The official report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission

"Our investigation included more than 900 hours of hearings and interviews with 1,167 people. We made nine site visits to nuclear power plants including Fukushima Daiichi, Fukushima Daini, Tohoku Electric Power Company Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant, and The Japan Atomic Power Company Tokai Daini Power Plant, in order to conduct as thorough an investigation as possible. To assure a maximum degree of information disclosure, all 19 of our commission meetings were open to public observation and broadcast on the internet (except for the first one), simultaneously in Japanese and English, to a total of 800,000 viewers. We also used social media, Facebook and twitter to communicate with the public, receiving over 170,000 comments. To gain a global perspective, we dispatched three teams overseas, and included interviews and hearings with experts from the U.S, France, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In addition to this English version of the executive summary, the entire report will soon be published in English. We focused on the selection of witnesses to those who held responsible positions at the time of the accident in the government, TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Co.] and nuclear regulators. In order to better comprehend the viewpoints of evacuees, we held three town hall meetings, at which we were able to hear first hand the opinions of more than 400 attendees. We also visited twelve municipalities--Futaba, Okuma, Tomioka, Namie, Naraha, Kawauchi, Hirono, Katsurao, Minamisoma, Tamura, Iitate, and Kawamata--within the designated evacuation area, to conduct interviews and survey the residents and workers at the nuclear power plant accident site. We received 10,633 responses to a survey of residents, and many responses from the on-site workers of about 500 related contractors.".