The word "nuclear" has a lot more power in Japan than it does elsewhere.
Tokyo Electric Power, or TEPCO (TKECY) as it is better known, has just won approval to re-start two reactors at the world's largest nuclear power plant. Its shares got a jolt of 3% at that announcement.
Nuclear-linked stocks will be worth watching as the company pushes on with that attempt. TEPCO is, after all, the company that responded so badly to the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant in 2011.
The only country to have been hit by an atom bomb nevertheless embraced the technology behind nuclear power. Around one-fifth of all electricity is intended to be produced that way.
Then came the disaster at Fukushima. The March 2011 earthquake unleashed a tidal wave that ultimately killed 15,894 people, causing ¥21.5 trillion ($191 billion) in damage. Only the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine was worse.
The tsunami deluged the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, and three of them melted down. That shined a spotlight on the inept operations and response of TEPCO, which ran the plant.
The company was terrible at responding to the disaster and even worse at responding to the public. Its executives went into shutdown mode, as Asian companies are wont to do. It denied facts that turned out to be true, downplayed the impact and generally pretended that there's nothing to see here, we've got it all under control, please move along.
So it's amazing that it's back in big-time nuclear business. Most recently, Japan's nuclear regulator, the Nuclear Regulation Authority, has granted TEPCO initial safety approval to restart two reactors, six and seven, at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, the world's largest.
The five NRA commissioners voted unanimously for permission to crank the reactors back up. Formal approval will likely go ahead after a 30-day period for public comment.
The governor of Niigata prefecture, where that plant is based, says he won't consider allowing the plant to run again until the prefecture conducts its own review of what went on at Fukushima, and that won't happen until 2020 at the earliest.
Opinion polls show that a majority of the Japanese public now opposes nuclear power and would ultimately like Japan to cease producing it. It's likely that nuclear power will come up as an issue in the Japanese election, slated for Oct. 22.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe believes nuclear power is a viable and stable source of energy. His Liberal Democratic Party wants to see more of Japan's nuclear reactors put back to work.
Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, a former defense minister in the Abe government, has formed a conservative party to rival Abe's conservative government. Although she says she won't run for prime minister, her Kibo no To, or Party of Hope, will contest many of the seats up for grabs.
The party is considering an anti-nuclear stance. "We'll examine how to bring down the reliance to zero by 2030," Koike told a news conference, according to the Japan Times.
Nuclear power is intended to produce around 22% of Japan's electricity if all its plants are operating. Government plans call for another 27% to come from liquefied natural gas, around 23% from renewable sources, and only 26% from coal.
All 42 of Japan's nuclear reactors were ordered to shut down in 2011.
Kyushu Electric Power (KYSEY) was the first company to fire back up a nuclear plant after the 2011 quake, on the island of the same name in the city of Sendai. That's part of Japan's industrial heartland.
Kansai Electric Power (KAEPY) was last week granted permission from the mayor of Ohi, in Fukui Prefecture, to re-start two reactors there. The company had applied in August for permission to do so, from Japan's nuclear regulator, the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
Meanwhile, TEPCO continues the cleanup of the mess at Fukushima. It has delayed the removal of used nuclear rods from fuel pools at the plant. It shifted fuel removal from 2017 to 2018 at the safest of the reactors, and from 2020 to 2023 for another two.
It also has to mop up about 770,000 tons of contaminated water that was pumped into the plant to cool the melted fuel reactors. That's due to be cleaned out of around 580 tanks where it is stored on site by 2020 - the same year that Tokyo will host the Olympics.
