamination to rescue TEPCO.

The government is going to set recovery hubs in contaminated area in Fukushima starting from FY 2017. Those hubs will be the places with law radioactive level after cleaning up and the government will recover lost cities and towns in returning difficult area with annual 50 mSv of radioactive exposure. If the effort is successful, it hopes former residents to start returning back to their home in 2017.

To appeal positive effort for reconstruction of devastated area in Fukushima, the government decided to accelerate decontamination without requesting cost to TEPCO. While the Guidance for Recovery of Fukushima in 2013 requires TEPCO to pay for decontamination plan in progress, there has been no plan about the payment for the returning difficult area.

It is obvious that the government is supporting a specific private company with pubic money. If the government is paying for TEPCO, it needs to realize responsibility for its policy on nuclear power generation and the accident in Fukushima with verification of the accident and presenting new nuclear policy. Nevertheless, Abe administration looks like doing everything to salvage incompetent TEPCO.

In the name of acceleration of Fukushima recovery, the government is coordinating new scheme to add ¥2.4 trillion to compensation for suffered people. The cost will be added to appliance fee of all electric power companies in Japan except Okinawa, including new companies for renewable energy that uses existing power distribution network. Although Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced that the whole cost of disaster recovery would be doubling to ¥21.5 trillion earlier this month, additional cost proved to be inevitable.