I see that I forgot to respond to the last point in the
201204/12 comment from Richard Katz, where he says that force majeure "seems to me like a big can of worms that TEPCO would want to leave unopened."

I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't see any additional damage to the bottom line since we don't have punitive damages in principle. Criminal negligence? It's already theoretically not impossible to hypothesize about taking up the case of the two TEPCO workers at Fukushima-daiichi who drowned. But that means that the authorities would have to figure out what to do about the rest of the 3.11 victims. In any case, the threshold for invoking force majeure appears to be higher than for avoiding negligence.

Addendum, over.