Japan lifts operational ban on world's biggest nuclear plant in Niigata Prefecture

Good for Japan. Nuclear energy is the cheapest, safest, reliable, cleanest, and efficient energy supply. Solar energy is unreliable and produces waste after use. Wind energy farms kill birds, whales, and dolphins. Wind energy is unreliable, inefficient, and also produces waste.

an increase in renewable energy sources.

It would be great to see 'an increase in renewable energy sources', but hard to believe much will be done toward that, unless the oligarchs running energy here are given more control over the sources on top of a larger cut of profits. It's good to read that less LNG might be used, but would be better to read about actual renewable energy sources being used, not just talked about.

It may be the world's largest, on paper, but each reactor has a different story. Being built over earthquake faultlines never helped their case, and lax management has left much to be desired.

I wonder which one, No.7(?) will be the first to gain permission for a restart...

This plant was commissioned in 1985 so it’s nearly forty years old. It originally had a service life of 30 years, which has conveniently been extended to fifty years. That means they only gave another decade to use this plant and then go through the decades long and extremely expensive process of decommissioning the plant. Tell me again how nuclear power is cheap.

Work towards gaining local permission? Not sure how things could move any slower.

Yes!

Let's re-enact the glory days of 1984-1986.

David Lee Roth,dayglo,Top Gun.

Oh wait.This is a facility with the potential to contaminate the whole Kanto area?

If you don’t want to get frozen in the middle of the winter, restarting the nuclear power plant is the only option,

Fire it up!

Found it! According the the NHK, it would be reactors 6 and 7, if and when they can get support from the local community.

Quote: また今回、事実上の運転禁止命令が解除された柏崎刈羽原発6号機と7号機は、地元の同意が得られていないことなどから、現時点で再稼働の見通しは立っていません。

東電 柏崎刈羽原発 “運転禁止命令”を解除 原子力規制委 今後は地元の同意が焦点に | NHK | 新潟県

It is foolish to trust TEPCO. At Fukishima they put emergency cooling equipment AT sea level to save money. TEPCO is incompetent.

You know tsunami is a Japanese word. The disaster at Fukushima was entirely foreseeable. It was greed and incompetence that caused the disaster. I would not trust the executives at Tepco.

It is foolish to trust TEPCO. At Fukishima they put emergency cooling equipment AT sea level to save money. TEPCO is incompetent.

Are you crazy? Do you realize how much money they have saved by being able to simply toss their dirty water into the ocean? It's an amazing business decision!

You know tsunami is a Japanese word. The disaster at Fukushima was entirely foreseeable. 

If the accident could have been foreseen, wouldn't that mean that GE was incompetent in proceeding with plant construction for Unit 1 while leaving the cooling system on land?

Then, American companies will also be held responsible for the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Aren't they supposed to hold referendums to get the consent of locals?

In 2021, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) barred TEPCO from operating Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, its only operable nuclear power station, due to safety breaches including the failure to protect nuclear materials …

Japan will have only itself to blame when the nuclear plant disaster eventually happens! Then they’ll start with the blame game that they did back in 2011 after Fukushima! Idiots commenting here who support the idea should be the first ones to get radiation poisoning!

Japan's nuclear agency and Tepco begun to escape into spiritual talk with the words such as "put soul" "determination", and intend to restart superannuated nuclear plants.

That is the way to Japan's typical failure as same as prewar Japan's regime who begun reckless war.

in the first place, world's biggest nuclear plants are in Japan where quake often hit is absurd and insane.

http://fkuoka.blog.fc2.com/img/20140123193533b36.png/

Fukushima disaster is telling that nuclear power is never clean, never cheapest.

That photo looks like a Nuclear wasteland in Japan

Agent_NeoDec. 27 09:58 pm JST

You know tsunami is a Japanese word. The disaster at Fukushima was entirely foreseeable. 

If the accident could have been foreseen, wouldn't that mean that GE was incompetent in proceeding with plant construction for Unit 1 while leaving the cooling system on land?

Then, American companies will also be held responsible for the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

There were plenty of warnings about the tsunami risk before the incident. It was TEPCO that decided to keep operating:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable-pub-47361

What is the determining factor that signals that "we have achieved the people's 'understanding'"? If not a referendum, what? Show of hands? Online surveys? Some TEPCO appli for the smartphones?

The few people who decide are vulnerable to persuasion, such as financial incentives to their areas, and the ubiquitous brown envelopes. Amply demonstrated in other areas where multiple power plants where built, and when the subsidies and incentives ran out, they offered to support newer ones.

As wanderlust says, every town hosting a nuclear power plant in Japan was heavily rewarded before the thing was built. Such rewards may have come in the form of Japan's shiniest sports halls, concert halls, and community centers, not ordinary residents' bank accounts, but it is highly likely that a lot of money was involved.

The following is about Fukushima, but you get the picture and it will be the same for the plant in Niigata, incidently the closest (about 100km) nuclear power plant to our home.

On returning home, I discovered the depth of the Faustian compacts in which these Fukushima seashore towns had engaged with TEPCO. While the prefectural average per capita income in the year to end-March 2009, the latest year for which data are available (Japanese-only link to a mine of fascinating Fukushima factoids here), was around Y2.75mn ($34,000 at the current rate), it was Y5.65mn (over $70,000) in Hirono, by far the highest in Fukushima, and Y4.85mn (over $60,000) in Okuma, home to most of Fukushima Daiichi. In the sublimely implausible event that Hirono and its 4,500-odd inhabitants were to declare independence, it would rank somewhere above Switzerland and below Norway as one of the nominally half-dozen wealthiest nations on the planet. Remember that the next time you fork over for your electricity bills, Tokyoites.

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/holiday-in-fukushima-to-the-zone-of-exclusion/

That's good. Electricity prices are all times high nowadays. Plus they had enough time to improve their safety standards.

If countermeasures have to be taken at the stage of building a nuclear reactor, why are we talking about continuing its operation?

Who can blame us for not having taken measures to deal with a once-in-a-millennium tsunami?

Even if countermeasures should have been taken later, why didn't those people raise their voices from the manufacturing stage?

There are other important issues as well.

While it is true that proper measures were not taken to deal with the earthquake and tsunami, I find it strange that no one criticized the government's response after the accident occurred. At that time, more than 60% of Japanese citizens did not approve of the government's response to the accident.

I think that if a more sensible response had been taken, the damage would have been much less, and I regret that I was a member of the Democratic Party at the time.

At the time of the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, there was a coalition government including the Social Democratic Party, and Tomiichi Murayama, an anti-Self-Defense Forces leader, was the prime minister, so the deployment of the Self-Defense Forces was delayed and the human casualties increased.

So no more dangerous earthquakes then?