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The operator of the nuclear reactors and power plants on the northern coast of Japan has a documented history of errors and cover-ups and, according to anti-nuclear activists, a pattern of hiding the truth when things go wrong.

Amidst the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the exact nature of the stress and damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, even Japan's Prime Minister, Naota Kan, was overheard demanding from officials of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) why the company withheld some information from the government.

Those reported comments were in themselves unusual because in the past, critics say, there has been close cooperation between the two.

"The history of the Japanese nuclear industry and the government is that is very tight and is less than glorious in regard to public information and full disclosure," Arjun Mahkijani told CNN

"These events are unprecedented," he said, "and there's every reason to believe TEPCO has not told the entire truth of what's been happening."

TEPCO officials deny they have been hiding critical data from the Japanese government.

But there's a detailed history of just those kinds of events in the recent past.

In 2002, the president of TEPCO and four other executives resigned when it was discovered that repair and inspection records at the Fukushima plant had been doctored. The company admitted "dishonest practices" after an internal investigation.

"It was discovered that TEPCO had covered up incidents of cracking of an important piece of equipment in all of its reactors and as a result, they were forced to shut down all 17 of their reactors," anti-nuclear activist Phillip White told CNN. White is the English-language liaison for an organization called Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), Japan's largest anti-nuclear organization.

"There was a pattern that emerged that TEPCO isn't frank and deliberately covers up to protect its own interests," he said.

In 2007, an 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck western Japan and affected another plant owned by TEPCO. The company reported only a minor fire but later, admitted that the fire had burned for two hours and that hundreds of gallons of radioactive water had leaked into the sea.

"The plant simply wasn't designed for the level of earthquake that took place, " Mahkijani told CNN. "They were very lucky not to have a bigger disaster then."

Against that background is what White and other anti-nuclear activists say is a far too-cozy relationship between Japanese nuclear regulators and power plant operators like TEPCO.

The chief regulatory agency is called Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency (NISA), but it does not, according to critics, operate at an arms-length distance from the industry it is charged with regulating. NISA is part of the giant Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). That ministry is charged, among other things, with selling Japanese technology (including nuclear technology) abroad.

"There's no true regulation of the Japanese nuclear industry," Phillip White told CNN. "It's just an amiable fiction."

NISA approved a 10-year extension for the life of the oldest of the six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi just before the earthquake struck. This, despite allegations that safety at the reactor in question had been questioned.

TEPCO admitted on its website that it had failed to properly inspect 33 pieces of equipment related to the cooling systems at the reactor, and told CNN that everything that needed to be addressed has been done. It said it would take corrective action in the future to prevent similar problems from occurring.

Nuclear experts tell CNN that the reactors are now almost certainly inoperable in the future.

As one physicist, Dr. Kenneth Bergeron, told CNN, "It's a very frightening situation. And we can only hope for the best."

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Submerged in 40-ft.-deep (12 m) tanks of blue, boron-infused water, nearly 50,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are stored near the 104 nuclear reactors in the U.S. Industry officials say it is perfectly safe to keep there. "You can stand right above a fuel pool" and not get sick, says Tom Kaufman, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the nuclear-power industry.

Safe or not, spent-fuel storage will be a significant part of a 90-day review of U.S. nuclear reactors expected to be conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in coming months. Instigated in the wake of the disaster in Japan, that probe will include an investigation into the ability of U.S. nuclear plants to deal with total power loss and natural disasters.

When power to the pumps that flush cooling tanks with water is cut off, the zirconium cladding on hot spent fuel rods can ignite, pumping radiation into the air. Nuclear experts fear that might happen at the Fukushima plant in Japan, and watchdogs say that under similarly catastrophic circumstances, the same thing could happen at U.S. plants. "If we go down that same road, we are likely to reach that same destination," says David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Storage sites have fail-safes in the event that power is lost, but they're not foolproof. "If the emergency diesel generators are lost — which is the backup power source — the cooling systems for the spent-fuel pools don't have battery capacity," says Lochbaum. "So you have to get either the diesels back or the electrical grid back in order to restore cooling." Rod McCullum, the director of used-fuels programs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, says backup systems in Japan and the U.S. "are highly similar."

Though the stakes are significant — the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., estimated in 1997 that a massive calamity at one spent-fuel pool could ultimately lead to 138,000 deaths and contaminate 2,000 sq. mi. (5,200 sq km) of land — government officials insist a worst-case scenario is incredibly unlikely, even in the course of extreme events. "We believe that the spent-fuel pools, these are very robust structures that are designed to withstand the type of natural phenomena that we have seen in Japan," Gregory Jaczko, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, told C-SPAN on Sunday.

There are 31 reactors in the U.S. where spent fuel is stored in "attic" pools above the reactor like those at the Fukushima plant in Japan. At the other 73 reactors, the spent fuel is stored in tanks housed in buildings adjacent to the operating reactors. Storage tanks are made of steel and reinforced with concrete; all of them are designed to withstand earthquakes that might typically occur within a 200-mile (320 km) radius.

Industry critics don't quibble with the claim that the spent-fuel pools themselves would likely survive an earthquake, but worry that it's the power grid and backup generators that are unsafe. Several plants sit near powerful fault lines, including the Diablo Canyon facility near San Luis Obispo in California, and the San Onofre plant about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo this month ordered a safety review of the Indian Point plant in Westchester County, which sits on the intersection of two faults, just 24 miles (40 km) upriver from New York City. Even without natural disaster, the Union of Concerned Scientists reports that there were 14 nuclear "near misses" at U.S. plants in 2010 alone.

Safety concerns remain even after the fuel is cooled, a process that takes a minimum of five years. Still highly radioactive, cool fuel is stored in steel-reinforced concrete casks that sit out in the open on concrete slabs. There are about 15,000 tons of it currently sitting at nuclear power plants across the country. The casks aren't really supposed to be there. Under a 1987 law, the Department of Energy is tasked with transporting that fuel to a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But protests from environmentalists, residents of the state and many politicians have delayed the site's opening repeatedly. Without a long-term viable option for fuel storage, industry critics worry the risks will only increase.

The coming review from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is unlikely to put the issue of nuclear safety and spent-fuel pools to rest. Watchdog groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists contend that the similarity between nuclear systems in Japan and the U.S. shows just how vulnerable nuclear plants are to catastrophe. And while nuclear-industry representatives insist that a Fukushima-scale disaster is unlikely in the U.S., they too are watching how Japanese and American officials are responding to the incident. "We are all going to learn something from this," says the Nuclear Energy Institute's McCullum.

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