Lightbridge Corporation (LTBR)

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Sendai power plant restart good news for Japan – if it happens

08/01/2014
By Sharryn Dotson
Editor of Nuclear Power International

Three years ago, it looked like nuclear power in Japan was a lost cause. As the black smoke rose from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, the fears of meltdowns, radiation releases and other known and unknown dangers were fresh in people's minds. The government responded by shutting down all 48 reactors in the country by the end of 2012, vowing at one point to never restart them again.

We watched a shift with the election of a new leader and government and the implementation of stringent safety checks and upgrades, but with utilities hemorrhaging money due to those upgrades and years of not operating plants, it still seemed unlikely that any reactors would run.

http://www.power-eng.com/articles/npi/print/volume-7/issue-4/departments/enrichment/sendai-power-plant-restart-good-news-for-japan-if-it-happens.html


This author did a great job getting the perspective of the local community. She did an equally good job of getting the perspective of the corporations.

"All nine of Japan's publicly traded nuclear operators reported a loss of 3.2 trillion yen ($31 billion) since their reactors shut down."

A lot of people don't realize that the largest shareholders in these companies are public pensions from teachers to police and everyone in-between. Japan has sunk trillions of dollars of public and private money into building not only 54 commercial nuclear reactors, but an entire support system, and there are very high paying jobs throughout that industry and education chain.

Another critical problem is that the currently "idle" reactors cost millions per year to keep cool, and would cost trillions to decommission.

They can't just shut the doors and walk away, or simply build more renewables to fix this problem. Hopefully the people of Japan can find a reasonable solution, but putting the genie back in the bottle would cripple them economically for a century.