OSAKA ¨C Kansai Electric Power Co., angered by the decision earlier this month by the Otsu District Court in Shiga Prefecture to slap a provisional injunction on restarting two reactors at the Takahama nuclear power plant on safety grounds, is lashing out at its critics and threatening to sue them for lost revenue.

¡°As a general rule, seeking damages against such people is a possible target for discussion, although we¡¯ve not decided anything,¡± Kepco President Makoto Yagi said at a new conference on March 18.

Kepco said it was desperate to have Takahama reactors 3 and 4, which are in neighboring Fukui Prefecture, back online before April 1 so it can offer more competitive rates when full deregulation of the electricity market takes place. The utility loses about ?10 billion a month when the reactors are offline.

The plaintiffs in the Shiga case, however, fired back at Yagi last week.

¡°Such comments are a threat to others who don¡¯t want to see another nuclear accident and want to go to court to seek provisional injunctions against other possible restarts throughout Japan,¡± two groups involved in the Shiga case said in a formal letter of protest to Kepco.

With anti-nuclear citizens and their lawyers energized by the court ruling, Kepco and other nuclear advocates in Japan fear a flood of new lawsuits will emerge from residents near any reactor that gets the green light to restart.

Just a couple of days after the Otsu ruling, 67 plaintiffs including atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced they had filed a lawsuit at the Hiroshima District Court to prevent the restart of three reactors at Shikoku Electric Co.¡¯s Ikata nuclear power plant in Ehime Prefecture.

Some of them also filed a separate suit seeking a provisional injunction to effectively block Shikoku Electric from restarting the Ikata plant¡¯s reactor 3, which has already cleared new safety inspections and received local political approval, paving the way for its restart as early as this summer.