Japan Press Weekly

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2016 October 12 - 18 [SOCIAL ISSUES]

JCP Kurabayashi: evacuation plan will not work in event of accident at Takahama NPP

Japanese Communist Party lawmaker Kurabayashi Akiko on October 12 at a House of Councilors Budget Committee meeting criticized the current evacuation plan to be used in case of an accident at the Takahama Nuclear Power Plant (Fukui Prefecture) as infeasible.

Kurabayashi pointed to an emergency evacuation drill which was held on August 27 under a scenario in which the Takahama NPP had a serious accident and released a large amount of radioactive substances.

The NPP is located at the base of the Otomi Peninsula. Under the current evacuation plan, residents living on the peninsula will flee with Self Defense Forces helicopters. However, in the August evacuation drill, the SDF decided not to deploy their helicopters because of rough weather, and the drill participants had to take a route by land and pass near the NPP site.

In the drill, residents living on another peninsula about 10 km northwest of the NPP, who are to be transported by ship in the event of a nuclear accident, were unable to use ships due to bad weather. Kurabayashi pointed out that that day was not so windy and that the daily maximum wind speed near the Takahama NPP was greater on 183 days in 2015 than it was on August 27, the evacuation drill day. The JCP lawmaker quoted a resident as saying that the evacuation plan is worthless because of the failure of the drill on such a moderate wind day.

In response to Kurabayashi, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo explained that it was just a drill and thus the use of helicopters and ships were cancelled in consideration of participants’ health conditions.

Kurabayashi stressed that Abe’s remark is tantamount to admitting to the infeasibility of the evacuation plan. She said that if the current evacuation plan goes unchecked, it will fail to prevent local residents from being exposed to radiation in a possible nuclear accident. With this situation, to restart the Takahama NPP is totally unacceptable, Kurabayashi said.


Past related articles:
> Residents near Takahama NPP need 7.5 hours to escape from nuclear accident [February 28, 2016]
> NRA okays use of 40-year-old reactors at Takahama NPP [February 25, 2016]