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Head of Japanese Utility Steps Down After Nuclear Crisis

May 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

At a news conference in Tokyo, the outgoing president, Masataka Shimizu, also said that the company had decided to decommission the four most heavily damaged of the plant’s six reactors and to cancel plans to add two more.

But his choice of an insider to succeed him could prompt further criticism of the troubled utility in the wake of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which was ravaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and continues to release radiation.

Mr. Shimizu, 66, will step down and be replaced by Toshio Nishizawa, 60, a senior executive at the company, Tokyo Electric said.

“I take responsibility for this accident, which has undermined trust in nuclear safety and brought much grief and fear to society,” Mr. Shimizu said. “Whatever happens, there must be change,” he said.

The crisis has raised serious questions over cozy ties between Japan’s nuclear industry and the regulators charged with overseeing safety at the country’s 55 nuclear reactors. It has also prompted a rethinking of Japan’s energy policy, which had sought to raise the country’s dependence on nuclear energy to one-half of its electricity needs, from the current one-third.

The Japanese government has also been saddled with the task of aiding Tokyo Electric as it starts to pay out what is expected to be trillions of yen in compensation claims even as it continues desperate efforts to stabilize the Fukushima plant.

The Japanese government has announced a plan that could tap public money to save Tokyo Electric from financial collapse and also help it compensate victims of the disaster. But the plan would require the company to eventually repay in full all the money owed to victims of the accident. The company had hoped that payouts might be capped.

Speaking in a grave monotone, Mr. Shimizu said that Tokyo Electric had booked a net loss of 1.25 trillion yen, or $15.3 billion, for the fiscal year that ended in March, hit by the punishing costs of bringing the Fukushima Daiichi plant under control.

The company booked a special loss of 426 billion yen for costs associated with cooling down the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, he said, and another 207 billion yen for shutting down the four most heavily damaged reactors.

But its losses so far do not include the compensation claims related to the accident. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to relocate from the area around the power plant, while nearby farmers and fishermen have seen their livelihoods threatened.

Tokyo Electric said it would sell off at least 600 billion yen in assets — including real estate and a stake in one of Japan’s largest telecommunications companies — to help meet compensation payments. The company’s board of directors promised to take no pay, and other executives will return 40 percent to 60 percent of their paychecks.

The company also said it would not pay dividends for the current fiscal year. Still, it was impossible to forecast earnings for the year, the company said.

Moody’s Japan has warned that it could downgrade its debt rating for Tokyo Electric to junk bond status.

Speaking after Tokyo Electric’s announcement, Yukio Edano, the top government spokesman, called for the company to step up efforts to squeeze out funds for compensation payments.

“This is just the start. There must be more scrutiny and more effort,” Mr. Edano said.

During the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it became clear that Mr. Shimizu would have to go as the nuclear complex was exposed as woefully unprotected against tsunami risks.

Tokyo Electric has also come under intense criticism for its handling of the accident. Revelations this month that three of the plant’s reactors may have suffered meltdowns in the early days of the crisis has added to the furor.

Mr. Shimizu had been particularly criticized for largely disappearing from the public eye just as the crisis worsened. He checked himself into a hospital for a week after the disaster, and has rarely appeared at news conferences since.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/business/global/21iht-tepco21.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Despite Bipartisan Support, Nuclear Projects Falter

April 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Even supporters of the technology doubt that new projects will surface any time soon to replace those that have been all but abandoned.

“My gut feeling is that there is going to be a delay,” said Neil Wilmshurst, a vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit utility consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif. News on Thursday that Exelon Corporation, the nation’s largest reactor operator, planned to buy a rival, the Constellation Energy Group, only reinforces the trend; until late last year, Constellation wanted to build, while Exelon was firmly against it.

Mr. Wilmshurst said the continued depressed price of natural gas had clouded the economics of new reactors, and he predicted that construction activity would “go quiet” for two to five years. His group has shifted its efforts to helping figure out how existing plants can extend their licenses to 80 years from the current limit of 60.

Of the four nuclear reactor construction projects that the Energy Department identified in 2009 as the most deserving for the loans, two have lost major partners and seem unlikely to recover soon. In addition to low prices for natural gas, the demand for electricity is down, and the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant could bring new rules.

Only $8.8 billion of the 2005 guarantee has been allocated — to a twin reactor project in Georgia. Ground has been broken on the fourth candidate, a twin reactor project in South Carolina, but its sponsors may get a better deal in the commercial finance market.

The initial $17.5 billion was approved during the Bush administration, but President Obama has also embraced the idea of marrying nuclear power to solar, wind and “clean coal” to reach his administration’s goal of generating 80 percent of American electricity from those sources by 2035. Mr. Obama’s call for new loan guarantees came when the administration was seeking Republican votes in the Senate for a limit on carbon dioxide emissions, but he has stuck with the loan guarantees even after prospects for such legislation died after last fall’s midterm elections.

The Republicans, who won control of the House, have portrayed such regulatory legislation as an energy tax. A White House spokesman, Clark Stevens, said that in the president’s view, nuclear power would continue to be an important part of the “clean energy economy” he was seeking.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said on Wednesday that he favored more nuclear reactors and that loan guarantees were the only way to get them.

The idea was approved by the Republican Congress in 2005. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, now the ranking Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has praised the Energy Department for issuing the first nuclear loan guarantee, for the Alvin W. Vogtle plant expansion, in Georgia. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, supports loan guarantees as a step to build 100 new nuclear reactors.

One reason for all the financial support may be the way Congress does its accounting. The guarantees cost little or nothing to approve. “It’s not real money,” Mr. Wilmshurst said.

A federal loan guarantee is a little like a parent co-signing a child’s car loan; if the child makes the payments, the parent pays nothing. Under the 2005 law, borrowers pay a lump sum to the government to compensate the Treasury for the risk it is undertaking, and if the companies finish the projects and can pay back the loans, the government makes a profit.

The precise shape of new loan guarantees is uncertain, but when “scoring” the provisions for the purpose of calculating their expense, the White House says they cost nothing, and Congress assumes they cost 1 percent of the face value. But they are not without risk.

If the builders default, as happened on some nuclear construction projects in the 1980s, the taxpayer liabilities could run into the billions of dollars.

Officials at the Energy Department, which administers the loans, said they were confident that other developers would come forward and apply for the guarantees. Jonathan M. Silver, the executive director of the loan programs office, said, “There is a significant queue of nuclear power plants in house that we will and are working on.”

“They may just go forward under a different time frame,” he said, but he declined to estimate how many years it would be before the government could reach its goal of providing loan guarantees to six to eight reactor projects.

Mr. Silver said that by the time a reactor could be finished and brought on line, market factors might be more in the industry’s favor. “There are so many variables in this equation, taking a snapshot may be less relevant than watching the whole movie,” he said.

Duke Power, for example, has been seeking to build a twin reactor in South Carolina that would also serve North Carolina. Company executives said that to move forward, it would need approval to charge customers for some construction expenses before the plant is completed. The company is still trying to line up additional partners, and has not made a final decision to build, a spokesman said.

Entergy Corporation, of New Orleans, has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to build reactors in two locations, but has not reached the point of applying for loan guarantees. It will build “in the event that we do decide that economics, load demand and other factors make new units favorable,” the company said.

“There’s not much else I’m aware of that’s really actively moving forward right now,” said Michael J. Wallace, a former Constellation executive who was the chief operating officer of its partnership with a French firm to build the Maryland project, the proposed Calvert Cliffs 3 reactor. With a carbon tax no longer appearing likely, he said a new kind of help, like a federal “clean energy” standard that would set a quota for nuclear and renewable electricity, might be needed.

Henry D. Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said he opposed government assistance for new reactors. He said that because the loan guarantees covered only 80 percent of the construction cost, project sponsors had to come up with the remaining 20 percent.

“Since the most likely candidates to pony up the 20 percent bailed out,” he said, “it doesn’t augur well.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=98fd94e80f80e22793d0993fa6ae2801

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Japan Announces Emergency Budget for Rebuilding

April 23, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The $48.5 billion budget is likely to be followed by more spending as Japan takes on the gargantuan task of rebuilding the section of its Pacific coastline ravaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Parliament is expected to pass the budget next week.

At least 14,133 people have been found dead, an additional 13,346 remain missing and more than 130,000 are living in evacuation centers. Government estimates put the total damage from the quake and tsunami at $300 billion.

The nuclear crisis set off by the tsunami has added to the human and economic toll. On Friday, the government banned residents from a 12-mile evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, where several reactors have suffered explosions and radiation leaks. A previous order urged but did not require evacuation from that zone; the government still recommends that residents leave if they are within 19 miles of the plant.

“We all share the hope that reconstruction does not mean a return to where we were, but the building of a brighter future,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan said at a news conference.

“I feel it was my fate to be prime minister at a time of great adversity,” said Mr. Kan, whose handling of the crises has been criticized sharply in Parliament and in the country at large.

Japan has rebounded from other catastrophes: The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake killed as many as 140,000 people and caused widespread destruction in Tokyo. It also is thought to have wiped out almost 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. In comparison, the death toll from the March 11 quake and tsunami is far lower, and the economic damage is likely to add up to just a few percent of G.D.P.

Still, Japan faces different challenges now, which could weigh heavily as it rebuilds: a rapidly aging population, a long-stagnant economy and public debt that is already at twice the size of its economy, thanks to profligate public works projects of the 1990s. That debt burden adds serious obstacles to financing the great reconstruction. Raising taxes, for which there appears to be a measure of public support, will dampen already tepid personal consumption levels. Issuing more government bonds will add to the ballooning deficit.

Mr. Kan’s grip on leadership also appears to be weakening under the withering criticism, including charges that he bungled the initial response to the nuclear crisis, causing it to worsen.

The president of Fukushima Daiichi’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, visited an evacuation center on Friday. “I have no words to express my regret,” the president, Masataka Shimizu, told the evacuees after making his way through cardboard beds and blankets. Television cameras in tow, he knelt and bowed deeply — the ultimate posture of apology in Japan.

Some refugees bowed back, but others heckled him. “We all just want to go home,” one told him quietly.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/world/asia/23japan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Screening the Day’s Catch for Radiation

April 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“I just want to make sure whatever we use is safe,” said Mr. Ripert, whose staff is using the device to screen every item of food that enters the restaurant, regardless of its origin. He has also stopped buying fish from Japan, which means no high-quality, farm-raised hamachi and kampachi for raw seafood dishes.

“Nobody knows how the currents will carry the contaminated water,” he said.

Despite assurances by health officials that radiation from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan is unlikely to show up in the food supply, worries about contaminated foods are growing among consumers, businesses and governments across the globe.

On Tuesday, the Japanese government announced new radiation standards for fish after high levels of radioactive iodine and cesium were found in fish caught halfway between the reactor site and Tokyo. In response, the European Union said it would tighten its own radiation limits for Japanese food imports. India said it would ban all food from Japan for at least three months.

In the United States, where about 4 percent of food imports come from Japan, the Food and Drug Administration has restricted some foods from the country. And the agency is working with customs officials to screen incoming fish and other food for traces of radiation.

So far, that screening has identified seven items that required further testing to see if the radiation detected exceeded normal background levels, according to Siobhan Delancey, an F.D.A. spokeswoman. Those items included tea and flavoring compounds. She said three of the items had been cleared for delivery and four were awaiting test results.

Patricia A. Hansen, a senior scientist at the F.D.A., acknowledged that the radiation detection methods used to screen food imports were not sensitive enough to detect a single contaminated fish in a large shipment. But she said that small amounts of contamination did not represent a public health hazard. A person would have to consume large amounts of fish in excess of what are known as an “intervention level,” or threshold level, of radiation for an extended period of time before it would be considered dangerous, she said.

“One fish that might be at an intervention level in a huge cargo container, we’re not going to pick that up,” she said. “But the important context is, is that one fish at the intervention level a public health concern? No, it is not.”

Nicholas Fisher, a professor of marine sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that, according to some radiation safety guidelines, people could safely eat 35 pounds of fish each year containing the level of cesium 137 detected in the Japanese fish.

“You’re not going to die from eating it right away,” he said, “but we’re getting to levels where I would think twice about eating it.” All the talk about radioactive food in Japan, which earlier banned milk and other farm products from areas near the crippled plant, has made some people uneasy, even thousands of miles away.

“When radioactive material started going into the ocean, that raised my concern greatly,” Karen Werner, 68, said on Tuesday as she shopped for fish at 99 Ranch Market in Richmond, Calif. “Right now, I’m not too worried about it showing up in fish, but I’m keeping my eye on it.”

Lee Nakamura, a partner who manages the fish counter at Tokyo Fish Market in Berkeley, Calif., estimated that one in five customers asked about possible radiation, but he had not yet seen an impact on sales. He said his Japanese suppliers had assured him that fish were being tested for possible radiation.

“Everything is under a microscope right now,” Mr. Nakamura said. “I feel confident the fish is safe. Everyone in Japan and here is looking at it and double-checking it before it gets to us.”

Several restaurant owners and fish importers said that while they continued to buy some fish from Japan, it came from areas far from the reactor site.

Still, Scott Rosenberg, an owner of Sushi Yasuda, a highly regarded sushi restaurant in Manhattan, said he planned to buy a radiation detector and would post a notice on the restaurant’s Web site to let customers know about the testing. “We want to make sure there is no exposure,” he said.

Elisabeth Rosenthal and Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/business/06food.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Disaster in Japan: Countries Begin Radiation Checks on Ships That Have Visited Japan

March 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

HONG KONG — Shipping companies and airlines around the world, already nervous about rising fuel prices and the potential effect of an economic slowdown in Japan, now have another worry: intensified monitoring of ships and aircraft that have made recent stops in Japan.

As the concerns mount over radiation leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, several governments have announced various steps to monitor or screen ships and aircraft arriving from the quake-stricken country.

So far, very few ships or planes appear to have registered unusual radiation levels or suffered holdups because of contamination fears.

At the moment, most shipping companies and airlines are less concerned about potential disruption caused by radiation screening at ports and airports around the world than they are about a range of other international problems, like the health of the Japanese economy, increasing fuel bills and — in the case of sea traffic — piracy off the coast of Somalia.

Still, the prospect of tighter checks and possible delays to port calls has made many operators nervous.

One particular, and so far apparently unique, case has fanned the shipping industry’s fears. A Japanese cargo vessel was turned away last week by the Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau in the Chinese city of Xiamen, in the southeastern province of Fujian, after the bureau said it had detected a “radioactive anomaly” on the vessel. A representative of the ship’s operator, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, later told Reuters that the radiation level in question was 3.5 microsieverts per hour — considered by experts to be far from harmful.

Adding to the confusion is the difficulty of getting a clear picture of exactly what approach the customs, security, health or port authorities in various countries and cities are taking, what radiation levels they consider abnormal and what steps officials might take if unusual levels are detected.

“We know some places are screening for radioactivity,” said Arthur Bowring, managing director of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, one of the largest associations of its kind. “But often, we don’t know what exactly they are screening, and what levels of radioactivity would be considered abnormal by the various officials.”

Many vessels travel long routes spanning several countries and ports, he added. “How do you know that somewhere along a route, someone with a Geiger counter won’t seriously delay or deviate a ship or cargo?”

Measures announced so far vary widely, and they often lack detail about what is considered safe or abnormal, industry experts say.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, for example, said last week that “out of an abundance of caution,” it had directed field personnel to specifically monitor maritime and air traffic from Japan.

The Marine Department in Hong Kong is “keeping track” of oceangoing vessels that have been within 30 kilometers, or about 18 miles, of Fukushima. None have arrived in the Hong Kong port so far, a spokesman for the department said. The city’s Customs and Excise Department is checking seaborne and airborne cargo originating from Japan.

The government authorities have also set up a health desk at the restricted area of Hong Kong International Airport for inbound passengers arriving from Japan to conduct voluntary radioactivity screening.

In mainland China, which received about 20 percent of Japan’s exports by value last year, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine has asked the local inspection authorities to intensify monitoring of nuclear and radioactive materials. Qingdao Port is inspecting every batch of cargo that has originated from or been anchored in Japan since March 11.

In Indonesia, the authorities plan to start screening some ships from Japan at the Jakarta port using wipe tests before the end of the week, said Reno Alamsyah, the director of nuclear emergency preparedness at the Indonesian Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=58fe65a42c34e819b76c3024d607d928

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