TEPCO To Pay

The BBC reports that at the insistence of the government Tepco to compensate Japan’s nuclear plant victims

The Japanese government has ordered the operator of the nuclear plant damaged by last month’s quake and tsunami to pay compensation to affected families.

About 48,000 families who lived within 30km (18 miles) of the Fukushima Daiichi plant will be eligible.

The compensation is described as provisional, with payouts – expected to be 1 million yen ($12,000, £7,331) per family – beginning on 28 April.
…

Announcing the compensation, Tepco President Masataka Shimizu offered “heartfelt apologies” to residents hit by events at the plant. He said the company would cut costs to finance the payments.

“We want to streamline operations with no exceptions in what we consider,” he said. “We are obviously thinking about pay cuts for our board and managers.”

Earlier TEPCO had offered ¥1,000 [$12] per person and was told to bugger off by the locals.

There is also news that they are finally admitting that the spent fuel rod pool in Reactor 4 that I have been complaining about for a month, might possibly be a “problem” as a result of a probable meltdown caused by the uncovered fuel rods.

They had a hydrogen explosion and a fire in that reactor. They weren’t storing hay in there, and it’s a steel and concrete structure, so the only source for a fire was the fuel rods, which is also the source of the hydrogen that caused the initial explosion. Those rods are not in a containment structure of any kind, hell, they aren’t even covered with a tarp. At this point I really expect we’ll see the telltale blue aurora [Cherenkov radiation] of a chain reaction as the remnants of the 1,500+ fuel rods that were in that pool when the earthquake struck achieve critical mass at the bottom.

Finally, as an example of how worthless the Japanese government’s response has been, I offer this quote from the Zero Hedge article I linked to above:

According to TEPCO, radioactive iodine-131 amounting to 220 becquerels per cubic centimeter, cesium-134 of 88 becquerels and cesium-137 of 93 becquerels were detected in the pool water. Those substances are generated by nuclear fission.

The government’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said the confirmed radioactive materials were up to 100,000 times higher than normal but that the higher readings may have also been caused by the pouring of rainwater containing much radioactivity or particles of radiation-emitting rubble in the pool.

RAINWATER?!?! Japan’s NISA expects someone to buy an irradiated rainwater excuse for that quantity of radioactive material in a damaged fuel rod pool? I’m hearing echoes saying that “all of the oil in Gulf is gone”, for some reason…