Hidden Dangers: Japanese Officials Ignored or Concealed Dangers

If such a quake struck, electrical power could fail, along with backup generators, crippling the cooling system, the lawyers predicted. The reactors would then suffer a meltdown and start spewing radiation into the air and sea. Tens of thousands in the area would be forced to flee.

Although the predictions sound eerily like the sequence of events at the Fukushima Daiichi plant following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the lawsuit was filed nearly a decade ago to shut down another plant, long considered the most dangerous in Japan — the Hamaoka station.

It was one of several quixotic legal battles waged — and lost — in a long attempt to improve nuclear safety and force Japan’s power companies, nuclear regulators, and courts to confront the dangers posed by earthquakes and tsunamis on some of the world’s most seismically active ground.

The lawsuits reveal a disturbing pattern in which operators underestimated or hid seismic dangers to avoid costly upgrades and keep operating. And the fact that virtually all these suits were unsuccessful reinforces the widespread belief in Japan that a culture of collusion supporting nuclear power, including the government, nuclear regulators and plant operators, extends to the courts as well.

Yuichi Kaido, who represented the plaintiffs in the Hamaoka suit, which they lost in a district court in 2007, said that victory could have led to stricter earthquake, tsunami and backup generator standards at plants nationwide.

“This accident could have been prevented,” Mr. Kaido, also the secretary general of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, said of Fukushima Daiichi. The operator of the plant, Chubu Electric Power Company, temporarily shut down Hamaoka’s two active reactors over the weekend, following an extraordinary request by Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

After strengthening the plant’s defenses against earthquakes and tsunamis, a process that could take a couple of years, the utility is expected to restart the plant.

Japan’s plants are all located in coastal areas, making them vulnerable to both quakes and tsunamis. The tsunami is believed to have caused the worst damage at the Fukushima plant, though evidence has begun emerging that the quake may have damaged critical equipment before the waves struck.

The disaster at Fukushima Daiichi, the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, directly led to the suspension of Hamaoka here in Omaezaki, a city about 120 miles southwest of Tokyo. But Mr. Kan’s decision was also clearly influenced by a campaign, over decades, by small groups of protesters, lawyers and scientists, who sued the government or operators here and elsewhere.

They were largely ignored by the public. Harassment by neighbors, warnings by employers, and the reluctance of young Japanese to join antinuclear groups have diminished their numbers.

But since the disaster at Fukushima and especially the suspension of Hamaoka, the aging protesters are now heralded as truth-tellers, while members of the nuclear establishment are being demonized.

On Friday, as Chubu Electric began shutting down a reactor at 10 a.m., Eiichi Nagano, 90, and Yoshika Shiratori, 78, were battling strong winds on the shoreline leading to the plant here. Mr. Shiratori, a leader of the lawsuit, led the way as Mr. Nagano followed with a sprightly gait despite a bent back. The two men scrambled up a dune, stopping only before a “No Trespassing” sign.

“Of course, we’re pleased about the suspension,” Mr. Nagano said, as the strong wind seemed to threaten to topple him. “But if we had done more, if our voices had been louder, we could have prevented the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Fukushima was sacrificed so that Hamaoka could be suspended.”

Unheeded Warnings

In 1976, a resource-poor Japan still reeling from the shocks of the oil crisis was committed fully to nuclear power to achieve greater energy independence, a path from which it never strayed despite growing doubts in the United States and Europe.

 

Hidden Workshops Add to Libyan Rebels’ Arsenal

Now they roam the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.

The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from Misurata’s center to its outskirts, is in part the result of a hidden side of this lopsided ground war: a clandestine network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.

The workshops are officially a rebel secret. But for three days journalists for The New York Times were granted access to two of them, on the condition that their exact locations not be disclosed and that no photographs be taken of their entrances.

On display inside were both the logistics and the mentality of the seesaw fight for Libya’s third-largest city. In Misurata, an almost spontaneously assembled civilian force has managed, alone along Libya’s central and western stretch of Mediterranean coast, to withstand a sustained conventional attack from an army with all the arms and munitions an oil state can buy.

In these places — the fledgling war industry for a force that regards itself as a democratic insurgency — weapons manufactured in cold war-era factories to be operated remotely on aircraft and tanks have been modified for manual use.

Four-door civilian pickup trucks have been converted to sinister-appearing armored vehicles. And conventional munitions designed for one thing — land mines and tank shells, for which the rebels have little use — have been converted to other types of lethal arms.

The rebels remain ill equipped and materially outmatched. Some of their production is of questionable value. But they have acquired a collective sense that, to drive back the Qaddafi troops, any contribution matters.

And there is no question that their fighting power has grown. For the beleaguered residents, just as war can be fought with rifles, it can be waged with hammers, grinders and lathes.

“If we had enough weapons, I would not be here,” said Ahmed Shirksy, a welder fitting an armored plate to a pickup truck’s bed on Monday morning, as shells fell in neighborhoods nearby. “I would be fighting at the front lines, with two of my sons.”

Around Mr. Shirksy were the assignments of the day — four civilian pickup trucks in various states of conversion to fighting machines. There was also a pair of long sawhorses serving as a workstation for modifying heavy machine guns.

Here Omar el-Saghier, 30, puzzled over a .50-caliber machine gun that had no manual trigger. Asked what kind of machine gun he was working on (it appeared to be an FN Herstal M3M, designed for aircraft), he allowed himself a smile and answered in English.

“I don’t know, exactly,” he said.

But Mr. Saghier had figured out how to make it work. And by using a set of machinist’s tools and scraps and sheets of steel, he was midway through designing and creating a custom trigger, so that this weapon might be fired by a man standing at a turret in the back of a pickup truck.

Another team beside him was making a rotating pedestal mount for the weapon. A third team was fitting a set of metal plates to the truck that would, before the day’s end, become part of the rebels’ fleet.

These armor-clad gun trucks, typically painted black and often with their taillights and turn signals removed or painted over so they are more difficult to spot, are the signature weapon of the Misurata rebels.

The exact quantity that have been made is not known, said Bashir el-Zargani, who supervises the workshops.

“We have been too busy to count them,” he said.

But judging from the number seen racing through the city each day, and at Misurata’s many fronts, the total easily exceeds 100, and might be more than twice that.

The pickup trucks are only one of the workshops’ products.