One Year After Fukushima, Japan Faces Shortages of Energy, Trust
By summer, no nuclear plants will be operating in Japan, where mistrust reverberates one year after the world’s second-worst nuclear accident, at Fukushima Daiichi.
The tsunami that knocked out critical back-up cooling power at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 11, 2011, is still, in a sense, rolling over Japan's energy system.
Only two of the nation's 54 nuclear power plants are still in operation, and by the end of next month, those will be shut down, too, extinguishing the source that provided one-third of the electricity for the world's third-largest national economy before the Tohoku earthquake. One by one, local government officials have used the power they have under Japanese law to halt nuclear generation, by refusing to sign off on restart of any reactor after its routine maintenance shutdown. Until and unless the national government can convince prefecture officials of the
