Charley... another one for you... NHK...

Some of the shareholders of a Japanese electric power company say they want the utility to close its nuclear power plants.

On Monday, a group of 232 individual stockholders of Tohoku Electric Power Company submitted the documents needed for their proposal to scrap its nuclear power plants.

The proposal is expected to be put to a vote in an annual shareholders' meeting at the end of next month.

Tohoku Electric Power has 2 nuclear power plants in Japan's northeastern region, one in Higashidori Village in Aomori Prefecture and another in Onagawa Town in Miyagi Prefecture.

The group is also calling for the company to end its investment in spent nuclear fuel reprocessing businesses, including a reprocessing plant at Rokkasho Village in Aomori Prefecture.

The group representative, Hironori Shinohara, noted the moves by power companies to introduce additional safety measures following the nuclear emergency involving Tokyo Electric Power Company. But he said accidents never happen under the same scenarios, and stressed the importance of shutting down the nuclear plants.

An official of Tohoku Electric Power said the company takes the disaster facing TEPCO extremely seriously. The official said Tohoku Electric will examine the proposal and submit it to the shareholders' meeting along with comments from board members.

Monday, May 02, 2011 20:15 +0900 (JST)

Not so good...

The operator of the troubled Fukushima nuclear power plant says it has detected higher levels of radioactive materials in seawater samples from near the water intake at one of the reactors.

Tokyo Electric Power Company says it detected 130 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131 per cubic centimeter in samples collected near the water intake for the Number 2 reactor on Saturday. The figure is 3,300 times the national limit and 30 percent higher than the level detected on Friday.

It's the same site where iodine-131 at a level 7.5 million times the limit was detected on April 2nd. TEPCO says it detected radioactive cesium-134 at 120 times the limit and cesium-137 at 81 times the limit at the same place on Saturday. But the readings taken for these 2 substances were down for the third straight day.

There was a 90 percent drop in levels of iodine and cesium to the south of water intakes for reactors 1 through to 4.

The level of highly radioactive water in the sea rose to three to four times the level of the previous day along the coast 10 kilometers south of the power plant.

TEPCO says it's continuing to monitor the level, though there has not been a fresh leak of highly contaminated water.

Monday, May 02, 2011 05:45 +0900 (JST)