Tokyo--The Japanese government's push to return to nuclear power won a boost Wednesday after a court rejected a bid to stop the restart of two reactors deemed safe by regulators.
The district court in southern Kagoshima prefecture turned down the challenge by local residents who wanted to halt the restart of the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors at the Sendai nuclear plant, a court official said.
They could come back online as early as this summer.
The ruling comes just over a week after another court in Fukui in central Japan sided with a citizens' group by temporarily halting the restart of the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at the Takahama nuclear plant.
Those reactors cannot resume operations unless a successful appeal by their operator overturns the injunction.
Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga declined to comment on the latest court ruling.
But he said Tokyo stood behind an earlier decision by the Nuclear Regulation Authority to greenlight the restart of all four reactors because they met new, tougher standards.
"The government respects the decision made by the Nuclear Regulation Authority to resume plants that it considers meeting safety standards, while placing the top priority on safety over any other factor," he told reporters at a regular press briefing.
On Wednesday, the Kagoshima court ruled that Japan's new nuclear safety standards were not unreasonable, Jiji Press news agency reported, in a different view to the Fukui court which had said the standards "lacked rationality".
The earlier decision questioned whether the safety rules were strong enough, citing earthquake risks, in a move hailed by anti-nuclear activists.
Japan has seen a groundswell of public opposition to the technology since Fukushima, where reactors went into meltdown in March 2011 after a tsunami swamped their cooling systems -- setting off the worst atomic disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.
AFP
