Trade minister Yukio Edano, the government's top spokesman during the March 11 disasters, testified Sunday at the Diet that Tokyo Electric Power Co. considered withdrawing all its workers and abandoning the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant amid the meltdown crisis.
Tepco has claimed it always planned to keep key workers at the plant and never considered abandoning it.
But Edano claimed Tepco President Masataka Shimizu was considering the option when the two spoke over the phone during the late hours of March 14 or in the early morning of March 15, when the pressure inside the No. 2 reactor was getting dangerously high.