Second major scandal involving a steel supplier of reactor components. Japan’s Kobe Steel has joined a rather unfortunate ‘club’. That club’s membership includes those Japanese companies recently racked by scandal and mismanagement.
Kobe’s management admitted that its employees faked quality inspection reports on its steel and other metal products used domestically in automobiles, bullet trains and nuclear power stations. So far, corporate announcements have been vague, offering little clarity about the duration of the quality control lapses or, more important, the type of components involved.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501. T) just announced that it replaced a Kobe-made piece of equipment, offering no other details. Kobe, however, is a major producer of nuclear power plants components. Even if quality control lapses did not extend to those operations, the onus may be on Kobe to prove its innocence.
So what should we expect? If these QA/QC lapses began recently, it should have little or no effect on most of the nuclear assets in the United States. Most of them were built decades ago.
This post was published at Wolf Street on Oct 15, 2017.
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