Japan Restarts Nuclear Reactor, No Problems So Far

The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant disaster was sparked when a tsunami plunged over the plant’s 10-foot-tall wall and damaged equipment, resulting in the release of radioactive material and the evacuation of 300,000 nearby residents. If another atomic accident happened, he added, the government would “deal with it responsibly”. “And certainly not all the necessary precautions for such accidents have been taken here”, Kan said.

Anti-nuclear sentiment runs high in Japan and television showed protesters scuffling with police in front of the Sendai plant, which is on the southernmost main island of Kyushu.

Kyushu Electric Power Co. said the reactor should begin generating electricity by the end of the week and resume commercial operations by early September, following inspections.

Abe has said only reactors that were deemed to have cleared the “world’s most stringent regulation standards” would be allowed to restart.

A majority of Japanese oppose the return to nuclear energy.

It’s been “four years and five months post Fukushima and nearly two years since the last reactor was shut down”, Cameco Corp. chief executive Tim Gitzel, 53, said Monday in a phone interview. To offset the shortfall in power output, the country ramped up imports of oil and gas and fired up more thermal power plants, slowing progress toward reducing its emissions of greenhouse gases.

“It is important to restart reactors one by one from the perspective of energy security, the economy and measures against global warming, but safety always comes first”, industry minister Yoichi Miyazawa told reporters.

“It would be impossible to achieve all these three things simultaneously – keep nuclear plants offline, while also trying to curb carbon dioxide and maintain the same electricity cost”.

Anti-nuclear protestor Kyoko Minoguchi at a tent encampment in Tokyo’s government district, July 16, 2015. “Accepting them as permanently closed would have financial implications that would be hard to manage”, said Tomas Kaberger, chairman of the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation.

Currently, power companies in Japan are awaiting approval to restart a total of 23 reactors. Meanwhile, removal of melted fuel from three of the plant’s six reactors – the most challenging part of the 30-to-40-year cleanup process – will not begin until 2022.

New, strict safety codes have been put into place following the disaster.

Before 2011, Japan relied on nuclear power for 30 percent of its energy.

The Fukushima disaster, the worst since the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, revealed dire problems within the nuclear industry, including lax contingency planning and inadequate precautions against tsunami, earthquakes and other natural disasters at some plants. Up to 18 reactors are needed to burn the plutonium stockpile.