I’ve noticed that TEPCO tends to respond to queries with “We cannot deny ...” when it confirms a negative piece of news. So apparently, where information is lacking (either the public doesn’t have information or that TEPCO doesn’t have it), TEPCO states the most optimistic interpretation (’all is well’) because they CAN DENY the worse scenarios technically. By that I mean ‘Hey, you can’t prove otherwise so we are ALL going to proceed if all is well! Next question!”. I think we’ve seen some of that on FR as well over the past weeks.
Normally, if information is unavailable, the default position is not set on ‘optimism’ when developing plans to deal with disasters because baseless optimism can cause you to respond to little, too late, or flat out choose the worst possible course of action if the situation is not in fact as well as proposed. It seems like that is happening right about now - they planned water entombment and now have to ‘reexamine the roadmap for recovery’ because their optimistic plan may trigger a catastrophic explosion. Or most painfully - when the backup generators first went down the day of the tsunami - TEPCO could choose the most optimistic scenario (’we will defnitely be able to restore power without outside assistance) or the most cautious (notify foreign nations offering assistance that if we are unable to get power back up ourselves by 8 we will ask them to fly theirs in and we would need them here by 10 at the latest). TEPCO seems to have relied strictly on ‘best case scenario planning’ and there are those who post on FR and other websites often seem to reason the same way - unless proven otherwise, the best of all possible outcomes is in progress and any diversion from this party line is ‘fear mongering’.
If you read some of the latest PR from TEPCO everything was fairly under control and workers could go and work in Reactor 1.
But oops..not so fast...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2719839/posts
The sad fact is...they cannot get this under control..and they don’t know what to do.
When TEPCO admitted early on that they could not rule out recriticality..that should have been a clue.