TEPCO sees no quick restart for biggest nuclear plant in Niigata

They can build the walls to a 100 meters high and it wont make a difference if the earthquake happens in their basement.

SOmehow, TEPCO just doesn't seem to get it. For a lot of people, it will never matter how much preperation, upgrading and repairing they do. They lost a lot of people's trust due to the way they (didn't) deal with the Fukushima disaster. It is really hard for people living near these plants to really trust the measures that have been put in place especially when TEPCO seems to be doing its best to speed up the process of getting the plants back online.

sakurala you do not get it Japan does not have the money to import fossil fuel to replace these plants. Just trying to pay for it will send Japan into a longer harsher winter. As the price of electric climbs more and more manufacturing will be sent overseas and the unemployment rate will climb. Most foreign people do not care about our fate. In fact a bankrupt weak Japan appeals to them. Japan can not go from atomic power to none without something substitutable replacing it. Until then there is risk but then again our entire country is at risk. About faith I have no faith that other countries have Japans best interest in mind.

YuriOtani: No, I get it completely. I would be fine with a restart if TEPCO had acted responisbly and if the government were competant enough to help those that suffered from the disaster. However, given the circumstances, I personally, along with many other people, feel that they should not be given another chance. There is already a large chunk of land that people are no longer allowed to live on. Farms there have been lost and probably not be able to recover to 100% in the farmers lifetime. The sea has been (and still is...?) being poisoned with the waste that was (is) leaking out of the plant which has a great effect on fisherman. I think that these jobs create things that are much more important in our lives than being able to have enough power to run a laptop, a TV, charge an iPod and PSP and such on a daily basis. I know that there are economic risks, but I think that the lives of citizens and the state of our land is much more impotant in the long run.

A lot of peopl in Japan just don't get it. Japan really does not need nuclear reactors at all to produce electricity. With all of the volcanoes that are all over Japan, Japan can simply produce energy from them in a natural way. The real reason that TEPCO and Japan want the nuclear reactors to continue is because they are making a whole lot of money from them.

Soon everyone in Japan will be contaminated from the radiation of these reactors on a daily basis and the country will become worst than what it presently is right now.

Japan can make all of the excuses that they want about keeping the reactors going, but when it comes to the bottom line of things, they are actually killing everyone in the country .

Seems to me that Japan has become a country that is worst then the terrorists that are in Iraq.

Maybe they are making a whole lot of money from them, but they are also spending a whole lot of money on them. All public works projects, then?

Quote: "Four years before Fukushima, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant was damaged by an earthquake, triggering a fire and radiation leaks. At the time of the Fukushima disaster, three of its reactors were still being repaired and were not operational. Arai, who had previously worked at Fukushima, showed Reuters elements of the 70 billion yen safety upgrade at the plant, about 220 km northwest of Tokyo."

70 billion yen, is what, USD 880,000,000? Taxpayers' money?

Yuri: Forgot to ask...aren't you living abroad? In America? And your family lives in OKinawa right...where there aren't any NPPs. You claim that foreign people do not care about the fate of Japan. Perhaps some don't but I DO. I am married and living IN Japan. My husband, my family and home is here. I am pregnent with my first child and you had better believe that I care about the state of Japan. But to only focus on the economy which is ever fluctuating and to ignore something like sustainability in the long run, to me...that points to someone who is not looking out for the country in the long run. I don't see other countries actively discouraging Japan from using NPPs but I do hear a lot of people who have legitimate concerns about how those NPPs are being run and the issues of safety if there is a disaster.

It always amazes me that they never factor in the cost of producing all that highly poisonous long lasting waste into their "cheap nuclear electricity" calculations.

@Yogi

otherwise they would just loose the only selling argument they have in favor of this kind of energy producing

Interesting that the title of this article says that Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the biggest nuclear plant in Niigata. No big deal, you think?

The second line of the article then informs us that this is the biggest nuclear plant in the world.

YuriOtani: "Just trying to pay for it will send Japan into a longer harsher winter."

Yeah, so let's light up all of Kobe with millions of lights, and other areas (ex. Nabe no sato or whatever it's called) with millions more to make people here go out and cram into small spaces to see and feel better about the power they might not have if they weren't staring at it in crowds of hundreds that saw others doing the same on NHK.

Zetsu: "otherwise they would just loose...."

what, arrows? Let loose a bit of gas? I'm quite sure you did not actually mean 'lose', did you? The number of people making this moronic mistake is becoming too common and a bane on the language. Show me a teacher who cannot tell you the difference and I'll have his or her job.

sakurala understand you point but I have lots of cousins living in the Japanese home islands. Then I have all of my friends and Japan is my country. I would be more worried with all of the other pollutants in the air. There are so many of them and things like lead are such a threat. The incinerators in Japan also release large quantities of dioxins, pvc, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen fluoride. The coal plants release radiation and mercury which will harm an unborn child. Then add in the effects of the fossil fuel plants Nitrous Oxides which causes smog and Particulate or Dust which causes lung cancer and other lung problems. They also pollute the ground and water.

While I do think the plants need to be phased out phased out means that. Japan needs to make it priority #1 and have a program much like the 60's American space program. We can do it but it takes time and todays people think everything needs to be done NOW!

Yuriotani.

Money bought the cents. They can comment all they want. The nuclear power plants will restart. You can say "we will shut down nuclear reactors forever" but mind changes and politicians are always a joke.

nandakandamandaNov. 15, 2012 - 12:27PM JST

70 billion yen, is what, USD 880,000,000? Taxpayers' money?

No, it's money they save from not paying for fuel. $1 billion is tiny compared to the increase of about $1-2 billion per month in fuel costs. Even if it was 100% taxpayer money, TEPCO would be able to achieve profitablity that much quicker, and the government would take back 40% of the profit in taxes and another few percent in dividends every year for several years (and taxes on the construction companies for one year, total payback would be many times more than inflation). Not to mention lower healthcare costs due to fossil fuel related illness.

While the plant is only about 15% of TEPCO's peak energy production, it was responsible for up to 6% of the energy production of ALL OF JAPAN. Similar to how the TEPCO had a loss in 2008 because this one plant was offline, this continued loss is almost entirely preventable by restoring just this one plant.

TEPCO sees no quick restart for biggest nuclear plant

It is even most scaring that TEPCO still thinks of restarting any nuke plant in the first place! Nuke plants are not for Japan

YuriOtaniNov. 16, 2012 - 03:57AM JST

While I do think the plants need to be phased out phased out means that. Japan needs to make it priority #1 and have a program much like the 60's American space program. We can do it but it takes time and todays people think everything needs to be done NOW!

Space program took about 15-20 years (8 years between Kennedy's declaration and the Apollo 11 mission) to achieve its goals. That's about as long as it'll take for ITER phase 2 and subsequent designs to be completed and bring clean (well, million times cleaner than 100% efficient gas turbine, several thousand times cleaner than fission plants) affordable next generation energy. If they simply dropped the feed in tariff and taxed coal and oil (then gas at a later date) just a few yen per kWh (say 1 for oil 2 for coal), they probably could take a few years off the time before Japan can start using plants (speeding up construction times by throwing more money at it). Of the current next gen energies, only fusion and gen 3+ fission provides enough power density to be viable for Japan while being safer for the population than gen 1 and gen 2 fission.