Japan's new enviro minister says nuclear must go

Japan's new environment minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, son of the former prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, says Japan should close down its nuclear power plants. At a news conference reported by Reuters, he said: "I would like to study how we scrap them, not how to retain them." This is a surprising position from someone inside Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's extremely pro-nuclear government. The elder Koizumi, alongside the prime minister at the time the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster began, Naoto Kan, are both outspoken opponents of the continue use of nuclear energy. Abe replaced 19 of his ministers in a cabinet re-shuffle on September 11, including Yoshiaki Harada, the former environment minister, who had made headlines earlier this week by re-iterating Japan's intention to dump radioactively contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear site into the Pacific Oceean (see story below). Read the full article. (Picture by R2d2ki for Wikimedia Commons)