VIENNA: Japan's minister in charge of handling the Fukushima crisis told an annual gathering of the UN atomic agency Monday that his country had a "safer nuclear future."
"I am convinced we will definitely overcome this challenge and find a prosperous, safer nuclear future," Goshi Hosono told the 151-nation International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) general conference in Vienna.
He said Japan would benefit "from the lessons learned" in the wake of the March disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.
Hosono said the Japanese government last week submitted to the IAEA a new report on dealing with the crisis, details of which were due to be presented later on Monday.
Six months after the massive earthquake and tsunami that caused the disaster at the four-decades-old plant, emergency crews are still struggling to stop radiation seeping out.
Hosono said the government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) still hoped to achieve a stable "cold shutdown" by the end of the year.
The IAEA was expected to endorse at its gathering, which runs until Friday, a safety "action plan" drawn up by agency chief Yukiya Amano, himself Japanese, in the wake of the Fukushima accident.
Critics say the 12-point plan falls well short of promises made in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy and does not oblige countries to comply.
Many of Amano's original proposals, such as mandatory "peer reviews" of reactors by foreign experts and 10 percent of the planet's plants being inspected in the next three years, were watered down.
France, for example, wanted the action plan to be tougher, and Energy Minister Eric Besson called Monday at the IAEA for peer reviews to become standard practice worldwide by mid-2012, and for their results to be published.
Last week the world's nuclear power plant exporters announced in Washington a first-ever code of conduct which they hope will raise safety standards, prevent proliferation and enhance environmental protection.
But the commitments by firms such as France's Areva, US-Japanese firm GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and US giant Westinghouse, three years in the making, are not legally binding.
The chief executive of German industrial giant Siemens was quoted at the weekend as saying the firm was turning its back on managing and building nuclear plants. Germany itself plans to abandon nuclear power by 2022.
Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011
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