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Fukushima

Ukraine Live Updates: Residents Flee Town Near Nuclear Site as Shelling Continues

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The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, along the banks of the Dnipro River, is occupied by Russian forces.Credit…David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Artillery fire resumed on Sunday from the direction of a nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, with shells streaking into a town from which the Ukrainian army has been unable to return fire, for fear of causing a meltdown or releasing radiation at the plant.

Hours before the barrages, there were reports that conditions were unraveling in and near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. The flight of civilians from the area accelerated on Saturday.

The plant is the first active nuclear power plant in a combat zone. The United States and European Union have called for the formation of a demilitarized zone, as the fighting in and around the plant and its active reactors and stored nuclear waste has sparked particular worry.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said in his nightly address on Saturday that Russia had resorted to “nuclear blackmail” at the plant, reiterating a Ukrainian analysis that Moscow was using it to slow a Ukrainian counteroffensive toward the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, where Russian conventional military defenses appear increasingly wobbly.

Contrary to the fears of some analysts when Moscow launched its invasion in February, the more urgent nuclear threat in the Ukraine war now appears to be Russia damaging the civilian plant, rather than deploying its own nuclear weapons. Russia says it’s Ukrainian forces who are shelling the plant.

Engineers say that yard-thick reinforced concrete containment structures protect the reactors from even direct hits. International concern, however, has grown that shelling could spark a fire or cause other damage that would lead to a nuclear accident.

The six pressurized water reactors at the complex retain most sources of radiation, reducing risks. After pressurized water reactors failed at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, Ukraine upgraded the Zaporizhzhia site to enable a shutdown even after the loss of cooling water from outside the containment structures, Dmytro Gortenko, a former plant engineer, said in an interview.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said that on Saturday, Russian artillery fire hit a pump, damaged a fire station and sparked fires near the plant that could not be immediately extinguished because of the damage to the fire station.

In fields near the Russian-controlled town of Enerhodar, close to the plant, long lines of cars carrying fleeing civilians formed on Saturday, according to social media posts and another former engineer at the plant who has remained in touch with local residents.

“Locals are abandoning the town,” said the former engineer, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Oleksiy, because of security concerns. Residents had been leaving for weeks, but the pace picked up after Saturday’s barrages and fires, he said.

Since Russia captured the plant in March, its army has controlled the facility, while Ukrainian engineers have continued to operate it.

Ukrainian employees are not fleeing but sending their families away, said Oleksiy, who left in June. Enerhodar was built for plant employees in the Soviet period and had a prewar population of about 50,000.

Ukraine has accused Russia of staging artillery attacks targeting Ukrainian towns across the Dnipro River from the plant starting in July, as Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south ramped up.

Overnight into Sunday morning, Russian howitzers fired on the Ukrainian town of Nikopol, which lies across a reservoir from the power plant, Yevheny Yetushenko, the Ukrainian military governor of the town, said in a post on Telegram.

The Ukrainian military has said it has few options for firing back. In July, it used a self-destructing drone to strike a Russian rocket artillery launcher that sat about 150 yards from one of the plant’s reactors.

— Andrew E. Kramer

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Filed Under: WORLD Tagged With: Africa, European Union, Fukushima, Grain, Japan, Media, Military, New York, Nuclear power, Nuclear waste, Nuclear Weapons, Population, Radiation, Russia, Social Media, staging, Ukraine, United States, Waste, Water, York

Can Japan Keep the Lights On? The Ukraine War Upends a Big Energy Bet.

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However, the sudden surge in prices in early 2021 blindsided the company, which had not prepared for the possibility of a major jump in costs, according to a statement it released when it declared bankruptcy.

Masaru Tagami, who is in charge of facilities procurement for the central Japanese city Hida, one of Hope Energy’s former clients, said it had been caught off guard by the company’s “sudden” collapse and the rise in costs as its business was handed to another firm.

The city’s annual electric bill is expected to rise 40 percent, he said, adding that the situation had played havoc with its budget. “I am seriously worried about how long these circumstances will continue,” he said.

Power companies hit hard by the pandemic-related spike expected that prices would abate by this March as the effects on supply chains wore off, said Junichi Ogasawara, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Energy Economics Japan.

“But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the situation has changed to one where the current conditions will drag on,” he said.

Since then, the precariousness of Japan’s energy situation has only become clearer. In March, after an earthquake near Fukushima knocked out part of the electrical grid, a cold snap pushed Tokyo to the brink of rolling power outages. In the past, coal-fired power stations could have been called upon for cheap backup energy, but inefficient old plants have been taken offline.

In a disaster-prone country like Japan, “we’re still in a position where these kinds of things can happen again” unless the government fixes the issues introduced by deregulation and the patchwork shift to renewables, said Dan Shulman, the chief executive of Shulman Advisory, a firm analyzing Japan’s power industry.

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: Alternative and Renewable Energy, budget, Business, Economics, Economy, Electric Light and Power, Energy, Energy and Power, Fukushima, Gas, Government, Industry, International Trade and World Market, Japan, Natural Gas, Plants, Research, Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022), Ukraine

How the Olympics Hurt Tokyo’s Economy

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Toshiko Ishii, 64, who runs a traditional hotel in the city’s Taito Ward, spent over $180,000 converting the building’s first floor into an eatery in anticipation of a flood of tourists.

It was already a bit of a risk, and when the pandemic hit, Ms. Ishii became worried that she might have to shut down. Even with the Olympics, she has had no guests for weeks.

“There’s nothing you can really do about the Olympics or the coronavirus, but I’m worried,” she said. “We don’t know when this will end, and I have a lot of doubts about how long we can keep the business going.”

Pandemic or no, reality was bound to fall short of the grand expectations set by Japanese leaders.

They pitched Tokyo 2020 as an opportunity to show the world a Japan that had shaken off decades of economic stagnation and the devastation of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that touched off the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Appealing to nostalgia for the 1964 Olympics, when Japan wowed the world with its advanced technology and economic strength, Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister, framed the 2020 Olympics as an ad campaign for a cool, confident country that was the equal of a rising China.

After decades of perceived decline, “more and more Japanese, the elder generation, senior people, wanted to remember, wanted to repeat that successful experience again in 21st-century Japan,” said Shunya Yoshimi, a professor of sociology at Tokyo University who has written several books about Japan’s relationship to the events.

Instead, the pandemic brought a sense of fear and uncertainty that were worsened by the decisions of Japan’s leaders.

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Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: Books, Business, China, Coronavirus, Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), Culture, Economic Conditions and Trends, Economy, Fukushima, Games, Hunger, Japan, Light, Olympic Games (2020), Politics and Government, Suga, Yoshihide, technology, Tokyo (Japan)

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