A power plant operator in southern Japan restarted a nuclear reactor on Tuesday, the first to begin operating under new safety requirements following the Fukushima disaster.
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All of Japan’s 48 commercial reactor units were shut down for safety checks and upgrades following the 2011 accident, and 25 plants have applied to be restarted under the new safety standards.The reactors at Sendai are M-type pressurized water reactors built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The resource-poor nation, which once relied on nuclear power for a quarter of its electricity, restarted two reactors temporarily to feed its needs after Fukushima.
All Japan’s nuclear plant s were gradually shut down after a series of meltdowns at the Fukushima plant sparked by the tsunami and quake. But the risk of severe accidents would not be eliminated.
Japan decommissioned 50 reactors after the 2011 meltdown, forcing it to re-examine its power combine. On Tuesday, he stood shouting outside the gates of the Sendai plant, along with about 300 other protesters.
But I think that number will be much higher, and much faster, if these first restarts go well. The power company says it will halt the plant’s operation and ship spent fuel to safe areas if it detects signs of eruptions, but many volcanologists have cast doubts on the viability of this plan. However, many Japanese citizens continue to oppose the return to nuclear generation, and have successfully petitioned to block the restart of nuclear reactors before.
But Tanaka conceded there was “no such thing as absolute safety” and Japan’s people are sceptical as the country remains deeply scarred by the legacy of Fukushima – although no deaths have been directly attributed to the accident. Local protests were held near the Sendai reactor Monday, in advance of its re-opening. Utility companies, meanwhile, face mounting costs from keeping nuclear plants idle.
“A disaster like that at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will not occur” under the new rules, Nuclear Regulation Authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka said in an interview with the Nikkei newspaper published at the weekend. Power companies fired up more thermal power plants, including aging facilities, to make up for the loss of nuclear power. Following the meltdowns, the short-lived cabinet of then prime minister Yoshiko Noda considered phasing out nuclear energy entirely (see Nature 486, 15; 2012) and replacing it with renewables and fossil fuels. Industries have moved aggressively to avoid disruptions by installing backup generators and shifting to new sources, such as solar power.
Japan’s post-Fukushima energy bill skyrocketed as it scrambled to fill the gap left by taking reactors offline, a problem worsened by a sharp weakening of the yen which pushed up the cost of dollar-denominated energy imports.
While seeking to reactivate the idled reactors, the government has yet to address numerous long-term problems in Japan’s nuclear power generation. The government has also yet to find a site for the final disposal of highly-radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, with questions raised by many experts over its plan to bury the waste deep underground.
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Nuclear-safety culture has made progress since Fukushima, says Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank in Snowmass, Colorado.
