In Japan, the disaster brought down one government and has shaken the nation’s trust in the tight alliance of government and business that has been at the core of economic policy for decades. Around the world, it gave new impetus to efforts to slow or roll back nuclear development, with Germany committing to shut all of its nuclear plants.
In early July 2012, a report released by an independent parliamentary commission concluded that the crisis was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture. The report also warned that the plant may have been damaged by the earthquake in March 2011, even before the arrival of the tsunami — a worrying assertion as the quake-prone country is starting to bring its reactor fleet back online.
In October, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, admitted for the first time that it had failed to take stronger measures to prevent disasters for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants. The admission, an apparent bid to inspire confidence, also seemed to confirm one of the main arguments of the company’s critics: that it refused to recognize and fix problems because it did not want to jeopardize the so-called safety myth that Japan’s nuclear technology was infallible.