TOKYO – Japan will begin restarting its idled nuclear plants once new safety guidelines are in place later this year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday, moving to ensure a stable energy supply despite public safety concerns after the Fukushima disaster.

In a speech to Parliament, Mr. Abe pledged to restart nuclear plants that pass the tougher new guidelines, which are expected to be adopted by a newly created independent watchdog agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, as early as July. However, he did not specify when any of the reactors might resume operation. News reports have suggested that it might take months or even years to make the expensive upgrades needed to meet the new safety standards.

All of Japan’s 50 operable nuclear reactors were shut down following the March 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which spewed radiation across northern Japan after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems. Two were later restarted as an emergency measure to avert power shortages in the heavily populated region that includes the cities of Osaka and Kyoto.

Responding to public safety concerns, leaders from the previous Democratic Party government had vowed to slowly phase out nuclear power by the 2030s in favor of cleaner alternatives like solar and wind. However, Mr. Abe, who took power after his Liberal Democratic Party won national elections in December, has vowed to shelve the planned phase out, saying that Japan needs stable and cheap electricity from nuclear power to compete economically.

On Thursday, Mr. Abe said that Japan had learned the need for tougher safety standards from the Fukushima accident, which forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate. He said the new safety standards will be enforced “without compromise.”

Mr. Abe also said Japan will continue seeking energy alternatives to reduce its dependence on nuclear power, even without going so far as to eliminate it.

In January, the new nuclear agency released a list of its proposed new safety regulations, which include higher walls to protect against tsunamis, additional backup power sources for the cooling systems and construction of specially hardened earthquake-proof command centers. According to a report by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, none of Japan’s 16 undamaged commercial nuclear plants would currently pass those new standards.

The newspaper said making the necessary upgrades to meet the proposed guidelines would cost plant operators a total of about $11 billion, in addition to improvements already made after the Fukushima accident. The agency has said the new guidelines will be finalized and put in place by July 18.

The new guidelines will also prohibit the restart of reactors that were built atop earthquake faults that have been active in the last 400,000 years, saying these faults could produce earthquakes again. The agency has dispatched teams of experts to begin widely watched surveys aimed at detecting whether such active fault lines run beneath any of the plants.

So far, the teams have announced they have found active faults beneath two of the plants, a discovery that may force the permanent scrapping of one or more reactors at each. Potentially active faults have been found below three other plants, including Tokyo Electric Power’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the world’s largest nuclear plant. The agency says further study is needed to determine if those faults are in fact active.

The new safety standards followed an admission last year by the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, that it had failed to take stronger measures to prevent disasters for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants.

In the October 2012 report, Tepco said that before the accident it had been afraid to consider the risk of such a large tsunami, fearing admissions of risk could result in public pressure to shut plants down. The report was intended to showcase internal changes at the company, which has been widely criticized for lax internal oversight that left the plant excessively vulnerable to the 14-meter, or 46-foot tsunami that actually struck.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/world/asia/japan-to-begin-restarting-idled-nuclear-plants.html?partner=rss&emc=rss