Posted on 04/13/2011 6:31:27 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Russia's nuclear chief says Japan exaggerating nuclear crisis
Wed Apr 13, 2011 11:29am GMT
SANYA, April 13 (Reuters) - Japanese authorities are exaggerating the scope of the country's nuclear disaster to give insurance companies an out, Russia's nuclear chief said on Wednesday.
"It is hard for me to assess why the Japanese colleagues have taken this decision. I suspect, this is more of a financial issue, than a nuclear one," Sergei Kiriyenko said on the sidelines of a bilateral meeting between the Russian president and Indian prime minister ahead of a meeting of major developing economies in southern China.
(Excerpt) Read more at af.reuters.com ...
P!
Russia to Japan: “Hey, nuclear victimhood belongs to us! Uhh...except for that whole Hiroshima and Nagasaki thing.”
There is a definite financial equation to all of this.
Apparently, TEPCO had already written off (tax wise) these reactors. This info may not be correct.
So is that a good thing or a bad thing.
Let’s see. It appears to be the man really in charge of TEPCO was the guy who had to resign over the safety scandal.
When this disaster hit the CEO goes missing and the other guy steps back in to takeover.
His plant has already been written off. he can’t write it off again. So he tries to save it and doesn’t want to do the sea water thing right away.
I sit back and ponder what would happen if there was such a disaster like this in the US be it man made or natural.
I am not sure we would do much better than Japan as we have a bunch of lying thieving people in our own government.
RC, AIT and I have both been in Japan for decades now and while I can’t speak for him, I find the TEPCO mess to be infuriatingly predictably, perplexedly... Japanese.
I don’t think this situation was caused by a nefarious scheme to avoid insurance payouts and/or government penalties, it’s more obviously the result (senior management wise) of the fact that in most Japanese corporations there is nothing that resembles firm leadership. No one, not even the chairman of the board or the company president, wants to stick his neck too far out ahead of the group.
Instead, they gather in group, talk, talk, talk some more, hold meetings, do the minimum they all agree on, talk some more, hold more meetings, try something else they can all agree on, talk.. ad nauseum, ad infinitum...
And the result is what we have here.
What they needed was a Red Adair. Someone with balls of brass and the ability to think outside the box who could have moved into the scene in the immediate aftermath, taken charge and immediately started doing SOMETHING to control the situation — but that kind of personality is very rare in Japan — if it exists at all.
So true. Arghhh. Its such a weird corporate world out here that I can’t even put it into words until I think about it for a few weeks more. Blargh, off to Toyosu I go...
Spent some time in Japan myself right after the Occupation. What you say makes total sense. A very strange world the “We Japanese” inhabit.
The same class of mistakes cost Japan the Pacific War. From my viewpoint it is as if they simply refuse to act intelligently under pressure. The greater the pressure, the greater the emergency, the less intelligent the action.
An odd place.
By and large, I think many of your cultural propositions here hold up, Ronin.
Re: Koizumi, I completely agree. Like him or hate him (I always liked him) he was the last Prime Minister since Nakasone that actually provided a sense of leadership.
China would go nuts if he came back, though.
Come to think of it, that’s a positive element in itself.
By and large, I think “gaman” has served the Japanese people well in this crisis. And, yes, “gambaru” has been and will continue to be a great help in many of the situations throughout the nation as we work to recover from this.
However, as it relates to Fukushima, or any serious crisis, neither one of those traits are much use for the people who are supposed to be in charge. Those people need to “think” and “act” quickly and decisively in real-time.
Instead of that, we had chickens running around without their heads squawking at everything, ostriches with their head buried in the sand hoping it would all go away, and most of all — we had the consensus-building, duck-quacking, group-think-let’s-all-keep-yakking-until-a-consensus-emerges aspect of Japanese life that drives EVERY American here close to total psycho every now and then.
A freshly-minted USN Lt.j.g., fresh out of Nuke school, could have handled this crisis better if he had been put in charge and given free reign. Hell, a good chief could have handled it better.
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