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2012 July 4 - 10 [NUCLEAR CRISIS]

Tokai Mayor calls for nuclear reactors to be shut down

Murakami Tatsuya, mayor of Tokai Village (Ibaraki Prefecture) which hosts Tokai Daini Nuclear Power Plant, sent a message to the Japanese Communist Party’s speech assembly held on July 2 in Tsukuba City. The excerpts of his statement are as follows:

I have urged the national government to cancel the reactivation of and move to shut down the Tokai Daini Nuclear Power Plant, the only nuclear facility in the Tokyo metropolitan area which has 1 million residents within a 30-km radius. I am the only head of a NPP-hosting municipality outside Fukushima calling for an end to nuclear power generation. Together with Kosai City Mayor Mikami (Shizuoka Pref.), Minamisoma City Mayor Sakurai (Fukushima Pref.), and former Kunitachi City Mayor Uehara (Tokyo), we launched an association of municipal leaders calling for the closure of all nuclear power plants on April 28 with about 70 members.

I call for the decommissioning of nuclear reactors because I have dealt for so many years with the entrenched culture and structure of the nuclear community of interest, which has denied the people’s right to live in safety and all the other fundamental rights in order to seek short-run economic profits. When a criticality accident occurred at a JCO uranium processing plant in Tokai Village 13 years ago, I realized that this country has no expertise or qualification to operate nuclear power plants. In the light of the irresponsible handling of the post-Fukushima nuclear disaster, this realization has become even stronger.

We are very much disappointed by the actions and attitudes of politicians, bureaucrats, economic leaders, and scholars, but I have a strong hope for the people’s mounting struggle against the government’s nuclear-oriented energy policy that has spread to every corner of this nation. This movement, the biggest since the struggle against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty took place in the 1960s, could be even bigger than all past struggles.

We Japanese people, who have experienced the Great East Japan Disaster and Fukushima nuclear accident, have a responsibility to create a nation without nuclear power plants for the sake of the 7 billion people living in the world. I also believe that Ibaraki Prefecture, the birthplace of Japan’s nuclear power generation, has a grave responsibility and recognized right to lead in the effort to abolish nuclear energy generation.