TEPCO chief apologizes to shareholders for "meltdown" cover-up as problems rumble on at Fukushima plant

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) President Naomi Hirose apologized to the company's shareholders on Tuesday for it deliberately covering up the fact that reactors at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered meltdowns following being hit by an earthquake-triggered tsunami in March 2011.

Speaking to 1,200 people at TEPCO's annual shareholder meeting in Tokyo, Hirose conceded that the then-president of the utility has instructed senior officials to not use the words "core meltdown" to describe the situation at the plant following its key cooling functions being knocked out by the tsunami.

It wasn't until more than two months after the accident that TEPCO finally admitted the reactors at the plant has undergone core meltdowns.

Last week Hirose finally confirmed the company had intentionally covered up the meltdowns that occurred at the plant, with the admission coming after rumors had been swirling in the press about a government instituted order for TEPCO to keep mum on the actual severity of the disaster.

Hirose admitted that TEPCO was ordered and itself issued an order not to use the word "meltdown" when referring to what happened at the still crippled plant in Japan's northeast.

"It was a cover-up and it's extremely regrettable," Hirose told a news conference on the matter, regarding then President Masataka Shimizu's instruction given to employees not to use the word "meltdown." Hirose added that the order was made under pressure from the Japanese government.

According to an investigative report on the cover up, on March 14 in 2011, just three days after the tsunami hit the plant, Shimizu told TEPCO Vice-President Sakae Muto not to use the expression "meltdown," when discussing what would become the worst commercial nuclear crisis in history.

The fist time TEPCO used the word "meltdown" was, in fact, on May 15, 2011, when the utility switched from using the inaccurate term "core damage" to refer to the damaged reactor, to "core meltdown."

As the disaster unfolded it finally became public knowledge long after the fact that three nuclear meltdowns had occurred and huge amounts of radioactive materials had leaked from the ravaged plant into the atmosphere.

Subsequent leaks due to shoddily built storage tanks and drainage ditches beneath damage reactor buildings have seen contaminated water flow freely into the Pacific Ocean, unchecked, since the disaster began to unfold more than five years ago, much to the ire of the international community.

On Tuesday, Hirose said the results of an investigative panel on the cover-up would be taken extremely seriously and measures taken to ensure such instances would not happen again.

The shareholders submitted to TEPCO 10 proposals, including one calling for the abolition of the nuclear power business due to concerns of future accidents.

Some TEPCO shareholders, according to local media reports, said they were appalled at the utility's attitude regarding compensating victims related to the Fukushima catastrophe.

As the disaster rumbles on more than half a decade after it started, TEPCO also said Tuesday that a power outage at the trouble-plagued plant had caused some of its facilities to be affected.

TEPCO said that in the early hours of Tuesday equipment to treat contaminated water and to cool an ice wall built to contain toxic water had stopped operating.

It said of 30 devices used to cool the ice wall, 22 of them were in operation when the power failure occurred.

TEPCO claimed that there had been no change in radiation levels, but had failed to find the cause of the power failure. Endit