TOKYO: A suspected World War II bomb was found Thursday on the premises of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, an official said, with police called in to investigate.
The 85-centimeter (2.9 foot) long object, believed to be an unexploded bomb dropped by the United States during the war, was discovered by workers constructing a parking lot close to the facility’s reactors, a spokesman for Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said.
TEPCO called police immediately upon finding the object, suspending construction work and roping off the area around one kilometer (0.62 mile) from the reactors, he added.
There was no impact on ongoing decommissioning operations at the nuclear plant, which suffered meltdowns in March 2011 after a powerful earthquake spawned a huge tsunami.
Japan’s Jiji Press reported that under such circumstances police call in bomb disposal experts from Japan’s military.
Unexploded US bombs and shells are still occasionally found in Japan more than 70 years after the conflict ended in 1945, particularly on the southern island of Okinawa where an extremely bloody battle took place in the war’s closing months.
A Japanese military airport existed in the area around the Fukushima site in northeastern Japan during the war, and the area was a target of US bombing raids.
The meltdowns at Fukushima in 2011 were the world’s worst such accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
TEPCO and the government are facing a four-decade task of cleaning up and decommissioning the facility, while tens of thousands of people remain displaced, the majority from Fukushima prefecture due to high radiation.
‘Unexploded WWII bomb’ found at Japan Fukushima nuclear plant
‘Unexploded WWII bomb’ found at Japan Fukushima nuclear plant
Unprecedented gagging order over Afghan data breach should have been avoided, former secretary says
- Ben Wallace tells MPs that he had ordered time-limited injunction to protect lives of Afghan veterans
- Sensitive details of thousands was leaked via email mistake because ‘someone didn’t do their job’
LONDON: The former UK defense secretary has said he would not have proposed a secret gagging order to conceal the catastrophic data breach that threatened the lives of thousands of Afghans.
Ben Wallace told MPs on Tuesday that he had ordered a time-limited injunction to protect the news of the data leak, The Independent reported.
At the time, in mid-2023, the Ministry of Defence had scrambled the learn the source of the leak, which took place when an official accidentally emailed a sensitive spreadsheet containing Afghans’ contact details outside of the ministry.
It led to the publication of the identities of thousands of Afghans who had served alongside British forces during the war against the Taliban, placing them at risk of reprisal.
They were secretly relocated to the UK, and the leak was only revealed to the British public when a High Court judge lifted a superinjunction last year.
It followed a longtime lobbying effort by The Independent and other news organizations to have the details of the leak released.
Wallace told MPs: “We are not covering up our mistakes. The priority is to protect the people in Afghanistan and then open it up to the public. We need to say a certain amount are out of danger.”
On the indefinite injunction, he added: “I didn’t think it was the right thing to do; I didn’t think it was necessary.
“I said, ‘we’re not doing that.’ The only thing we’re going to do, is we need to basically hold off in public until we get to the bottom of the threat these people are under. I said we won’t cover up our mistakes; we’ll talk about them.”
The rules surrounding a superinjunction forbid even mentioning its existence.
Wallace said: “You can have an injunction, I think, without reporting the contents … a superinjunction; my understanding is you can’t even say there’s an injunction. I think I would never have been in that space. Public bodies are accountable. If necessary you could even ring up the journalist and say ‘please hold off, people are at risk.’ Most journalists don’t want to put people at risk.”
The superinjunction was applied by a judge shortly after Wallace had left government.
It came after the MoD applied to the High Court for a regular injunction.
Grant Shapps, the subsequent defense secretary, then maintained the gagging order until the 2024 general election, when the Labour opposition took government.
Wallace blamed the 2022 breach on negligence, adding: “Someone didn’t do their job.”
The former defense secretary had implemented new checking procedures in the ministry after another Afghan data breach, but that “that clearly didn’t happen on this occasion; someone clearly didn’t do their job,” he told MPs.
Wallace said that military and defense spending is not a priority for voters, “partly because they don’t know” the true nature of the threat facing Britain.
