On one hand, it's a massive waste of judicial bandwidth. On the other, it's an effective check on the coziness between AGs, DAs, and law enforcement organizations.
But, from the description in the article, when a citizens' panel finds that charges should be issued after a prosecutor has decided not to prosecute, the case is reopened by prosecutors. Assuming this isn't just a reconsideration where the prosecutor can again decide not to actually prosecute the charges, this is a fairly substantial difference.
I don't think they will be convicted.
[1] - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/nuclear-disaster.html
Other things that came to light that were shown in the video:
Completely passive backup cooling systems that were dependent on actively-actuated valves for proper functioning. (Should have defaulted open in case of a power failure.)
Dependence on sensors that would fail without power.
Dependence on sensors that would provide dangerously misleading readings in precisely the most dangerous situation. (Water already boiled away)
I think it's a good video to watch if you are doing operations of any kind that requires worst-case thinking and planning.
But the issues you mention (and others) have been solved by the aviation industry. Nuke plants and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig could have benefited immensely from consultation with airframe engineers. A lot of those faults that doomed them could have been inexpensively corrected.
I always remember the backup generators in New Orleans that were put in the basements. Precisely the time you'd need the backup generators was when the basements were flooding. Oops.
At the time the plants were built, there was no geologist on the planet that believed Japan could even have a 9.0 quake, or a 30 meter tsunami (which you needed the quake for anyway). Thus, at the time, the plant was over designed for all possible scenarios.
I'm sort of surprised they weren't treated better. All of the nuclear reactors in Japan are shut down now, and the financial interests would like to see them turned on. But how do you expect public support with 80000 refugees from the meltdowns that are grumpy about it?
When Chernobyl had its meltdown, they weren't pumping up to 400 tons of radioactive waste into an ocean every single day [2].
Either way, am surprised but delighted to see the Washington Post bring the issue to the forefront today.
[1] http://enenews.com/govt-official-chilling-report-pacific-oce...
The waste we're talking about is HTO --- tritiated water --- which is a low-energy beta emitter that has intrinsically low bioavailability, because it is literally just water and is eliminated quickly.
Before developing an opinion about how terrifying this radiation leak is, a good number to have handy --- exercise for the reader --- is over the 12 year half life of tritium, assuming 400 gallons pumped into the ocean every day, for 4384 days, what percentage of the background radiation of the Pacific ocean are we talking about elevating it to?
Another number, which will not make you feel better about the world, is what elevation to background radiation is produced by the coal plants it would take to offset all the power produced by nukes.
Finally: if you believe that HTO leaks from TEPCO are, or are going to be, responsible for mass die-offs of marine life, you're going to have to account for the fact that we basically carpet-bombed the oceans with HTO during the insane nuclear weapons testing of the 1960s; nothing TEPCO is doing will come close.
"Michio Aoyama’s initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/concerns-over-m...
