Japan Press Weekly

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2013 September 18 - 24 [NUCLEAR CRISIS]

Prime minister should retract ‘under control’ remark

After visiting the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on September 19, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo could not reassert that the situation was “fully controlled”, and ordered the plant operator to decommission the plant’s offline Nos 5 and 6 reactors.

However, it was two years ago that the Fukushima Prefectural Assembly adopted a petition to decommission all nuclear reactors in the prefecture. Abe’s decommission order this time turned out to be too late. Furthermore, he did not include the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant in his order.

His move allegedly aims to sweep away criticism over his “under control” remark during his presentation speech made at the International Olympic Committee general assembly early this month.

Since the IOC general meeting, it has been found that radioactive water leaking from a storage tank drained into the ocean and that nearly 170,000 becquerels of Tritium was detected from groundwater near the tank.

TEPCO estimates that half of the water within a port attached to the Fukushima plant is exchanged with ocean water each day, which shows that the silt fence installed in the port is useless in preventing radioactive substances from leaking into the ocean.

Prime Minister Abe after his visit to the crippled plant said to reporters, “I’ll instruct my government to take a lead” to respond to the radioactive water problem.

As the Japanese Communist Party claims in its proposal issued on September 17, in order to solve the radioactive water leak issue, it is urgently required to consider the opinions and recommendations of experts, regardless of differences in their stances on nuclear power generation and energy policy.