Executives at ailing conglomerate Toshiba have asked banks for additional support. Three main lenders say they are considering providing new lines of credit.

Toshiba executives met with representatives of about 80 financial institutions on Tuesday. They are believed to have discussed the temporary swell in the company’s losses following the bankruptcy of its US nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse.

The firm plans to spin off its mainstay flash memory chip operation. But it will be some time before it sees any gains from selling a majority stake in the new entity.

Toshiba said it needs to secure more than 6.3 billion dollars in fiscal 2017.

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and 2 other main creditor banks proposed additional support on the condition that Toshiba offers shares in the spin-off company as collateral.

The electronics maker has postponed the release of its earnings report twice because it needed to investigate accounting practices at Westinghouse.

Suzuki Yūichi interviewed and with an introduction by Katsuya Hirano with Yoshihiro Amaya and Yoh Kawano

Transcription and translation by Akiko Anson

Suzuki Yūichi (56) was born to a farming family in Namie, Fukushima in 1960. Namie was one of the areas most devastated by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, as well as the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Besides 565 deaths from the earthquake/tsunami, because the town was located within the 20 kilometer exclusion zone around the damaged nuclear power plant, the entire town was evacuated on March 12. The government of Namie continued to operate in Nihonmatsu-city 39 kilometers from Namie. At the time of the nuclear accident, Mr. Suzuki was working in the Citizens’ Affairs Division of Namie and was immediately assigned to the Disaster Management Division established to assist citizens in finding missing family members, locating temporary housing, and evacuating families. Suzuki was…

MINES Paris Tech is the leading institution, at the heart of the french nuclear lobby, a state within the State.

Crisis management students in France are hoping to learn from a first-hand account of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Franck Guarnieri, a researcher in risk and crisis management at one of France’s leading institutions, MINES ParisTech, has been studying the accident.

Guarnieri and his team have interviewed nearly 30 government officials, experts, and employees at Tokyo Electric Power Company who were active during the aftermath of the 2011 disaster.

He is particularly interested in the actions of the late Masao Yoshida, the plant manager at the time.

Some months after the disaster, Yoshida told the government about what he did. The transcript, titled the Yoshida Testimony, was released in 2014.

When Guarnieri saw it, he decided to publish it in French.

The job of rendering Yoshida’s entire 28-hour testimony into French…

JAPANESE corporate giant Toshiba has announced that its Westinghouse nuclear power unit has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US, largely due to massive cost overruns for four reactor projects the company is building in South Carolina and Georgia. The financial loss to Toshiba is estimated to be about 1 trillion yen (about $9 billion) for the fiscal year that ended yesterday (March 31), which would be one of, if not the biggest, annual loss in Japanese corporate history.

Officials at both W estinghouse and parent company Toshiba are optimistic that the collapse is not total; the financial problems are rooted in Westinghouse’s construction division, while its nuclear fuel and plant operations/maintenance segments remain relatively profitable. On the other hand, the bankruptcy filing is glaring evidence that these same people have been very wrong before; every other objective indicator suggests that Westinghouse’s fall may be a fatal blow to…

A Tokyo-based think tank estimates that the complete cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster could reach ¥70 trillion.

Fukushima nuclear disaster aftermath cost estimated at Y70 trillion

TOKYO —The total cost to deal with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster has been estimated at 70 trillion yen ($626 billion), over three times more than the government calculation, a study by a private think tank showed Saturday.

The Japan Center for Economic Research said total costs at the Fukushima nuclear complex operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc could rise to between 50 trillion and 70 trillion yen. It compares with the roughly 22 trillion yen a government panel estimated in December.

“If costs rise, the public burden could greatly increase. The country’s nuclear policy needs to be reviewed,” the JCER said.

Initially in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the government expected the costs to total…