Can you tell us a little bit about
where we are and what's going on today?
Yes. We are standing in front of the
Osaka District Courthouse.
Three years into the Fukushima Daiichi Accident
all the 50 nuclear power plants in Japan are shut.
However, the Japanese government and
electric utilities want to
restart nuclear power in Japan.
And the electric utilities have a total of
17 applications in to restart 17 reactors
and the government is right now
processing those applications.
We are here today
to try to stop that process of restart.
This area Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe
has a huge population.
Its also where the largest lake in Japan is located-
the water for 14 million people.
The Oi reactors Unit 3 and 4 are located
in a chain of reactors just north of here
and this lawsuit is seeking an injunction for
the restart of these reactors.
We are suing the electric utility Kansai Electric
and today is the last court hearing before the verdict.
Kansai Electric is trying to underestimate
the kind of shaking that could occur at
Unit 3 and 4 at Oi.
All the electric utilities are doing the same.
What they are doing is
using foreign earthquakes as a model
instead of Japanese earthquakes.
Japanese earthquakes are unique in that
the same length of earthquake fault
can cause a lot more earthquake shaking,
motion, than foreign earthquakes.
This is not being taken into consideration
and we are asking the courts to
rule on this so that we can protect
citizens in Japan, and citizens worldwide
from another serious accident like Fukushima.
The second issue we are addressing is
radioactive discharges into the ocean.
Kansai Electric's application
and the way the government is
trying to rule on this is that it will not
prevent the kind of discharges that occurred,
that is currently occurring at Fukushima Daiichi.
We don't want another
serious contamination of the ocean.
The third issue we're addressing is that
citizens who are successful in getting a
reinvestigation of an earthquake fault
underneath the Oi 3 and 4 reactors.
However, when the government asked
that a 300-meter length trench be dug
in order to detect this earthquake fault,
Kansai electric refused and
only dug a 70-meter-long trench,
found a certain fault and said,
"That's the one in question,
it's not active, no problem."
And the government did nothing about it.
During this investigation,
north of the site,
an active fault was actually found,
and although the peer review stated
they should look into how long that fault line is,
you know, whether it goes into the reactor site or not,
the Japanese government, Nuclear Regulation Authority,
although promised to do so,
hasn't even put it on the agenda.
Also, this fault line runs very
close to the emergency coolant pipe,
and the new post-Fukushima regulations require
that if a facility is near an active fault that
it not operate and yet
the Nuclear Regulation Authority
is violating its own rules
and ignoring this fact.
So we're seeking the court,
that the courts rule on this
and protect citizens because
neither the electric utilities
nor the government are doing that.
