Three executives of the company that owns the destroyed Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant were acquitted of criminal negligence in a Japanese court on Thursday. A thirty foot tsunami destroyed the seaside plant after a magnitude 9 earthquake in 2011. Thousands died in the natural disaster, but forty-four more died in the chaotic evacuation after the giant wave exposed the core of the nuclear reactors requiring the movement of 160,000 people to escape nuclear fallout. Tsunehisa Katsumata, Sakae Muto and Ichiro Takekuro were the only people charged with a criminal offense, so their acquittal makes it unlikely anyone will be held criminally responsible for the worst nuclear disaster in history. TEPCO still faces numerous civil lawsuits and responsibility for the disaster clean up.
In their defense the executives claimed they could not have foreseen the magnitude of the event which destroyed their facility and caused radioactive contamination of land and sea that will last for generations. Prosecutors presented evidence that three years before the accident the executives were warned that a tsunami as high as 15.7 meters could overwhelm the sea wall and hit the plant. Defense attorneys dismissed the warnings as "unreliable".
In light of the evidence against the executives, an appointed prosecutor said the acquittal could only be seen as an unjust verdict. The government, an active partner in Japan's nuclear power industry, was extremely reluctant to criminally prosecute company officials. Only after two citizen review panels overturned state prosecutors' decisions not to bring charges in 2013 and 2015 was the case filed by appointed special prosecutors. Conviction rates in Japan are close to 100%, but only two of eight cases instigated by citizen review since the war resulted in convictions. TEPCO has lost every civil suit for damages related to the disaster brought to trial so far.
Since the disaster, Japan has placed only five of its 39 nuclear power plants back on line after a temporary moratorium. TEPCO has struggled with the consequences of its multiple reactor meltdown. It announced that it will run out of storage room for contaminated water used to cool the still burning reactors by 2022. As of August, 2019 1.2 million cubic feet of radioactive water is stored in 977 surface casks at the facility, perhaps another disaster in the making.