Lady Barbara Judge CBE held a roundtable meeting with TEPCO’s female employees working in Fukushima area at the Fukushima Revitalization Headquarters on January 26, 2013.

February 13, 2013

  • Lady Barbara Judge CBE held a roundtable meeting with 5 female employees who were engaged in work related to radiation protection management, emergency planning, industrial safety and reactor maintenance and general affairs at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini nuclear power stations, Fukushima Daiichi Stabilization Center etc.
  • The following is a dictation of the opening words of encouragement Lady Barbara Judge CBE presented to TEPCO’s female employees;
  • I’m Barbara and it is a great pleasure to be here to see such elegant, beautiful, and brilliant women sitting across the table. I am by training a lawyer and I have been in a number of businesses but for the last more than 10 years I’ve been in the nuclear field.
  • I’ve been chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and after that I’ve been at advising a number of governments on building nuclear power plants and decommissioning them.
  • Although I have lived in London for the past 20 years, I have worked as Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. When I was younger living in America, I was a Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC. So I worked with the government for a long time. I’m also a mother. I have one son, who is getting older now and is about to be married next summer. I hope to be a grandmother soon. So I want to say one more thing. You are a dream come true. Because my mother worked as dean in a College until she was 87 years old. And she believed that women should work. Not just because they needed to or they were alone or they were poor, but because they had a brain and they should use it and they should be independent. She used to teach young women to go to work. So for me to see women who are working in the nuclear field is a dream come true. Especially because people think it’s a man’s business. And it’s an honor for me to representative women on this committee, the nuclear monitoring committee for TEPCO, and to see the TEPCO women who are real heroes, some of the real heroes of Fukushima and of the restoration activities that you are doing here. So I am particularly honored to be here on a day when I learned so much about all the efforts TEPCO is expending to make sure Fukushima and the power plants get to the highest safety standards.
  • And I know now that you are very much an important part of the team in those high standards. And that TEPCO is very proud to have women in such senior and important positions. Because I have often said that woman should be represented in the nuclear field. So now I would like to meet you and learn more about you.