Japan’s New Environmental Minister Calls for Closing Down All Nuclear Reactors to Prevent Another Disaster Like Fukushima

Japan’s newly-appointed Environment and Nuclear Disaster Minister Shinjiro Koizumi enters the prime minister’s official residence in Tokyo on Sept. 11. TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA / AFP / Getty Images Japan’s new environmental minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, called Wednesday for permanently shutting down the nation’s nuclear reactors to prevent a repeat of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, comments that came just a day after Koizumi’s predecessor recommended dumping more than one million tons of radioactive wastewater from the power plant into the Pacific Ocean. Koizumi was appointed to his position Wednesday as part of a broader shake-up of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet. He is the 38-year-old son of former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a vocal critic of nuclear energy . "I would like to study how we will scrap them, not how to retain them," the younger Koizumi, whose ministry oversees Japan’s nuclear regulator, said during his first news conference late Wednesday. "We will be doomed if we allow another nuclear accident to occur. We never know when we’ll have an earthquake." In March of 2011, a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami that caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on Japan’s northeastern coast, forcing […]

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