Japan’s Chubu Electric Power Co has admitted to intentionally falsifying 14 construction and expense reports. The fraudulent claims concern the ongoing decommissioning of units 1&2 reactors at its Hamaoka NPP in Shizuoka Prefecture.
Chubu Electric improperly received approximately JPY800m ($5m) in reimbursements from the Nuclear Reprocessing and Decommissioning Facilitation Organisation (NuRO). Employees altered subcontractor reports to misrepresent dates, types of equipment used, and the weight of dismantled items to make the lagging work look as if it was progressing strictly according to schedule.
In several instances, workers affixed official approval seals to documents without authorisation. The utility stated that this incident does not affect nuclear safety, as no used nuclear fuel remains inside the units.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI) has strictly ordered Chubu Electric to submit a detailed investigative report by 25 September. The report must cover the exact facts, root causes, and verification of whether similar fraud exists in other departments.
The scandal has drawn widespread public criticism, especially since it occurred just months after the utility admitted to manipulating seismic safety data. That prior manipulation forced the Nuclear Regulation Authority to suspend safety reviews for restarting the Hamaoka 3&4.
The seismic data manipulation was carried out by the company’s nuclear civil engineering department, while the newly revealed falsified expense reports occurred in a different department. “It is hard not to conclude that there are very serious problems in the organisation’s culture,” Toshiaki Yamaguchi, a lawyer specialising in corporate misconduct investigations told Asahi Shumbun.
He said Chubu Electric’s failure to exercise self-correction in both cases “inevitably raises suspicions that similar data falsification and document manipulation may be occurring elsewhere in the company as well”.
