Rat may have caused Fukushima outage

Spray Rataway Fragrance to protect pumps, engines, homes , business...... safe around children and pets!

Japanese can produce high quolity goods such as wash toilet, cleaning robots, high speed train "shinkansen", but they can't close this problem Fkushima plant!!!

It's going to be several decades before these NPPs will be fully removed. and judging by the amount of near catastrophic incidents that have occurred over the first two years of the shut down it seems very likely that,TEPCO does not have the ability to oversee this problem safely. It is MHO that sooner or later TEPCO will screw up royally, and when they do??????? Signora NW Japan. Isn't it strange that there does not seem to be much international press/media coverage of what is clearly an ongoing and very dangerous environmental disaster,the worst in the past few decades. Problems like loosing the power supply to cooling water pumps for nuclear waste rod storage tanks would be big time front page news but I have not seena word in US papers a report from our national media outlets.....Very strange indeed. One has to wonder how this situation is swept under the carpet internationally.

Considering I've personally witnessed a grey squirrel take out a local power grid when he tried straddling a step-down transformer's electrodes, I have no trouble believing a rat could short-out a switchboard. What I have trouble with is the fact that the switchboard was exposed to wildlife and mounted on the back of a truck a full two years after the meltdown. You'd think that in the course of those two years, somebody would have stopped by an electrical supply store and picked up a switchboard enclosure (or two, or three).

lol. Can't blame nobody else so they blame a lowly organism. All this trouble caused by a mere rat? Really? Japanese tech must be really going down to the gutter.

Splinter!!

Is that fur all over the place? Wouldn't a shock like that have fried Ratty? The fur all over the place looks like it was shedding hair like crazy.

Looks like a rat to me or a furby from further up in Management. Got lost and died of radiation Exposure.

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley

LOL yeah Basil from Faulty Towers, perfect Tepco CEO.

, wow Tepco the BS just keeps coming. ran out of excuses now there blaming the wildlife, look out yeah GODZILLA RAT is out to destroy!

Can they clean it up? scrub the walls down, replace wiring, caulk and seal it up?

oohh come on seriously now rat ? ohh man hahahhaa that funny !!!

TEPCO - Forever redefining the bounds of incompetence. Is this supposed to reassure the public that nuclear plants are safe? This was no tsunami or earthquake. It was a rat. A lone rat. If a little rodent can wreak such havoc, what more? And they want to restart the others?

The tittle for this article would only make any sense if the low life rodent they are talking about lives in Tokyo and directs all the ongoing operations at the plant from a few hundred km.

Um.....does anyone know how the rat died? Natural causes?!

No doubt the cost of the rat detection systems they will now be installing will appear on the bottom lines of our bills this year.

Dont let anyone from Nagatacho near the system. Itll go into overdrive

Are we honestly expected to accept this as a valid reason to say "shoganai"?

Great. Now there are going to be giant 50 foot glowing rats taking over the country with laser beam eyes.

Either TEPCO thinks we are all stupid enough to believe this rat story, or TEPCO's engineers are stupid enough to let a rat shut down their nuclear plant.

Rat and especially dead rat can't talk so investigators blame the poor animal but it could be electrostatic or some other glitch.

A rat can do all that, eh? Quite the system TEPCO has set up.

And here I was going to ask just what was the "rats" name that cut the power.

There was no redundancy in the power system? Typically shoddy Tepco engineering.

Reminds me of the Fawlty Towers episode. I'd probably sleep better with Basil running things at TEPCO.

FPSRussia you are saying we get a Rat surcharge!

you dirty rat!! you killed my power! you dirty rat.... Grrrr... Old movie referance...:-)

A rat shut down a nuclear facility. The real rats are no where near this facility. They are ready to raise the price of electricity yet again this summer. You see it when you get your TEPCO bill this summer.

My electricity bill nearly doubled this year. With that said, yes I can believe there are rats at TEPCO.

Is that okay to say or is dissent not allowed?

Tepco have stooped so low, that they have to pass the buck ....... to a rat !

So let me put this straight. All future of Tohoku and far south depends if some rat feel like chewing on wires? If Tepco looses control over one pool they loose control over whole plant. This means over 1500 fuel assemblies would melt down and the pools collapse, releasing vast amounts of radioactive material into the environment. Again we will see crying Tepco and gvmnt officials and blaming all rats on earth.

I thought it said "Rat may have caused Fukushima outrage"

You know, what with the storage water rising a whole, what 7 degrees was it?

So the are saying, RAT 4 TEPCO 0. Isn't it reassuring to know that one rat can take out 4 reactors for 2 days. TEPCO does know how to run electrical wires, I'm beginning to have my droughts.

Terrorist Rat!

Tepco should arrange flowers and incense and deploy few "kawaii" cats as well :(

Came here for the "I smell a rat" reference, left disappointed.