Our correspondent in Japan, Murata-san, updates us on developments there, as we get closer to the 2020 Tokyo Atomic Olympics.
Toshiba has retreated from the nuclear construction project in Great Britain.
France has withdrawn from the Astride project of creating a new type of nuclear reactor.
“The destructive power of nuclear energy and immorality in all directions”
seems to be increasingly understood worldwide.
The nuclear policy of Japan could not but be affected by such emerging new international moves as the intervention of the United Nations in the protection of health of the workers at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant and that of the temporary refugees recommended to return to the native places where radioactivity is 20 times higher than before the accident.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has recently authorized the restart of the Tokai No.2 nuclear reactor situated only 110 km from Tokyo. It reflects the problematic level of the Commission, for the mere intuition of a citizen allows us to foresee the decisive opposition of the public against this decision. The neighboring cities have started reacting strongly as expected.
The nuclear policy of Japan remains fundamentally the same as before the Fukushima accident of 2011.
Conscientious Japanese citizens can hardly understand or accept it.
The nuclear energy seems to paralyze the sense of ethics.
Mitsuhei Murata
Former Ambassador to Switzerland
