KYUSHU and Kansai, Japan’s two most nuclear-dependent regions, are bracing for a bitter winter. Citizens of both areas, many of them elderly, have been advised that they may have to turn down the heating because of shortages of nuclear power. It will be another hardship in an already trying year; after the March 11th nuclear disaster they had to swelter through the summer with restrictions on air conditioning. But this time it is not just TEPCO, operator of the stricken nuclear power plant in Fukushima, that is getting the blame. People are putting their local power suppliers in the dock too.

Take Kyushu Electric. The monopoly that covers the south-western part of Japan will on December 25th suspend the last of its six nuclear reactors for routine maintenance, as it has its other five. In less than a year nuclear power will have dropped from providing 40% of the region’s electricity to zero. This is a generic problem. Normally reactors restart once maintenance is complete, but across Japan public safety concerns mean that no suspended reactor has been authorised to resume operations since March 11th. Only eight out of 54 are still in service.

In Kyushu Electric’s case, however, some problems are self-inflicted. In June the power company sought to influence a publicly broadcast hearing by asking employees covertly to send in e-mails supporting the restart of a nuclear reactor. When the scandal broke, the company recruited an independent panel headed by a former Tokyo prosecutor, Nobuo Gohara, to investigate. It concluded that the attempted manipulation had indeed taken place. It also said that an internal Kyushu Electric memo indicated that Yasushi Furukawa, governor of one of the local prefectures of Saga, encouraged the sending of supportive e-mails.

But when Kyushu Electric sent a separate report on the matter to the Economy and Trade Ministry (METI) in October, it played down the independent committee’s findings and denied Mr Furukawa’s involvement—as did the governor himself. Although Kyushu Electric’s boss has tendered his resignation, the company’s 13-man board has rejected it, so he remains in his job. Even METI was unimpressed. Its head said last month that he would not allow Kyushu Electric to restart reactors in Kyushu because of the poor governance, indicating that he wanted heads to roll. Mr Gohara, the prosecutor, believes the more Kyushu Electric sticks to its guns, the harder it will be to rebuild trust. “All they are doing is giving more ammunition to the anti-nuclear people,” he says.

via Japan’s energy crisis: Nuclear winter | The Economist.

IT IS another world beyond the roadblocks stopping unauthorised traffic from entering the 20km (12.5-mile) exclusion zone around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The few people inside are dressed in ghostly white protective suits. Town after town was abandoned after March 11th, and spiders have strung webs across the doorways. An old lady’s russet wig lies in the road, lost perhaps as she took flight after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. Outside the “Night Friend” nightclub in Tomioka, 9km from the nuclear plant, this correspondent was confronted by an ostrich with a feral glint.

Journalists are supposedly barred from the exclusion zone, though sympathetic evacuees, many furious with the authorities about their state of limbo, help provide access. Some of the 89,000 displaced residents have been given one-day permits to go home and each collect a box of valuables. To an outsider, the size and recent prosperity of the abandoned communities is striking. As well as the rice paddies, now overrun with goldenrod, are large businesses and well-built schools for hundreds of children.

Patrol cars stop passing vehicles. The police are particularly vigilant in preventing unauthorised people getting near the stricken plant, owned by Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), Japan’s biggest utility. The air of secrecy is compounded when you try to approach workers involved in the nightmarish task of stabilising the nuclear plant. Many are not salaried Tepco staff but low-paid contract workers lodging in Iwaki, just south of the exclusion zone.

It is easy to spot them, in their nylon tracksuits. They seem to have been recruited from the poorest corners of society. One man calls home from a telephone box because he cannot afford a mobile phone. Another has a single front tooth. Both are reluctant to talk to journalists, because a condition of their employment is silence. But they do share their concerns about safety. One, who earns ¥15,000 ($190) a day clearing radioactive rubble at the plant, says he was given just half-an-hour of safety training. Almost everything he has learned about radiation risks, he says, came from the television.

A strict hierarchy exists among the workers at Fukushima. Tepco’s own salaried staff are in a minority. The firm employs a top tier of subcontractors, from the builders of reactors such as Toshiba and Hitachi. They, in turn, subcontract work to builders and engineers, who subcontract further, down to small gangs of labourers recruited by a single boss. Some lower-ranking companies may have ties to the yakuza, Japan’s mafia, and among the lowest-paid recruits are members of the burakumin minority, who have long been discriminated agains

via Cleaning up Japan’s nuclear mess: The twilight zone | The Economist.

IN A nation of stoics, the most patient sufferers—by common consent—are those from Tohoku, the poor north-eastern area struck by earthquake and tsunami on March 11th. The best-known poem by the region’s most beloved poet, Kenji Miyazawa (born in 1896), starts “Be not defeated by the rain”. It extols the virtues of enduring harsh conditions with good grace. Rarely can Miyazawa’s fellow northerners have faced such a test of true grit. Yet the worry is that the longer they suffer in silence, the less they will act as a spur for revival in Japan.

In the past week three developments have cast doubt on the usefulness of Japan’s prevailing attitude of gaman, or endurance. First, on April 17th Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) laid out a nebulous six-to-nine-month plan to bring its damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power plant to a state of cold shutdown, in which it stops leaking radioactive matter. That is a long time for northern Japan to remain in radiation limbo. Yet there is no grand plan for dealing with the tens of thousands of evacuees—many in their 70s and 80s—from towns near Fukushima who are living in temporary shelters. They have been told by the central government that they may be able to return home once the nuclear situation stabilises, though many are understandably dubious about that possibility.

Some evacuees feel that if they move outside their prefecture, they will lose benefits and links to their communities. Families have been broken up by dysfunctional policies, such as evacuating pregnant women and young children, but not fathers and older children. Indebted farmers and business people have not been offered debt relief by the banks, though they have lost all sources of income. There are innumerable stories of personal hardship. Yet in the absence of concerted local pressure for financial support from Tokyo, the central government appears stuck in the comforting rituals of parliamentary squabbling with a myopic opposition.

Second, on April 14th Naoto Kan, the prime minister, inaugurated a 15-member task force that aims to develop a “New Tohoku Model” for rebuilding stricken areas. This may not be enough to head off rising frustration. North of Fukushima, the biggest challenge is rebuilding tsunami-destroyed areas in a way that makes them safe, economically successful and compact enough to benefit the many elderly residents who live there. Again, locals speak of their need for housing and places to work, but their communities have not organised to press those claims. The new task force has solid local representation. But it hardly sounded reassuring when Makoto Iokibe, who heads the panel, spoke dreamily on its first day of creating “Hills of Hope” on which to site the new towns.

A third area in need of public debate is energy policy. This ranges from the future of nuclear power, to the conflicts of interest between regulators and utilities, to the dysfunctional state of the national power grid. West and east Japan are unable to share electricity because of different transmission frequencies dating back more than a century. Conservation will help (see next story). But it will not allay the sense of unease. Thousands have gathered in anti-nuclear protests in Tokyo and elsewhere. An opinion poll by Asahi Shimbun, a national newspaper, showed that the percentage of those opposed to nuclear energy has risen to 41% from 28% in 2007 (women are the strongest opponents), though the share favouring the nuclear status quo barely fell from 53% to 51%.

via Japan: Silenced by gaman | The Economist.

“It is important for us to send out inspectors to do comprehensive verification … to assure ourselves that it is … fit for peaceful purposes,” Mohamed ElBaradei said.

Iran sent shock waves through the international community recently when Tehran wrote a letter to the IAEA revealing the existence of a nuclear enrichment facility near the city of Qom.

Iran said its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, but the United States, among others, fears the country aims to build nuclear weapons.  Watch ElBaradei announce the October 25 visit »

The New York Times reported Sunday that IAEA experts “have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired ‘sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable’ atom bomb.”

Citing senior European officials, the report said that the conclusions are tentative, but “go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United States.”  Watch can the West live with a nuclear Iran? »

CNN could not immediately confirm the Times’ report….

www.cnn.com