Girls' Generation

Girl group Girls' Generation attend a press event before a concert at Olympic Park Gymnastics Stadium in Seoul on Sunday.

englishnews@c

The Men Who Die for Kim Jong-il's Criminal Stupidity

North Korea's former deputy prime minister and National Planning Committee chairman, Kim Tal-hyon, who visited Seoul in 1992 leading an economic team, was a member of nation founder Kim Il-sung's family and an economics expert who enjoyed Kim's confidence. Returning home from Seoul, he realized that reform and market opening were the only way for the North to survive. He endeavored to revive the North Korean economy but committed suicide in 2000.

He fell out of favor with leader Kim Jong-il while attempting to turn around the Hungnam fertilizer plant which he saw as the key to resolving the North's food problem. The plant, built by the Japanese colonialists, was a sort of lifeline for the North's agriculture, producing over 1.6 million tons of fertilizer a year. But production plummeted due to obsolete equipment. Convinced that improved fertilizer production would help, Kim Tal-hyon staked his fate on building it up.

He reportedly urged Kim Jong-il to invest US$100 million in the latest equipment. A short while later, the Organization and Guidance Department of the Workers' Party held a rally of engineers and laborers at the People's Palace of Culture in Pyongyang. Kim went along and was dumbfounded to find himself denounced by participants. They reportedly shouted, "Kim Tal-hyon is a turncoat" and "betrayed the revolutionary classes." Relegated to nominally managing the February 8 Vinalon Complex in 1993, he committed suicide in August 2000 upon hearing a word that the State Security Agency were coming to arrest him. Workers at the Hungnam fertilizer plant reportedly wept when they heard the news.

Had the Hungnam fertilizer plant been renovated as planned, the North might have been able to reduce the scope of the mass starvation of tens of thousands of people in the 1990s. Kim Jong-il, while pouring $870 million into the construction of the bombastic Kumsusan Memorial Palace for Kim Il-sung, left the fertilizer plant to turn into a pile of scrap metal.

In 1997, another party leader was publicly executed in Pyongyang. So Kwan-hi, the then party secretary for agricultural affairs, had also been close to Kim Il-sung. Charged with minor graft, he was made a scapegoat by Kim Jong-il for the mass starvation. He was denounced as a spy for the U.S. imperialist and shot in front of tens of thousands of people. The State Security Agency claimed the starvation was all So Kwan-hi's fault, and North Koreans believed that, unable to credit that their "dear leader" himself could be to blame.

When the Lee Myung-bak government took office in 2008, Pyongyang started setting up another scapegoat. Choi Sung-chol, the former deputy director of the party's United Front Department, was thrown in a concentration camp because Kim Jong-il was angry about the unexpected election result in the South, where he had thought the Left would win.

Now reports say that Pak Nam-gi, the former director of the Planning and Finance Department, was executed by firing squad for the botched currency reform of late last year. Nobody thinks that Pak Nam-gi, who was in his late 70s, played the leading role in such an enormous task. The disastrous currency reform and its fallout are shaking the regime to its core, and North Koreans have to fear execution without having committed any serious crimes. The people know that they are dying in place of someone else.

Ulleung Island Airport on the Cards Again

The government has revived a plan shelved as unprofitable last year to build an airport on Ulleung Island, the nearest inhabited island to Dokdo.

The Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs on Wednesday said an airport could block wave penetration to nearby areas and thus save it having to build a breakwater planned at the island’s Sadong Port, for which it has budgeted W170 billion (US$1=W1,051).

Instead, it decided to build an airport for smaller planes with up to 50 seats by 2017.

The ministry believes the airport would be economically viable if it cuts the total construction cost from W640 billion to about W400 billion by shortening the planned runway from 1,200 m to 1,100 m and reducing the width from 150 m to 80 m.

"There are various reasons why an airport on Ulleung Island would be significant, including the care to a remote region it would show and that it could galvanize the leisure industry there," a ministry spokesman said. "As it takes just an hour to fly from Gimpo Airport in Seoul to Ulleung, it'll make visiting Dokdo much more convenient as well."

N.Korea Tight-Lipped on Possible Flood Damage

North Korea saw torrential rains drench the country on Tuesday and Wednesday, just as they caused flooding and havoc in Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and other central regions of the South. The downpours are forecast to pelt the two Koreas throughout Thursday.

The [South] Korea Meteorological Administration said Wednesday that the reclusive communist state had 115 mm of rain in Kaesong, home to one of the North's key industrial complexes, as well as 42 mm in Sariwon, North Hwanghae Province, and 29 mm in Haeju, South Hwanghae Province.

It also predicted that between 30 ml and 60 ml of heavy rain would fall each hour in some areas of the North from Wednesday night to Thursday morning, accompanied by thunder, lightning and gusty winds.

But Pyongyang has not updated the weather conditions there or reported any resulting damage except for on Tuesday, when it reported heavy showers mainly in South Hwanghae Province. This region experienced sustained downpours of more than 30 ml per hour on average during the rainy season in the middle of the month.

The North's state media issued almost real-time updates of the havoc wreaked by the weather from July 12 to 17, but it has fallen silent on the issue since the Associated Press suggested Pyongyang may have altered a photo of a flooded road near the Taedong River to exaggerated flood damage. The photo in question was supplied to the AP by the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

Meanwhile, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has started to distribute aid for rain damage to North Korea's Hwanghae Province, the Voice of America said on Wednesday.

Seoul is sinking and I don't want to swim

Some 70 mm of rain per hour pounded the Seoul metropolitan area on Tuesday afternoon, leaving four missing and traffic severely congested. Lightning caused an explosion that led to one death. Over 400 cases of flooding were reported in Seoul alone.

Pocheon in Gyeonggi Province had the heaviest precipitation of 198.5 mm, followed by Namyangju and Uijeongbu in the province with 191 mm and 190.5 mm. Next were Dongdaemun district with 180 mm and Nowon district with 173.5 mm, both in Seoul.

Pedestrians walk through heavy rain in downtown Seoul on Tuesday. /Yonhap

Thunderstorms lashed Seoul and Gyeonggi Province through the night and rain kept pouring until early Wednesday morning, affecting traffic in the morning rush hour.

A mass of hot and humid air from the south collided with a cold and dry air mass over the Korean Peninsula, forming strong precipitation clouds, the Korea Meteorological Administration said. The rain will continue until Thursday and the central regions will likely see up to 300 mm of rain, it added.

englishnews@chosun.com / Jul. 27, 2011 08:57 KST

Seoul flooded

Trapped citizens wait for rescue at an intersection near the Gangnam subway station on Wednesday morning. /Yonhap

A record downpour on Wednesday left 39 people dead and eight missing in Korea. It was the most rainfall since Korea began gathering weather data in 1907. Some 620 people were left homeless, while the power at 66,093 homes was cut off and 720 homes were inundated.

Seoul was paralyzed once again by torrential rain. Heavy downpours began on Tuesday afternoon and continued sporadically until Wednesday. Accumulated rainfall recorded until 10 p.m. on Wednesday was 579 mm in Yangju, 545 mm in Pocheon, 527.5 mm in Dongducheon, 517 mm in Hanam, and 503.5 mm in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province, 465 mm in Seoul and 440.5 mm in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province.

The amount of rain that fell on Seoul from Tuesday to Wednesday beat the previous record precipitation for the month of 390.6 mm recorded on July 10, 1940.

The downpours triggered a landslide at a mountain resort in Chuncheon early Wednesday morning, killing 13 students from Inha University in Incheon who were there doing volunteer work at a nearby elementary school during their summer vacation. Another landslide in a suburb in southern Seoul left 17 people dead. Swelling waters at a stream in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province killed six people, and three bodies were found after a landslide in Paju just north of Seoul.

Parts of Mt. Umyeon in Seocho in Seoul are washed by torrential rains on Tuesday and Wednesday.

◆ Gangnam Hit Hardest

Wednesday's deluge submerged many parts of the affluent Gangnam area of southern Seoul. Drivers abandoned their cars in waist-deep water, while mobile phone services were immobilized when rainfall damaged signal relay stations. Traffic at the Gangnam intersection, one of the busiest in Seoul, came to a grinding halt. Power-lines in the Gangam and Seocho districts became submerged on Wednesday morning, triggering a blackout that affected 20,000 households. A dozen banks around the Gangnam intersection were shut due to the power outage.

◆ Traffic Paralyzed

The rain submerged some subway lines, main highways and low-lying parts of the capital, creating hellish conditions for commuters. Parts of Gwanghwamun in downtown Seoul were submerged in waist-deep water, causing traffic to come to a halt. Police blocked some 20 areas in the capital, trapping millions of commuters in their vehicles and causing many to report late to work.

Vehicles are submerged in floodwaters at the Daechi Intersection in Gangnam, Seoul on Wednesday morning. /Yonhap

◆ More Rain Predicted

Weathermen forecast another 250 mm of rainfall between Thursday and Friday in Seoul and other parts of central Korea. High winds and thunderstorms are also expected between Thursday night and Friday morning, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration.

The KMA predicted more than 60 mm of rain per hour in Seoul, Gyeonggi Province, northern Chungcheong Province and Gangwon Province with some areas seeing between 50 to 150 mm or even 250 mm of precipitation. It also warned of more landslides.

The rain could bring accumulated precipitation between Tuesday and Friday to as much as 700 mm, or half of the average annual rainfall of 1,450.5 mm in the capital.

The total amount of rain that fell on the capital between June 22, the start of the summer monsoon, and Wednesday was 1,259.5 mm, or 86.8 percent of the average yearly precipitation.

Countdown to Daegu World Championships

In 30 days, Daegu, about 300 kilometers south of Seoul, will play host to the world’s fastest and strongest athletes as well as hundreds of international sports officials.

Daegu is preparing for the 2011 IAAF World Championships in Athletics which is slated for Aug. 27-Sept. 4. The biannual event is one of the world’s top three sporting events along with the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. In fact, the IAAF World Championships ranks second only to the World Cup as a single sport event which can bring more than 2,000 athletes.

Athletes compete at Daegu Pre-Championships in May 2011. (Daegu Organizing Committee)

More than 3,500 athletes and officials including triple Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt and Women’s pole vault record-holder Yelena Isinbayeva, will be competing at Korea’s first ever world championships in athletics.

The nine-day event will kick-off on Aug. 27 at 9 a.m. with the women’s marathon, and in the evening the opening ceremony will be held at Daegu Stadium, the country’s largest stadium which served as one of the main venues for the 2002 World Cup and also the 2003 Universiade Games.

With just 30 days to go to the opening ceremony, final preparations are in full swing for the world’s biggest athletics event.

To prepare for the global sporting event, the local organizing committee replaced two large video screens at the stadium with High Definition LED screens. The new screens not only increase spectator visibility but also ensure the reliability of event coverage during the event, according to the LOC.

The state-of-art Mondo track and filed surface was also installed earlier to help athletes set new records at Daegu Stadium.

Daegu 2011 will also be the first IAAF World Championships to feature an athletes and media village. The village, located just five minutes drive from the main stadium, consists of nine buildings that can accommodate up to 3,500 people. The construction has been completed, and finishing touches, such as interior decorations, are also expected to be done by Aug. 5.

Daegu, the country’s third largest city with a population of more than 2.5 million, has already proved its capability to host large athletic events by successfully hosting its annual Pre-Championships event since 2005.

The LOC says that by successfully hosting the World Championships next month, it hopes to create an athletics boom in here.

Korean athletics, having failed to make an impact in top level competitions for a long time, still lags far behind other leading countries. But the local organizers claim that the nine-day event will be a turning point.

“I believe the Daegu championships will turn our athletics passion and hope into a reality,” Oh Dong-jin, president of Korea Association of Athletics Federations said.

“It will be also vital in boosting the public’s interest and support for the athletics events,” he added.

Moon Bong-gi, head coach of the Korean national athletics team, acknowledged that the qualifying standards for the Daegu Championships, particularly the short-distance running events, are still very tough for Korean athletics, but he added: “Our aim is not just to qualify for the event, but to break into the finals, so that we could at least show something to our home supporters.”

41 dead, 12 missing as heavy rains batter nation

At least 41 people were killed and 12 others missing as of Thursday morning as torrential rains triggered landslides, flooding and power outages in Seoul and central regions, the nation’s disaster control agency said.

“The death toll could rise, as more reports are coming in,” an official at the National Emergency Management Agency said.

Vehicles wade through a water-logged road in Yeouido, Seoul, as heavy rains drenched the central part of the country on Wednesday. (Yonhap News)

Rescue crew evacuate a resident on a stretcher from an area hit by a landslide in Chuncheon. (Yonhap News)

In Chuncheon, some 85 kilometers east of Seoul, 13 people died after a landslide destroyed a mountain pension and three residential buildings just after midnight Wednesday. Twenty others were injured, with four of them in critical conditions.

The victims were mostly students from Inha University in Incheon, who were in the area for volunteer work during their summer vacation, emergency officials said.

“I was sleeping on the second floor of the pension when I heard the thunderous sound of a landslide. The stairs collapsed and I was buried in mud,” one student rescued by firefighters told the Yonhap news agency.

In Seoul, which recorded more than 400 millimeters of precipitation from Tuesday till early Wednesday, tons of mud from Mount Woomyeon swept through nearby villages in the city’s southern ward of Seocho, killing 16.

Of them, six were killed in a village of Jeonwon.

The landslide also hit another village, Hyeongchon, killing the wife of Shinsegae chairman Koo Hak-su. Yang Myeong-ja was killed while trying to check the flooded basement of her home, according to local reports.

A plant collapsed in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, in the evening leaving three workers dead and two others injured.

Police, firefighters and emergency officials were carrying out rescue efforts, as half of the village, or about 60 houses, were still isolated.

Another six people were killed and hundreds evacuated as Gonjiam Stream in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, flooded.

On top of the casualties from landslides, at least three people were reported missing in flooded streams and rivers, emergency officials said.

Police declared a state of special emergency as roads, streets, subway stations and residential districts were flooded throughout the capital.

More than a thousand officers were mobilized to help ease traffic gridlock and block roadways deemed too dangerous.

Some 36 major roads were closed to traffic nationwide, including 23 in Seoul, and more than 700 homes were flooded in the capital, the disaster control agency said. Mobile phone networks were cut off in some areas.

The Korea Meteorological Administration said downpours tallying more than 110 millimeters of rain per hour, were recorded in Seoul and elsewhere. More rain, as much as 250 millimeters, is expected until early Thursday morning.

Districts in Gangnam, south of Han River in Seoul, were one of the hardest-hit areas.

“All roads near my home are flooded and it seems no bus operates here. I had to call my boss that I can’t come to work today,” a citizen living in Yangjae-dong wrote via Twitter.

Electricity outage hit nearly 10,000 homes in the Gangnam area, while hundreds of traffic lights malfunctioned, worsening the traffic chaos.

The Sadang intersection, the southern gate to the capital, was flooded, causing severe traffic jam in the area. Its nearly subway station, Sadang, was shut down in order to prevent it from being submerged.

Subway services were disrupted.

The services on subway line No. 1 was halted for about an hour in early Wednesday morning after Oryudong Station was submerged.

Another line linking Seoul and Bundang, a residential town in the city of Seongnam, was also disrupted due to submerged railroads.

TV and radio station EBS stopped broadcasting its regular programs after its facilities were damaged by the flood.

Landslides, floods kill 38 after downpour

Half-submerged vehicles are stranded at Daechi Intersection in southern Seoul, Wednesday. Record rainfall pounded the country’s central regions, causing multiple landslides that killed at least 36 people. Torrential rainfall hits central regions The heaviest downpour in a century devastated the country’s central regions Tuesday and Wednesday, triggering multiple landslides and floods that killed at least 38 people and left 8 others missing. The National Emergency Management Agency said more than 50 other people were also injured with four of them in critical condition, predicting that casualties could rise further as the heavy rain is expected to continue until Friday. Flood waters inundated main roads, residential areas and basement facilities in and around Seoul, cutting the power supply at 14,000 homes and leaving thousands of vehicles submerged on flooded roads. Seventeen residents were killed in the wreckage from landslides that occurred at hillside villages on Mt. Umyeon in Seocho, southern Seoul. Among the casualties was Yang Myeong-sook, 63, the wife of Shinsegae Department Store Chairman Koo Hak-su. She drowned while examining the flooded basement of her house located at the foot of the mountain, police said. Some 400 residents were ordered to evacuate their apartments in the posh mountainside village near the southern tip of the capital. In Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, at least six residents in a village near Gongiam Stream were killed and several others went missing after the stream overflowed its banks and submerged the village Wednesday afternoon. Separately, earlier in the day in Chuncheon, about 100 kilometers northeast of Seoul, a massive landslide destroyed five residential buildings near the Soyang River Dam just after midnight, killing 11 university students and two other people. The students from Inha University in Incheon were sleeping with other colleagues and tourists at a lodging house when the landslide hit. They were staying there to do voluntary work during their vacation. Rescue workers said two persons still remain missing, while 24 other people, injured in the landslide, are receiving treatment at nearby hospitals. Four of them were in a serious condition, they said. “I saw a house being swept away by the landslide on my way home and called the police immediately. The house was soon smashed into pieces. It happened in a flash,” said Choi Jun-yong, a 33-year-old resident in Chuncheon. Some 90 residents in the area were evacuated from their homes after officials warned of further landslides. Some people criticized the local government for failing to take necessary safety measures. “One of the five buildings destroyed by the landslide was inundated by the heavy downpour and signs of a landslide were reported hours before the tragedy. But the city government didn’t list the area as a danger zone so people stayed there,” a resident said, asking not to be named. A spokesman for Chuncheon City said there was much heavier rainfall than forecast by the weather agency. The Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) said more than 110 millimeters of rains per hour, a record volume witnessed once or twice in a century, were recorded in the country’s central regions, including the Seoul metropolitan area, from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. The precipitation recorded in Seoul for two days exceeded 400 mm, the agency said, adding that more than 250 mm of rainfall is expected in the capital area through Friday. Traffic was at a standstill in most parts of the city as streets were flooded and traffic lights were shorted out by the torrential rain. All the 12 riverside parks along the Han River were closed to the public from 2 a.m. Many public buildings and schools were also closed. EBS suspended broadcasting services after one of its power facilities in Seocho suffered damage from a landslide. The Korea Educational Development Institute, also located in the district, had to evacuate employees after its underground facilities were flooded. Kim Jae-un, a 37-year-old taxi driver, said he had to quit work early due to “nightmarish” traffic jams and accidents on the roads. “It took more than four hours to get out of downtown in the morning. It’s normally a 20-minute drive. It was just crazy,” he said.

fvisajobs.com

Deadly landslide in South Korea mountain city

At least 10 people are dead and several missing after heavy rain triggered a landslide in a mountain resort in northern South Korea.

Hundreds of rescuers have been sifting through rubble and mud to find survivors in Chuncheon, about 100km (60 miles) east of Seoul.

Hotels, restaurants and coffee shops were wrecked when the slide occurred just after midnight (1500 GMT Tuesday).

More than 250mm (10in) of rain have fallen on Chuncheon in two days.

The ten victims were reportedly college students doing volunteer work in the area, who had all been staying in the same hotel.

"We were asleep and suddenly heard a big sound, and then the ceiling fell down," said fellow student Lee Beon-seok, who was also in the hotel.

"I heard a weird sound like a train," the student was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

"I felt weird for hearing that train sound, but heard someone shouting 'Help me'. So I went out to see, and I saw it was swept by landslide all over."

More heavy rain was forecast for Wednesday.

Soros to return outsiders' hedge fund money

Billionaire investor George Soros, whose stock-picking career has spanned nearly four decades, said he will manage money only for himself and his family as new regulations threaten to crimp the hedge fund industry he made famous.

The octogenarian fund manager, known as much for earning $1 billion on a nervy currency bet as for giving away millions to support liberal causes, will return roughly $1 billion to outside investors most likely by the end of the year and turn Soros Fund Management into a family office. The sum represents only a small portion of the $25 billion he oversees.

Keith Anderson, who has been Soros' chief investment officer since 2008, will leave the firm.

Since launching the Quantum Fund nearly 40 years ago, Soros, who emigrated to the United States from Hungary, created one of most envied records in the industry, returning about 20 percent a year. But recently volatile market conditions have taken their toll on the fund as it lost 6 percent in the first half of 2011 and gained only 2.5 percent last year.

In a letter to investors, Soros' two sons, the fund's deputy chairmen, cited impending industry regulation as a reason for returning the money now.

Bloomberg first reported the news.

EXEMPTIONS NO MORE

Under the new Dodd-Frank Act, hedge funds will be forced to register with financial regulators, giving the Securities and Exchange Commission fresh insight into exactly how these generally secretive portfolios make money. But family offices are treated more leniently under the new regulations.

Ever since their father reorganized the Quantum fund in 2000 after heavy losses, the firm has effectively been operating as a family office, relying on various exemptions to avoid registration, the Soros brothers wrote.

Now that many loopholes have been closed, it made more sense to return outsiders' money instead of going through the expensive and time consuming process of registration, people familiar with Soros' thinking said.

"An unfortunate consequence of these new circumstances is that we will no longer be able to manage assets for anyone other than a family client as defined under the regulations," Jonathan and Robert Soros said.

Soros joins a growing list of fund managers who have recently revamped their businesses in the face of fresh regulation. Stanley Druckenmiller, Soros' long-time deputy who helped engineer the firm's winning bet against the British pound in 1992, returned money as did Chris Shumway, who was mentored by another industry great, Julian Robertson. Earlier this year Carl Icahn did the same.

For some outsiders the trend is raising some red flags.

"If the top money managers are closing shop because of overly onerous regulations, then this will ultimately be to the detriment of our institutional investors," said Jim Liew, who teaches finance at NYU's Stern School of Business. "In this environment, we actually need more hedge fund activity: hiring people, raising capital, allocating money, and ultimately stimulating our economy," he added.

MORE BARK THAN BITE

Soros' decision to return money sounds dramatic but the move is expected to be more symbolic than disruptive. The firm is not expected to shrink in size from its roughly 100 employees and George Soros is expected to remain as active in managing money as he always has been.

Soros, and Anderson, recently unwound a huge bet on gold, selling off almost $800 million of exchange-traded funds that hold gold during the first quarter, according to a recent SEC filing. Soros also slashed stakes in gold mining stocks like Kinross Gold and Novagold Holdings.

Indeed even Carl Icahn, who returned outsiders' money, has not retreated from the public stage and recently made a prominent play for bleach maker Clorox. And Julian Robertson, who long mentored some of the industry's next generation of stars, is now letting outsiders invest along side him again.

George Soros' particular focus on philanthropy may have played a hand in his decision to manage only his own money as his support for liberal causes and candidates have increasingly made him into a lightning rod for conservatives.

Last year, Soros told Reuters "I will effectively give away half my income as I earn it and the other half I will give away on my death."

Outsiders interpret this to mean he wants to make more and now it may be easier to act on his own. "The trades that people will have to conduct in the future in order to make money may not be very politically correct -- you may have to short the dollar and do other things that are considered unpatriotic-- and making those bets may be easier without having limited partners calling up to complain," said Charles Gradante, co-founder of Hennessee Group which invests with hedge funds but has no money with Soros right now.

Fukushima long ranked most hazardous plant

Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant ranked as one of the most dangerous in the world for radiation exposure years before it was destroyed by the meltdowns and explosions that followed the March 11 earthquake.

For five years to 2008, the Fukushima plant was rated the most hazardous nuclear facility in Japan for worker exposure to radiation and one of the five worst nuclear plants in the world on that basis. The next rankings, compiled as a three-year average, are due this year.

Reuters uncovered these rankings, privately tracked by Fukushima's operator Tokyo Electric Power, in a review of documents and presentations made at nuclear safety conferences over the past seven years.

In the United States -- Japan's early model in nuclear power -- Fukushima's lagging safety record would have prompted more intensive inspections by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It would have also invited scrutiny from the U.S. Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, an independent nuclear safety organization established by the U.S. power industry after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, experts say.

But that kind of stepped-up review never happened in Tokyo, where the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency remains an adjunct of the trade ministry charged with promoting nuclear power.

As Japan debates its future energy policy after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, a Reuters review of the long-troubled record at Fukushima shows how hard it has been to keep the country's oldest reactors running in the best of times. It also shows how Japan's nuclear establishment sold nuclear power to the public as a relatively cheap energy source in part by putting cost-containment ahead of radiation safety over the past several decades.

"After the Fukushima accident, we need to reconsider the cost of nuclear power," Tatsujiro Suzuki, vice chairman of Japan's Atomic Energy Commission, told Reuters. "It's not enough to meet safety standards. The industry needs to search for the best performance."

In an illustration of the scale of the safety problems at Fukushima, Tokyo Electric had set a 10-year goal that insiders considered ambitious in 2007. The plan was to reduce radiation exposure for workers at Fukushima to bring the facility from near rock-bottom in the industry's global safety rankings to somewhere below-average by 2017, documents show.

"Severer management than before will be required," Tokyo Electric safety researcher Yasunori Kokubun and four other colleagues said in an English-language 2004 report. That report examined why Japan lagged other countries such as France and the United States in limiting radiation exposure for workers during plant maintenance.

The report came from an earlier period of corporate soul searching by Tokyo Electric, a politically powerful regional monopoly in Japan that ran the Fukushima power station and remains in charge of the clean-up work at the crippled plant expected to take a decade or more.

In 2002, the chairman and president of the utility were forced to step down after regulators concluded the company had routinely filed false reports during safety inspections and hid evidence of trouble at its reactors, including Fukushima. All 17 of Tokyo Electric's reactors were ordered shut down. The last of those did not restart until 2005.

COST-SAVING CULTURE

As part of a bid to win back public trust, the utility promised to repair a "safety culture" it said had failed in the scandal. Teams of newly empowered radiation safety managers were created and began to audit the company's nuclear operations, including Fukushima. They also reported back findings to other nuclear plant operators and regulators. None of the utility's safety managers who gave those archived presentations responded to requests for comment for this report.

One problem, according to one of those early assessments, was that Tokyo Electric's managers on the ground tended to put cost savings ahead of a commitment to keep driving worker radiation doses "as low as reasonably achievable," the international standard for safety.

Take maintenance, for instance. Japanese plants are required to shut down every 13 months for almost four months at a time -- twice as long as the U.S. average. Tepco was slow to invest in the more expensive radiation safety precautions needed during maintenance, thus lowering the cost of operating Fukushima before the accident.

But that focus on costs also kept Tepco from developing a more active commitment to worker safety that could have helped it navigate the March disaster, officials now say.

After the earthquake, contract workers at Fukushima were sent in without radiation meters or basic gear such as rubber boots. Screening for radiation from dust and vapor inhaled by workers was delayed for weeks until experts said the testing was almost meaningless. At least 39 workers were exposed to more than 100 millisieverts of radiation, five times the maximum allowed in a normal year.

Fukushima Daiichi, built in a poor region on Japan's Pacific Coast to supply power to Tokyo, was pushed into crisis by the massive March 11 earthquake and the tsunami that hit less than an hour later. The backup power systems meant to keep its radioactive fuel cool were disabled, leading to meltdowns, explosions and radiation spewing into the environment, forcing the evacuation of more than 80,000 residents.

Goshi Hosono, the government minister appointed to coordinate Japan's response to the Fukushima crisis, said he was not aware of the details of Fukushima's radiation safety record before March 11 and declined to comment on that basis.

But he said the utility had failed to protect workers in the chaos that followed the accident, prompting a reprimand from government officials and a decision by regulators to take charge of radiation health monitoring at the plant.

"In normal times, radiation monitoring would be left to the plant operator, but these are not normal times," Hosono told Reuters.

HIGHER RADIATION IN OLD PLANTS

In a June report to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japanese officials said basic design failures, a fatal underestimation of tsunami risk and a chaotic decision-making process had contributed to the disaster. But they also said Tokyo Electric's "safety culture" had failed it again.

Outside experts agreed. "The main root causes of this man-made disaster can be found in (Tokyo Electric's) ineffective -- exemplary poor -- safety practices and track record," said Najim Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California and former U.S. government science advisor.

In response to questions about the radiation safety record at Fukushima, Tokyo Electric said that radiation exposure for each individual worker at the plant had been kept below the regulatorystandard. The overall radiation level remained relatively high because the plant's six reactors were all between 30 and 40 years old at the time of the accident, the utility said.

"Because it was an older plant it required longer maintenance periods and more intensive repair work," Tokyo Electric spokeswoman Ryoko Sakai said. "For that reason, the overall radiation exposure was higher than our other plants."

The General Electric-derived design of the reactors at Fukushima posed a particular safety challenge during routine shutdowns because radioactive steam is allowed to circulate through the power-generating turbine. That means that large parts of the power plant pose a radiation risk during repairs, experts say.

But even compared to other boiling water reactors, Fukushima stood out for its risks. At the start of the decade, each of its reactors had exposed workers to 2.5 times the amount of radiation they would have faced in an average U.S. reactor of the same design. By 2009, that gap had narrowed, but exposure at Fukushima was still 1.7 times the U.S. average and equivalent to subjecting workers on the site to a collective 1,500 full-body CT scans each year.

Because of Fukushima's high radiation, Tokyo Electric brought in thousands of workers each year, often to work just a few days on the most hazardous jobs. The utility employed almost 9,000 contract workers annually on average at the plant over the past decade, according to records kept by Japan's trade ministry.

Those workers were needed in part to allow Tokyo Electric to meet the international safety standard Japan had committed to in 2001. Under that standard, workers were limited to 20 millisieverts of radiation exposure in an average year, equivalent to getting two CT scans at work.

But even with its extraordinary work force, the average contract worker at Fukushima was exposed to 73 percent more radiation than the average nuclear worker at other plants in Japan over the past decade, according to a Reuters review of data from Japan's trade and industry ministry. The same worker was also exposed to almost three times the amount of radiation that Tokyo Electric's own staff faced. The average radiation dose ran almost a third higher than for U.S. workers at similar plants.

The number of Fukushima workers near the annual limit for radiation also remained troublingly high. Over the past five years, each Fukushima reactor exposed almost 300 workers to between 10 and 20 millisieverts of radiation, the Reuters review of the data showed. The comparable figure for U.S. reactors of similar design was just 22 workers per reactor with those kinds of exposure levels.

'THIS SITUATION IS THE WORST'

Part of the reason was that Fukushima maintenance work took almost three times longer than comparable jobs at U.S. plants -- more than four months on average. But American utilities have also spent heavily as a group on steps to reduce worker exposure, including building mock-up reactors so workers could rehearse dangerous jobs almost as commandos would.

"We are ready and willing to spend money to reduce worker doses," said John Bickel, a nuclear safety expert who has consulted for the NRC and the IAEA. "I would characterize that there is an intense competition in the U.S. to be the lowest."

By contrast, critics of the Japanese nuclear industry cite records showing how Tokyo Electric and other utilities shifted the health risks of operating nuclear plants to a group of relatively poor and sometimes homeless day laborers desperate for a quick payday.

"Nuclear power is based on discrimination, a system in which the people who are working to protect nuclear safety end up on the streets and are given the cold shoulder by society. All of us who use electricity are responsible for this system," said Yuko Fujita, a former physics professor at Keio University who has campaigned for nuclear worker safety in Japan for over 20 years.

To be sure, Tokyo Electric had taken steps to reduce the amount of radiation workers faced. It changed the chemistry of water piped through the reactors to reduce corrosion in pipes. It developed robots and remote-controlled probes to inspect hazards rather than sending in workers. And it used radiation shields such as lead "blankets" wrapped around pipes during maintenance to limit radiation in places workers had to be.

Those measures had reduced the overall radiation exposure for workers at Fukushima to a third of the 1978 peak by the start of the past decade, the records show.

But by 2006, Tokyo Electric safety managers had decided that they had to take on a tougher problem to make any more progress. They needed to reform the basic organization of the utility, where maintenance managers faced no pressure to meet targets for reducing radiation exposure for the thousands of contractors and day laborers, two reports show.

The only more dangerous plants from 2003 to 2005 on that basis had been the Tarapur nuclear plant in India, where two reactors shared the basic Fukushima design, and the Perry nuclear plant on Lake Erie outside Cleveland, Ohio.

Perry, which is operated by FirstEnergy Corp, was cited by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a series of safety mistakes during a maintenance period in April. In that incident, regulators said four workers were exposed to high levels of radiation after being sent to retrieve a radiation monitor near the reactor's core. The plant has been the target of NRC safety inspections for more than three years because of what U.S. regulators call "human performance" issues in safety management.

COMPLACENCY SETS IN

Tokyo Electric did not come to terms with its own management and organizational problems related to safety until recent years, the record shows.

Shiro Takahira, a Tokyo Electric manager in charge of radiation safety, showed a conference in October 2006 a chart depicting Fukushima Daiichi as the third-worst nuclear plant in the world in terms of worker exposure to radiation.

"This graph could be a good driving force to improve our process," Takahira told the radiation safety conference in Niigata, Japan, according to remarks posted by the organizer. Takahira said Tokyo Electric had traditionally "put more weight on cost effectiveness" than the need to keep driving radiation exposure down. "There has been no standard mechanism to promote (the standard of 'as low as reasonably achievable') systematically and continuously," he said.

By late 2006, radiation safety managers such as Takahira had won a seat at the table in planning repair jobs at nuclear plants including Fukushima. By 2007, the company set a goal of getting the annual radiation at each Fukushima reactor to about 2.5 sieverts, a more manageable dose equivalent to about 250 CT scans for workers. That would mean Fukushima was still lagging the industry but by a narrower margin.

The full-year radiation for 2008 and 2009 came in just below 2.5 sieverts of exposure per reactor, just under the goal managers had set in 2007. On a three-year rolling basis, the exposure was 2.53 sieverts per reactor between 2007 to 2009.

"We had largely reached our target by 2009," said Tokyo Electric's Sakai.

At that point, some of the urgency behind the safety campaign appeared to drain. "We'll continue to try to reduce occupational exposures by every possible measure after cost performance evaluations," Shunsuke Hori, a Tokyo Electric safety manager, said at a September 2009 conference in Aomori, Japan.

Hori was one of two Tokyo Electric safety managers who published what amounted to a declaration of victory after the nascent effort to improve radiation safety.

"The reliability of Japanese nuclear plants is now quite high," Hori and another Tokyo Electric manager, Akira Suzuki, wrote in a radiation health journal. "The Japanese nuclear industry has over 40 years of radiation protection experience, and it is believed that more radiation control will be possible in the future using this experience."

The upbeat assessment was published in a little-read scientific journal, Radiation Protection Dosimetry, on April 26, 2011, the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

On the ground in Fukushima that day, white smoke was still steaming off three of the reactors, and residents to the northwest had started a wider round of evacuations.