Japan’s nuclear future – very uncertain

Japan’s nuclear future Don’t look now A series of mishaps comes at an awkward time for the government the Economist, Apr 20th 2013 | TOKYO In February this year, Shinzo Abe, leader of the then incoming Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), said the new government would restart reactors after they passed a forthcoming set of new safety tests. The country’s “nuclear village”, a cosy bunch from industry and government, cheered. But now the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi plant is starting to alarm the public once more. On April 15th the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN body, flew in to investigate a series of dangerous incidents.A power outage in March left four underground pools that store thousands of the plant’s nuclear fuel rods without fresh cooling water for several hours. A rat, it later emerged, had gnawed through a cable. Workmen laying down rat-proof netting caused another outage. Then this month regulators discovered that thousands of gallons of radioactive water had seeped into the ground; the plant’s operator had installed a jerry-rigged system of plastic sheeting, which sprang leaks. The quantity of contaminated water has become a crisis in its own right, the manager has admitted. And now the pipes used to transfer water to safer storage containers are leaking too.

All this will further darken the public’s view of nuclear power, says Hideyuki Ban, secretary general of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Centre in Tokyo, an anti-nuclear group, “because it looks like still more bungling”. That is no mean feat.

Experts who examined the causes of the 2011 catastrophe reckon the LDP has paid too little attention to what went wrong. Kiyoshi Kurokawa, the chairman of a parliamentary investigation, says the country may be moving “too hastily back towards nuclear power, without fully regaining the trust of the Japanese public and the international community”. Yoichi Funabashi, a former editor of Asahi Shimbun newspaper who headed a private-sector investigation, says it is unfortunate that the 2012 election, which brought the LDP back to office, did not include a proper debate about the future of nuclear energy……

A nationwide poll in February found that around 70% of respondents wanted either to phase out all the plants, or to shut them down immediately. Opposition is likely to be strongest at the local level, as regions move to switch their reactors back on. This week an Osaka court ruled on a suit brought by local residents to have Japan’s only two operating reactors, at the Oi plant in Fukui prefecture, shut down. They lost, but their suit looks like only the first of many battles. http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21576450-series-mishaps-comes-awkward-time-government-dont-look-now

April 19, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, politics

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