In the 12 years since the meltdowns, Tepco’s disaster response efforts, always heralded as fixes, have been a series of hugely expensive failures: the “advanced” wastewater filter system “ALPS” has failed; the buried “ice wall” groundwater barrier has failed; containers made for the radioactive sludge produced by ALPS have failed; and plans to deal with millions of tons of collected debris -- now kept in plastic bags — are being fiercely resisted by Japanese citizens.
The Japanese government failing at something. Who would have thought that that “competent” group of 80+y old dinosaurs would ever fail at something…
What a shocking surprise…
I was a little confused since I’m from America and am used to all utilities being privately owned, so I did some research. It does look like Japan’s government owns a majority stake in the company, specifically because of this disaster. The private stakeholders are still there but own minority stakes. So yeah, the government of Japan dropped the ball here. It’s strange that I read the linked article and they never mentioned the government once.
The Japanese government drops the ball all the time. I don’t think they’ve ever even actually held it.
Bunch or clueless dinosaurs together.
I think you could say the same for a lot of countries. Even the ones that seem to know what they’re doing make braindead decisions sometimes.
Japan is almost uniquely bad though. A super aged population and a society that values conformance over anything else results in agonizingly slow and absurd government reactions.
They need 4 committee meetings each morning just to drink tea: one for to pick the teams, one team meeting to pick the tea, and another team meeting to pick the cup. There’s a final meeting at the end to discuss the costs associated with the tea and how to more properly distribute it according to rank and social standing, as one does.
And the sad thing is that this is so much closer to the truth than most people want to believe.