Thirty months after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that touched off multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Japan, the government has decided the crisis is too big a job for plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. to manage.
On Sept. 3, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that, instead of "ad hoc approaches," the government would formulate a fundamental solution. The government also announced it would appropriate $470 million to deal with immediate cleanup issues. That amount is considered a small down payment on what is likely to be a 40-year decommissioning process.