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Japan to Begin Restarting Idled Nuclear Plants, Leader Says Japan to Begin Restarting Idled Nuclear Plants, Leader Says
(about 11 hours later)
TOKYO — Japan will begin restarting its idled nuclear plants once new safety guidelines are in place later this year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday, moving to ensure a stable energy supply despite public safety concerns after the Fukushima disaster. TOKYO — Japan will begin restarting its idled nuclear plants after new safety guidelines are in place later this year, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday, moving to ensure a stable energy supply despite public safety concerns after the Fukushima disaster.
In a speech to Parliament, Mr. Abe pledged to restart nuclear plants that pass the tougher guidelines, which are expected to be adopted by a newly created independent watchdog agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, as early as July. However, he did not specify when any of the reactors might resume operation. News reports have suggested that it might take months or even years to make the expensive upgrades needed to meet the new safety standards. In a speech to Parliament, Mr. Abe pledged to restart nuclear plants that pass the tougher guidelines, which are expected to be adopted by a new independent watchdog agency, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, as early as July. He did not specify when any of the reactors might resume operation, and news reports have suggested that it might take months or even years to make the expensive upgrades needed to meet the new safety standards.
All of Japan’s 50 operable nuclear reactors were shut down following the March 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which spewed radiation across northern Japan after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems. Two were later restarted as an emergency measure to avert power shortages in the heavily populated region that includes the cities of Osaka and Kyoto. Still, by making the promise in front of the Diet, Mr. Abe indicated in the strongest way yet that he planned to move ahead with a campaign pledge to reverse his predecessor’s hopes that Japan would begin weaning itself off nuclear energy.
Responding to public safety concerns, leaders from the previous Democratic Party government had vowed to slowly phase out nuclear power by the 2030s in favor of cleaner alternatives like solar and wind power. However, Mr. Abe, who took power after his Liberal Democratic Party won national elections in December, has vowed to shelve the planned phaseout, saying that Japan needs stable and cheap electricity from nuclear power to compete economically. The speech came as the World Health Organization published a comprehensive, two-year analysis on the health risks associated with the 2011 disaster suggesting that the chance of getting certain types of cancers had increased slightly among children exposed to the highest doses of radioactivity. But the report said that there would most likely be no observable increase in cancer rates in the wider Japanese population.
On Thursday, Mr. Abe said that Japan had learned the need for tougher safety standards from the Fukushima accident, which forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate. He said the new safety standards will be enforced “without compromise.” The study’s authors warned, however, that their assessment was based on limited scientific knowledge; much of the scientific data on health effects from radiation is based on acute exposures like those that followed the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not chronic, low-level exposure. In Japan, some densely populated areas are expected to remain contaminated with relatively low levels of radioactive materials for decades.
Mr. Abe also said Japan would continue seeking energy alternatives to reduce its dependence on nuclear power, even without going so far as to eliminate it. The government’s initial reaction to the report — saying it overestimated the risks by failing to fully take into account government evacuations of citizens — suggested that officials did not see it as a help for Mr. Abe’s plans. Antinuclear sentiments in Japan are now strong, and the results could feed fears of any increased risks.
In January, the new nuclear agency released a list of its proposed new safety regulations, which include higher walls to protect against tsunamis, additional backup power sources for the cooling systems and construction of specially hardened earthquake-proof command centers. According to a report by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, none of Japan’s 16 undamaged commercial nuclear plants would currently pass those new standards. The question of when, and whether, to restart the plants has dogged the country for two years, as politicians and ordinary Japanese try to balance their fears of a moribund economy when oil and gas costs have already hurt the balance of trade and worries over another environmental crisis, especially if the industry is not well regulated.
The newspaper said making the necessary upgrades to meet the proposed guidelines would cost plant operators about $11 billion, in addition to improvements already made after the Fukushima accident. The agency has said the new guidelines will be finalized and put in place by July 18. Lax regulation and a cozy relationship between the nuclear industry and the government helped make Japan vulnerable to the Fukushima accident, the world’s second-worst nuclear plant disaster.
The new guidelines will also prohibit the restart of reactors that were built atop earthquake faults that have been active in the past 400,000 years. The agency has dispatched teams of experts to detect whether such active fault lines run beneath any of the plants. All of Japan’s 50 operable nuclear reactors were shut down following the March 2011 triple meltdown, which spewed radiation across northern Japan after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems. Two were later restarted as an emergency measure to avert power shortages in the heavily populated region that includes the cities of Osaka and Kyoto.
So far, the teams have announced they have found active faults beneath two of the plants, a discovery that may force the permanent scrapping of one or more reactors at each. Potentially active faults have been found below three other plants, including Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the world’s largest nuclear plant. The agency says further study is needed to determine if those faults are in fact active. Leaders from the previous Democratic Party government had vowed to slowly phase out nuclear power by the 2030s in favor of cleaner alternatives like solar and wind power. But Mr. Abe, who took power after his Liberal Democratic Party won national elections in December on a platform of economic revitalization, said the phaseout would keep Japan from the cheap electricity it needs to compete economically.
The new safety standards followed an admission last year by Tepco that it had failed to take stronger measures to prevent disasters for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests. On Thursday, Mr. Abe said that Japan had learned the need for tougher safety standards, and he said the new standards would be enforced “without compromise.”
In the October 2012 report, Tepco said that before the accident it had been afraid to consider the risk of such a large tsunami, fearing admissions of risk could result in public pressure to shut plants down. The report was intended to showcase internal changes at the company, which has been widely criticized for lax internal oversight that left the plant excessively vulnerable to the 46-foot tsunami that actually struck. Mr. Abe also said Japan would continue seeking energy alternatives to reduce its dependence on nuclear power.
In January, the new nuclear agency released a list of its proposed safety regulations, which include higher walls to protect against tsunamis, additional backup power sources for the cooling systems and construction of specially hardened earthquake-proof command centers. The rules surprised many for their toughness, though skeptics worry that industry supporters in the government will manage to get around the regulations.
According to a report by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, none of Japan’s 16 undamaged commercial nuclear plants would pass the new standards. The agency has said the new guidelines will be finalized and put in place by July 18.
The W.H.O. study focused on cancer incidence, not deaths, and some of the cancers listed are serious but have good rates of survival.
According to the study, girls exposed as infants to radioactivity in the most contaminated regions of Fukushima Prefecture faced a 70 percent higher risk of developing thyroid cancer than would be expected normally. The report pointed out, however, that the normal risk of thyroid cancer was just 0.75 percent, and that the additional lifetime risk would raise that to 1.25 percent.
Girls exposed to radioactivity as infants in the most heavily contaminated areas also had a 6 percent higher risk of developing breast cancer, and a 4 percent higher risk of developing cancers that cause tumors. Meanwhile, boys exposed as infants had a 7 percent higher chance of developing leukemia.
The study also said that about a third of the emergency workers who remained to try to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi plant were estimated to have a slightly increased risk of developing leukemia, thyroid cancer and other types of cancer.
The analysis was based on data available as of September 2011, and takes into account airborne contamination as well as contaminated food, water and other sources of contamination, the WH.O. said.
Some local government officials in Fukushima criticized the report for identifying specific areas and their associated exposure estimates. Radiation exposure is a sensitive topic in Japan, where victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings often experienced discrimination in marriage, for example, because of feared health effects.
“I feel extreme anger over this excessive analysis, which will plunge more residents into fear,” Mayor Norio Kanno of Iitate Village, told N.H.K. Iitate was one of the areas identified in the W.H.O. report as heavily contaminated. Villagers there are among tens of thousands of evacuees who have not been able to return home.

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.