Japan Earthquake 2011: Cabinet Approves Nearly $50 Billion In Spending For Post-Earthquake Rebuilding

April 22, 2011 4:37:58 AM

By Linda Sieg and Kazunori Takada

TOKYO, April 22 (Reuters) - Japan's cabinet approved on Friday almost $50 billion of spending for post-earthquake rebuilding, a downpayment on the country's biggest public works effort in six decades.

The emergency budget of 4 trillion yen ($48.5 billion), which is likely be followed by more reconstruction spending packages, is still dwarfed by the overall cost of damages caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, estimated at $300 billion.

"With this budget, we are taking one step forward towards reconstruction ... and towards restarting the economy," Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 15 metre tsunami that followed caused Japan's gravest crisis since World War Two, killing up to 28,000 people and destroying tens of thousands of homes.

It also smashed a nuclear power plant which began leaking radiation, a situation the plant's operator says could take all year to bring under control.

Markets are keeping a close eye on how much the government will borrow to fund reconstruction. Though it kept its promise not to issue new bonds to finance this tranche of spending, additional bonds are expected to pay for rebuilding budgets to come.

Though Japan's debt is around twice the size of its $5 trillion economy, it does not face a Greece-style debt crisis since most of that debt is owed to domestic creditors rather than foreign banks.

The budget will be submitted to parliament next week and is expected to be enacted in May.

"CAUSED GREAT TROUBLE"

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has been accused by opposition politicians, his own party and quake survivors of failing to take command of the country's response to the triple disaster, has said the need to rebuild is an opportunity for national "rebirth".

Kan's approval ratings are extremely low. In a Reuters poll of investors released on Friday, 83 percent of those surveyed said they disapproved or strongly disapproved of the administration's handling of the crisis.

Japan, recently overtaken by China as the world's second biggest economy, has been struggling with deflation for years.

As well as trying to rebuild the ruined northeast, Japan also has to contend with the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, the wrecking of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, 240 km (150 miles) from Tokyo.

Radiation spilled out from the facility after a hydrogen explosion, and in their battle to cool melting fuel rods, engineers pumped radioactive water into the Pacific, a move that worried Japan's neighbours about the spread of contamination.

Masataka Shimizu, the much-criticised president of facility operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) , met Fukushima's local governor Yuhei Sato on Friday to apologise in person, the first time Sato has agreed to see the TEPCO chief.

Shimizu, wearing a blue work clothes, bowed deeply to Sato.

"I apologise from the bottom of my heart for the great trouble caused to many people in society."

Sato replied: "I want you to gather wisdom from all over the world and make every effort so that people can think that they can return to their hometowns."

Shimizu, whose company has been accused of downplaying the dangers and ignoring warnings about the risk of a quake and tsunami striking the plant, as well as reacting poorly to the damage, will later visit an evacuation centre in Koriyama city to offer an apology to those forced to leave their homes.

Japan said this week it would ban anyone entering a 20-km (12-mile) evacuation zone around Fukushima Daiichi.

Prime Minister Kan has instructed residents in some areas outside that zone to leave in order to avoid radiation, Japan's top government spokesman Yukio Edano said on Friday, but it was unclear how many people this will affect.

"We don't have the number. We will be working with local authorities in compiling this data," an official with Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said. (Writing by Daniel Magnowski; Editing by Sugita Katyal)

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

Comments

[mrJJ]

12:45 PM on 04/22/2011

Magnitude 5.5
Date-Time Friday, April 22, 2011 at 15:25:19 UTC
Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 12:25:19 AM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location 37.224°N, 140.981°E
Depth 35.8 km (22.2 miles)
Region EASTERN HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances 18 km (11 miles) NNE of Iwaki, Honshu, Japan
55 km (34 miles) ESE of Koriyama, Honshu, Japan
74 km (45 miles) SE of Fukushima, Honshu, Japan
200 km (124 miles) NNE of TOKYO, Japan

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0002wzr.php

1066 quakes/aftershocks since March 11
http://www.japanquakemap.com/today

[dhhh]

12:26 PM on 04/22/2011

What does this 50 billion dollars do to address the ongoing catastrophe that they still cannot seem to fix?

[Winston13]

12:25 PM on 04/22/2011

Visit:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/21/japan-earthquake-today-_n_851962.html

for un-moderated discussion of Fukushima.

[dhhh]

12:24 PM on 04/22/2011

Why won't this website approve any comments relating to the very real possibility of a country being made UNINHABITABLE by this kind of tragic human lack of foresight and planning? Does that change reality?

[dhhh]

12:22 PM on 04/22/2011

Why aren't they allocating money instead to contingency mass evacuation plans? They don't want to do that, they want to just "fix" it of course. And this has to be anguish for them. Yet realistically, no one, not even them, knows if they CAN fix it. What happens if/when their population can no longer safely drink the water or eat the food?

[dhhh]

12:18 PM on 04/22/2011

They are now vowing to dump money to "rebuild" a country that they do not even know will be habitable. This is so so sad.

[dhhh]

12:00 PM on 04/22/2011

This is beyond sad. Here they are, vowing to dump money onto a catastrophe that is still in no way resolved! The details are sketchy, contradictory, confusing, but when you look, it is obvious that they are still in desperation/panic mode. Like dumping sandbags (poor little sandbags??) of zeolite (which absorbs cesuim 137, highly dangerous long-lived radioactive isotope) into...... THE OCEAN? Sandbags are for the likes of preventing a river bank from breaching the contained flow of a river. An ocean is hardly contained! In fact, there is milk now testing positive for cesium in Vermont! Which means (someone stop me if I'm wrong) that the ocean water around Japan evaporated and the cesium came down in rain half-way around the world, to contaminate the pasture that the cow in Vermont was grazing in. So I think that the grim reality here is that the Japanese cabinet cannot yet even know if Japan will be INHABITABLE into the future, much less "rebuilt."

[rkoenn]

11:44 AM on 04/22/2011

Just a comment to contrast Japanese CEOs from American CEOs. The Japanese is extremely guilt ridden and is losing honor and is extremely humble. A US CEO would force the board to give him millions to quietly disappear and they would. No guilt, no honor, just personal greed.

[mrJJ]

10:32 AM on 04/22/2011

Via: MEXT
Reading of environmental radioactivity level　（English version）

http://www.mext.go.jp/english/incident/1303962.htm

[mrJJ]

10:04 AM on 04/22/2011

StainlessSteal : Weird as this may sound, I somewhat feel sorry for Mr. Shimizu. His company may have made a misjudgmen­t that greatly contribute­d to the nuclear crisis, but he seems repentant. He dressed in blue work clothes, humbling himself from president of TEPCO to the level of the common working man who has suffered the most as a result of his lack of action. But the greatest difficulty may be in having to apology directly to the victims dwelling in the evacuation center, knowing that the incident has permanentl­y altered the lives of its innocent residents.
=================
You "somewhat feel sorry for Mr. Shimizu.." ?

2011/04/12
Heroes and realists found among the brave "Fukushima 700

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201104110137.html

Bleak Conditions
Aired.. April 19th Via NHK TV

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/movie/feature201104192005.html

or the same NHK vid uploaded to youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3d6SdpcqQ8

[CalmDawn]

11:16 AM on 04/22/2011

I'd have more empathy for Shimizu if he suited up and went into the plant, and physically helped with the cleanup process. In fact, all the TEPCO executives should do that.

[StainlessSteal]

03:41 PM on 04/22/2011

Obviously, the victims truly deserve my pity. The guilt that will probably haunt Mr. Shimizu for the remainder of his life (regarding the sacrifices of his employees, the displacement of affected residents, environmental contamination, and more) is intimidating. Perhaps I should have said that I would definitely not want to be in his shoes.

[mrJJ]

03:56 PM on 04/22/2011

You seem to have left out the conditions & treatment of the 700+ TEPCO workers who are in his facility right now..

[outnow]

09:17 AM on 04/22/2011

The disaster reminds me of an old Dennis the Menace cartoon in which Dennis was visiting with some engineers at his dad's office who were examining the design of a bridge. Dennis started to fool around with the model of the bridge, when something broke. Mr. Mitchell, Dennis' father, apologized profusely while scolding his son. The other engineers said, "No, wait, the kid has shown us a very important flaw in the design that none of us even thought of."

Mother Nature has shown us a flaw in the thinking of engineers in the nuclear power generating field, In fact, nuclear power generators are systems with many parts. Those containment and cooling systems are very vulnerable and statistically are bound to eventually fail. The magnitude of those failures is greater than most even imagine.

The Wall Street Journal or Washington Post ran article that stated what I have been saying all along' i.e., that insurance underwriting involves asessment of that risk and the cost of fully insured nuclear power makes nuclear energy out of the ball park entirely unless the risk of damage falls not on the industry but on average citizens and governments. Any actuarial specialist would be happy to explain Pascall's equations that allowed predictions about future risks.

Anything you cannot get insurance for is to damned dangerous. An example is the driver with two DUIs, speeding tickets, and a string of accidents.

The idea of boiling water with radiation appauled Einstein. See why?

[Lonesome Tears]

08:45 AM on 04/22/2011

http://tinyurl.com/4xqxfk9
From today...a must read.

[Lonesome Tears]

08:20 AM on 04/22/2011

Fairewinds down? Hope it's a temp glitch.
http://fairewinds.com/

US NRC: Fukushima plant "static but fragile"
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are "static but fragile" in its latest assessment of the nuclear emergency.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/22_28.html

[Lonesome Tears]

08:48 AM on 04/22/2011

Fairewinds is up, thank goodness.

[outnow]

09:33 AM on 04/22/2011

Morning Lonesome Tears!

Fairwinds had an interview with a nuclear epidemiologist I believe yesterday. Gunderson looked really tired on the video. He has been traveling.

In this country the advice was to avoid additional radiation in addition to that we get second-hand from Japan. The nuclear pollution has circled the Earth several times now so that the East Coast is being exposed as much as the West Coast.

We cannot avoid the dust particles from the jet stream but we can avoid radiation from rainfall to the extent that we don't go out in the rain. Other routes of ingestion and exposure must be considered separately, but, in general, there isn't much we can do here in the US. Prevention is better than any "cure." That would IMHO involve decomissioning most, if not all such plants. As with atmospheric testing, nuclear power generating is inherently unsafe at every stage.

I do not support dirty coal or oil either. Even American biomass is not the answer. This is why Dick Cheney said to just invade Iraq as our "energy policy." What if Cheney was heavily invested in nuclear? We would have spent three trillion on that instead of on the war in Iraq. With nuclear, we are cooking our own gooses and damaging our DNA. Those mutations are forever. Other species will suffer, too.

[euromarkusx]

08:09 AM on 04/22/2011

Another government BAILOUT?

It's Obama's fault!

[Lonesome Tears]

08:01 AM on 04/22/2011

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Friday the government will most likely need to issue new bonds for a sizable second extra budget, expected to be drawn up around June, to finance reconstruction in the earthquake- and tsunami-hit northeastern region.

Kyodo http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/87190.html

[Robert 999]

08:20 AM on 04/22/2011

Thanks for great link,, but very sad.

[Lonesome Tears]

08:29 AM on 04/22/2011

Morning Robert. It is very sad.