article: Japan's nuclear plants had been switched off after the meltdown at the Fukushima plant in March 2011 caused by a tsunami following an earthquake. More than 100,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding area. This switch-back-on will be the first of many. But, after one of the most shocking incidents in nuclear power's history, four experts talk to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme about whether we can continue to live with the technology. Tatsujiro Suzuki was vice-chairman of the Japanese government's Atomic Energy Commission at the time of the Fukushima disaster. He is now director of the research centre for nuclear weapons abolition at Nagasaki University. "I thought [Fukushima] would be the end of the nuclear industry in Japan: it was very shocking. "I personally felt very responsible for the event and I felt very sorry for the Fukushima people. It was not just a technical issue. This kind of accident has a serious social, ethical, political impact on their lives. "We expected that there would be no such serious accident in Japan. In our culture if you speak of the devil he will show up. So you better not speak the bad thing. There's no Japanese translation of the word 'risk', so there's no 'risk analysis' or 'risk assessment': we call it 'safety analysis', 'safety assessment'. "In the public mind there was no clear connection between the peaceful use of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Most people in Japan are against nuclear weapons, but the majority of the public were not against nuclear power. "As you saw pictures of the explosion and people evacuating from their homes and becoming concerned about radiation, people started to think this could have the same impact as nuclear weapons. Finally, people started to realise radiation is radiation. "It is a huge, huge loss of public trust. It's going to take a long long time to recover it." Miranda Shreuers is director of the Environmental Policy Research Centre at the Free University in Berlin. She was asked to join the commission to determine Germany's nuclear policy after the Fukushima disaster. "Germany had always looked at Japan as a peer, a country of similar technological capacity, so the question was really, could something like that happen in Germany? "After Fukushima, Germany reached something that you don't find in many other countries that have nuclear energy: a cross-party consensus that nuclear is not the future. That lies with other areas, with energy efficiency, with smart cities, with new technologies. "We're going to phase out nuclear energy and, at the same time, phase out of other fossil fuels: so a double phase-out, that really is historic. "Germany has a history of division, so there was always concern that there could someday be new conflict, and concern about the connection between conventional nuclear and military purposes of nuclear. "That contributed in the 1970s to the development of an environment peace movement and anti-nuclear movement that came together in a much stronger way than it did in most other places. "The best thing that Germany can do is to present
summary: As Japan restarts its nuclear power industry four years after the Fukushima disaster, have we learned to make peace with the technology?