[brg]

From a distance this seems like a horrible decision. Nuclear power is one of the areas that Japan leads the world, both in expertise and operation. It runs 50 plants, third to only the US and France. It is amazing that as a society they would abandon this advantage.

[lftl]

I'm no nuclear expert, but from what I gather very few people consider TEPCO or the Japanese regulators to have shown a high level of expertise in handling the Fukushima situation. Some of it was definitely bad luck, but most reports I see have pretty harsh criticism of regulators neglect of the situation prior to the event and TEPCO's handling of the situation after the event.

[ninjin]

As someone close to me working with foreign countries and the Japanese nuclear energy industry said:

"Which country is willing to buy the products of our industry if we are not willing to buy them for ourselves?"

There are already a bunch of countries way ahead of Japan on renewable energy. But Japan is suffering from severe populism over the last years, nowadays it appears that taking responsibility for governing the country has become to equivalent resigning when the going gets tough. So, I don't think it is likely that they will stay the course and talk about safe and modern nuclear power.

[new299]

We've yet to see how real this decision is. Only today it was announced that new reactor projects will still go ahead: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120915x2.html

Which seems... odd!