The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.
© Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Auditors say billions of yen wasted in Fukushima cleanup
By MARI YAMAGUCHI TOKYO©2025 GPlusMedia Inc.
49 Comments
Login to comment
Yubaru
And the yaks got how much?
BluesRee
Who are the bigger clowns? TEPCO, the government, or joe public for putting up with this and footing the bill? I dispair.
papigiulio
Lol, is anyone surprised really?
Disillusioned
Ah, yes! Is it the clowns or the monkeys running this circus? This article only mentions the money wasted on untested and stop-gap measures that have all failed. The ice wall was destined to fail from it conception. It seems that nearly every idea these clowns (or monkeys) come up with is just a stop-gap fix with no real crisis or project management. After four years they still do not have any kind of solid plan as to how they are gonna store all their radioactive crap nor do they have any idea how to stop it leaking into the pacific at a rate of hundreds of tons every day. I haven't surfed the east coast of Japan since the meltdowns and I won't until there is some kind of fix for the leaking radioactive water streaming from the plant. I wonder how I'd go seeking compensation for lifestyle changes from TEPCO? And, the government, who owns 51% of TEPCO, is just keeping out of it and doing bugger all! But, the all-mighty leader 'Abe' has proclaimed, "It's under control!"
CH3CHO
All the expats who vociferously argued that Japan needs help from the West should know this consequence.
gogogo
Pretty obvious, Japan didn't ask for any help and just spent spent spent, almost they didn't want things to work so they could get more money.
Why can't the government sue some of these companies to get the money back!?
DeDe Miura
gogogo... the government KNEW.
Yubaru
And how is joe public here supposed to do anything about it? Suggestions please.
Kaerimashita
Brilliant
CH3CHO
gogogoMar. 25, 2015 - 04:13PM JST
Are you serious? Would you rather believe such unbelievable story than much more believable story that the French company simplely did not have an equipment that worked in severe accident? What difference, do you think, the French company made if Japan "asked help," rather than "spend money"?
It is not unusual in nuclear industry that manufacturers like Areva and GE get indemnity in the contract.
M3M3M3
Did someone throw away the receipt so that it couldn't be returned? I suspect there is more to this part of the story.
Kevin Davis
The French haven't built anything worth buying except for my dyson vacuum I love it
SuperFamiLover
すごいショック!(not at all shocked)
harvey pekar
Billions of dollars are wasted in any large scale endeavor like FEMA after Hurrican Katrina or the past Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Whenever there are so many outside agencies involved and so many moving parts and so many variables, those people at the very top of the mountain can't see what everyone is doing at the base. Mismanagement happens when those have underestimated the situation are in charge.
warispeace
Good to know that disaster capitalism is alive and well in Fukushima.
CH3CHO
warispeaceMar. 25, 2015 - 06:27PM JST
As a taxpayer and electricity bill payer, I am seriously angry with the waste of money and the Westerners who pressured TEPCO into buying good for nothing gadgets from France.
Robert Dykes
SURPRISE!
oh... yeah. no its not.
clamenza
The only surprise here is that the auditors didn't rate more of the budget wasted. The gov't, Yakuza and TEPCO saw the Fukushima disaster as nothing more than a chance to fill their pockets from the start. Thats how Japan works.
slumdog
What is sad is that, as a poster above already said, I doubt that even one reader was surprised when they read the headlline.
kwatt
Nuclear power turns out to be the most expensive and dangerous energy though they used to say it is the cheapest, the cleanest and the safest energy of all. All should be scrapped in turn while they are safe.
GW
And of you add in the K/B, dango, amakudari, yakuza take, etc etc these figures need to go MUCH higher as corruption isn't even figured into these figures.
What a bloody mess, days like this I dream about having left after 3/11, Japan what a nightmare & its set to continue unabated !!
Bernd Laurent
This is a great example of why you should never trust a government or corporation. And why things like nuclear energy, GMOs, WMD etc., nobody is taking responsibility when something goes wrong.
gaijinfo
Wasted money isn't the issue. It's all that radioactive material they can't seem to find.
DenTok2009
"...assembled by unskilled workers..." Curious minds want to know how much they were paid versus the welders welding the replacement tanks.
liarsnfools
@gaijinfo has put the finger on the problem. Not only was all this money wasted but there also are no solutions. So Japan is doomed to continue to spend massive amounts of money in pursuit of solutions, many of which will fail. Meanwhile Japanese will continue to be endangered by the uncontrolled and only vaguely known scope of the the melted nuclear fuel. And yet nobody is in jail, while many Tohoku people live in limbo. Shame, Japan. From 頑張ろう日本 to 馬鹿ろう日本 for continuing to tolerate this state of affairs.
smithinjapan
CH3CHO: "As a taxpayer and electricity bill payer, I am seriously angry with the waste of money and the Westerners who pressured TEPCO into buying good for nothing gadgets from France."
So you're outraged about the waste of money for ONE machine from a foreign company (and mistake a for-profit company's greed for actual help and expertise offered and refused by foreign workers!), but no comment on: Hitachi, Toshiba Corp,TEPCO itself, and TEPCO subsidiary Tokyo Power Technology?
Seems you're just angry that TEPCO and the government have mismanaged this so badly that the nation is embarrassed, and need to try and deflect by pointing at ONE machine imported at great cost when no one at all is surprised by the usual Japanese money-wasting, monopolizing, and general ineptitude. Sadly, we're about as surprised by your comments as we are by the fact that so much money has been wasted by TEPCO.
Yubaru
It's obvious to me that the folks running this show have the same mentality as the Japanese government, throw money at the problem and "things" will miraculously happen.
I wonder how many people remember when the discussions started about how to "fix" Fukushima, the government made a number of statements saying that "The technology needed to clean up this mess has not even been developed yet, so the public needs to understand and have patience", or words to that effect.
Little did the public know or realize that this was a coded message for businesses to get their piece of the pie! There is no accountability and until the public gets fed up with the system nothing will change, and everyone will just sit and suck their teeth along with sucking it up!
Mike O'Brien
The ice wall STILL hasn't fail. It hasn't even been built yet.
Yeah Japan just took on the problem all alone. Well except for all the non-Japanese companies specifically mentioned by the Board.
My question is why it took the Board of Audit 4 years to start pointing out these specific issues? If proper oversight had been put in place by the Board from the start these issues could have been addressed before they ran into the billions of yen.
jerseyboy
A poster here on JT last week railed on the folks who left Japan after 3/11, stating that they did not have the "guts" to see the recovery through, or words to that effect. I responded that, speaking for myself, I made the decision to leave because I grasped, based on my years in Japan, that the disaster was something beyond Japan's capabilities, given its poor history of disaster management, and decades-long tradition of being a cesspool of waste and corruption under the LDP. I rest my case.
sighclops
Yakuza have literally taken them to the cleaners
BertieWooster
"Don't worry. There's plenty more where that came from."
S. Abe
zurcronium
Lets remember that TEPCO was and still is a private company that is 100% responsible for this disaster. All you free market goonies forget that. The government is bailing out TEPCO cause if it did not it was be bankrupt now. This is a classic too big to fail situation. Same thing lead to the Wall Street collapse and the near depression. That is free market capitalism when it fails as it often does. And how does the system get corrected, the taxpayers bail out the banks or in this case the utility. No posts from the nuclear zealots on this article? No, sound of crickets only. This proves completely what a scam nuclear energy is, a total money dump.
nath
Well, figuratively.
sf2k
it's regrettable (lots of bowing)... but it would be better if they sued all the contractors who sub contracted sub contractors and got their money back. It's all their buddies though so that's not going to happen. We all know this
Black Sabbath
What a mess Japan has become.
Utrack
So which of the 5 major engineering companies in Japan received most of the work??? Kojima Corp maybe?? The ice wall scheme did not work for Chernobyl:
Why waste the time and money trying it... Learn from past experiences and Entomb All of Daiichi NPP and surrounding areas Land and Sea.
iworld99
Corruptions and wastes like these will continue in the future as long as those are responsible are not held into account.
MarkG
It's not like we humans perfected nuclear disaster clean ups. Radiation is deadly and frightening fortunately we haven't had much practice in such events.
CH3CHO
smithinjapanMar. 25, 2015 - 08:44PM JST
That is because the Areva project is the most expensive waste of money in the list.
Areva's equipment could not de-contaminate even one day amount of water and failed. Other companies and even low wage workers are doing better job than it.
Admit it, Smith. Westerners do not have any more expertise in decontaminating melt down NPP than Japanese. The difference is the eagerness. Look what the people without expertise and without eagerness did. I would rather let people without expertise but with eagerness do the job.
Scrote
The costs of the cleanup and the amount wasted should be shown as a separate item on TEPCO bills,
e.g. Fukushima Cleanup Y1500 (of which Y300 was wasted)
It might lead TEPCO customers to put pressure on the company, or maybe not. Shouganai.
Moby Grape
the more TEPCO and Abe waste the more they get, and yakuza are happy too. and more reasons to have classified government secrets. nuclear power is great like that.
nath
least surprising headline of the moment
kcjapan
"cleanup work has been dominated by one group of Japanese utility, construction and electronics giants" - article
Disaster Capitalism at it's best? TEPCO didn't cause the tsunami, or DID THEY!?
YuriOtani
How can this be a surprise to anyone?
Star-viking
Of course, if TEPCO hadn't bothered with these failed operations, they would be getting castigated for not trying them.
careing
And who will pay for it? we will with the 10% tax hike just around the corner.
Utrack
News Flash TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Plant Chief admits that there is no technology in existence to Decommission a Melted Nuclear Reactor, so the whole "clean up operation" has been a waste of Yen..
NHK world http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/features/201503312108.html
Okay folks now is the time for JAEA and TEPCO to think about entombment because there maybe a 200 year wait bfre such technology exists to decommission a melted nuclear reactor