Chapter Ten
The Future of Nuclear Energy in Japan
THE GREATEST UNCERTAINTY to emerge from the Fukushima catastrophe is whether Japan will turn away from nuclear power and embrace alternative ways to generate electricity. If it does, will this further inhibit the international nuclear industry? The choice Japan makes is dependent on commercial interests, public opinion, and factionalised politics. Whether opposition to nuclear power will be strong enough to overcome support for it cannot be predicted with any confidence at the time of writing, but informed speculation is possible.
With his limited experience, former Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) prime minister Naoto Kan tried valiantly to handle the situation at Fukushima. Immediately after the tsunami, he mobilised 100,000 troops and accepted foreign emergency aid, a positive contrast to the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) fumbling response to the Kobe earthquake in 1995. But in the first two frantic weeks following the nuclear meltdown, he acted in ways that the Japanese have learnt to expect from their political leaders. He initially downplayed the seriousness of the accident and denied that a radiation leak had occurred, going so far as to suppress a situation report urgently prepared and submitted to him on 25 March by Shunsuke Kondo, head of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission. Using matter-of-fact language, Kondo had advised Kan that if there were explosions not just in protective structures but within the reactor vessels themselves, if complete meltdowns occurred, or if the cooling ponds suffered from catastrophic structural failure, radiation levels would soar. If so, the reactor complex would have to be abandoned, and ‘voluntary’ evacuation orders issued to everyone living within 250 kilometres of the reactors, including the 35 million residents of Tokyo and its suburbs. Knowing that such evacuation would have been an all-but-impossible task, the cabinet minister in charge of the crisis, Goshi Hosono, later said, ‘It was a scenario based on hypothesis ... We were concerned about the possibility of causing excessive and unnecessary worry if we went ahead and made [the report] public.’
Kan and his government not only kept the Kondo evaluation from the public, they also failed to take friendly countries into their confidence through their Tokyo legations. After completing his posting to Tokyo at the end of 2011, Australian ambassador Murray McLean told journalist Rick Wallace (in The Weekend Australian of 10–11 March 2012) that during the early days of the crisis he and several of his colleagues were kept in the dark about the Japanese government’s worst fears, thus frustrating efforts to make realistic evacuation plans for Australian citizens. ‘It was very difficult indeed to know there had been obvious damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant and not being told very much about it,’ he said. ‘If you believe some of the accounts of some of the insiders, [the government] knew a lot more than they were telling the public [or us] and that’s frustrating.’
Although he suppressed Kondo’s report, Kan was no doubt rattled, and he began to lose his composure as the situation deteriorated. He was receiving worst-case scenarios from his officials, but nothing concrete from TEPCO either to support or dispel them. On live television, his temper flared when he angrily demanded to know from TEPCO officials, ‘What the hell is going on?’ — an uncharacteristic outburst, but a good question: the company had been remarkably slow to disclose information. It had not been forthcoming about the extent of radiation leaking from the stricken reactors, it had delayed releasing information about the meltdowns in three reactors and one spent-fuel storage pool, and it had allowed its president, Masataka Shimizu, to disappear for almost a month right after the disaster.
Kan bruised TEPCO’s feelings further by publicly calling on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and US military-radiation experts in Japan to provide more competent and accurate information than he was obtaining from his own officials. He rejected TEPCO’s demand to evacuate workers from the complex, and ordered them to stay and try to restore cooling functions. He launched an independent investigation into the accident, and called on all nuclear-power operators to submit their reactors to unprecedentedly exacting stress tests. He pressured the Chubu Electric Power Company to shut down its Hamaoka nuclear complex, which was on the coast south-west of Tokyo, highly vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. An accident at Hamaoka similar to Fukushima would have exposed the entire Tokyo metropolitan area to radiation with no practical possibility of evacuation. (This danger remains.)
Kan commissioned other emergency work in the Tōhoku region promptly and with vigour. He presided over evacuations and quickly arranged for the building of temporary houses. In ten weeks, 27,700 were constructed, just short of the 30,000 he promised by that deadline. In July, he announced that he would cancel the national energy plan that was to generate more than half of the nation’s electricity by augmenting the existing fleet of 54 nuclear reactors with another 14 by 2030. A trained engineer, Kan publicly questioned the nation’s dangerous dependency on the flawed technology of nuclear energy, and called for the separation of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency from the pro-nuclear Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI). He announced his intention to introduce legislation for the rapid expansion of the neglected renewable-energy sector, and openly talked of ending the power monopoly of the country’s ten electricity utility companies, splitting the function of electricity generation from distribution, and giving renewable-energy providers subsidised access to the energy-generation market.
If it had had the chance to absorb the implications of Kan’s suggestions, a frightened and confused public might have endorsed all or most of them. But amid continuing social chaos created by the earthquake and aftershocks, the tsunami, and reactor meltdowns, few people could focus rationally on what he was saying. In the meantime, he was creating some powerful enemies, not least in the Diet. The conservative opposition Liberal Democratic Party, unceremoniously dumped in September 2009 by an electorate tired of the party’s drawn-out political entropy, remained solidly pro-nuclear. During its tenure, the LDP had greedily supped at the table of industry largesse. Its pro-nuclear advocacy had been richly rewarded by huge donations to its coffers from TEPCO and the nine other Japanese electric utilities. According to a Japan-based political-science academic, American Jeff Kingston, 92.5 per cent of executives at nine of Japan’s ten electric utilities made political donations to the LDP, but none gave to the DPJ, a shady and collusive arrangement that placed the nuclear village’s interests ahead of public safety. Meanwhile, when the DPJ replaced the LDP, its leaders were less than fully committed to policies that would rein in the nuclear village — including, it seems, the DPJ’s founder and brilliant maverick politician, Ichiro Ozawa. Ozawa could have supported Kan’s radical reform agenda and helped him retain power as prime minister. Instead, he discredited Kan’s vision of a clean and green Japan without the threat of nuclear accidents, and engaged in petty pointscoring to assert his influence and force Kan’s resignation.
As for the electric-utility monopolies, they were predictably appalled by Kan’s plans. TEPCO knowingly and maliciously spread damaging disinformation about Kan’s role in the crisis — that when he visited the Fukushima complex on 12 March 2011, he overrode a decision to vent the reactors and ordered the cessation of sea water being pumped into them. He had done neither, but the allegations added to popular discontent, and the search for a scapegoat began. The electorate had dumped the old LDP regime without being certain of what it wanted a new and apparently progressive government to do, and Kan became a lightning rod for criticism. It was only a matter of time before he, like his ill-fated DPJ predecessor, Yukio Hatoyama, became another victim of Japan’s political revolving door. He fell on his sword and resigned in August 2011 — the seventh prime minister to do so in six years.
The DPJ replaced Naoto Kan with Yoshihiko Noda, a former finance minister and economic reformer, but not, like Kan, a nuclear sceptic. More of a lower-key consensus-builder than Kan, Noda quickly went on the public record to say that, on the one hand, nuclear energy might have a limited future in Japan, but on the other, reactors would have to continue to generate electric power for some time to prevent the country from sliding into recession. In a speech delivered on 23 September 2011 to a United Nations meeting on nuclear safety and security, Noda gave his delivery a stronger pro-nuclear bias. ‘Japan is determined to raise the safety of nuclear-power generation to the highest level in the world,’ he said. ‘Japan stands ready to respond to the interest of countries seeking to use nuclear-power generation.’ Like many of his colleagues, he appeared perpetually to be looking over his shoulder to see how to formulate strategies that would allow him to hold onto power. Given the power of the nuclear village, any courageous move to change energy strategy seemed to be beyond him, even if he had had more Diet support than he in fact enjoyed.
Public anti-nuclear sentiment was strong, but perhaps not yet strong enough to make Noda and his colleagues change their positions. To create a new consensus was risky. Supporters of the old paradigm would have to reconsider their assumptions and change long-standing views. And the status quo in Japan on nuclear power has long been supported by a wide network of powerful interests, including banks that finance the industry, heavy-machinery companies that make the nuclear components of reactors, trading companies that sell uranium fuel to utilities at high prices, overseas mining companies that sell the uranium, and the shipping companies that transport it, as well as the intricate and closely networked international nuclear industry that refines and enriches it, and fabricates it into pellets that go into carefully crafted fuel rods. Inhabitants of Japanese towns and villages have benefited economically from hosting nuclear reactors, and the media and public relations firms make tidy profits from copious advertising aimed at convincing the public that nuclear power is good for them.
Notwithstanding all these pro-nuclear forces, anti-nuclear feelings in Japan are growing. The centuries-old social strictures under which the Japanese live make them, except in rare circumstances, quite reticent about publicly expressing their objections. But in the 1950s, two exceptional events generated strong feelings of public indignation: nuclear irradiation of Daigo Fukuryū Maru, the Japanese tuna-fishing boat blanketed in fallout from American hydrogen-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific; and renewal of the United States–Japan Security Treaty which guaranteed US nuclear protection of Japan. Although social and political opinion in Japan is not uniformly intense, articulate and vocal opposition to nuclear power is now being expressed.
By June 2011, opinion polls showed a significant erosion of support. According to data compiled by Jeff Kingston, the Asahi Shimbun reported a decline from 43 per cent in favour of nuclear power in May 2011 to 37 per cent in June. Over the same period, opposition grew from 32 to 42 per cent. More dramatic were polls that showed proponents of nuclear power among the public making up only 4 per cent (Sankei Shimbun), 5 per cent (Asahi), 7 per cent (NHK, Japan’s main public broadcaster), or 10 per cent of the population (Yomiuri). In June 2011, NHK reported that between April and June, support for maintaining the status quo on nuclear power had declined from 42 to 27 per cent, while support for reducing nuclear power rose from 32 to 47 per cent. A Mainichi Shimbun nationwide opinion poll in mid-May found that 66 per cent supported Kan’s initiative to shut down the Hamaoka nuclear-power complex of four reactors, with only 25 per cent opposed. It also found that only 31 per cent of those polled continued to believe that nuclear power was indispensable, down from 40 per cent in April. There has only been a further erosion of public support since then. On 18 March 2012, a poll of 3000 voters conducted by the Tokyo Shimbun indicated that 80 per cent of them supported the idea of ending nuclear power — not necessarily in one fell swoop, but over a period of around ten years.
The swing against nuclear power has been buttressed by unprecedented sayonara genpatsu (goodbye-to-nuclear) rallies in Tokyo and other major cities. One of the largest, approximately 60,000 strong, was held in a public park in Tokyo on 19 September 2011. After Fukushima, prominent Japanese also became outspoken advocates for abolition. They included a Nobel laureate for literature, Kenzaburo Oe, musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, filmmaker Yoji Yamada, novelist Haruki Murakami, and Masazumi Harada, a publicly celebrated physician who identified mercury poisoning in industrial waste at the town of Minamata in the 1950s. In an interview with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker magazine, Murakami said, ‘[Fukushima is Japan’s] second massive nuclear disaster. But this time no one dropped a bomb on us. We set the stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own lands, and we are destroying our own lives ... While we are the victims, we are also the perpetrators. We must fix our eyes on this fact. If we fail to do so, we will inevitably repeat the same mistake again, somewhere else.’ The group of intellectuals collected 10 million signatures against nuclear energy, and planned further rallies around Japan in 2012.
Satoshi Kamata, a prominent journalist who has covered nuclear matters for 40 years, became an unofficial spokesman for the group. Rejecting vague or moralistic generalities, he publicly outlined a set of priorities that he urged the government to adopt. They included, in chronological order:
Announcing the reasons for his wish list, Kamata said that neither the nuclear-power authorities nor the government could be trusted to give an honest portrayal of the dangers of nuclear power. He characterised METI and the National Security Commission as being ‘like a crooked pitcher and umpire at a baseball match’. He added that only 12 of 54 reactors were online in Japan (by October 2011, that number had fallen to 11, and by May 2012 to none) with no energy shortages, and that Japan had a reserve of fossil-fuelled power plants, including natural gas and coal, which could be used to bridge the power gap until sufficient renewable-power plants were built.
Crucially, agreement from local and prefectural councils is mandatory before national authorities can give approval for the operation of nuclear reactors. In his 1998 book NIMBY Politics in Japan, the Australian academic Hayden Lesbirel showed how siting and constructing nuclear reactors in Japan was always a highly contentious issue for local governments. Constitutionally, the state has eminent-domain powers that in principle can force the acquisition of land for reactor construction; but during times of nuclear expansion in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the government chose bargaining and compensation as a wiser course than pre-emption. This resulted in long delays in the approval process, and some locations were rejected outright by citizens’ groups, fisheries’ cooperatives, and local governments.
A nuclear power plant proposed in the early 1960s by the Chubu Electric Power Company in Mie prefecture, on the Kii Peninsula, was one that was rejected. Three hundred kilometres south-west of Tokyo, the site was ideal — on flat and comparatively stable terrain, with readily available cooling water, a relatively low population density, accessible to major transportation routes, and close to major loading centres. The prefecture was falling behind its neighbours — Aichi, Gifu, Kyoto, Nara, and Wakayama — in economic growth, and the governor, Satoshi Tanaka, favoured construction. But when Chubu began drilling investigations on 6 January 1964, a group of local fishing cooperatives, fearing that the reactor would endanger yellowtail fishing and pearl cultivation, began a vehement protest movement. It dragged on for 36 years without resolution, until a nuclear accident occurred in September 1999 at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s Tokaimura complex in Ibaraki prefecture on the Pacific coast, 120 kilometres north of Tokyo. Three plant workers were killed when they placed 2.4 kilograms of enriched uranium in a stainless-steel bucket, setting off a nuclear chain-reaction. The public reacted strongly to what was widely seen as the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, and the new governor in Mie-ken, Masayasu Kitagawa, cancelled the Mie project.
Another site that caused strong opposition was Chubu’s plant at Hamaoka in Omaezaki, Shizuoka prefecture, 200 kilometres south-west of Tokyo. Construction of the complex began in July 1967. The Japan Socialist Party and Japanese Communist Party joined local residents in opposing it, arguing among other things that it was on an earthquake fault line. Local whitebait fishermen joined in, arguing that the plant would raise the temperature of waters in their fishing grounds. But Chubu used clever public-relations tactics to wear down its opponents. At its own expense, the company invited protesters to visit reactors at other complexes with good safety records around Japan. It held lectures emphasising the safety features and economic benefits of ‘modern’ nuclear power plants. It arranged cocktail parties and banquets. It solicited support from the Sankei Shimbun newspaper group, local governments, mayors, and agricultural cooperatives. The site was approved and the reactors built, only to have prime minister Naoto Kan force closure of the complex after Fukushima because of its perceived vulnerability to tsunamis and its closeness to the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. A local mayor and a group of citizens subsequently filed a court application to have the whole complex closed indefinitely.
The fact is that whenever Japan’s nuclear industry has encountered resistance from industries and residents close to reactor sites, it has attempted to persuade them with propaganda, tax concessions, financial incentives, and other forms of bribery. Usually these have worked, but only after lengthy delays, and sometimes not even then.
According to Lesbirel, the average lead-time for the approval of reactors in Japan has been 154 months, from project inception until reactor start-up. Since the meltdowns and venting of radiation at Fukushima Dai-ichi, the lead-time is likely to be even longer and to result in even more rejections. Many local and prefectural governments not only oppose new reactors, but want to close existing ones. The Fukushima government was the first. On 22 October 2011, it adopted a petition calling for all ten reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi and Dai-ni complexes to be decommissioned.
Thirteen other prefectural assemblies in Japan host nuclear-power stations, and some of them may follow the Fukushima example. At the time of writing, it is not clear whether they will even agree to restart reactors shut down for routine inspections or safety checks in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. What occurred at Kyushu Electric Power Company’s Genkai nuclear complex in Saga prefecture in June 2011 may be a pointer to local attitudes. Following the Fukushima disaster, all six Genkai reactors were sequentially shut down for ‘routine maintenance’ with no definite schedule for restarting them — the first time in 31 years this had happened. METI arranged a public forum to brief local residents about safety measures at the complex. It was later revealed that, prior to the meeting, the Kyushu Electric Power Company had asked its employees and those of subsidiary companies to post online comments favourable to restarting the reactors. The utility helpfully supplied respondents with talking points: that blackouts might cause children and old people to suffer heatstroke, that businesses would suffer, and that electricity bills would rise. Amid growing public anger, other utilities around Japan were found to have used similar tactics to create the illusion of wide public support for the continuation of nuclear power.
A disincentive for terminating nuclear power is the effect it would have on Japan’s commitment to reduce carbon emissions. Prior to March 2011, Japan was on course to meet its Kyoto Protocol target of 6 per cent reduction levels from 1990 by 2012. This was due to a sharp economic downturn, and efforts by companies and households to reduce their energy consumption. But the nation’s aim of achieving more ambitious long-term emission-reduction targets of 25 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050 depended heavily on expanding the use of nuclear power for electricity generation rather than on developing alternative energy sources. Japan’s fleet of 54 reactors generated just under 30 per cent of the nation’s electricity — a share that would rise to 50 per cent by 2030 with 14 new reactors coming online.
Until a decision is made to fully resume the nuclear program, to turn to renewables, or to undertake a strategy combining both, Japan will have to depend on existing fossil-fuelled and hydropower plants, augmented by the few reactors that Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has approved starting up again. The fact is that, through propaganda, bribery, influence-peddling, standover tactics, and bureaucratic manoeuvres, the nuclear village has successfully inhibited the wholesale development of renewable-energy technologies. The result is a scattering of roof-mounted photovoltaic cells around the country, a few wind farms, and a couple of electricity-storage plants, such as a rechargeable flow-batteries complex installed at Tomari Wind Hills in the northern island of Hokkaido.
The situation may be about to change in two ways. First, by saving energy. Japanese cities are already doing so by shutting down lighting in public buildings overnight. Eighty per cent of the member companies of Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation) have expressed their readiness to try to meet the government’s 25 per cent reduction target by 2020 by introducing an aggressive energy-saving program that involves taking it in turns to shut down their factories. By changing their own housekeeping strategies, resilient and resourceful private householders are finding ways to reduce their own energy consumption.
Second, Japanese industry and government are beginning to look more positively at renewables. Crucial to their success are two requirements — energy banks to store electricity for use at night or when the wind does not blow, and a feed-in tariff that allows individual renewable-electricity producers to be reimbursed for the contribution their power input makes to the grid. Such a system has been operating in Australia and Europe for years; but until the Fukushima crisis, the ten electricity utilities successfully opposed a smart grid in Japan. Before he resigned in August 2011, prime minister Naoto Kan demanded and obtained the passage of legislation for an electricity feed-in tariff system. He also proposed creating ‘eco towns’, after the German model, which would be highly resilient to natural disasters, although no concrete steps were taken to implement such schemes before his resignation.
A persistent mantra of the nuclear industry is that, apart from fossil fuels, only nuclear power can meet base-load electricity requirements. This argument has become increasingly threadbare as technical breakthroughs are made in storage technology, and energy banks are created to hold hydro and geothermal power, as well as intermittent power derived from wind and solar energy. The challenge is to equalise electricity supply and demand over a 24-hour period. The range of technologies is broad. Hydropower can be mechanically stored by pumping water to high reservoirs during off-peak periods and releasing it through turbines and generators at times of peak demand. A wide range of batteries is becoming less expensive with greater storage capacity. Thermal energy can be stored in the form of ice, accumulated at night for use in the cooling systems of office buildings during daylight hours. Electrochemical fuel cells, developed to provide power during manned space flights, can be increased in capacity for grid storage. Compressed air can be stored in disused underground mines, for release through turbines at times of peak demand. Molten salt can store solar heat in specially designed heat towers, for use in turning water into steam to drive turbines and generators, much as nuclear reactors do. Chemical storage techniques are also being developed using hydrogen, biofuels, liquid nitrogen, and hydrogen peroxide. Japan is already a world leader in hybrid-automobile technology. A concerted effort by government and industry to extend that leadership — into the successful commercial coupling of renewable-energy generation with grid storage — is all it would take to make nuclear energy a technology of the past.
The process has already begun. In April 2011, shortly after Fukushima, the climate-change division of the Ministry of the Environment hired experts to study the commercial feasibility of installing small- to medium-scale renewable-electricity generators in the Tōhoku and Kantō (Tokyo) regions. For photovoltaic installations, it surveyed annual solar radiance on the Sanriku coast, the northern part of the Kantō region, Yamanashi prefecture, and the Bōsō and Izu peninsulas. It found that strong winds blew on a more or less regular basis, offshore and on, in parts of Hokkaido and Tōhoku, making them suitable for wind farms. It surveyed rivers, agricultural canals, reservoirs, and sewerage systems in mountainous areas for small-scale hydro-electric installations. It examined geothermal resources, within a commercially viable range of 53 to 150 degrees Celsius, in well-known hot-spring resort areas of Tōhoku. By the spring of 2012, no construction had yet begun, but each of these possibilities could encourage commercial engagement by Japanese enterprises.
Following the environment ministry report, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun published a survey of renewables in Japan in June 2011. It favoured wind power over solar, quoting International Energy Agency findings that the wind generated a global output of 120 gigawatts in 2008 — eight times more than solar power — and had the potential to generate 535 gigawatts worldwide by 2020, exceeding the 502 gigawatts currently generated by nuclear. The newspaper lamented the fact that despite all the nation’s industrial skills, Japan did not have a major wind-turbine factory. Even Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Japan’s largest wind-turbine maker, was not among the world’s top-ten manufacturers. Here indeed was a challenge to gain a pre-eminent position. Wind turbines are constructed from at least 10,000 parts. In a burgeoning wind-power sector, Japan could adopt exactly the same high standards of product coordination as it does with its intricate and efficient system of small- and medium-scale industries producing parts for motor-vehicle companies. With expectations of a dramatic reduction in the export of nuclear-power components, Japan might be able to make wind turbines a major export item.
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun added that wind-power promotion in Japan could have a ripple effect into neighbouring economies, as assembly of turbines requires large work forces. According to the research division of the Mizuho Corporate Bank, building a 1 million kilowatt wind farm could create 12,500 turbine-making and 1200 plant-building jobs. When the Tōhoku Electric Power Company announced in autumn 2011 that it would buy wind-generated power, existing wind companies offered to sell it 2.5 million kilowatts — ten times more than the utility planned at that stage to purchase. With its nuclear reactors offline, it might be prepared to purchase a lot more in the future.
Also in June 2011, Haruo Shimada of the Chiba University of Commerce published a visionary report on the construction of a solar- and wind-energy economic zone along the devastated Tōhoku coastline. If replicated in other parts of the country, it would enable Japan to dramatically reduce its reliance on fossil-fuelled and nuclear power plants. Solar panels a few hundred metres wide, mounted on platforms 20 metres high for protection against tsunamis, would line dozens of kilometres of coastline. Towns and factories could be built beneath. Making use of Japan’s auto-making and ship-building technologies, wind turbines could be constructed and anchored offshore on large floating platforms. They could also be utilised as commercial fishing docks and seaweed nurseries to produce biomass. Shimada estimated the creation of more than 100,000 full-time jobs for farmers and fishermen dispossessed of their land and fishing boats as a result of the tsunami and radiation pollution.
Along similar lines are the ideas of Masayoshi Son, CEO and chairman of Japanese computer giant SoftBank. While publicly launching his Renewable Energy Foundation in Tokyo in September 2011, Son shared his thoughts on the future of electric-power generation in Japan. Before Fukushima, he believed that at ¥5–6 per kilowatt hour (12–16 cents Australian), nuclear was the most inexpensive way of generating electricity. But the actual cost was ¥15–20 and, after Fukushima, that did not include the cost of the accident, which was incalculable. He believed that the true cost of nuclear power should include local subsidies, nuclear-waste processing costs, and accident coverage. The number three reactor at Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland (a so-called advanced thermal reactor, of French design), was subject to wildly escalating construction costs, adding to the eventual cost per kilowatt hour to the consumer. By the end of 2010, power production costs for solar and nuclear energy in the United States had intersected. Residential solar cannot yet be compared with wholesale nuclear, which supplies the wholesale electricity market in countries in which it is installed. But solar is now competitive with retail prices of electricity in some parts of the world. And when they are built in the coming decade, large solar-power stations will very likely be competitive with nuclear in both the wholesale and retail markets. Meanwhile, natural-energy production is dramatically increasing in Europe, the United States, and China. Countries such as Germany, France, and Spain have set their energy targets from natural sources at 20–30 per cent by 2020.
According to Son, the key to incentive is government policy:
For us to head toward a clean and more inexpensive option over the long term ... [a]ll the government needs to do is take solar power purchasing policy it is already discussing one step further and simply add a line, ‘Purchase of all power at 40 yen for [the next] 20 years’ ... [I]s it not sheer nonsense to cling to nuclear power when it will recede in the future instead of taking the path that ... will definitely lead to cost reduction? ... Solar, solar thermal, wind, geothermal, biomass, oceanic energy and other blessings of nature can be used for thousands of years without contaminating the Earth. These are forms of energy that coexist with nature without destroying it ... Ports of the past could gain new life as ports of solar and wind energy. Such a recovery project would create huge job opportunities for the region’s people, and Japanese manufacturers already have the number-one solar technology in the world. Instead of exporting it, we should use it domestically to create the world’s largest solar belt.
These are grand visions indeed, but none will be translated into reality without enormous political struggle. Politicians will have to desist from the immensely unstable process of annual prime-ministerial replacements, and foster less opportunistic and more responsible debate in the Diet. Another charismatic and long-serving leader, like Shigeru Yoshida (1948–1954), Eisaku Sato (1964–1972), or Junichiro Koizumi (2001–2006), may emerge to lead the way. But it is hard to pick such a politician from the current bunch in the Democratic Party of Japan, let alone from the opposing Liberal Democrats.
Meanwhile, the pro-nuclear lobby may be recovering some of the strength that was shattered after Fukushima. On 23 September 2011, Stephen Hesse, a commentator for The Japan Times, found it deeply troubling that Prime Minister Noda, so new to office, had already ‘fallen on his knees’ before nuclear-village bureaucrats. Hopes to reform the METI were proving illusory, as three crucial jobs went to three pro-nuclear bureaucrats — Kensuke Adachi, administrative vice-minister, Ichiro Takahara, director-general of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy (ANRE), and Hiroyuki Fukano, director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA). Bureaucrats within ANRE, in particular, had built a wide variety of policy instruments to bring public opinion in line with their goals of energy security and the continuing use of nuclear power. These included an invisible tax on electricity use called the Dengen Sanpō, which funnels hundreds of millions of yen in cash and infrastructure projects to communities that host nuclear power plants; creation by bureaucrats of public-school science curricula emphasising the safety and necessity of nuclear power; and annual fairs held exclusively for farmers and fishermen from areas near nuclear reactors to ensure that they have a market for their goods despite concerns about nuclear contamination.
Another group exerting pressure on Japan to resume nuclear power is the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agency has the international responsibilities of discouraging nuclear-weapons proliferation while promoting the civilian use of nuclear energy — in the eyes of many observers, contradictory missions. Following the stewardship of Mohamed ElBaradei from 1997 to 2009, the director-generalship of the agency went to a Japanese nuclear bureaucrat, Yukiya Amano. In his previous life, Amano had supported the expansion of Japan’s nuclear fleet. On 31 January 2012, a visiting IAEA mission concluded that safety checks on Japan’s reactors since Fukushima were adequate, and that undamaged ones could be restarted. (At that stage, all but two of the country’s 54 reactors were offline).
To reassure the Japanese public further, cabinet established the new nuclear-safety agency foreshadowed by former prime minister Kan. Removed from METI, which as both promoter and regulator of the nuclear industry had an obvious conflict of interests, the agency was placed in the Ministry of the Environment. It combined the work of three formerly disparate bodies: NISA from METI, the Cabinet Office’s Nuclear Safety Commission, and a technical group responsible for monitoring radioactive materials, hitherto in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology.
But neither the IAEA findings nor the establishment of a new regulatory agency are likely to convince a deeply sceptical Japanese public about the safety of nuclear reactors. Some Japanese experts question the validity of the IAEA findings, and claim that its visit to Japan was just for show. University of Tokyo professor Hiromitsu Ino and former nuclear engineer Masashi Goto asserted, ‘It is obvious that a visit by an international organisation advocating nuclear power is part of a political agenda that is built into a story already formulated in advance.’ Ino and Goto said the IAEA tests only simulated one natural disaster at a time, and did not take into account the possibility of the sort of equipment failure and human error seen at Fukushima.
Another report emerged to deepen public scepticism. Commissioned by the government-sanctioned Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, and chaired by Koichi Kitazawa, former president of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, it was released in February 2012. Distilling the findings of 30 experts, who had interviewed 300 engineers and technicians employed by TEPCO at Fukushima Dai-ichi at the time of the disaster, it was a damning indictment of the inaction of TEPCO and the government.
Initially, an operator had failed to notice that during the earthquake an isolation-condenser valve in Unit One had been closed when it should have been open. This led to a chain of errors and oversights. Operators had been completely untrained to prevent the rapidly cascading events leading to meltdowns. TEPCO had delayed venting hydrogen build-up in the reactors for seven long hours. Its ‘abnormal operating procedures’ manual of 1994 was outdated, and did not address the possibility of a prolonged loss of power at a nuclear plant. The relevant branch office of the government’s emergency-response headquarters, established in the aftermath of the 1999 nuclear accident at Tokaimura, was not operating at the time of the meltdowns. The government’s environmental-radiation detection system, set up in 1984 to monitor emergency radiation doses among the community, was not used because the authorities did not want to alarm people unduly.
Among the report’s other findings were that TEPCO had been psychologically unprepared to handle the situation because it had been fooled by its own propaganda about the ‘absolute safety’ of nuclear reactors; that the size of the tsunami could and should have been anticipated; that there had been a failure of communications at a senior level at TEPCO — neither chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata nor president Masataka Shimizu were available at the time to make timely organisational decisions; and that there were egregious failures of communication between TEPCO and the Kan government. The report concluded that the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex demonstrated the dangers inherent in building clusters of reactors, whether to save money, allay public anxiety, or for whatever other expedient reason.
An even more damning report was published by the Japanese government on 5 July 2012, substantiating the findings of this book. The Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) — chaired by Kiyoshi Kurokawa, former president of the Science Council of Japan — was the first commission on any subject sanctioned by the National Diet in its 66-year postwar history. The NAIIC conducted 900 hours of public hearings, interviewed 1167 witnesses, toured several Japanese nuclear power plants, and interviewed nuclear experts in Belarus, France, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.
The members of the commission were unambiguously critical of both Japan’s nuclear village and aspects of Japanese culture. They found that nuclear power had become an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society. Its regulation was entrusted to the same bureaucracy responsible for its promotion, and the industry’s conceits were reinforced by the ingrained societal conventions of reflexive obedience, reluctance to question authority, collective devotion to ‘sticking with the program’, groupism, and insularity.
The conclusion reached by the NAIIC was that the ‘direct causes of the accident were all foreseeable’ prior to 11 March 2011.
The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly ‘manmade.’
Because of these and earlier findings, a number of governments of prefectures in which reactors are located have rejected suggestions that the reactors be restarted. Stress tests commissioned by the Kan government, in particular, are not seen as sufficient to allow them to give approval for restarts. There is no legal requirement for local governments to approve restarts, but it is customary to do so, and the Noda government would risk much censure if it goes ahead without such approval. The general feeling in Japan is that if offline nuclear reactors are brought back into operation, more nuclear accidents like the cascading disaster at Fukushima are likely to happen. Charles Perrow, emeritus professor of sociology at Yale, could have been closely reflecting the thoughts of many when he observed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in December 2011:
Governments regulate risky industrial systems such as nuclear power plants in hopes of making them less risky, and a variety of formal and informal warning systems can help society avoid catastrophe ... But recent history is rife with major disasters accompanied by failed regulations, ignored warnings, inept disaster response, and commonplace human error. Furthermore, despite the best attempts to forestall them, ‘normal’ accidents will inevitably occur in the complex, tightly coupled systems of modern society, resulting in the kind of unpredictable, cascading disaster seen at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Government and business can always do more to prevent serious accidents through regulation, design, training, and mindfulness. Even so, some complex systems with catastrophic potential are just too dangerous to exist, because they cannot be made safe, regardless of human effort.
A final very grave possibility about the Fukushima reactors must be mentioned — the collapse of the spent-fuel cooling pool attached to reactor number four. If this were to occur, any talk about the revival of nuclear power in Japan would become unrealistic. In Chapter One, I described the perilous state of the cooling pond, containing as it does two-and-a-half times the fuel rods used in a reactor core. The pool is bent slightly out of shape, and sits 30 metres above the ground. As the head of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, Shunsuke Kondo, warned then prime minister Naoto Kan in the weeks following the March 2011 meltdowns, the collapse of the pool, or the draining of its cooling water, would release into the atmosphere a huge amount of actinides and transuranic elements, particularly caesium-137. According to Robert Alvarez of the US Institute for Policy Studies, the pool contains roughly ten times more caesium-137 than was released at the Chernobyl accident. If, at the time of release, winds were blowing towards Tokyo, attempts to evacuate the city might have to be made. One must hope that such a catastrophic event does not happen before TEPCO succeeds in removing the rods from the pond and storing them elsewhere.
Given the forces at play, it is still difficult to offer an accurate prediction about the future of nuclear energy in Japan. But there are strong indications that the industry is in terminal decline. Some of the 54 reactors that were taken off the grid for safety checks and servicing after the accident will temporarily be brought back online during a transitional period. Indeed, on 1 July, the first of these reactors was restarted by the Kansai Electric Power Company, at Oi in Fukui prefecture. But this will continue to be done in the face of determined opposition from an articulate and growing anti-nuclear lobby. Meanwhile, I believe that no new reactors will be built to augment the shrinking nuclear fleet, and the service life of all reactors will be carefully restricted to an outer limit of 40 years.
The nuclear village that actively discouraged investment in renewable energy has been greatly discredited in Japan. One analyst compared it to the Imperial Japanese Navy, which, for years before the Pacific War, short-sightedly insisted on putting its funds into building battleships rather than aircraft carriers. Another analyst called the anticipated beginning of a serious investment in renewable-energy technologies the ‘third opening’ in Japan’s modern technological history: the first was the arrival of Commodore Perry and his Black Ships in Tokyo Bay in 1853, leading a reclusive society to embrace Western technology; the second was Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, and its switch from military force to economic competition as the best way to secure the country’s prosperity. Renewable energy is the third opening. Until sufficient wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal electricity generators have been built, the country will manage with a mix of coal and gas power plants, plus a diminishing number of nuclear reactors. The change will be incremental, beginning hesitantly, but accelerating as the renewable-energy industry gains capital and confidence.
The predicted halt to nuclear-reactor production within Japan may not correspond to a similar fall-off in Japan’s nuclear export industry. In October 2006, Toshiba completed acquisition of the United States company Westinghouse, which had been responsible for a significant expansion in the construction of pressurised-water reactors around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. At around the same time, Hitachi merged with General Electric, the inventor and developer of boiling-water reactors. Both Japanese companies will benefit from the worldwide marketing presence of the two American giants, as well as their expertise in power generation and nuclear-fuel fabrication. Both could compete successfully with generation III and IV reactor technologies on offer from Korean, French, and Russian companies. But in a diminishing market, competition will be a lot keener than before the Fukushima accident. As shown in chapters Seven and Eight, many countries are already entertaining second thoughts about the wisdom of expanding their nuclear fleets, or starting them at all. I expect a commitment by a Japanese government of whatever persuasion to take a two-phase approach. The first phase will see some of the 54 decommissioned reactors coming back online in the short term, augmented by coal, natural gas, and hydro generators. The second, after around ten years, but beginning in 2013, will see a strong commitment to generating electricity by a comprehensive program of renewable-energy plants. Such a policy will be supported by more and more companies in the private sector. I anticipate that Japan will follow Germany in demonstrating that powerful economies can exist and even expand without the use of nuclear-generated electricity, and that other countries will follow their example.