Auditors from the Japanese government said that the operators of the Fukushima Daiichi plant have spent more than a third of 190 billion yen in taxpayer money allocated for the cleaning up of the plant. The plant was severely destroyed in the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
The audit report described that various expensive machines were used and the untested measures resulted in failure. The report added that the clean up work was dominated by a group of Japanese utility, electronics giant and construction despite calls for more transparency and more access for international bidders.
Teruaki Kobayashi, the spokesperson of Tokyo Electric Power said that all the equipments contributed to stabilizing the plant and despite that some operated briefly. Some of the failures mentioned in the report included usage of sea water used initially to cool the reactors after the normal cooling system had failed. Later machines from various companies including Hitachi, Toshiba and Areva were used to remove salt from the contaminated water.
One of the machines had functioned for just five days and the maximum a machine lasted was six weeks. Several storage tanks were constructed by Tepco to store contaminated water at the cost of 16 billion yen and the shoddy tanks were constructed by unskilled workers with rubber seals due to which they began leaking and seeped in to the ground.
Photo Credits: japandailypress
