Anti-nuclear meeting offers lessons learned from Fukushima

By Takehiko Kambayashi Jan 13, 2012, 5:12 GMT

Tokyo - Rebecca Harms, a European Parliament member from Germany, was braced for severe power shortages on arriving in Japan, with only six of the nation's 54 nuclear reactors in service, but was shocked to find wasted electricity all over the country.

The country, which experienced the world's worst nuclear disaster in 25 years, 'is wasting electricity everywhere,' a heated toilet seats and garish neon signs to large air heaters outside hotel entrances, said Harms, co-president of the Greens in the European Parliament.

'It was really astonishing,' said Harms, who is among speakers at a weekend anti-nuclear conference in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.

Her critical observation seems to typify what organizers of the conference want to share with participants in order to deal with various issues including future energy and radioactive contamination after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

After the plant was struck by a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami on March 11, a series of blasts and fires triggered the massive release of radioactive material into the environment.

The plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power Co, suffered meltdowns at three of its six reactors. More than 80,000 residents have been forced to evacuate the area.

The weekend event titled Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World to be held in Yokohama has dozens of experts, activists and lawmakers from Japan and abroad and is expected to draw more than 10,000 people.

The international conference is mainly organized by non-governmental organizations and research centres in Japan such as Peace Boat, Green Action, Citizens' Nuclear Information Centre, FoE Japan, Greenpeace Japan and the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies.

The conference is to take place amid growing anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

As Japan's powerful utilities have shut down their reactors for inspection or maintenance, they have been unable to restart them amid growing public concern and resistance to atomic power. Before the disaster, about 30 per cent of the country's electricity was nuclear-generated.

The organizers, want to seize the moment to mobilize other across borders and generations and phase out nuclear power around the world.

'Now is the time to start to discuss how to reduce nuclear dependency and promote natural energy for future society,' Tatsuya Yoshioka, chair of the conference and director of Peace Boat, told a news conference in Tokyo.

In mid-December, the government declared a cold shutdown had been achieved at Fukushima, which marked an end to the emergency phase of the disaster and the start of the clean-up and scrapping of its reactors.

Despite the government's declaration, 'so many people in Fukushima are still struggling' with their daily life and also fear the health effects of radiation, Yoshioka said.