Prosecutors need to take a recent decision by a judicial panel of citizens seriously and look hard again at whether Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s former top executives should be held criminally responsible for the March 2011 disaster at its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. The government and power companies, meanwhile, need to see the decision by the Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution as a stern warning from citizens against their moves to restart the nation's idled nuclear power plants before demonstrating they've fully grasped the lessons of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe.
The prosecution inquest panel on July 31 voted that three former Tepco executives, including ex-chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, should be indicted on a charge of professional negligence for failing to take appropriate steps to prevent the triple meltdowns at the Fukushima plant.
The panel, comprising 11 randomly selected ordinary citizens, had been reviewing the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office's September 2013 decision not to take action against the Tepco management on the grounds that it was difficult for them to foresee the scale of the massive tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, which crippled emergency generators that supply power to cool nuclear cores during power outages and led to the meltdowns at three of the plant's nuclear reactors.