No one with the Japanese government or with the Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the reactors, has said anything like that publicly.
But IRNA, Iran’s state-owned news agency, said it has spoken with an unnamed Japanese official who said General Electric was fully in charge of one of the troubled reactors. Actually, GE has had nothing to do with operating the reactors since building them 40 years ago.
IRNA, however, has a directive to turn news developments around the world into anti-American propaganda any way it can. This story is one example of how that mission is carried out.
In this case, IRNA quoted the unnamed Japanese official as saying, “The US is trying hard to prevent Japan from exposing the role of the General Electric Co. by exerting much pressure on Japan. The US effort is aimed at preventing further resentment of the United States by the Japanese people, particularly because they have a bad memory of the US atom bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II.”
IRNA further quoted the unnamed official as saying that the United States was aware of deficiencies in the Fukushima reactors but failed to upgrade the technology. The main problem at Fukushima is that the tsunami knocked out the electricity line that provided the power to pump cooling water to the reactors and also overwhelmed the backup generators.
While governments around the world are promising a review of safety at nuclear reactors, President Ahmadi-nejad said there was no correlation between the Fukushima reactors and Iran’s Bushehr reactor.
He said the point was that Bushehr used far more modern technology than is found in the Fukushima reactors. He didn’t blame the United States for the problems at Fukushima.
“The security standards there [in Bushehr] are the standards of today,” he said. “We have to take into account that the Japanese nuclear plants were built 40 years ago with the standards of yesterday.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Bushehr meets all the safety standards of the 21st Century. But he also noted that construction at Bushehr began in the 1970s under a German contractor. “There is German equipment there, which the Iranian leadership asked us to use. That equipment is not the most modern, as you can imagine,” Lavrov said.
