| This week, Reuters reported on the growing credibility gap among Japanese with regard to the ethical reliability of their nuclear industry as a whole, even as the Fukushima disaster remains unresolved.
With Tokyo Electric already discredited, the industry has been further tarnished by revelations that Kyushu Electric Power Co. attempted to manipulate a public forum on nuclear safety by instructing its workers to pose as ordinary citizens and send e-mails in support of restarting nuclear power plants in the south.
"There is growing suspicion that power companies are playing fast and loose with data to support their cause and will go so far as to orchestrate public support," said Jeffrey Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University's Japan campus.
To their credit, the Japanese public actually seem surprised and outraged by this effrontery! Over here, we've just come to expect such unethical behavior as a matter of course.
There's little comfort for Vermonters in Attorney General William Sorrell's conclusion that Entergy and Vermont Yankee's misrepresentations do not exactly rise to the level of criminal behavior. As the Free Press observed today, incompetence in the administration of a nuclear facility is hardly more desirable than downright dishonesty.
"We found more incompetence than malevolence," Attorney General William Sorrell said this week in announcing the results of the investigation. "A corporation of this size and this importance -- I don't mean to disparage cops -- but this was like Keystone Kops."
In a sane world, where concerns for public safety would trump all corporate claims, this finding would be...should be... the final nail in the coffin for Vermont Yankee.
But, no...if the Attorney General thinks he can't make a criminal case out of the whoppers perpetrated by Entergy and VY, we just go on as if nothing ever happened; and the NRC doesn't even care that the operators have been publicly exposed (at the very least) as colossal incompetents.
Isn't this sort of the corporate equivalent of claiming innocence by reason of insanity? |
