A diablito, a “little devil,” is an illegal hookup to the power supply. Xataka describes it as a method by which a person alters the connections of the electricity meter.
In February 2025, El Imparcial reported that the federal power company CFE had detected “un millón 123 mil conexiones irregulares de luz” (1,123,000 irregular power connections).
In January 2026, citing a filing by Pemex with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, El Imparcial reported that the state oil company had rescheduled its payments to suppliers. Debts from 2025 could be paid “hasta en ocho años, mediante pagos trimestrales de capital e intereses” (over up to eight years, in quarterly payments of capital and interest). On October 31, 2025, these agreements came to 29,236 million pesos.
In July 2026, the suppliers’ association Amespac said that Pemex still owed them 27,240 million pesos, with debts dating back to 2024.
In February 2019, Manuel Bartlett, director of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), questioned the contracts that the commission had signed for gas pipelines. The companies included Grupo Carso, TransCanada and IEnova. Negotiations began in July.
On August 27, 2019, at the president’s morning press conference, with Carlos Slim present, the government announced an agreement. Tariffs fell by roughly 19 to 38 percent. In return, some companies received higher volumes or longer terms, up to 30 years instead of 20. The government said the deal saved 4.5 billion dollars.
On July 1, 2022, President López Obrador formally opened the Olmeca refinery at Dos Bocas, Tabasco. The refinery was still under construction, and fuel production was not expected until 2023. It first produced fuel on September 1, 2023.
On December 15, 2023, he inaugurated the Campeche to Cancún section of the Tren Maya, the railway around the Yucatán Peninsula. The outlet El CEO reported that the project was about 50 percent complete that day. Sections 6 and 7 were inaugurated a year later, on December 15, 2024.
On September 30, 1999, three workers at the JCO plant in Tōkai, Ibaraki Prefecture, were preparing a small batch of nuclear fuel. They had dissolved uranium in stainless steel buckets and tipped the solution into a precipitation tank, with no proper control of the amount. It became Japan’s first criticality accident. Two of the three workers died.
The approved procedure dissolved the uranium in a dissolution tank. Three years earlier, the company had changed its work procedure without permission from the regulators, so that buckets could be used instead. According to a report from Kyoto University, the plant’s own manual allowed the buckets.
On December 8, 1995, metallic sodium leaked from the secondary cooling system of Monju, the fast breeder reactor in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, and caught fire. According to the magazine Gendai, its operator at the time, Dōnen, made false reports and repeatedly tried to conceal what had happened. Monju restarted in May 2010. In August of the same year, a device used in fuel handling fell inside the reactor, and Monju stopped again.
In December 2016, a meeting of the ministers responsible for nuclear energy decided that Monju would not restart and would be decommissioned. More than one trillion yen had been spent on it. According to nippon.com, it had operated on only 250 days in 22 years.
The Tokyo area runs on electricity at 50 hertz, and the Osaka area at 60. The split goes back to the late Meiji era. Tokyo Electric Light bought 50-hertz generators from Germany, and Osaka Electric Light bought 60-hertz generators from the United States. That difference remains today.
Genshiryoku mura, the nuclear village, is the mocking name for the industry, government, academics and media bound together by the interests of nuclear power. A paper in a Japanese sociology journal says the term was jargon used inside Tokyo Electric Power, an insiders’ name in the power industry. Another paper uses the same word for the towns that host nuclear plants.
The Diet’s independent commission on the Fukushima accident found that regulator and regulated had traded places. The regulators had become captives of the power companies.
The Diet’s commission on the Fukushima accident found that Tokyo Electric Power had told the nuclear regulator, its usual point of contact, that venting work was under way. It found no evidence that this had reached the top of the trade ministry or the prime minister’s office.
The commission concluded that the regulator’s failure to function and the lack of information at TEPCO headquarters built distrust between the prime minister’s office and TEPCO. It led the prime minister to go to the plant himself and give instructions there.
Early on March 15, 2011, Prime Minister Kan Naoto went to TEPCO headquarters, where a joint response headquarters of the government and TEPCO was set up.
On March 12, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was injecting seawater to cool a reactor. Tokyo Electric Power’s headquarters wanted the injection stopped. The plant manager, Yoshida Masao, quietly told the staff in charge to keep injecting.
Accounts of his words differ. In one, reported by Gendai Business, he said: Chūshi meirei wa suru keredomo, zettai ni chūshi shite wa dame da. I will give the order to stop, but under no circumstances stop. In the video conference with headquarters, he reported that the injection was being interrupted. It continued.
In May 2011, Tokyo Electric Power first announced that the injection had been interrupted for 55 minutes. On May 26, it corrected itself. The injection had never stopped.