Japan's nuclear official loses phone with classified data in China

By Shoko Oda

 

An employee at Japan’s nuclear energy regulator lost a cell phone with confidential information in China, Japanese media reported, the latest misstep by Tokyo as it tries to rebuild public trust in atomic power.

 

The Nuclear Regulation Authority could not rule out the possibility that information from the agency-issued device was leaked, and reported the incident to Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission when it happened in November, according to an NRA official who asked not to be named.

 

The employee informed the NRA that the phone, which contained information like names and contacts of people working at the agency, may have been lost at an airport, the NRA official told Bloomberg News on Wednesday. The official declined to say what country the device was misplaced in as it was during a personal trip. Kyodo News reported the employee contacted an airport in Shanghai upon realizing the phone was lost but couldn’t find it.

 

The incident is the latest in a series of missteps that threatens to sour public trust in nuclear oversight at a time when Japan is pushing to restart its fleet of idled reactors. In 2023, an employee at Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the world’s largest nuclear plant, placed a stack of documents on top of a car before driving off and losing them.

 

It also follows a major regional utility announcing on Monday that there may have been misconduct over how it compiled key safety data, potentially posing a further delay to the restart of its nuclear plant. 

 

A stringent regulatory process has delayed Japan from restarting most of its nuclear reactors shut in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster.