The victory of an anti-nuclear power candidate in the Niigata gubernatorial race last Sunday is yet another indication that popular sentiment remains wary about restarting reactors that were idled in the wake of the March 2011 meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima No. 1 power plant. The Abe administration, which pushes nuclear power as a key source of the nation's energy supply, should not dismiss the outcome of the Niigata election as a mere local setback, but instead take seriously the public's misgivings about the safety of nuclear power behind the vote.
The win by Ryuichi Yoneyama, a 49-year-old doctor who had the organized backing of the opposition Japanese Communist Party, Liberal Party and Social Democratic Party, over Tamio Mori, a former mayor of the Niigata Prefecture city of Nagaoka endorsed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner Komeito, comes on the heels of the victory by another nuclear power foe in the Kagoshima gubernatorial race in July. In that race, going down to defeat was an incumbent who had given the go-ahead last year to restarting two reactors at Kyushu Electric Power's Sendai power plant.
Niigata Prefecture hosts Tepco's seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant — the world's largest in terms of power generation capacity. All of its reactors remain offline after they were shut down for regular maintenance following the Fukushima disaster. Tepco views restarting the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant as crucial to reviving its finances, which have been battered by the Fukushima disaster. But that is likely to remain elusive with the election of Yoneyama, who reiterated after winning the race that he would not consent to reactivating the plant under current conditions. The Abe administration has been pushing for rebooting idled reactors once they have cleared the Nuclear Regulation Authority's revamped post-Fukushima standards, but power companies need the consent of host prefectures and municipalities before bringing their reactors back online.
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