Japanese restart nuclear reactor

Although the report echoes other investigations into last year’s disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, it could fuel complaints that Japan is trying to restart nuclear reactors without doing enough to avoid a repeat.

Yesterday’s resumption of operations at a reactor in Ohi, in western Japan, already had been hotly contested.

Government officials and the utility that runs the Ohi plant announced last month that the No. 3 reactor had passed stringent safety checks and needed to be brought back online to ward off blackouts as the nation enters its high-demand summer months.

The government hopes to see the restart of more of Japan’s 50 working reactors as soon as possible.

“We have finally taken this first step,” said Hideki Toyomatsu, vice president of Kansai Electric Power, which operates the plant and hopes to restart another reactor there in the few weeks. “But it is just a first step.”

The reactor is the first to be restarted since last year’s devastating tsunami inundated the Fukushima plant, setting off meltdowns in three reactors in the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.

All of Japan’s reactors were gradually taken off-line for maintenance or safety checks, and in early May the last reactor shut down, leaving the country without nuclear-generated electricity for the first time since 1970.

The report released yesterday said the Fukushima disaster was “man-made” because it should have been foreseen and avoided.

It said the response “betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents”, and was the result of collusion between the government, regulators and the utility itself that allowed lax preparation and precautions.