However, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)'s response to the disaster following earthquake and tsunami were often slow, opaque and reluctant. It rejected aggressive proposals to combat the crisis repeatedly and only had to adopt them later on, much too late. It was a re-run of BP oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, only to even large scale of devastation.
In responding to crises, both companies tried hard to reduce the impacts of disasters for sure; however, it seems to me that if most effective solutions would render their equipments inoperable, they'd cast their eyes to other directions and only after alternatives failed, they'd move back to the more drastic options they rejected at first.
American and Japanese governments are not blame-free here either. They relied on the expertise of the companies and many times, and too eager to trust the guarantees put forth by those companies and had to humiliated themselves along with those companies' retreats.
By nature, commercial entities worry about bottom-line above anything else and those else things often are much more essential for the well beings of the community and sometimes, national securities, as in the case of those investing banks who brought down the world-wide economy with their unchecked but hardly unexpected insatiable greed.
People might argue that market can correct itself and commercial companies will do the right thing, given time.
Well. a seemingly far-fetched analogy might be a perfect one. Chinese Communist Party, had admitted that in the past, it had made grade mistakes. Even so, it insists its legitimacy at all time to rule over Chinese people. Its argument - even though grave mistakes were made by the Party, it was none other the Party who corrected the mistakes.
There you go. We can always trust those corrections, which sure to come, given time.
How long did we wait for BP to seal off the oil spill and how much longer do we have to wait for TEPCO to seal off the radiation?
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