Moscow, May 01: The Russian prime minister has criticized Japan’s nuclear industry for poor handling of the Fukushima disaster and the building of nuclear power plants in seismic zones.
“The Japanese have a unique situation. I don’t know why they build their plants in seismic zones. The whole of Japan is a seismic zone,” AFP quoted Vladimir Putin as saying on Saturday during a meeting of physicists in Penza, south of Moscow.
The Russian prime minister said he thought that the Japanese authorities should have quickly supplied the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant with extra power in order to pump water and cool it down.
“They should have brought in new power generators from other areas of the country in time, but they did not and that’s what caused problems,” Putin said in a speech published on his official site.
“And you know, these are old facilities, American reactors dating back to the 1970s,” he added.
Radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, badly damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, have sparked new concerns over the potential risks of nuclear power.
Russia currently hosts 10 nuclear stations whose 32 reactors produced 169.4 billion kilowatts in 2010.
——–Agencies