Tokai disaster prompts nation to take a new look at alternative power Staff writer
One day in March 1997, Nobuaki Sato, a senior engineer at Toshiba Corp., helplessly watched industrial cranes demolish a fuel cell manufacturing plant, turning it into a heap of scrap.
While it called off the 5 billion yen project because of dim profitability prospects, Toshiba had spent 50 billion yen on fuel-cell development over the last 20 years, hoping to spread the use of fuel cells as small-scale power generator for homes and factories.