Tepco appoints ex-business lobby chief Kobayashi as new chairman Sorry, but your browser needs Javascript to use this site. If you re not sure how to activate it, please refer to this site: https://www.enable-javascript.com/
Yoshimitsu Kobayashi headed the Japan Association of Corporate Executives for four years through 2019. | KYODO
Kyodo Apr 28, 2021
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. (Tepco) said Wednesday it has appointed Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, former head of a major business lobby, as its new chairman, in a bid to reconstruct the struggling utility tasked with the decommissioning of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant.
Kobayashi, 74, headed the Japan Association of Corporate Executives for four years through 2019 and now serves as chairman of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp. He will assume the post after a general shareholders’ meeting scheduled in late June.
Japan will release some 1 million tons of contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean, the country s government said amid strong opposition from Japan s neighbors
Work is under way to decommission the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on Feb. 1. (Shinnosuke Ito)
Delays have long been common in the decommissioning of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, but one recent postponement carried special significance.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. in December said work to remove melted nuclear fuel from the three destroyed reactors would be delayed by about a year.
The retrieval process was supposed to start this year, marking a milestone in the formidable cleanup project.
It was one of the two paramount targets that the utility had refused to abandon despite its repeated tweaking of the decommissioning road map and the mountains of stumbling blocks it has faced.