Legacy Progress Director's Production of Documents (Part 3 ... - NCUC

By about 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, the problem seemed to be over as real-time prices in the MISOdropped to more-normal levels in the $30s per MWh.The biggest utilities in the MISO include units of Duke Energy, Xcel Energy, Ameren Corp, BerkshireHathaway's MidAmerican Energy, DTE Energy and CMS Energy.Commission Calls Fukushima Nuclear Crisis a Man-Made DisasterNew York Times, 7-5-12By Hiroko TabuchiTOKYO — The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a preventable disaster rooted in governmentindustrycollusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a parliamentary inquiryconcluded on Thursday.The report, released by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, alsowarned thatthe plant may have been damaged by the earthquake on March 11, 2011, even beforethe arrival of a tsunami — a worrying assertion as the quake-prone country starts to bring its reactorfleet back online.The commission challenged some ofthe main story lines that the government and the operator oftheFukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Pfant have put forward to explain what went wrong in the earlydays of the crisis.Despite assigning widespread blame, the report also avoids calling for censure of specific executivesor officials. Some citizens' groups have demanded that Tepco executives be investigated on chargesof criminal negligence — a move Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the commission's chairman, said Thursday wasout of its purview. But criminal prosecution "is a matter for others to pursue," Mr. Kurokawa said at anews conference after the report's release."It was a profoundly man-made disaster that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response," Mr. Kurokawa, amedical doctor and an academic fellow at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, said inthe report's introduction.The 641-page report criticized the plant's operator — the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco— as being too quick to dismiss earthquake damage as a cause of the fuel meltdowns at three of theplant's six reactors, which overheated when the site lost power. Tepco has asserted that the plantwithstood the earthquake that rocked eastern Japan, instead blaming the disaster on what someexperts have called a "once-in-a-millennium" tsunami that ensued. Such a rare calamity was beyondthe scope of contingency planning, Tepco executives have suggested, and was unlikely to pose athreat to Japan's other nuclear reactors in the foreseeable future.But by suggesting that the plant may have sustained extensive damage from the earthquake — a farmore frequent occurrence in Japan — the report in effect casts doubts on the safety of Japan's entirefleet of nuclear plants. The report came just as a nuclear reactor in western Japan came back onlineThursday, the first to restart since the Fukushima crisis.The parliamentary report, based on more than 900 hours of hearings and interviews with 1,167people, suggests that reactor No. 1, in particular, may have suffered earthquake damage — includingthe possibility that pipes burst from the shaking, leading to a loss of cooling even before the tsunamihit the plant about 30 minutes after the initial earthquake. It emphasized that a full assessment wouldrequire better access to the inner workings of the reactors, which could take years."However, it is impossible to limit the direct cause of the accident to the tsunami without substantiveevidence. The commission believes that this is an attempt to avoid responsibility by putting all theblame on the unexpected (the tsunami)," the report said, "and not on the more foreseeable quake."9LEGPGNDIR001175