“By triumphantly declaring a cold shutdown, the Japanese authorities are clearly anxious to give the impression that the crisis has come to an end, which is clearly not the case,” Greenpeace Japan said in a statement. Greenpeace dismissed the announcement as a publicity stunt. “We hope that this will be a fresh step towards going back home but it does not change the fact that the path to bringing the crisis under control is long and tough,” Fukushima governor Yuhei Sato said, according to the Asahi newspaper website. nuclear agency welcomed “significant progress” at the plant. That provoked an angry response from senior local officials, Greenpeace and some reporters even as the Vienna-based U.N. It is a government pre-condition for allowing about 80,000 residents evacuated from within a 20 km (12 mile) radius of the plant to go home.īoth Noda and his environment and nuclear crisis minister Goshi Hosono said that while the government still faced huge challenges, the situation at the plant was under control. The declaration of a cold shutdown could have repercussions well beyond the plant. One of the chief aims of the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), had been to bring the reactors to that state by the year-end. “A stable condition has been achieved,” he added, noting radiation levels at the boundary of the plant could now be kept at low levels, even in the event of “unforeseeable incidents.”Ī cold shutdown is when water used to cool nuclear fuel rods remains below boiling point, preventing the fuel from reheating. “The reactors have reached a state of cold shutdown,” Noda told a government nuclear emergency response meeting.
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