Ministry limits foreigners doing Fukushima cleanup

foreign workers ruled out 19 april 2019.jpg

April 19, 2019

Japanese Justice Minister Takashi Yamashita has outlined a restriction pertaining to the country’s new visa program. He said foreign nationals won’t be allowed to work in Japan if their main task is to do decontamination work at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Yamashita’s remark on Friday follows the plant operator’s statement that it will accept foreign workers hired under the new visa program to help decommission the facility.

Tokyo Electric Power Company says that construction, industrial machinery and automobile maintenance will be relevant to the decommissioning. The utility told the contractors to make sure they hire foreign workers legally.

TEPCO also says it’s not aware of a shortage of workers in the decommissioning process, but that it is up to the contractors to decide whether to hire foreigners under the new visa category.

Yamashita said that the Justice Ministry and other relevant ministries will ensure that foreigners in the program are eligible for the jobs they are hired to do.

Yamashita said foreigners coming to work in the construction sector must not be hired if their main job is decontamination work.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the industry ministry will supervise TEPCO to make sure the utility’s operations are legal and that the plant’s reactors are decommissioned safely and stably.

A revised immigration law that took effect on April 1 allows foreign nationals with certain vocational skills to work in a range of sectors under a new visa category.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20190419_28/

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Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

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