by John D’Amico<\/p>\n
Before the disaster on March 11, 2011, thirty percent of Japan\u2019s electricity came from nuclear power.\u00a0 Now, only a few plants remain operational.\u00a0 The one or two still online will close sometime this September. \u00a0Oil and gas bought in bulk from abroad make up for the lost power.\u00a0 Though the previous administration planned for the deactivation of nuclear power plants by the 2030s, Abe Shinzo and his political allies, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), might go in a different direction.\u00a0 Future policy will depend on both the new rules instituted by the Nuclear Regulation Authority of Japan and the outcome of an ongoing debate in Japanese politics.<\/p>\n
Some, like Mr. Hatakeyama, the head of nuclear policy at METI, argue that the cheap operating costs of nuclear and the risks of a volatile global oil market make the continued use of nuclear power, with the adoption of more stringent safety standards, economically rational. Yet Mr. Kono, a member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party in the lower house, makes a surprisingly different calculation.\u00a0 Unlike many others in his party, he opposes the use of nuclear power, and not for the usual reasons of safety or sensitivity to the feelings of the victims of the 2011 disaster.<\/p>\n
According to him, the problem is none other than waste.\u00a0 Within ten years the storage for spent fuel will fill up, and no feasible fast breeder reactors even exist to deal with leftover plutonium.\u00a0 While Mr. Hatakeyama seemed confident that the planned Rokkasho underground storage and treatment center would take care of at least the spent fuel problems, Mr. Kono rather drily countered that finding an appropriate site for the facility\u2014one with no risk of earthquake, no volcanos, and no groundwater\u2014\u201cwould be impossible in Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though nuclear plant operation costs are comparatively low, the process of finding an appropriate means of waste disposal, as well as the maintenance of that disposal system, makes nuclear power much more costly when compared to fossil fuels.\u00a0 According to Mr. Kono, even on a technical level, Japan cannot in the long term continue the reprocessing and storage of spent fuel.\u00a0 He sees this technical impossibility as the key limitation of any effort to restart nuclear power.<\/p>\n
Yet the others we spoke to disagreed, considering technical problems irrelevant.\u00a0 According to Mr. Hatakeyama, METI deals with policy and therefore does not need scientists directly on staff.\u00a0 Mr. Kono criticized this tendency to neglect scientific knowledge in the upper echelons of the Japanese political world, laughing about how a past Minister of Science couldn\u2019t answer a simple question about the difference between processing uranium and plutonium.\u00a0 The other two members of the lower house we interviewed exemplified this tendency, choosing instead to make the case for or against nuclear power for economic or safety reasons.<\/p>\n
Part of the problem is misinformation.\u00a0 TEPCO and other power companies not only sponsor political campaigns, but also provide technical advice and analysis that often ignores unpleasant, un-business-friendly truths.\u00a0 Before 3\/11, it was in no one\u2019s interest to challenge the status quo mentality: \u00a0that nuclear power was absolutely safe and \u00a0economically sustainable.\u00a0 After the disaster, everyone knew the former was false.\u00a0 The latter is still up for debate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by John D’Amico Before the disaster on March 11, 2011, thirty percent of Japan\u2019s electricity came from nuclear power.\u00a0 Now, only a few plants remain operational.\u00a0 The one or two still online will close sometime this September. \u00a0Oil and gas bought in bulk from abroad make up for the lost power.\u00a0 Though the previous administration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[13,12,11,14],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trip","tag-dpj","tag-ldp","tag-nuclear-policy","tag-nuclear-waste"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26,"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/japan2013.yira.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}