Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan acknowledged on Saturday that the government shared the blame for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, saying that officials had been blinded by a false belief in the country’s technological infallibility, even as he vowed to push for the idled reactors to be restarted.
Mr. Noda spoke ahead of the one-year anniversary of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 11, which killed nearly 20,000 people in northeastern Japan, set off multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima plant and brought about a crisis of public confidence in the country’s nuclear program.
“The government, operator and the academic world were all too steeped in a safety myth,” Mr. Noda said in an interview with journalists from overseas news media organizations. “Everybody must share the pain of responsibility.”
But the government will keep pushing to restart idled reactors, Mr. Noda said. Two of Japan’s 54 reactors are still operating, with local communities unwilling to restart the others, but even they may power down by May. Nuclear energy once provided 30 percent of Japan’s electricity needs.
In an attempt to ease public worries, Japanese nuclear regulators have introduced stress tests that will focus on the reactors’ ability to withstand an earthquake and tsunami like the ones that hit the Fukushima Daiichi site. But some critics have said the tests, which rely on computer simulations, are woefully inadequate to ensure reactors can withstand shocks as unpredictable as earthquakes and tsunami waves.
Mr. Noda remained largely uncommitted to a pledge by Naoto Kan, the prime minister at the time of the disasters, to eventually phase out nuclear power in Japan.
While he agreed that Japan should “move in that direction,” Mr. Noda said officials were still trying to figure out “the best mix” of power. The government should have a better sense of its plans for its nuclear program by the summer.
– source nytimes.com