Did Fukushima kill the entire energy
policy of Japan? Don't forget to hit like,
subscribe and share. Hi, everyone: welcome back to Tokyo on Fire. Today is March
19th 2019. Today, we're going to talk
about nuclear energy, the policy here in
Japan. Michael, what in the heck is going
on?
Well in this case, I was really
surprised at the build-up up to the
March 11th anniversary of the
tsunami and then the nuclear accident. I
thought eight years on they're just
gonna let it go, they're gonna have a few
things on television commemorating... no!
It was incessant and it was constant, it
was an overbearing presence and I was
saying "wow this has really changed the
psychology of people regarding the
entire industry, the entire concept of
nuclear power in ways that I really just,
even though I remember, not quite sure
that I really understand".
Before the incident of 3/11, eight years ago, nuclear energy provided about a third of
Japan's total energy.
Well, it provided 30% or so of the
electrical power generation. There were,
you know, close to 50 power plants that
were either operating or could be
operating. Now, we're down to a handful. We
have the ongoing cleanup that's going on
at the Fukushima site for the six
reactors that are there: it's going to
cost a great deal more money.
There's a million tons of contaminated
water on-site, the engineers say that
it's safe enough to release into the
ocean but good luck
telling other countries
in the world that we're going to release
a whole bunch of tritium and strontium
contaminated water into the ocean and
the ocean is so big it will take care
of and dilute... it'll be fine. Try that at an international conference.
They say that they need about 90 ongoing reactors to reach parity with where they
were before.
They have this plan. They had a bit of a  plan in
the mid-2000s about how nuclear power
would be the answer to Japan's
contribution to climate change with and
the reduction of fossil fuels
and co2 emissions.
Which they're committed to under the
Kyoto Protocol, right?
Well, they were under the
Kyoto Protocol and then reaffirmed under
the Paris agreement. That's fine, that's
great, that was the plan... Fukushima
changed everything at least domestically. Nuclear power is
no longer politically viable. It's
viable in so far is that there are
people who are very interested in it,
particularly those who work for very
large corporations, amongst them those
that build nuclear power plants. They
have a tremendous hold on the Abe
administration. Mr.Abe is the Keidanren
Prime Minister. He really works with big
business and big business has been
decidedly pro-nuclear right, but the rest
of Japan is decidedly against it. And, if
you look at public opinion polls, you
look at any kind of measure of what you
know the public wants to have done in
terms of energy, nuclear power is off,
right off the table. Now, it's never
really been on the table, actually, in
terms of its its environmental safety, and because no one ever calculated in
the costs of cleanup. Now,
Fukushima as a disaster, the cleanup of
that brings it front and center, the
questions of what happens with long-term
storage of radioactive waste; what
happens to long-term storage of highly
radioactive waste in a country with a
lot of seismic activities. All of these
things are now put into the cost
equation. And in terms of energy in
Japan, there was always a three stage
criteria. Stage 1:
a top-level continuous power, and
continuous power means continuous
generation and continuous supply of
fuel. So that was priority one for all
power, and that's why we don't have
brownouts here. Have you ever
experienced a blackout in this country?
No! Except during a natural disaster when
the power lines are actually physically
down, but a missed generation problem no.
The second issue is actually
environmental impact and before
Fukushima, nuclear had a really good
story "we're gonna take
care of the climate change problem".
Now, it doesn't have the environmental
story and that's priority two. And
priority two is important only insofar
as that doesn't interfere with priority
one. And then price was always
third. You know, Japan's electricity is
extremely expensive but people live with
it, in other countries like the United States or
Great Britain, they would have
a revolution for the electricity
costs here. Here it was always priority
three, so unless nuclear can sell
environmental safety, it's going to not
be a part of the mix and that's
basically what's happened. Renewables
have gone from strength to strength,
especially with the feed-in
tariffs that was put into place by the
Kan administration and now nuclear
power is not only domestically untenable,
it's now international untenable.
I mean the export market for reactors has
just fallen through the floor?
It's just fallen through the floor.
Vietnam stopped its reactors, Taiwan
walked out of its program, Lithuania has
said no, in Great Britain the project there
has bankrupted Hitachi*. All of these
projects have become disasters and
they were such vital parts of the
Abenomics story: the export of our
technology, and especially after
Fukushima, made it clear that there were
not going to be any more nuclear power
plants being built in Japan anytime soon.
The thing that strikes me, Michael,
is that in Japan there are lots of
free-flowing rivers for hydroelectric
production. It's an island, so
there's wave movements,
there's geothermal energy, there's wind
offshore, so how come
technology hasn't been dedicated to
turning that into something that is more
usable?
Everybody is now saying
that, in the chattering classes,
the basic issue is the issue of the
nuclear Lobby holding the
concept that if we go anymore into
renewables will be endangering Japan's
energy security, meaning that, you
know, sometimes the wind doesn't blow. the
sun doesn't shine all day, sometimes you
will have interruptions, you won't have
wave action, we need to have a steady
source of power. And the Abe
administration, not bought into it,
they have put forward that as the
argument that nuclear has to be part of
the base. The problem is where are you
going to build the plant. Now, Fukushima
has absolutely poisoned not
only its area but every other part of
the country. There is no community that
will say yes right to any of these
projects, so the Abe administration is
committed through its relationship to
big business to promote nuclear power at
the same time that it cannot possibly
arrange the creation of a new nuclear
power site. Those two things
we've been working through them through
the six years of Abe
administration life and it's starting to
come. It's not gonna come home to
roost, he's not gonna be lose his
position over it, but this story this
week the way that they just kept
emphasizing that Fukushima was very
important in the media is telling me...
That there's another nail in the coffin!
There are plenty of nails now in the nuclear coffin.
Well, it strikes me as something
akin to the population decline and the
insistence of putting women more
prominently into the workforce. There
between a rock and a hard place.
That's right and they have these
dreams, they have these plans, they have
these expressions, they have these
incredible commitments, but the
country is not behind them.
So, how did they get out of this situation that
they can't do nuclear, they need to
provide some some source to 30%?
Yeah, but the issue is really what
happens in the next election; what
happens in the next six months; 
just muddle along, pretend that we're
pro-nuclear, allow more solar farms to be
built, support wind farms offshore, but in
a lackadaisical way there's no national
commitment in the way that there could
be. If someone said "this is for our
energy security, this is for our energy
autonomy to make Japan a generating
place. We want this". There's no way
that that's sellable under the current
administration because at its onset,
when it came into power, it promised. 
So nuclear power is to Abe
what the wall on the border is to Trump,
he can't walk away from it and say "you
know, I said that but it's not doable".
Nuclear power doesn't look like
it's in the mix, we're going to continue
to follow it, and you should too!
