{"id":707,"date":"2012-07-08T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-08T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/07\/one-japanese-nuclear-reactor-back-online.html"},"modified":"2012-07-08T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-08T17:00:00","slug":"one-japanese-nuclear-reactor-back-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/07\/one-japanese-nuclear-reactor-back-online.html","title":{"rendered":"One Japanese nuclear reactor back online"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not surprising, but quite possibly not a good idea. Mari Yamaguchi wrote for AP yesterday, Japan powered by nuclear energy again, blamed anew<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\n

Nuclear power returned to Japan’s energy mix for the first time in <\/a> two months Thursday, hours before a parliamentary panel blamed the government’s cozy relations with the industry for the meltdowns that prompted the mass shutdown of the nation’s reactors.<\/p>\n

Though the report echoes other investigations into last year’s disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, it could fuel complaints that Japan is trying to restart nuclear reactors without doing enough to avoid a repeat. Thursday’s resumption of operations at a reactor in Ohi, in western Japan, already had been hotly contested.<\/p>\n

Government officials and the utility that runs the Ohi plant announced last month that the No. 3 reactor had passed stringent safety checks and needed to be brought back online to ward off blackouts during the high-demand summer months. Another Ohi reactor, No. 4, is set to restart later this month and the government hopes to restart more of Japan’s 50 working reactors as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

“We have finally taken this first step,” said Hideki Toyomatsu, vice president of Kansai Electric Power Co., which operates the Ohi plant. “But it is just a first step.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Maybe they’re like Southern Company (SO) CEO Thomas A. Fanning,who said he’d\n\n\n <\/a> learned everything there is to know from Fukushima.<\/a> I wonder, considering SO is already almost a billion dollars overbudget; I wonder whether they really know what they’re doing as much as they think they do. But it’s only our money and our lives they’re gambling with.<\/p>\n

\n

Thursday’s report said the Fukushima disaster was “man-made” because <\/a> it should have been foreseen and avoided. It said that since at least 2006, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. \u2014 or TEPCO \u2014 knew the risk of a total power outage at Fukushima Dai-ichi in case of a major tsunami. The report accused both of “intentionally” postponing safety measures to avoid reactor stoppages.<\/p>\n

It said that the response “betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents” and that collusion between the government, regulators and the utility itself had allowed lax preparation and precautions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Well, that could never happen here, right? The Georgia legislature authorizing a Georgia Power CWIP rate hike to pay for the new nukes, the federal government guaranteeing $8.3 billion in loans, the Georgia PSC saying cost overruns can be charged to Georgia Power customers, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission already starting to approve delays; none of that would be collusion between government, regulators, and utility, would it?<\/p>\n

Hey, what if we deployed sun and wind power instead? <\/a> Not only is renewable energy more profitable<\/a> (think of that, SO shareholders), but a solar power spill is called a “nice day”.<\/p>\n

-jsq<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not surprising, but quite possibly not a good idea. Mari Yamaguchi wrote for AP yesterday, Japan powered by nuclear energy again, blamed anew, Nuclear power returned to Japan’s energy mix for the first time in two months Thursday, hours before a parliamentary panel blamed the government’s cozy relations with the industry for the meltdowns that […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,70,17,8,18,2,19,104,21,22,23,73,74,24,36],"tags":[8704,8728,167,8707,8701,8708,8699,8709,2222,8702,12,7,8737,8711,8712,8713,8731,8732,8714,108,6,8716],"class_list":["post-707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-ethics","category-ga-psc","category-georgia","category-georgia-power","category-government","category-history","category-nuclear","category-planning","category-politics","category-renewable-energy","category-safety","category-security","category-solar","category-wind","tag-economy","tag-ethics","tag-fukushima","tag-ga-psc","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-government","tag-history","tag-kansai","tag-lake","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-nuclear","tag-planning","tag-politics","tag-renewable-energy","tag-safety","tag-security","tag-solar","tag-southern-company","tag-valdosta","tag-wind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-bp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}