I am Takashi Dodo, continuing to serve as the Executive Director of JANTI.

In May this year, Japan went into an extraordinary state of having all of its nuclear plants in shutdown, since they were unable to resume operation even after annual outage had been completed.Yet, the recognition that the nation cannot survive without nuclear power stations has finally started to take hold, resulting in the restart of nuclear plant operations with the precondition to ensure safety, much to the relief of the industry for now.However, in order to restore social trust, it is essential to show, with its behaviors and performance, to what extent the nuclear industry can regulate ourselves.As stated in IAEA’s Fundamental Safety Principles, the prime responsibility for safety rests with the licensees of nuclear facilities.Such licensees must take a defense-in-depth approach, rather than becoming complacent, to work on overcoming any potential vulnerability of their facilities.

Having learned lessons from the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island Unit 2 and Chernobyl Unit 4, JANTI has been an objective observer on the tasks of human error prevention and safety culture enhancement, keeping some distance from licensees in the industry.

Since the core meltdown and resulting radioactive contamination of the environment, which nuclear licensees had long vowed never to allow to happen, JANTI has made analyses and identified “re-affirming nuclear safety” and the “importance of the questioning and learning attitude” as two of the most important lessons we should learn from this accident.From this point of view, we are in the process of going back to the basics and debating whether our earlier activities before the accident were sufficient.Of course, this does not negate, even slightly, the importance of making continuous efforts to prevent human errors and enhance safety culture.Indeed, these aspects should be reinforced and expanded even further for practical application.

The accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station revealed the importance for the industry to make voluntary efforts to attain the world’s highest standards in not only the prevention and mitigation of severe accidents but also in nuclear emergency measures, rather than merely becoming satisfied with meeting regulatory requirements for facility design and equipment.Japan’s electric utilities have already announced their decision to establish a new independent entity for enhancing safety.Our understanding is that this new organization has close and inseparable involvement with activities that JANTI has undertaken thus far.We intend to give full support for the new organization to ensure that our experiences accumulated over the last seven or so years will be utilized to the maximum extent to boost the practical effectiveness of the organization’s activities.

Including the establishment of the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the shift into the new regulatory system, the situations surrounding the nuclear industry are expected to remain fluid in FY2012.

Given such trend and the globally common consensus that nuclear safety could only be achieved when government regulations and voluntary industry efforts work hand in hand, JANTI is committed to progressing ahead with our duties steadily and boldly as one of the organizations that facilitate voluntary industry efforts for nuclear safety,JANTI is committed to progressing ahead with our duties steadily and boldly.

Your continued guidance and support would be sincerely appreciated.