Anti-nuclear activists yesterday launched a global campaign to urge governments to force makers of nuclear reactors to shoulder some of the cost of accidents.
Greenpeace said in many countries blame for nuclear disasters falls on operators, but laws often limit their liability, leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill for compensation.
Meanwhile, suppliers of nuclear reactors, including GE, Toshiba and Hitachi, companies involved in the design and building of units at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, are often legally shielded from sharing blame for accidents involving their products, they said.
There have been no suggestions that the meltdowns that started after a tsunami thumped the plant nearly two years ago were in any way the fault of those companies.
“The nuclear industry evades responsibility in ... a big accident,” Aslihan Tumer of Greenpeace said.
“Every business around the world as well as all technologies have certain levels of risk when it comes to accidents,” Tumer said. “However, it’s only the nuclear industry that can avoid this risk despite the large, long-term and trans-boundary impacts that these accidents cause.”
The group’s campaign aims to raise public awareness that the same companies that make TVs and refrigerators also produce nuclear reactors, said activists, who hope social pressure will force businesses to rethink their nuclear strategy.
About 19,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands left homeless in March 2011 when a huge tsunami smashed into Japan, swamping the cooling systems of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and sending radiation over a large area.
Fukushima Dai-ichi operator Tokyo Electric Power Co bears legal responsibility under Japanese laws for compensating those affected by the accident.
The Japanese government has agreed to release ¥3.24 trillion (US$34 billion) worth of public funds to help the company with the payouts after bringing the utility under state control.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion