Feb. 18, 2012
Japan Subculture Research Center
Jake Adelstein
On February 10th, an expert panel of Japan’s Nuclear Energy Commission submitted a report urging the government to make it mandatory that workers and contractors involved with nuclear facilities have background checks conducted before hiring them. The panel indicated that it could be problematic to have debtors, convicted criminals, organized crime members, and other possibly anti-social elements working with nuclear energy. The report didn’t suggest that these individual be banned from the sites or handling radioactive materials but that background checks should be conducted before hiring these anti-social elements. We guess this is so that no one is surprised when these unsavory elements steal dangerous materials and sell them to terrorists. In the United States and Europe, background checks on nuclear power plant workers, including Homer Simpson, are mandated by law.
The panel suggested that not only should the people operating the nuclear power plants be subject to background checks, but even the subcontracted workers as well. The panel reportedly took into account the poor management of labor by Tokyo Electric Power Company after the nuclear meltdowns began on March 11th, 2011.
In fact, TEPCO’s history of malfeasance and the nuclear industries unsavory connections to organized crime is one reason the firm is on the verge of meltdown.