Japanese Court restrains nuclear reactors from restart!

-Dr. Abdul Ruff

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Regimes of both developed and developing worlds consider it their prerogative to impose their favorite imperialist options on peoples, threatening their very existence one the earth.  Nuclear reactor companies are after the capitalist regimes worldwide to buy their dangerously explosive nuclear goods ostensibly to generate electricity. When other safe and very inexpensive techniques are available to the regimes, one wonders why the governments go after nuclear reactors that offer big commissions to politicians and bureaucrats as official bribes.

Japan, the target of first ever atomic attack during the World War, causing devastating destruction, still puts its populations in danger by commissioning a series of nuclear plants against the will and wish of people.  Japanese government, like other nuclear regimes, refuses to take into account the serious and genuine concerns of the people, who are scared of nuclear experiments, in deciding to restart the dangerous nuclear plants.  

Even after the devastations of Fukushima 2011, Japanese government is determined to go for nuclear reactors to encourage capitalist maneuvering as part of state promotion of the private companies to mint money.  

Pro-nuclear Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has backed an industry push to return to nuclear -- which once supplied more than one quarter of Japan's electricity -- as a plunging yen sent the country's energy import bill soaring.

 Japan has seen a groundswell of public opposition to the technology since Fukushima, where reactors went into meltdown after a tsunami swamped their cooling systems -- setting off the worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

Japan's entire stable of nuclear power stations was gradually switched off following the disaster, while tens of thousands of people were evacuated due to concerns about radiation exposure.

Many are still unable to return to their homes and scientists have warned that some areas around the plant may remain uninhabitable for decades or more.

Unable withstand pressure from private companies that are backbone of capitalism, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) last December approved the restarting of the reactors, saying they met tougher safety standards introduced after Japan's tsunami-sparked nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011.

A Japanese court on April 14 issued a landmark injunction against the restarting of two atomic reactors, after the country's nuclear watchdog had given the green light to switch them back on.

The district court in the central prefecture of Fukui made the (temporary) order in response to a bid by local residents to halt the restart of the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Takahama nuclear power plant, a court official said.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) II, of Japan, under pressure tactics from private reactor supplier companies last December approved the restarting of the reactors, saying they met tougher safety standards introduced after Japan's tsunami-sparked nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011. But "the safety of the reactors hasn't been secured", the court ruled, saying the watchdog's new standards were "lacking rationality", according to public broadcaster NHK.

Plant operator Kansai Electric Power described the injunction as "extremely regrettable and utterly unacceptable" and said it would appeal against the decision.

A lawyer representing the plaintiffs called the ruling a "perfect victory". "This is the best decision that we could have expected," he told supporters outside the courthouse. Two other reactors at Takahama also remain offline.

A separate court ruling on the restart of two other reactors in southern Japan is expected later this month.

Nuclear reactors today stand for nuclear bombs. Hiroshima needs to keep on sending a message to the world that things like this should never happen again. Hiroshima survivors often refrain from talking about their experiences even with their own children, some from a feeling that the past is too horrific and others from fear of discrimination against themselves and their offspring.

As the 70th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack approaches, many survivors still find it too painful to talk about. But with their ranks dwindling, others are determined to pass on their experiences to younger generations. Hiroshi Harada, the 75-year-old former head of an atomic bomb museum, remembers how his leg sank into one of the bodies blocking a narrow Hiroshima street 70 years ago, as he fled the spreading fire ignited by the atomic bomb. Later that day, a woman grabbed Harada, then just 6 years old, by the leg and asked for water. He stepped back in horror to find a chunk of flesh from her hand sticking to his leg..

A US bomber dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killing about 140,000 by the end of the year, out of the 350,000 who lived in the city. The city still has some 60,000 survivors but their average age is approaching 80. The United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. Japan surrendered on August 15.  For Hida, the real horror of the nuclear attack lay in its often invisible health effects. “The cruellest aspect of a nuclear attack is not the savage destruction of human bodies or visible burns, but its life-destroying after-effects,” said Hida, who treated and advised some 10,000 atomic bomb survivors.

Nuclear bombing does not end just in one time casualties for the people. Nuclear effects would continue to haunt the health and lives of the people for generations. Hiroshima began to see an increased number of leukaemia patients years after the bombing. People of Japan are the worst affected peole due to both nuclear bombing and nuclear reactor attacks. Fumiaki Kajiya, 76, lost his sister to the atomic bomb blast. Their parents had moved her to a rural area to keep her safe, but just before the bombing, they brought her back to the city, succumbing to her pleas to stay with the family. “If we forget Hiroshima, the world would be a dangerous place,” Kajiya said.

This year’s anniversary comes as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to ease the constraints of Japan’s postwar, pacifist constitution on the military. But by order to restart the nuclear plants he only tries to place people at perpetual risks if not put an end to lives of Japanese and encourages the military to produce nukes behind the scene.

At least judiciary has come to the rescue of people of Japan by restraining nuclear reactors from restarting and it is hoped the judiciary would not bend before the nuclear lobbyists and bribery mafias that seek all nuclear reactors to reopen.  

Let Shinzo Abe and his allies switchover to safe non-nuclear techniques for electricity generation.