Yesterday I blogged about problems with nuclear accident evacuation plans in Japan. Many of the cities that are supposed to host evacuees cannot afford the facilities and supplies demanded (but not funded) by the Japanese national government. All the Japanese reactors were shut down following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March of 2011. Now Prime Minister Abe is trying to get the reactors started again. However, the majority of the Japanese public would rather not have the reactors restarted. A new nuclear regulatory agency called the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) created after Fukushima has been strengthening regulations based on the problems at Fukushima. These new regulations have been making it harder to restart the reactors.
Now the Abe government is trying to decide whether it should offer "written guarantees" of reactor safety in order to persuade the citizens to support the restart. The Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry who oversees the nuclear power industry has said that different local governments have requested that the government guarantee the safety of specific nearby nuclear reactors in writing.
Two nuclear power reactors at Sendai have met the new stricter regulation passed since Fukushima. They have applied for permission to restart and, if granted, will be the first Japanese reactors to be restarted. There seems to some confusion in the Japanese government about which agency within the government has the final authority to OK the restart of the Sendai reactors. Government officials have said that the conclusions of the Nuclear Regulatory Authority are sufficient and no other permission is needed. With respect to safety, the NRA points out that its job is to insure compliance with regulation and that it is impossible to prove that anything is completely safe.
In Japan, local governments have a lot of power to decide whether or not they want to host an operational reactor. Because the Japanese government provides funds to communities that host reactors, there are poor communities that, desperate for money, might be tempted to accept the government's offer if safety is guaranteed.
The whole idea of a guarantee in writing is silly. Government officials can write anything they want, but that does not make it true. If they are not in the NRA, they don't have the knowledge to rule on reactor safety. If they are in the NRA, they are too intelligent to write something that is obviously false. But, for the sake of argument, let us say that someone in the government is willing to write such a guarantee. So what? Unless the guarantee includes specific remedies in case of nuclear accidents, it's not worth the paper that it is written on. And even if guaranteed compensation is written into the guarantee, enforcing it is an entirely different matter. Future governments might repudiate the guarantee once the reactors are operating again.
Anyone who would request a guarantee that a nuclear reactor is completely safe or who would write such a guarantee is an idiot or a cynical liar.
Sendai reactors:
