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Early reactor restarts unlikely despite LDP win

8 Comments
By Aaron Sheldrick

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The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), set up with more independence after the disaster discredited its predecessor, is expected to draw up safety standards by July 2013. It will judge whether plants are safe to restart, but its head says elected officials must take the final decision.

If the NRA maintains its independence, transparency and professiolism, at least early indications show that the public and politicians will be informed by the right scientific evidence to make decisions. Whether the politicians make the right decisions is another thing and will define their leadership and legacy. The people have already given their verdit on nuke energy issues. Repercusions of the stricken Fukushima reactors are global (polluted air and sea). The world is watching!

4 ( +4 / -0 )

"Repercusions of the stricken Fukushima reactors are global" ... NOT There is a small evacuation zone around the plant and some foodstuffs from the prefecture are banned from marketing. And that's it. The rest is pure media/activist hype.

-8 ( +1 / -9 )

@jerobeam -- you think there is media/activist hype? Where? Do you mean for the hundreds of thousands who are living in temporary shelters, or the villages that have been destroyed by contamination and not compensated?

Besides the evacuation zone there are villages that received so much radioactive cesium that their agricultural communities are forever gone. Watch the thousands of hours of Japanese documentaries on what radioactive fallout does to a local economy -- is that what you mean by media hype?

By the way, at each nuclear power plant in Japan, there is no place to store additional radioactive waste, the sites are full of nuclear waste, and there is no where to store in it Japan .. . . do you think this is activist hype as well?

4 ( +4 / -0 )

So, the NRA has no real authority and whatever their assessments are they will be ignored. It was the same the other day with the Tohoku power company. They received a negative report and ignored it in favor of the previous corrupt report. Nice!

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Wake me up when the LDP restarts the nuke plants.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

@SS Abe We don't deny many are living in temporary shelters. What we may argue is that they are doing so un-necessarily, because the evacuation standards are overly stringent.

And before you say strigency can do no harm, remember that money is finite and does stringency in one dimension means accepting less stringency elsewhere. In the furor to keep peacetime radiation low, money that could be diverted to building a higher seawall was diverted towards yet more shielding.

As for now, compared to the health efects of the tiny amounts of radiation, the health effects of being moved out of their homes forcibly are far worse...

-2 ( +1 / -3 )

LDP's pro-nuclear position was never unconditional. Don't think they are prepared to forcefully push anything through which does not truly reflect the general views and sentiments of the nation, which the Komeito seem to represent.

-2 ( +0 / -2 )

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