Today Japan's electricity providers released their end-of-year financial reports. All but 2 are in arrears, because of fuel costs for 'thermal' power generation (ie, greenhouse-gas intensive fossil fuels). Costs have been rising both because the importation of LNG has become more expensive in general, and because of the weakening yen. These costs are on top of the extensive expenditure needed to keep their nuclear power plants maintained in the hopes of eventual restart.
TEPCO announced a massive loss of 685 billion yen (6.8 billion dollars). In addition to running their power plants on imported fossil fuels, the electricity provider has also had to deal with the situation at Fukushima (408 million dollars) and pay compensation claims for the evacuees and cleanup (another 11 billion dollars!).
It hardly needs saying that the vast bulk of this expenditure is unnecessary. As the accident neither killed or harmed anybody, evacuation and its associated problems were avoidable. Costs of decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi would of course be considerable, but nothing like the massive losses that have been incurred as a result of Japan turning its back on nuclear power.
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