Japan’s PM ‘felt helpless’ when nuclear disaster hit

Japan’s former prime minister felt fearful and helpless during last year’s nuclear disaster and lacked experts to guide him, he said yesterday in his first response to a public inquiry on the crisis.

Naoto Kan resigned in September after being criticised for government failures during the disaster. He told the parliamentary panel yesterday that he felt afraid when nuclear officials kept failing to explain conditions at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, where three reactors melted down following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on 11 March, 2011.

The country’s nuclear emergency law was set up in 1999 after a fatal accident at a nuclear fuel processing plant, but Mr Kan testified that the law did not address a severe accident that would require hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate as in Fukushima.

“Everything anticipated in the law was inadequate,” he said.

Mr Kan said nuclear officials sent from government offices and the utility operating the plant as his advisers were not useful. Japan’s main regulatory body, the Nuclear & Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), was particularly incapable, he said.

“I was frightened and felt helpless,” he said. “You can’t expect a nuclear expert to be prime minister or cabinet minister, so we need top regulatory officials to provide expertise and help us. We didn’t have those people.”

NISA’s top officials, who are not nuclear experts, have acknowledged the need to improve their resources.

Officials have also said information disclosure was slow and at times wrong, particularly in the immediate aftermath. They also cited poor communication and co-ordination between nuclear regulators, utility officials and the government.