Japan’s nuclear regulators not impressed by nuclear facilities’ flimsy excuses about safety

VOX POPULI: Flimsy excuses by nuclear plant operators are unacceptable, Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a daily column that runs on Page 1 of The Asahi Shimbun., April 26, 2019 …………. three operators of nuclear power plants, seeking an extension of a very different kind of deadline, found the Nuclear Regulation Authority to be quite unforgiving.Kansai Electric Power Co., Shikoku Electric Power Co. and Kyushu Electric Power Co. were initially required to install anti-terror facilities against airborne attacks at their nuclear power plants by July 2018.

Having already failed to meet that deadline, the utilities on April 17 asked the government’s nuclear watchdog to extend it by another 12 to 30 months, but the plea was rejected on April 24.

The utilities have insisted in unison that installing facilities to remotely cool nuclear reactors would require the time-consuming work of drilling through mountains.

They probably thought this “excuse” was good enough to sway the government into extending the deadline.

No such luck.

The Sendai nuclear power plant in Kagoshima Prefecture will likely be shut down as a result, according to the NRA.

The utilities must be underestimating the odds of any of their nuclear power plants being targeted for a terrorist attack.

Have they already forgotten that North Korea was repeatedly test-launching its missiles until recently? And what about the Fukushima disaster of 2011, which occurred because virtually nobody wanted to consider the possibility of a mega-quake triggering a tsunami?

The “deadline” book mentioned above also contains an anecdote about author Akira Yoshimura (1927-2006), a stickler for punctuality who always handed in his manuscripts early, claiming he had a tendency to start panicking as the deadline approached. And he always attached a note to his editor, apologizing, in effect, for jumping the gun.

I guess it’s useless to expect the three utilities to emulate Yoshimura. http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904260032.html

April 27, 2019 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, safety

1 Comment »

I helped take care of a developmentally delayed child, from the Ukraine. The child was born in the ninetees. A lady I kew well, had a boy who had tumors in his brain as a small child. He was a teenager, when i knew him. A 32 year olld architect i know from Belarus risked it and bore a child. Th child was delivered cesarian. Has Heart problems. Many of the children of the Chernobyl diaspora, have problems. I do not see any studies of them.
Ukraine has been torn to pieces since chernobyl. Crooked politicians have stolen a great deal of their national wealth. Nazi malitias roam the countrysides, killing innocents.
Ukraine has several old nucblear reactors that are on the verge of meltdowns, and explosions. They store .megatons of high level nuclear waste, on concrete pads, poorly secured throughout the country.
When another reactor blows in Ukraine, most of what is left will leave there.
Japan is in a bad situation. A hundred times as much high level radionuclide was burmed and vaporized into the air there than chernobyl. It contiues to flood into the pacific.

Japan is now a super authoritarian right-wing state. Ukraine is a neonazi kleptocracy state.
People can be thrown in prison in Japan, for saying too much about NUCLEAR or Fukushima.
30,000 refugees, are being forced back to the most radioacive place on earth.

The Japanese government is forcing, the opening of damaged reactors from the tohoku quake. That means more future fukushimas, soon

Japan’s death rate is now ten to 20 times higher, than it was pre-fukushima. The nuclear reactors blew-up and, at least two fuel pools containing hundreds of tons of highlevel nuclear waste caught fire.
If a person got within 50 feet of a hundred pounds, of high level nuclear waste, with cobalt60 strontium90 cesium137 iodine 131 it will kill you with.

Hundreds of tons of highlevel radionuclides were vaporized from the explosions and atomized by fire , to be dispersed as far south as Yokohama and Tokyo in lethal concentrations. Two prominenet scientists, found cesium 137 and strontium 90 levels to be thousands of times higher than is habitable, in car air filters and house air filters in tokyo and yokohama.
They found cesium 137 at 1200Bq-Kg in a toko apt and cesium 137 at 900 Bq-Kg in a car in Yokohama in 2014 and 2017 respectively.

If another reactor goes up in Japan we will witness the effects of the highest levels of acute radionuclide exposure, ever seen on such a massive scale because there is so much already there.

Comment by doug | April 28, 2019 | Reply

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope