Niigata Assembly Green-Lights Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Restart, TEPCO’s First Post-Fukushima Reactivation

Japan’s U-turn echoes the U.S. post-Three Mile Island arc (1979 accident, first new plant restart not until Watts Bar-1 in 1996): public fear freezes nuclear fleets, then decades-later energy crunch thaws them. Today’s trigger is soaring LNG import bills and an AI-driven demand spike, spotlighting the structural risk of a resource-poor island nation that imports 85 % of its energy. The vote also tests a broader global drift back toward fission—France’s 2023 SMR push, Britain’s Sizewell C financing—as decarbonisation deadlines tighten and renewables still wrestle with intermittency. Yet it revives the perennial question of institutional memory: can a utility disgraced in 2011 sustain a “safety culture” for the half-century lifespan of these reactors and the 10-millennium stewardship of their waste? If Kashiwazaki-Kariwa operates safely, historians in 2125 may mark this week as the hinge when post-Fukushima paralysis gave way to a second nuclear age; a mishap, conversely, would cement public rejection for another generation.