Japan's nuclear safety upgrades mask industry problems

It really doesn't sound like Japan has learned any lessons here. Politics have no place in nuclear power plant operations. Even the bandaid repairs and safety standards that have been implemented are getting reduced or delayed with grace periods. Next earthquake Japan will be asking other countries for permission to evacuate their people out of super hot zones that they will never be able to return to.

Three mile island and Chernobyl have both operated for years after the nuclear disasters. It is just a step by step process of buying back public trust.. through bureaucratic corruption, and political lobbying.

Remember the only moral of a corporation is to create the largest possible profit, period. With luck by the time the next accident happens, the current CEOs, and officers, will have retired so it will be somebody else's problem and somebody else's fault. This why no corporation can be trusted to do the right thing. only the bottom line matters to the bean counters.

I may be the only one starting not to even trust NRA in doing its rightful job.Somebody may armtwist it to end up a rubber-stamp

"Chubu spokesman Hiroki Kosaka declined to comment when asked whether the company would abide by a popular vote calling for the closure of the plant."

Sounds like a pretty straightforward "no" to me. They only promise to abide by popular vote when it's in their favour (or they think it will be). When it's not they fall back on the, "Well, we're not legally obliged to follow community sentiment", or whatever.

Japan has learned NOTHING. It'll happen again, guaranteed. It's not a question of 'if', but 'when', and when it does you can bet the CEOs of the company(ies) in question will run away from the scene and his job, with the company scrambling and PR reps saying, "We had absolutely no way of knowing". Next time I bet it'll be a LOT worse, and we'll see some MAJOR cities needing to be permanently evacuated. That's about what it'll take for the government to realize how stupid it is to let these companies literally get away with murder.

I'm interested who will play the fiddle? Because it will burn. Would be nice to know the fiddle player.

Mask? More like thinly veil... Only a fool wouldn't see what those idiots running the nuclear industry are really up to.

Quote from article: "Chubu spokesman Hiroki Kosaka declined to comment when asked whether the company would abide by a popular vote calling for the closure of the plant. He said the company is striving to upgrade safety equipment as much as possible and is explaining its improvements to local residents."

When the local residents understand afresh the exact amount of handout they will be getting after these suggested restarts... will it be as much as before, or more even?

The government decided Tuesday to provide an additional 6 billion $ to Tokyo Electric Power Co.

If the utility is running a 300% debt, they are bankrupt. The J-Gov is running at 250% up from 200%, so how can a bankrupt Gov bailout the bankrupted utilities? Probably the only solution is to for a government takeover of all electric utilities and merge them into one. The stocks are worthless anyway and this would prevent the government from financial collapse. I just don't understand why Japan doesn't use the one major resource it has plenty of, geothermal. Japan is just one string of volcanoes, geothermal is everywhere even in Tokyo. Where every there is an osen, you have it. They really need to take a good look at Iceland. Then they need to look at building construction and see how to reduce the energy footprint to 25% or less. Technically they should be able to do it. They never needed something like nuclear which is a white elephant of pride.

ka_chan Jun. 26, 2013 - 05:40AM JST I just don't understand why Japan doesn't use the one major resource it has plenty of, geothermal. Japan is just one string of volcanoes, geothermal is everywhere even in Tokyo.

Sure, three Japanese companies, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Fuji Electric have a combined total of over half the world market for geothermal turbines. However, the geothermal power accounts for only one-third of one percent of Japan’s total electricity production. Maybe the reason why Japan is moving at a snail pace into the geothermal technology is that there might have more risks and environmental problems involved because there are many potential fail points. They need to study for a longer term evaluation. It is far better than wind and solar, but not nearly so compact reliable as new generation nuclear power plants.

Thanks, Zichi (again). Glad to see at least Oi 1 and 2 aren't on that list (although I'm sure some would like to start up even those reactors).