Japan Press Weekly

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2019 November 13 - 19 [SOCIAL ISSUES]

Mayor of NPP-hosting village to opponents of nuclear power: Power yourselves with your own generators

The mayor of Ibaraki’s Tokai Village, which hosts the Tokai Daini Nuclear Power Plant, said that those who are opposed to nuclear power generation should live on electricity generated by their own power generators, Akahata reported on November 13.

Tokai Village Mayor Yamada Osamu made this remark during a talk with Shinada Hiroo, mayor of Niigata’s Kariwa Village, which is home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPP, in a recent issue of the trade journal “Energy for the Future”. In the article, Yamada also said that opponents of nuclear power plants should not use the infrastructure powered by the power grid.

In the talks, the two mayors spoke about the reactivation of boiling water reactors (BWR). The Tokai Village mayor asserted that after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdowns, Japan’s nuclear authority fully updated its safety standards for nuclear power plants and strengthened safety regulations and that therefore it would be logical to assume that a nuclear accident like Fukushima will not happen again. He also claimed that it is necessary to resume the operation of idled BWRs. Nuclear reactors of this type are in the crippled Fukushima Daiichi NPP as well as the Tokai Daini NPP.

The Japan Atomic Power Company, operator of the Tokai Daini NPP, seeks to reactivate the aging NPP which started operations more than 40 years ago.

Mitsuta Kanna, secretary general of the international environmental NGO Friends of the Earth Japan, said that opponents of the restart of the Tokai Daini NPP have been expressing concerns over various issues, such as the degradation of the facility, and added that it is unacceptable for the mayor to have made remarks suppressing residents’ concerns.

Past related article:
> Aging Tokai Daini nuclear power plant passes safety screening [September 27, 2018]