Japan’s regulatory authority applies commercial nuclear power plant standards to small research reactors.
This overregulation, combined with vague and shifting criteria, delays research, education, and medical progress.
Rather than improving safety, it creates systemic risk and institutional paralysis.

This is a continuation of the previous chapter.
2016-01-05
Nevertheless, the regulatory commission applies the same standards used for large commercial power reactors to small research reactors.
It demands comprehensive countermeasures covering earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, terrorism, aircraft crashes, fires, and active faults.
In addition, it requires the preparation of enormous volumes of documentation, ranging from tens of thousands to as many as four hundred thousand pages.
At Kyushu Electric Power’s Sendai Nuclear Power Plant, the documentation reached four hundred thousand pages.
Professors and researchers at Kyoto University, including Mr. Unezaki, have spent the past two years consumed by regulatory responses.
Document preparation has become their primary task, while genuine research has been delayed and stalled.
Why has this happened.
The role of the regulatory commission should be to engage in dialogue with operators who best understand on-site realities, improve the safety of nuclear facilities, and protect human life.
However, the commission appears to confuse the independence granted to it as an Article 3 body with isolation, as if it must not exchange views with operators.
As a result, it pursues misguided reviews that ignore on-site realities and ends up creating outcomes that threaten human life.
Ensuring the safety of reactor facilities is a shared objective for all, and this needs no argument.
Yet a commission that refuses to listen adequately to the field imposes demands that are unrealistic in their severity.
Moreover, the more specific the measures become, the more their standards begin to waver.
It is reasonable to demand sufficient safety with respect to radiation.
But what constitutes sufficient safety.
How should engineering factors and risks be evaluated.
Those standards remain ambiguous.
Kyoto University was forced to submit four corrective applications for modifications to nuclear fuel-related facilities.
This process, which Mr. Unezaki described as “the pains of childbirth,” took a year and a half to reach final approval.
The primary cause of those pains lay in the fact that the regulatory commission’s standards had not been clearly established.
When conducting reviews, the commission should first present clear criteria.
In reality, it has failed to do so.
To be continued.