Fears of another Fukushima as Tepco plans to restart world's biggest nuclear plant

[brooklynite]

Source: The Guardian

If a single structure can define a community, for the 90,000 residents of Kashiwazaki town and the neighbouring village of Kariwa, it is the sprawling nuclear power plant that has dominated the coastal landscape for more than 40 years.

...snip...

But today, the reactors at Kashiwazaki-kariwa are idle. The plant in Niigata prefecture, about 140 miles (225km) north-west of the capital, is the nuclear industry’s highest-profile casualty of the nationwide atomic shutdown that followed the March 2011 triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi.

The company at the centre of the disaster has encountered anger over its failure to prevent the catastrophe, its treatment of tens of thousands of evacuated residents and its haphazard attempts to clean up its atomic mess.

Now, the same utility, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], is attempting to banish its Fukushima demons with a push to restart two reactors at Kashiwazaki-kariwa, one of its three nuclear plants. Only then, it says, can it generate the profits it needs to fund the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi and win back the public trust it lost in the wake of the meltdown.



Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/28/fears-of-another-fukushima-as-tepco-plans-to-restart-worlds-biggest-nuclear-plant

[rusty quoin]

1. It used to be that Japanese culture demanded those responsible falling down on their swords.

But for Tepco, a return to nuclear power generation is a matter of financial necessity, with the utility standing to gain up to ¥200 billion in annual profits by restarting the two reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa.

[NNadir]

4. Actually, the Japanese nation has been falling on a sword.

It's called air pollution.



Nature: China's annual air pollution deaths now stand at 1.4 million per year.

The original paper from which this post derives is here: The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale (Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015)

Air pollution kills more people in Asia every two or three days than nuclear power has killed on the entire planet in more than half a century of operations.

The difference between deaths from air pollution and the deaths from nuclear power is that no one gives a shit about how many people die from the former, and would rather burn more oil, gas and coal to run computers to complain about the latter.

[SergeStorms]

2. Trust is a very fragile commodity.

Once lost, it's almost impossible to regain. Tepco screwed over a lot of people, and Japanese culture isn't big on "forgive and forget". Most Americans have the attention span of a gnat on crack, and would forget about it as soon as someone showed them something shiny. Not so, the Japanese. They'll be watching with a very wary eye for quite some time.

[NNadir]

3. What we should really fear is the loss of life from air pollution.

Not starting nuclear plants is a decision to kill people.

If we devoted as much attention to the seven million people who die each year from air pollution as we do to scare nonsense about Fukushima, this would be an intelligently run and safer planet.

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

But this is not what we do. In everything connected with nuclear energy, we make a big deal about what could happen while ignoring the death toll from what is happening from the normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel plants.

More people died, for sure, from replacing the nuclear plants with fossil fuels than died from radiation. The death toll from the normal combustion operations that continue to dominate the world energy supply amounts to just under 20,000 people a day, every day.

The fear and ignorance associated with nuclear energy is a crime against all future generations. Nuclear energy need not be without risk, it need not be perfect, to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Nuclear energy saves lives.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)