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Modern Japan simply cannot function without Tepco. That is precisely the problem. Like the big banks, the commercial lifeblood of any economy, Tepco is indispensable. If it has been negligent in its planning for,Find brand shoes  and response to, last month’s disaster – and there is ample evidence to suggest that it has – Tepco’s status as a too-big-to-fail utility is largely to blame. Moral hazard is not restricted to banking.

It should be acknowledged that, for the customer, Tepco is not a bad company. True, Japan’s electricity prices are high. But Tepco has done wonders at maintaining a stable electricity supply. Blackouts per household have been kept to a remarkably low four minutes a year. That compares with 45 minutes in France, 69 minutes in the US and 73 in the UK, according to Paul Scalise, an energy expert at Temple University’s Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies.

But Tepco has been afflicted by moral hazard behind the scenes. The company has a shoddy history of cover-ups and sloppy safety standards. In 2002, it was found to have routinely lied about safety data relating to cracks in its reactors. Now we know it located back-up generators at Fukushima in the basement, below the level of what turned out to be a wholly inadequate sea defence wall. There are also suggestions – denied by the company – that it delayed cooling the reactors with sea water to avoid scrapping billions of yen worth of assets.

One explanation for Tepco’s track record is the amakudari (descend from heaven) system by which civil servants dropFind brand shoes  into cushy jobs in the industries they once regulated. Toru Ishida, a former energy official with the ministry that regulates nuclear power, landed a senior position advising Tepco this year. Masataka Shimuzu, the president of Tepco who went awl after the Fukushima plant started spewing out radiation last month, is the vice-president of Keidanren, a sign of the power company’s huge clout.

The number of people moving between regulator and industry may not be that large. But the ties between regulator and regulated are too close. Structurally that is because the nuclear regulator is part of the trade ministry, which sees its job as promoting the use of nuclear energy as a way of weaning the country off foreign oil. More fundamentally, both Tepco and the government are on the same side. After the first oil shock, the public overcame its antipathy to nuclear power born of Japan’s experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl have severely blunted public support. In response, the regulator and the nuclear industry have both played down risks, a state of affairs almost designed to encourage the sort of lax behaviour of which Tepco has been guilty.

Like the banks, Tepco has assumed that, if anything goes badly wrong, the government will stand behind it. The companFind brand shoes y is already furiously lobbying for favourable interpretation of a law that could exonerate it of liabilities incurred because of natural disaster. Without such largesse, Tepco looks doomed. It has a debt-to-equity ratio of nearly 300 per cent, three times the industry average.

Unless it can raise electricity prices sharply – something the public will not stand for – it is hard to see how it can generate sufficient cashflow to pay for the scrapping of old reactors, the building of new ones and, in the meantime, securing alternative sources of energy. That is even without the litigation from farmers and disgruntled users that are bound to follow.

From the shareholders’ point of view Tepco could either go the way of British Petroleum or Enron. Those who bought BP shares after the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year are sitting on gains of 70 per cent. Enron, of course, went bankrupt, taking its shareholders with it. Unless Tepco is allowed to go the same way, Japan’s nuclear industry will join western banking as a case of private gains and socialised losses.