THE DECISION last month by Japan’s prime minister Yoshihiko Noda to start bringing the country’s nuclear reactors back on line has triggered an escalation of protests across the country. Last week some 100,000 rallied in central Tokyo in the largest demonstration since the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 240 km north of the capital, was hit on March 11th last year by an earthquake and tsunami. Power supplies and the plant’s cooling systems had been knocked out causing the meltdowns of three of its six reactors and the massive release of radioactive material and forcing the evacuation of 150,000 people, many of them permanently. The meltdown resulted in the precautionary shutdown of all the country’s reactors, and recent reports on the accident suggest that the capital itself narrowly avoided catastrophe.
Today, the rationale for Japan, which experiences a fifth of the world’s earthquakes, maintaining 54 commercial reactors is deeply troubling to many of its people. But the cost of the continuing shutdown of over 50 plants is staggering, not only because of the write-down of massive capital costs, but the $100 million it adds daily to the country’s energy import costs. Business echoes Noda’s insistence that he has “no choice” but to restart the programme.
Yesterday, the fourth of the official reports on the disaster, all of which have heaped criticism on the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), and the government, argued that because of a pervasive “safety myth”, the conviction “that an accident could not occur, there was no preparation for catastrophic failure. “Even though there were new findings [about the risk of a tsunami], Tepco couldn’t see it because people are blind to what they don’t want to see.”
The report also blamed nuclear regulators for not paying sufficient heed to improvements in safety standards urged by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
A profound shift in disaster-planning strategy is required, the report insists. Setting the bar at what the industry regards as an impossibly high level, it argues that “both the government and companies should establish a new philosophy of disaster prevention that requires safety and disaster measures against any massive accident and disaster . . . regardless of event probability [our emphasis].” It is a standard that will certainly test the industry, not only in Japan but around the world, where nuclear power has begun to re-establish support, even within the environmental community.