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Thousands march as Japan shuts off nuclear power
By Yuri Kageyama

Thousands of Japanese marched to celebrate the switching off of the last of their nation's 50 nuclear reactors Saturday, waving banners shaped as giant fish that have become a potent anti-nuclear symbol.

Japan was without electricity from nuclear power for the first time in four decades when the reactor at Tomari nuclear plant on the northern island of Hokkaido went offline for mandatory routine maintenance.

After last year's March 11 quake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, no reactor halted for checkups has been restarted amid public worries about the safety of nuclear technology.

"Today is a historic day," Masashi Ishikawa shouted to a crowd gathered at a Tokyo park, some holding traditional "koinobori" carp-shaped banners for Children's Day that have become a symbol of the anti-nuclear movement.

"There are so many nuclear plants, but not a single one will be up and running today, and that's because of our efforts," Ishikawa said.

The activists said it is fitting that the day Japan stopped nuclear power coincides with Children's Day because of their concerns about protecting children from radiation, which Fukushima Dai-ichi is still spewing into the air and water.

The government has been eager to restart nuclear reactors, warning about blackouts and rising carbon emissions as Japan is forced to turn to oil and gas for energy.

Japan now requires reactors to pass new tests to withstand quakes and tsunami and to gain local residents' approval before restarting.

The response from people living near nuclear plants has been mixed, with some wanting them back in operation because of jobs, subsidies and other benefits to the local economy.

The mayor of Tomari city, Hiroomi Makino, is among those who support nuclear power.

"There may be various ways of thinking but it's extremely regrettable," he said of the shutdown.

Major protests, like the one Saturday, have been generally limited to urban areas like Tokyo, which had received electricity from faraway nuclear plants, including Fukushima Dai-ichi.

Before the nuclear crisis, Japan relied on nuclear power for a third of its electricity.

The crowd at the anti-nuclear rally, estimated at 5,500 by organizers, shrugged off government warnings about a power shortage. If anything, they said, with the reactors going offline one by one, it was clear the nation didn't really need nuclear power.

Whether Japan will suffer a sharp power crunch is still unclear.

Electricity shortages are expected only at peak periods, such as the middle of the day in hot weather, and critics of nuclear power say proponents are exaggerating the consequences to win public approval to restart reactors.

Hokkaido Electric Power Co. spokesman Hisatoshi Kibayashi said the shutdown was completed late Saturday.

The Hokkaido Tomari plant has three reactors, but the other two had been halted earlier. Before March 11 last year, the nation had 54 nuclear reactors, but four of the six reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi are being decommissioned because of the disaster.

Yoko Kataoka, a retired baker who was dancing to the music at the rally waving a small paper carp, said she was happy the reactor was being turned off.

"Let's leave an Earth where our children and grandchildren can all play without worries," she said, wearing a shirt that had, "No thank you, nukes," handwritten on the back.


To be very honest with you, I am floored that this has been managed in Japan. What isn't public knowledge around the world is that Japanese Nuclear Power group has the politicians in their pockets. The deal is, the politicians treat the Nuclear Group well with the laws, in return when they go out of office they have a nice cushy job waiting on them with that same group. This has been going on for years and years. That the public has made a dent in this little cozy nest is just beyond amazing.

It's not much better here in the US. GE is the owner of the nuclear power plant designs. It's worth billions in income. When the Dai-ichi plant was announced to have radiation escaped a few days after that, the GE group hired people to troll the net looking for any sort of negative remarks for the purpose of doing damage control. It was a hot bed of trolling comments everywhere you went.

Now here's a few things maybe you don't know. The US has for a long time had radiation detectors all along the west coast of the US. They were all tied to the internet and any authorized people working that needed access to the readings could get them straight off the internet by tying into the network. Within days of the Dai-ichi incident, they went off line. Something like 300 detectors on this net suddenly developed problems according to the US government. With in weeks, both the US and England had changed the radiation levels deemed to be safe in foods. You don't have to have a text book to figure out what was going on.

With in two weeks, radioactive iodine had started showing up in the grass here in the US of cow pastures. Iodine itself is not a big worry because the ½ life is measured in days.

There are other issues with nuclear power that no one is speaking of. It's like a conspiracy of silence. It was part of the problem with Dai-ichi. What do you do with the expended fuel rods once they are used? Where do you store them where they are not a danger?

Each of these fuel rods must be put into a boron container to prevent them from reacting with the rest. The boron serves as a sort of dampener. At the Dai-ichi plants, the expended fuel rods, not yet put into containers were being stored in the heavy water surrounding the reaction. When the water levels dropped in the reactor, they were the first to be exposed.

We don't know how to build containers that last thousands of years under radioactive bombardment. Our solution in the US sounds great but it too has problems. One of them is the storage area is in one location. That means anytime that a plant decides to send a shipment to be stored, it must either travel the highways or travel by train. Any accident that breaks the containers will teach us just why this is a very bad idea.

I had someone while I was discussing this shipment problem come in claiming to be a nuclear engineer and saying that was BS. While in the process of putting down my comments he could not come right out and say why. This is common sense. You don't need to be an engineer to figure this out for yourself. The spent rods have to be moved from point A to point B. I am sure he didn't want to mention that these are convoys that travel with all sorts of security protection, all sorts of permits, nor all sorts of escorts. Nor did I feel the need to mention it either. It does not change the fact that this is the way these items are getting to the nuclear storage facility.

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