Antinuclear

Japan’s nuclear safety regulators in bed with the nuclear industry

 He said that regulators had been too cozy with the industry. 

Japan Ignored Nuclear Risks, Official Says, NYT, By HIROKO TABUCHI  February 15, 2012 TOKYO — In surprisingly frank public testimony on Wednesday,Japan’s nuclear safety chief said the country’s regulations were fundamentally flawed and laid out a somber picture of a nuclear industry shaped by freewheeling power companies, toothless regulators and a government more interested in promoting nuclear energy than in safeguarding the health of its citizens. The disaster at the Fukushima
Daiichi plant, stricken by an earthquake and a tsunami last March, has
led to widespread criticism of nuclear officials for their lax
approach to safety, as well as for a bungled response that allowed
meltdowns to occur at three of the plant’s six reactors.

The scale of the accident, which forced almost 100,000 people from
their homes and contaminated a wide area of northeastern Japan, has
put pressure on the government to explain why warnings about the
plant’s safety went unheeded and global safety standards were ignored,
even as officials promoted nuclear power as the country’s most
reliable source of electricity.

Haruki Madarame, head of a panel of nuclear safety experts who provide
technical advice to the government, told a Parliament-sponsored
inquiry on Wednesday that Japanese officials had succumbed to a blind
belief in the country’s technical prowess and failed to thoroughly
assess the risks of building nuclear reactors in an earthquake-prone
country….. His candid testimony comes at a time when the government
is pushing to restart reactors around the country that were shut down
following the accident. Only 3 of Japan’s 54 reactors are operating;
the rest have been kept idle by local governments worried about
safety.

To quell opposition, the central government has ordered new “stress
tests” to assess whether the plants can withstand a major natural
disaster. But the investigative commission’s hearings could undermine
efforts to restart more reactors.

Mr. Madarame said the government should go far beyond the lax safety
checks that Japanese regulators performed for years, which he said
were still being carried out in some cases using “technology three
decades old.” He said that regulators had been too cozy with the
industry. … http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/world/asia/japanese-official-says-nations-atomic-rules-are-flawed.html

February 16, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized