nuclear-news

The answer is that two or so billion dollars has been lent by banks to keep the utilities afloat, because utilities don’t have two billion dollars in cash sitting around. Now, it’s payback time for the bankers, and between the banks who want their two or three billion back, and the utilities that want their investment—which is probably in the order of $10 or $20 billion—back, then the pressure on the Diet is astronomical. Big money is pushing very hard to get these reactors started back up.

So you say they’ve proposed a 30-year cleanup, and you don’t think this is possible, correct?
No, I’m sure it’s not. A normal, clean power plant takes about ten years to decommission, and by “clean” I mean where literally the workers are working in street clothes most of the time. There are very few places in the plant where they’d have to put on what we call PCs—protective clothing. The white uniforms you see all over Fukushima… I’ve worked in nuclear power plants and only once or twice have had to wear those.

You can literally walk through most power plants in your street clothes, and the reason they have to wear them outside at Fukushima is because the radiation fields are so high. What’s happening now is that the ground is highly radioactive. In some areas where the radiation level is so high they’ve even put steel plates on top of the ground so that people could walk there. That’s not a normal decommissioning………

It’s a show. This is all about showing the Japanese that it’s not too bad, and we can run our other 40 or so plants fine, trust us. It’s definitely symbolic for the Japanese, but the real reason is the banks want their money back…….http://www.vice.com/read/japan-fukushima-clean-up