Tsunehisa Katsumata (Tsunehisa Katsumata)

Biography

2022: Penalty for failure to prevent accident at Fukushima-1 NPP

On July 13, 2022, a Tokyo court ordered former executives of the energy company Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings to pay about $95 billion in total compensation for their failure to prevent a disaster at the nuclear power plant "" in 2011 Fukushima-1(its operator is Tokyo Electric).

The ruling in favor of shareholders suing in 2012 is the first to hold former Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) executives liable for compensation. After one of the worst nuclear disasters in history occurred at a nuclear plant in northeastern Japan in March 2011, caused by a powerful earthquake and tsunami.

Former leaders of the Japanese Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, who committed a disaster, were fined $95 billion

In a lawsuit filed in Tokyo District Court, 48 shareholders are seeking to pay the company a total of about $160 billion, the largest amount ever sought as compensation in a civil lawsuit in Japan, according to a lawyer representing the plaintiffs. Of the five defendants - former board chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, former vice presidents Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro, former president Masataka Shimizu and former managing director Akio Komori - the court found all but Komori liable to pay damages.

The decision said the company's tsunami response was fundamentally lacking in its understanding of safety and sense of responsibility. It points out that a nuclear disaster might not have occurred if TEPCO management had carried out the necessary construction work to prevent key areas of the station from flooding. The company declined to comment on the court's decision, saying it would refrain from answering questions related to individual claims.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno reiterated the government's policy to continue using nuclear power despite the disaster, saying. The court's focus was on whether management could have predicted a nuclear accident caused by a giant tsunami, a similar argument made by the three defendants when they were acquitted in a criminal trial in district court in 2019. The trial also considered whether management decisions on tsunami countermeasures were adequate after a TEPCO unit estimated in 2008 that a tsunami up to 15.7 metres high could hit nuclear power plants based on a government assessment of long-term earthquakes made public in 2002.

Shareholders said the government's assessment was the best scientific assessment, but company management delayed taking preventive measures such as installing a sea wall. Lawyers for the former executives said the assessment was not credible and that the accident occurred when management asked the civil engineers association to look into whether the company should include the assessment in its countermeasures. The court decided that the Japanese government's assessment was reliable enough to oblige TEPCO to take preventive measures.

More than 15 thousand people died after an earthquake of magnitude 9 balls and the ensuing tsunami, which caused large-scale damage in the northeast of the country and caused melting at the Fukushima-1 nuclear complex. As of July 2022, about 38 thousand people are still internally displaced, mainly due to the consequences of the worst nuclear accident in the world after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. There is still a no-go zone near Fukushima 1 by July 2022, where work on decommissioning the nuclear power plant is scheduled to continue until 2041-2051.^[1]

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