A frame from early in the newly released Fukushima video.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant when the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami struck last year, bowed to public and government pressure this week, releasing 150 hours of video recorded during the first days of the Fukushima crisis. Even with some faces obscured and two-thirds of the audio missing, the tapes clearly show a nuclear infrastructure wholly unprepared for the disaster, and an industry and government wholly determined to downplay that disaster’s severity:

Though incomplete, the footage from a concrete bunker at the plant confirms what many had long suspected: that the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant’s operator, knew from the early hours of the crisis that multiple meltdowns were likely despite its repeated attempts in the weeks that followed to deny such a probability.

It also suggests that the government, during one of the bleakest moments, ordered the company not to share information with the public, or even local officials trying to decide if more people should evacuate.

Above all, the videos depict mayhem at the plant, a lack of preparedness so profound that too few buses were on hand to carry workers away in the event of an evacuation. They also paint a close-up portrait of the man at the center of the crisis, Mr. Yoshida, who galvanizes his team of engineers as they defy explosions and fires — and sometimes battle their own superiors.

That summary is from New York Times Tokyo-based reporter Hiroko Tabuchi. The story she tells is compelling and terrifying, and focuses on the apparent heroism of Masao Yoshida, Fukushima’s chief manager when the crisis began, along with the far less estimable behavior of TEPCO and Japanese government officials. It is worth a couple of your monthly quota of clicks to read all the way through.

The story is but one take on the video, and I point this out not because I question Tabuchi’s reporting on its content, much of which is consistent with what is already known about the unholy alliance between the nuclear industry and the Japanese government, and about what those parties did to serve their own interests at the expense of the Japanese people (and many others across the northern hemisphere). Instead, I bring this up because I do not myself speak Japanese, and I am only allowed to view a 90-minute “highlight reel” and not the entire 150 hours of video, and so I am dependent on other reporters’ interpretations. And because neither TEPCO nor the Japanese government (which now essentially owns TEPCO) has yet proven to be completely open or honest on matters nuclear, the subtle differences in those interpretations matter.

Tabuchi took to Twitter to say how much she wanted to tell the story as “a tribute to Fukushima Daiichi chief Yoshida and the brave men on the ground who tried to save us.” But in a separate tweet, Tabuchi said she was “heartbroken” to discover her article was cut in half.

Editing is, of course, part of journalism. Trimming happens to many stories in many papers. But I had to raise an eyebrow when I saw a note at the bottom of Tabuchi’s piece that said Matthew Wald “contributed reporting from Washington.” I have previously been critical of Wald–a Times veteran, contributor to their Green blog, and often their go-to reporter on nuclear power–for stories that sometimes read like brochures from the Nuclear Energy Institute. Wald tends to perpetuate myths in line with the old “clean, safe, and too cheap to meter” saw, while reserving a much, uh, healthier (?) skepticism for nuclear power critics and renewable energy advocates.

There is, of course, no way to know what Wald’s contributions (or redactions) were in this case, and it is doubtful any of the parties involved would tell us, but what particularly stokes my curiosity is this paragraph:

Despite the close-up view of the disaster, the videos — which also capture teleconferences with executives in Tokyo — leave many questions unresolved, in good part because only 50 of 150 hours include audio. The company blamed technical problems for the lack of audio.

TEPCO might blame technical problems, but reports from other news services seem to leave little doubt that the general belief is that the audio has been withheld–or in some cases most obviously obscured–by TEPCO. The BBC’s Mariko Oi saw it this way:

Tepco has bowed to pressure to release 150 hours of teleconferencing footage but the tape was heavily edited and mostly muted to “protect employees’ privacy”.

. . . .

Tepco is again under criticism for not releasing the full recordings and has been asked if it was removing more than employees’ names and phone numbers.

And Mari Yamaguchi of the Associated Press reported even more directly about TEPCO’s intent:

Japan’s former prime minister criticized the tsunami-hit nuclear plant’s operator Wednesday for heavily editing the limited video coverage it released of the disaster, including a portion in which his emotional speech to utility executives and workers was silenced.

Naoto Kan called for Tokyo Electric Power Co. to release all of its video coverage, beyond the first five days. Two-thirds of the 150 hours of videos it released Monday are without sound, including one segment showing Kan’s visit to the utility’s headquarters on March 15 last year, four days after a tsunami critically damaged three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant.

Many people’s faces, except for the plant chief and top executives in Tokyo, are obscured in the videos and frequent beeps mask voices and other sound.

The AP story also points out that the released video arbitrarily ends at midnight on March 15–and though it is not known how much more tape exists, it appears clear that TEPCO has held some substantial portion back. After five days, the Fukushima crisis was far from over, after all (as it is still far from over), and the recordings end amidst some of the disaster’s most critical events.

But the New York Times omits all of this, leaving TEPCO’s Rose Mary Woods-like excuse to stand as the innocent truth.

That’s a shame, because the way you read this story changes when you look at some of the horrific revelations keeping in mind that this is only the part TEPCO decided it could let you see. Here are just a few highlights. . . or lowlights:

• Plant managers and TEPCO officials were aware from the earliest hours of the crisis that they were likely facing multiple meltdowns.
• Japanese government officials withheld information–and ordered TEPCO to withhold information–on radiation levels that could have helped untold numbers of civilians reduce their exposure.
• Despite warnings years prior that such natural disasters were possible in the region, Fukushima operators had no plan to deal with the damage and loss of power caused by the quake and tsunami.
• TEPCO did not even have the infrastructure or procedures in place to evacuate its own employees from an imperiled facility.
• Plant officials were–from the earliest days–as worried about the spent fuel pools as they were about the reactors. Those on the scene feared that most of the pools at Daiichi, not just the one at reactor four, were facing loss of coolant and the fires and massive radiation leaks that would follow, though publicly they said none of the pools were a danger at the time.

And there is more about the dire conditions for plant workers, the lack of food or water, the high levels of radiation exposure, and even a point where employees had to pool their cash to buy water and gasoline. And, as noted above, that’s just the part TEPCO has deemed acceptable for release.

Above all, though–beyond the discrepancies in reporting, beyond the moral failings of TEPCO and government officials, beyond the heroism of those at the crippled facility–what the new Fukushima tapes reveal is what those who watch the nuclear industry have mostly known all along. Nuclear power is dangerous–the radiation, the complexity of the system, the waste, the reliance on everything going right, and the corrupt conspiracy between industry and government saddle this form of energy production with unacceptable risks. The video now available might shed some light on how things at Fukushima went horribly wrong, but the entire world already knows plenty of who, what, where and when. We all know that things at Fukushima did go horribly wrong, and so many know that they must suffer because of it.