Land Of The Rising Core Temperature, Part 41

Another check of the ongoing Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster finds plant owner TEPCO in serious jeopardy, on the hook for around $50 billion dollars in compensation to people who lived near the plant.  As the first compensation checks go out this week, it's only a matter of time before TEPCO is nationalized by the crushing weight of their own massive failures.

Masato Muto, 40, works for the Tokyo Electric Power Co. in a rented one-story building. Only a clock and a calendar hang on the office walls, and most days, only angry people come through the front door.


The nuclear evacuees who come to this Tepco branch office in Fukushima prefecture are greeted two ways. First, by a letter from the company president — taped to a whiteboard by the entrance — that apologizes for the “great inconvenience” and “anxiety” caused by “the accident.” Next, by an employee like Muto, one of the 1,700 Tepco workers dispatched to centers in Fukushima to help people collect payments for their lost jobs and homes — provided they first fill out the 60-page application form.

Seven months after the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, Tepco, which operated the facility, owes $50 billion in compensation to the tens of thousands who lived close to the nuclear plant. The payments could send the company into bankruptcy, a government panel recently said. At minimum, they will handcuff the utility giant for years, forcing it to cut jobs, sell its assets, and perhaps raise electricity rates for its 29 million customers. 

I've long said that the total cost of Fukushima Daiichi will top the $1 trillion mark when all is said and done, not to mention untold thousands of lives.   TEPCO is not long for this Earth as a company, and Japan, already mired in a second lost decade economically, may not rise from the ashes of this disaster for a generation.

The prestige of working for Tepco is now gone, and so are many of the perks. It once operated resorts and sponsored clubs for its employees; Muto was once a running back on the American football team. But since the disaster Tepco has booked $23 billion in losses. Economists say the company will either go bankrupt — a likely scenario if its idled nuclear reactors don’t re-start — or carry for years the baggage of debts to evacuees and lenders.

Either way, said Tatsuo Hatta, an economist from Gakushuin University, “it’s a funeral company.”

And sadly, a lot of other funerals will precede TEPCO's demise, as well as follow it.