Japanese agency dismissed member's worry about tsunami risk to nuke plant

Yukinobu Okamura, a prominent seismologist, warned of a debilitating tsunami in June 2009 at one of a series of meetings held by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency to evaluate the readiness of Daiichi, as well as Japan’s 16 other nuclear power plants, to withstand a massive natural disaster. But in the discussion about Daiichi, Okamura was rebuffed by an executive from the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant, because the utility and the government believed that earthquakes posed a greater threat…

Of the seven panel members assigned to study Daiichi, none was a tsunami expert, Azuma said. From April 2008 through June 2009, the group met 22 times, he said, talking mostly about the earthquake dangers posed by the fault line closest to the plant. The risk of a tsunami “never came up,” Azuma said…

In A.D. 869, Okamura told the panel, a massive quake struck off the coast of Sendai, in northeastern Japan, sending a tsunami wave more than two miles inland. Only in recent years had a handful of Japan’s tsunami experts concluded that the disaster was more than allegorical, based on evidence collected in geological layers and sediment deposits.