Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), a name that resonates with the same soothing comfort as 'Iceberg' did to the stewards of the Titanic, has decided that the statute of limitations on collective trauma has finally expired. With the practiced nonchalance of a gambler who has already lost the house but still has a few chips hidden in his sock, the utility has commenced the process of restarting Reactor No. 7 at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant. One must admire the audacity. It is the kind of institutional bravado that only exists when one is shielded by layers of bureaucratic padding and the singular knowledge that, in the event of another 'unforeseen' geophysics-related inconvenience, the taxpayer will be the one holding the glowing bill.

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is not merely a power plant; it is the world’s largest nuclear facility, a sprawling monument to the twentieth century’s belief that we could domesticate the atom with enough concrete and a rigorous filing system. It has sat in a state of expensive hibernation for years, not because of a sudden surplus of wind-chime energy, but because of a series of security lapses that would be considered slapstick if they didn’t involve radioactive materials. We are talking about the kind of security protocols where employees were caught using their colleagues’ ID cards to access the control room—a level of professional rigor usually reserved for teenagers trying to buy cheap lager at a convenience store.

The restart of Reactor No. 7 is presented to us as a triumph of engineering and a necessity of the modern age. We are told that 'safety measures' have been enhanced, a phrase that carries all the weight of a 'Wet Floor' sign placed at the bottom of a tsunami. TEPCO has spent the last few years performing a sort of corporate penance, or at least the aesthetic equivalent of one, installing sea walls and promising that, this time, they have checked the locks. It is a delightful bit of theater. The regulatory bodies, those magnificent architects of the 'I’m sure it’s fine' school of thought, have lifted their bans, effectively telling the world that TEPCO has learned its lesson. One wonders what the lesson was: perhaps that if you wait long enough, the screams of the previous disaster eventually fade into the background noise of the next fiscal quarter.

There is a certain European exhaustion in watching this play out. In the West, we pretend to have rigorous debates about the merits of nuclear power, weighing the carbon-neutral benefits against the minor inconvenience of total ecological collapse. In Japan, however, the irony is more concentrated. This is a nation that sits on the Ring of Fire, a geological reality that TEPCO seems to treat as a minor zoning issue. To restart the world’s largest nuclear plant, under the management of the company that gave us the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, is a gesture of such profound cynicism that it borders on the poetic. It is the ultimate 'reboot,' an attempt to return to a status quo that was proven to be a fantasy over a decade ago.

The absurdity lies in the inevitability. Japan, a resource-poor archipelago, feels it has no choice but to return to the radioactive womb. The logic is impeccably grim: the economy requires power, the power requires reactors, and the reactors require a company that knows how to operate them—even if that company’s primary historical contribution is demonstrating how not to operate them. It is a closed loop of incompetence and necessity. We are told that local governors have given their 'understanding,' which is the political term for 'I have been promised enough subsidies to ignore the tremor in my hands.'

As Philomena, I find the most exquisite part of this saga to be the 'Safety Culture' seminars TEPCO surely holds. One can imagine the PowerPoints: Slide 1: Don't let the ocean inside. Slide 2: Use your own ID badge. Slide 3: Try to look concerned when the sirens go off. It is the bureaucratization of catastrophe. We treat these existential risks as if they are HR violations or minor accounting errors. The reality is that we are entrusting the most dangerous toy in the nursery to the child who already burned the house down, simply because he promises he has read the instructions this time.

And so, Reactor No. 7 hums back to life. It is a victory for 'energy security,' a term that sounds increasingly like a euphemism for 'keeping the lights on while we whistle past the graveyard.' The world watches with a mixture of apathy and 'I told you so's' already drafted and saved in their templates. We are living in a tragicomedy where the actors have forgotten their lines but the stage remains rigged with explosives. TEPCO is back in business, and the rest of us are left to hope that the next 'once-in-a-thousand-years' event decides to wait at least another decade. After all, we have spreadsheets to finish, and the theater of the absurd requires a great deal of electricity to stay lit.