nuclear-news

obfuscations have come on top of widely reported incidents — a mysterious cloud of steam rising from one of the crippled reactors, a 29-hour power failure to a cooling pool — that suggest Tepco can’t handle the decommissioning and cleanup. Last week, company executives broke from form and wisely admitted that they will need outside help to solve the complex problem of groundwater runoff flowing from the mountains to the sea under the foundations of the plant.

On Aug. 7, Abe opened the door to that help when he pledged that “we will not leave this to Tepco, but put together a government strategy.” Given Tepco’s hapless record, this would be an auspicious moment to put that strategy in place and increase government control over the company. Despite providing 1 trillion yen ($12.5 billion) and obtaining 50.1 percent of Tepco voting rights in 2012, the government has left company decisions to management. In taking on Tepco’s liabilities, it has treated the company as “too big to fail,” creating a moral hazard for other nuclear operators. As disruptive and expensive as it may be, nationalization may be the only way to ensure a thorough cleanup, one that doesn’t put the return to profitability ahead of public safety.

In the meantime, Japan needs to aggressively solicit outside expertise — the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for instance, has yet to receive a formal request for assistance — to solve Fukushima’s groundwater problem. And Japan’s nuclear power authority would do well to devote less of its limited resources to recertifying reactors for restarts and more to monitoring the Fukushima cleanup and ensuring that the public is kept reliably informed……

Fukushima’s corrosive impact on support for nuclear energy, a climate-friendly part of the energy mix, extends beyond Japan’s shores to some of its would-be nuclear customers….. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-25/abe-s-nuclear-imperative-starts-at-fukushima.html