The lead article in today’s New York Times, “In Japan Reactor Failings, Danger Signs for the U.S.,” provides one more instance of the nuclear industry lying to the general public about the nature of risks involved in the operation of its plants.

Apparently, the venting system used in the stricken Japanese plants is the most up-to-date version, the same used in many plants in the United States, and it has multiple design and operational flaws that require expensive retrofitting or redesign.

The flaws include the inability of venting systems, critical to avoiding the hydrogen explosions experienced at three reactors in Japan, to work without electricity. And that was exactly what happened with the failure of the backup generators in the Japanese plants.

In addition, a fail-safe system to open the vents by allowing manual access to the valves was ineffective due to damage from the earthquake as well as an inability to approach the valves due to prior release of large amounts of radioactivity.

General Electric had claimed that the Japanese plants were using a less advanced type of venting system than in the United States, and that we were perfectly safe here. They did not offer any comment to The New York Times story.

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Culture of Complicity Tied to Stricken Nuclear Plant,” shows a tendency all too familiar in the United States, where the regulators in charge of policing an organization are actually allied with industry officials. Details about coverups of faulty equipment abound, just to save the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, from the need to make costly repairs.

The collusion even had a name, “the nuclear power village,” and the community was corrupted by transfers of personnel between regulatory agencies, especially the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, and private nuclear companies such as Tepco. The process is known in Japan as “amakudari,” or descent from heaven, allowing senior government regulators to get honorary jobs in industry organizations upon their retirement.

Other conflicts existed as well. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency did not have engineers with appropriate expertise to make nuclear regulations so they relied on engineers whom they were supposed to oversee.

Some of the major factors contributing to the Japanese nuclear accident resulted from this lack of oversight. The sea wall was too low to adequately stop the tsunami from flooding the nuclear complex, and the diesel emergency generators were kept at ground level, thus making them vulnerable to the incoming water.

The research in this analysis was thorough and impeccable and should give us pause before we expand the number of nuclear plants in the United States.