Monday 3 November 2014

Reactor in Kagoshima ready for Restart

Tonight the NHK news covered the trip to Kagoshima by the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yoichi Miyazawa to attempt to convince the governor and legislature of the prefecture to restart the Sendai nuclear plant.

The Kagoshima governor Yuichiro Ito seems likely to accept the government's request and the legislature is expected to vote in favor of it this week. If all goes well, the plant will restart early next year.

As Sendai will be the first restart since 3/11, it's likely there will be local and national opposition and global media coverage of the event when it takes place.

It seems ironic that Kagoshima, which I once thought to be possibly the most backward place on Earth outside of Queensland, is showing such unexpected progressive spirit.

Kyushu Electric Company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars implementing the safety recommendations of the NRA, including building walls to keep out a 15-metre tsunami.

Since the NRA gave approval for the plant to be restarted in September, resistance to the restart has centered around perceived weaknesses in the evacuation plans for local municipalities in the event of something going wrong. Professor Emeritus Hirotada Hirose of Tokyo Women's Christian University claimed the evacuation plans would not work and that:

"The restart of the reactors might be so worrying that people might not be able to concentrate on their work or live comfortably"

He should try being married.

An editorial in the Japan Times this week complained that the restart was coming too soon and picked out the evacuation plans for special criticism, saying

"Iodine pills are supposed to be given in advance to residents living within 5 km of the plant. At present, fewer than 70 percent of them have received the pills. It has not yet been decided what to do with visitors who happen to be in the area when a nuclear accident takes place, as well as new residents"

A cynic might suggest that in the event of a tsunami big enough to swamp 15 meter seawalls, visitors to the area might be thinking about other things than iodine pills, but whatever.

When I read of things like this opposition, I just shake my head at humanity. I can only think there are some serious issues with our ability to assess risk. If there really was a tsunami large enough to damage the Sendai nuclear plant, tens of thousands of people will already have drowned. An accident at the local nuclear plant is the last of your worries, and would probably cause as much damage to the local population as the 'nuclear disaster' 3 years ago in Fukushima. That is, none.