May 5 could mark new beginning for Japan with reactor shutdown (Arjun Makhijani)

[bananas]

Excellent op-ed by Arjun Makhijani:

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2012/05/157816.html

May 5 could mark new beginning for Japan with reactor shutdown

By Arjun Makhijani
WASHINGTON, May 13, Kyodo

May 5, 1943, was a terrible date for Japan. But May 5, 2012, when all of Japan's nuclear reactors were shut, could mark a new beginning.

Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, wrote in 1945 that ''The target (of the atom bomb) is and was always expected to be Japan.'' It began two years before, on May 5, 1943, when the Manhattan Project decided not to target Germany with the atom bomb.

<snip>

Following President Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace speech, U.S. propaganda aimed to overcome Japan's ''nuclear allergy'' -- arising from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fifty-four nuclear power reactors, including the six at Fukushima, were the result.

<snip>

Japan could reestablish itself as a great economic example to the world. It could turn a tragic date, May 5, into a date that history would note as the moment when Japan remembered the roots of its nuclear allergy and joined it with the tragedy of March 11, 2011, to turn away from a way of making electricity that also makes plutonium.


(Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research near Washington. He has a Ph.D. in nuclear fusion from the University of California at Berkeley and has worked on nuclear and renewable energy issues for more than forty years.)

[kristopher]

1. The people have to overcome very powerful opposition

The political and economic forces pushing to restart their nuclear program are massive and are in full control of the levers of power. I hope the unquestioned consensus of the people prevails, but I wouldn't be willing to bet on it.