a former employee of Hitachi Ltd. (6501) came forward saying that he helped cover up a flawed steel protective vessel that was installed in the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Reactor 4 core in 1974. Mitsuhiko Tanaka told Bloomberg that the defective steel in the $250 million vessel was a very serious "time bomb" just waiting to go off, as it represents the key protective unit for the reactor's core.
According to the Bloomberg report, a mistake during the final construction process of the vessel caused the steel walls to become warped. Based on regulatory guidelines, the cylinder should have been scrapped, said Tanaka, but because doing so would have potentially bankrupted the company, his bosses asked him to come up with a quick fix -- and he complied.
After figuring out a way to reshape the flawed vessel and make it look as though nothing was wrong, Tanaka was awarded a three million yen bonus from Hitachi, which also gave him a certificate honoring his "extraordinary" work.
Years later when asked to participate in a documentary on the Chernobyl disaster, Tanaka says he became convicted over what he had done, and decided to come forward with the truth. When he told the Japanese Trade Ministry about the coverup in 1988, they allegedly refused to do anything about it, saying that because Hitachi had denied the accusations, they must not have been true.
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