Japan says building nuclear safety culture will take a long time

that elevating safety culture to international standards will “take a long time”, days before new rules come into effect to avoid a repeat of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011.

It's taken over 40 years of having nuclear reactors in this country to finally come to this conclusion? Probably take another 40 or more to implement.

"Will not be able to endure if they don't change their culture." Is this what they mean when they talk about the unique Japan? Just askin'.

Hey what do you expect Yubaru they only recently learned that asbestos is dangerous. ;-)

Yea and in the meantime keep exporting your unsafe nuclear culture :-/

So the NRA admits it's going to take time to come up to world standards and that awareness of dangers is weak and HOPES things will improve with the new standards set to take effect... and yet they're allowing the Oi reactors to stay online without them fulfilling said new requirements?

Safety or rather "lack of Safety" has nothing to do with culture, unless you add "incompetence" & "corruption" as part of your culture.

Business as usual:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/04/16/national/oi-reactors-can-remain-online-court/#.UdYRT6xhB8E

No it doesnt, get rid of those fosil regulators and get some people with vision, drive and authority!

It's already taken a long time and now they say they need more time? Why procrastinate? Just set the standards and implement them! Is that so bloody difficult?

Well thank you Japan for stating the blatantly obvious. It'd be nice if you could stop talking about it and actually start doing something about it.

N regulators admit it can not or will not change anything. Except get as may plants online ASAP, with non binding guidelines to placate the public. What on earth has to happen for these people to take this seriously?

such inspiration to a nation as nuclear power goes back online that they might start now thinking about raising safety to international standards. Yikes

So then Japan is knowingly and deliberately exporting their bad quality nuclear plants to other nations? So how are they allowed to export their incompetence and corruption to other countries? Maybe the UN should step in and stop this export of madness.

Why is Japan still pushing plans for this extremely dangerous way of producing electricity? The spent fuel from nuclear reactors doesn't have and could never ever be safely stored here so it is a pointless exercise.

Tepco has been seen not to have a handle on the decommissioning nor on the ability to prevent massive radioactive releases-why should the people of Japan be pro nuclear?

Sure will when they give companies 5 year grace periods to ignore repairs and forget about the rules ...oops I mean rules changed to suggestive guidelines ... What a farce ! They aren't going to learn anything until they are asking some other countries for emergency Visa's for 36 million people ....even then they will say ...we didn't expect that or we don't know why we weren't prepared !!

Headline "Japan says..." and not "NRA says..." speaks volume who is deciding in that commission...

Building a 'safety culture' generally does indeed take time when you take every step to avoid being safe, including steps YOU yourself have implemented but don't require anyone to follow.

Japan says building nuclear safety culture will take a long time

Watch out. All remaining iddled reactors could be restarted on the pretext that even if they don't have sufficient safety standards, they can as well continue working as it takes long time to fix the safety puzzle. If people and environment are put into consideration before profit, then safety should always be first....

Perhaps the above story should have the words “take a long time” changed to "forever ... "

That's the way things seem to be going nuclear-wise here in Japan ...

They the Regulators just Gave the industry an excuse to avoid doing anything. Not interested in Lip Service...I can guess where those lips have been.

My thought exactly, edojin. "take a long time" = till the end of time.

Weak!

Profit before people yet again!

This is the same Japan that wanted to export their technology to Europe? And then I got thumbed down and criticized.. bah.

Japan’s nuclear regulator said on Thursday that elevating safety culture to international standards will “take a long time".

Then I hope they will wait an equally long time before allowing any restarts of nuclear reactors.

so what they're really trying to say is we're incompetent and will stay that way for an indefinite amount of time...by blaming something on culture, they're deflecting blame and accountability

just like their 'culture' of whaling, dolphin killing, ...so on and so forth

Here's an idea: open the reactors that are not in immediate danger of being on earthquake fault lines or at sea level, but allow no Japanese to run or operate the plants. Let a bunch of top European engineers bring the facilities up to international standards and then let them run things so that pesky little things such as kickbacks, amakudari, sempai/kouhai and "saving face" don't get in the way of ensuring that the planet doesn't glow in the dark.