Three former top executives of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. on Thursday were acquitted of professional negligence resulting in death and injury related to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis.
The Tokyo District Court ruled that it was not realistic for the former executives to have predicted all possible tsunami scenarios and thereby prevent the triple core meltdown, which forced hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate and contaminated wide areas of the prefecture.
In concluding the two-year trial, presiding Judge Kenichi Nagafuchi ruled that the trio could not have foreseen the 9.0 magnitude earthquake, which caused massive tsunami and knocked out critical cooling systems at the three reactors, and heavily damaged other facilities at the Fukushima plant on the northeast coast.