You'd think that when you own a nuclear plant, you would at least be allowed to decommission it yourself when things start going from bad to worse. It turns out that this is not the case. Not for Tokyo Electric Power Company, at least.
By the looks of it, the Liberal Democratic party in Japan believes that, in order to avoid any more potentially catastrophic incidents from happening, it would be best if Tepco had nothing to do with the decommission of the Fukushima nuclear plant.
Specifically, they intend to file a proposal with Prime Minister Abe and demand that some other agency be allowed to oversee this process, Inhabitat reports.
The same source tells us that, earlier this week, Tepco detailed its plans to remove 1,300 spent fuel assemblies from the plant's Reactor No. 4 building. Apparently, they wish to use a crane to remove the rods.
Experts say that, given the fact that the situation at this nuclear facility is already touch-and-go, just one slip-up would be more than enough to cause some really serious problems.
And since Tepco is notorious for its many slip-ups over the past few years, the Liberal Democratic party's proposal makes sense to me.