TEPCO shares plunge amid nuclear crisis

TOKYO, Mar 28 (AFP): Shares in Tokyo Electric Power Co. plunged nearly 18 per cent Monday, with no end in sight to a deepening crisis at the beleaguered utility's stricken nuclear power plant. TEPCO nosedived by their daily limit, hitting 696 yen. Shares in the utility are now worth less than a third of their value before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan's northeastern coast and knocked out the cooling systems of TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. "The end (of the crisis) is nowhere in sight," Hiroichi Nishi, general manager of equity at Nikko Cordial, told Dow Jones Newswires. The failure of its cooling systems led reactors to overheat, triggering suspected partial meltdowns, and a series of explosions and fires, with workers scrambling to stabilise the plant amid spiking levels of contamination. Radiation from the plant northeast of Tokyo has wafted into the air, contaminating farm produce and drinking water, and seeped into the Pacific Ocean, although officials stress there is no imminent health threat. TEPCO is one of the world's largest power companies with 44.6 million customers -- more than one third of the population of Japan -- in the Kanto region of the main island of Honshu, including Tokyo. The company has been criticised for its handling of the crisis, particularly for the quality of information it has supplied. It came under fire Monday, a day after it erroneously said radiation in water at the stricken site had reached 10 million times the normal level, later issuing a much lower -- but still dangerous -- figure. "Considering the fact that the monitoring of radioactivity is a major condition to ensure safety, this kind of mistake is absolutely unacceptable," said top government spokesman Yukio Edano. TEPCO earlier admitted to not thoroughly inspecting a site at the Fukushima plant, after three workers stepped in puddles of highly radioactive water, with two not wearing adequate safety gear. Adding to questions about the handling of the crisis, TEPCO said its president Masataka Shimizu, 66, took several days off from a joint emergency taskforce with the government due to sickness, but has now returned to work. Shimizu has not appeared in public since attending a press conference on March 13. The world's number three economy, which endures 20 per cent of all major earthquakes, generates about 30 per cent of its power from nuclear plants. The record 9.0-magnitude tremor and monster wave that battered Japan prompted 11 of the country's 55 nuclear reactors to automatically shut down. Power outages in areas served by TEPCO since March 14 have already limited train services while major manufacturers such as Toyota and Honda have halted production and the likes of Toshiba and Sony temporarily closed plants. The IMF warned last week that sustained power shortages could threaten Japan's economic recovery prospects.