Tepco insists critical Fukushima units withstood earthquake

Tepco claims critical units of its Fukushima nuclear plant withstood shaking from the March 11 earthquake.

The company blamed the tsunami that followed, which swamped the nuclear reactors.

Tepco set up an internal committee headed by Vice President Masao Yamazaki in June to investigate the nuclear accident. The 130-page interim report, accompanied by a 314-page attached book on plant data, a 69-page chronology of events and other documents, has been released in Tokyo.

“This isn’t the end of the story. Tepco’s analysis needs to be reviewed by independent experts,” Tadashi Narabayashi, a former reactor safety researcher at Toshiba Corp. and now a nuclear engineering professor at Hokkaido University, said by phone before the release of the report. “The utility has often made mistakes in simulations that analyzed what happened.”

The company’s findings will be followed at the end of the month by the release of a government report on its probe into the catastrophe, which is being led by engineering professor Yotaro Hatamura.

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