Greg Johnson wrote:

"In support of my assertion that the government and KEPCO are guilty of obfuscation and dishonesty regarding the restart of the Fukui reactors, here is an article from the Chunichi shinbun indicating that there is enough capacity without the nuclear restart. .the reason is not the one they providedus, a shortage of electricity."

While I am skeptical of KEPCO and the government's shortage estimates, there is another factor that KEPCO and the government did talk about: supply security.
Even the most optimistic estimates by Iida Tetsunari and others showed supply just barely topping supply.
However, utilities normally budget large excesses in supply to deal with sudden spikes, and more importantly to deal with sudden supply disruptions. The thermal plants KEPCO and others have been using are old, and in any case subject to breakdown. Taking several of them off line for maintenance and keeping them in reserve (after all, what if one of the Oi plants has a problem and has to go off line?) is a reasonable and prudent thing to do. In other words, Kansai could have gotten through the summer without restarting the Oi reactors with stringent conservation measures, but even then they would have been "living dangerously" in the sense that one or more power plant failures or other accidents such as an earthquake could have lead to a major blackout and planned rolling blackouts for weeks after.

That said, it seems evident to me, based on polling data, that Kansai residents were willing to "live dangerously" to avoid a restart of the nuclear plants.
So the decision to restart these two plants arguably did not correspond to the preferences of the electorate.

Best Regards,

Paul Midford
Norwegian University for Science and Technology