After Fukushima Daiichi: Developments on several fronts

摘要

As was the case in the first few years after the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the aftermath of the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan remains an aspect of a great many tasks, decisions, and outlooks related to nuclear power worldwide. The degree of significance varies, depending on the locale; obviously, Fukushima Daiichi matters more in Japan than anywhere else, which is why the restart of Kyushu Electric Power Company's Sendai -1 power reactor in early August was a pivotal moment in the process of eventual emergence from the accident's aftermath. Despite there being essentially no connection between the resumption of nuclear power in Japan and the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States, the events were nonetheless conflated in some media coverage. Public protests of the Sendai-1 restart were covered as indicating dissatisfaction with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, although the old top-down system of reactor siting, construction, and operation, headed by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and its successor agencies, has been supplanted by a more rigorous (if still not completely transparent) process, in which both a national regulatory agency and local authorities must be satisfied before nuclear electricity can be produced.