TOKYO -- The utility behind Japan's biggest nuclear plant disaster can't seem to get much right.

The obviously harried officials from Tokyo Electric Power Co. have repeatedly announced botched radiation readings, corrected themselves over and over and indulged in seemingly endless rounds of apologies.

Every few days, Japan's nuclear safety industry scolds them to "to take steps to prevent a recurrence of similar mistakes."

The bumbling offers alarming insight into the embarrassing failure of crisis management at the nation's top utility.

The officials have been doling out information piecemeal about the unfolding crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which erupted after backup generators -- critical to powering the systems that cool the reactors -- were destroyed by the March 11 tsunami, for which the company was sorely unprepared.

And the mistakes keep coming. Sunday morning, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said radiation levels in contaminated water in one of the troubled reactors at the plant had surged to 10 million times the level than when the reactor is working normally.

Eight hours later, TEPCO Vice President Sakae Muto bowed in apology. They had gotten it wrong, misreading a machine that analyzes water samples and mistaking one radioactive isotope for another.

The real number turned out to be 100,000 times normal -- high, but well below their terror-inducing earlier figure that caused an immediate evacuation of workers from the reactor.