A Japanese court confirmed this Wednesday the acquittal, decided in 2019, of three former directors of the operator of the Fukushima plant, accused of negligence in the nuclear accident, after the tsunami of March 2011.
The decision was announced outside the Tokyo High Court by activists and supporters of those displaced by the disaster in northeast Japan, the worst civilian nuclear accident since Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.
The appeal court refused to confirm the decision immediately, as the hearing was still ongoing.
In September 2019, the Tokyo District Court acquitted former Tepco president Tsunehisa Katsumata, 82, and former vice presidents Sakae Muto (72) and Ichiro Takekuro (76), accused of negligence in the nuclear accident.
According to the plaintiffs, who appealed the decision, Tepco managers should have halted operation of the Fukushima Daiichi plant long before the 2011 disaster, based on information that the risk of a tsunami would exceed capacity to withstand it.
The three former Tepco employees, the only people facing criminal charges related to the catastrophe, could be sentenced to five years in prison.
The case was built on the death of 44 patients in a hospital located a few kilometers from the factory during the emergency evacuation of the facilities, in extreme conditions, on March 11, 2011, after the tsunami caused by an earthquake of magnitude 9.
While the earthquake and tsunami claimed 18,500 lives, including dead and missing, the nuclear disaster itself caused no immediate casualties.
However, it was indirectly responsible for several thousand “related deaths”, which the Japanese authorities recognized as being caused by the deteriorating living conditions of the many people evacuated from the region.
The three former Tepco executives and a fourth former employee were also ordered last summer, in a separate lawsuit brought by the group’s shareholders, to pay damages of 13.3 billion yen (95 billion euros at current exchange rates).
This amount is well above personal means, but the court explained that it corresponds to what Tepco paid for the costs of dismantling the plant, decontamination of the soil and storage of radioactive waste and debris, as well as the compensation to be paid to the inhabitants affected by the nuclear. accident. .
Source: TSF
