Hi, it's Akshad. We have a special bonus episode this week, and it's from the team behind a new podcast called Big Take Asia.

It's a look at the nuclear question in Japan, and it was first published late last month.

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, Radio News.

Last winter, on a windy, chilly morning, Bloomberg's reporter Shoko Oda arrived in a tiny rural city called Kashiwasaki.

It's on the western coast of Japan, surrounded by mountains and rice fields.

And it's about a two-hour bullet train ride from Tokyo. And it's known for heavy snow during the winter, so there's a lot of ski

resorts. The other thing that it's really well known for is really good quality of rice. So there's a lot

of sake brewers that are baking sake there as well.

But Shoko wasn't there for skiing or sake tasting. She was invited to tour the world's biggest

nuclear power plant, known as KK. So KKK stands for Kashabasaki Kariwa, and it's named after

the two cities that it straddles over, and it has seven

nuclear reactors, and it's also the world's biggest nuclear power plant with 8.2 gigawatt capacity.

If KK ran smoothly without any problems, at a very conservative maintenance schedule, it would

produce enough power for roughly 13 million

households in Japan. That's enough to power double the homes in Tokyo. Now, KK doesn't allow

electronic devices in its facility, so Shoko couldn't record anything, but she walked us

through her visit. Nuclear power plants are one of the most highly secured places in Japan.

Lots of checkpoints.

They also give you protective gear.

And then we went inside the actual reactor unit number seven,

where we were taken to an observation deck.

And you could kind of see through the glass, the operating floor, where

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