Japan’s federal government said Wednesday it is considering plans to build “next-generation nuclear power plants,” noting that the admission is a major departure from previous claims that Tokyo will no longer pursue “new nuclear power”, Kyodo News reported. .The 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.
“The government will lead various measures to restart our nuclear power plants,” Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio said at a conference on industrial decarbonisation on August 23. Said.
According to the Associated Press (AP), Kishida said in a speech at a green energy event that he had recently “led the government to consider building safer, smaller nuclear reactors.”
Kishida said he responded to the government commission’s request by submitting proposals for the development and construction of a state-of-the-art new structure. [nuclear] reactors with new safety mechanisms”. The prime minister urged the government to speed up the assessment of “all possible steps” and make a decision by the end of the year, the AP reported.
“It is crucial to provide all options for restructuring our country’s stable energy supply,” Yasutoshi Nishimura, Japan’s Minister of Economy and Industry, told reporters at the same conference on Tuesday. “From this point on, we will also consider all options regarding nuclear energy.”
An aerial photograph of the troubled Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant No. 1, on November 22, 2016, in Reading, Fukushima Prefecture, after a massive 7.4 magnitude earthquake hit the coast of the prefecture. Damaged by the 2011 tsunami, the power plant is in the process of being decommissioned and there is no emergency message. (via Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Footage)
A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and associated tsunami shut down the power and cooling functions of three reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011. The incident melted all three nuclei, leading to a second nuclear disaster. Following the accident, the Japanese federal government ordered the mass shutdown of nuclear power plants across Japan. The shutdown process took years and should have given the station operators ample time to update their safety standards in accordance with the relevant protocol introduced by Tokyo in 2013.
“Since then, Japanese energy companies have decommissioned more than 20 reactors, mainly due to the high cost of security measures,” the AP said on August 24. Seventeen have been confirmed so far, but only 10 have been rebooted after permission from the local community, three of which are currently offline for regular security checks.
Kishida acknowledged on August 23 that Tokyo changed its policy of phasing out nuclear power after Fukushima, in part because Japan needed to “get over the impending energy supply crisis”. The prime minister spoke of the recent nationwide power outages that forced Japan’s federal government to issue a “first-ever power outage warning” on March 21. On March 16, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck the northeastern coast of the archipelago.
Source: Breitbart
