Safety regulators, who also belong to METI, did not require Tokyo Electric to rethink the fundamental safety assumptions behind the plant. The utility only had to insure the reactor's component parts were not being worn down dangerously, according to a 2009 presentation by the utility's senior maintenance engineer.
That kind of thinking -- looking at potential problems with components without seeing the risk to the overall plant -- was evident in the way that Japanese officials responded to trouble with backup generators at a nuclear reactor even before the tsunami.
On four occasions over the past four years, safety inspectors from Japan and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were called in to review failures with backup diesel generators at nuclear plants.
In June 2007, an inspector was dispatched to Fukushima's No. 4 reactor, where the backup generator had caught fire after a circuit breaker was installed improperly, according to the inspector's report.
"There is no need of providing feedback to other plants for the reason that no similar event could occur," the June 2007 inspection concluded.
The installation had met its safety target. Nothing in that report or any other shows safety inspectors questioned the placement of the generators on low ground near the shore where they proved to be at highest risk for tsunami damage at Fukushima Daiichi.
"GET OUT, GET OUT"
Japanese nuclear regulators have handed primary responsibility for dealing with nuclear plant emergencies to the utilities themselves. But that hinges on their ability to carry them out in an actual crisis, and the record shows that working in a nuclear reactor has been a dangerous and stressful job in Japan even under routine conditions.
Inspectors with Japan's Nuclear Energy Safety Organization have recorded 18 safety lapses at Tokyo Electric's 17 nuclear plants since 2005. Ten of them were attributed to mistakes by staff and repairmen.
They included failures to follow established maintenance procedures and failures to perform prescribed safety checks. Even so, Toyko Electric was left on its own to set standards for nuclear plant staff certification, a position some IAEA officials had questioned in 2008.
In March 2004, two workers in Tokyo Electric's Fukushima Daini plant passed out when the oxygen masks they were using - originally designed for use on an airplane - began leaking and allowed nitrogen to seep into their air supply.
The risks also appear to have made it hard to hire for key positions. In 2008, Toshiba admitted it had illegally used six employees under the age of 18 as part of a series of inspections of nuclear power plants at Tokyo Electric and Tohoku Electric. One of those minors, then aged 17, had participated in an inspection of the Fukushima Daiichi No. 5 reactor, Tokyo Electric said then.
The magnitude 9.0 quake struck on Friday afternoon of March 11 -- the most powerful in Japan's long history of them -- pushed workers at the Fukushima plant to the breaking point as injuries mounted and panic took hold.
Hiroyuki Nishi, a subcontractor who had been moving scaffolding inside Reactor No. 3 when the quake hit, described a scene of chaos as a massive hook came crashing down next to him. "People were shouting 'Get out, get out!'" Nishi said. "Everyone was screaming."
In the pandemonium, workers pleaded to be let out, knowing a tsunami was soon to come. But Tokyo Electric supervisors appealed for calm, saying each worker had to be tested first for radiation exposure. Eventually, the supervisors relented, threw open the doors to the plant and the contractors scrambled for high ground just ahead of the tsunami.
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