Falsified expense reports emerge at Hamaoka nuclear plant

Another case of falsified reports by Chubu Electric Co. has emerged concerning its Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture, this time over expense claims for reactor decommissioning work.

The company said Aug. 27 it had identified 14 cases of improper claims for the decommissioning of the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors at the plant.

Chubu Electric said it will investigate whether it received excessive payments as a result of the discrepancies and what motivated the misconduct.

Once a nuclear reactor is decommissioned, it no longer generates revenue, but the decommissioning work continues for many years.

To ensure a stable source of funding for such work, electric utilities provide contributions to the Nuclear Reprocessing and Decommissioning Facilitation Organization of Japan (NuRO), which operates under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Through NuRO, utilities are reimbursed for reactor decommissioning expenses according to the progress of the work.

Chubu Electric began decommissioning work on the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors in 2009.

The company found problems in 14 sets of documents submitted to NuRO as evidence of decommissioning expenses for fiscal 2024.

Contractors carrying out the decommissioning work provided expense reports to the utility. But the copies that Chubu Electric submitted to NuRO contained altered descriptions of dismantling equipment and quantities that differed from the original reports.

The company also added dates and approval seals that did not appear on the original documents.

Chubu Electric received about 800 million yen ($5 million) from NuRO for the 14 expense claims.

The company said it was not yet known whether the altered records resulted in excessive reimbursement pay.

According to Chubu Electric’s internal investigation, some employees testified that they had tried to make the documents consistent with plans that had been submitted in advance.

However, the company said it does not impose penalties for deviations from the plans.

The company also believes that not all 14 cases of document alteration were motivated by the same reason.

It plans to conduct a detailed investigation.

TRUST SHATTERED

Chubu Electric was already embroiled in another serious problem revealed in January.

The utility hopes to restart the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Hamaoka power plant.

But in the safety screening process for the reactors, data related to the “design basis seismic ground motion,” the assumed maximum level of earthquake shaking used in safety evaluations, had been manipulated.

An investigation led by outside lawyers is now in its final stages.

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 organization’s culture,” said Toshiaki Yamaguchi, a lawyer specializing in corporate misconduct investigations.

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.”

Chubu Electric said the latest discrepancies did not directly affect nuclear safety because no spent nuclear fuel was stored in the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors.

However, Yamaguchi said: “The lack of a proper commitment to safety is clear. The company has its priorities fundamentally wrong, a problem that has much in common with the seismic data manipulation.”

On Aug. 27, the industry ministry instructed the company to submit a report by Sept. 25 detailing the facts, causes and whether similar cases exist.

Ministry officials are viewing the latest misconduct, along with the seismic-data manipulation, as “an issue that undermines trust.”

(This article was written by Keitaro Fukuchi and Chinami Tajika.)