Ex-Fukushima engineer warns Taiwan of unstable nature of nuke plants

A Japanese engineer, who helped build crippled Fukushima nuclear reactor No. 4, has warned Taiwan of the inherently unstable nature of nuclear power.

Mitsuhiko Tanaka said that the 1986 Chernobyl disaster changed his views on nuclear power, and agreed that nuclear accidents are bound to happen someday or the other, without anybody knowing when its going to occur, the Japan Times reports.

He urged Taiwan's government to make information publicly accessible, hoping that they won't repeat the same mistake.

Tanaka worked at Hitachi Ltd. in 1974, but quit the company in 1977 and became a writer.

He wrote a book in 1990 in which he chronicled the discovery of a manufacturing defect in reactor 4 of Fukushima nuclear plant, and the subsequent cover-up by the company.

He accused the government for refusing to investigate the cover-up in 1988, when he went to the then-Ministry of International Trade and Industry to report the matter.

The reactor 4 of the Fukushima plant suffered a terrible meltdown following the magnitude-9 earthquake off the Pacific coast and a subsequent tsunami on March 11, 2011 that robbed it of all power and disabled its cooling systems.