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Japan Unshaken

An Archipelago of Staunch Nuclear Supporters

By Wieland Wagner

Hardly any other country is as committed to atomic energy as Japan, with the island nation deriving a large share of its energy from nuclear plants. Even a large number of incidents and the ever-present risk of earthquakes have not deterred the Japanese from the costly expansion of their nuclear facilities.

As the host of this week's G-8 summit, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, 71, was determined to heavily promote the use of nuclear energy. Fukuda believes that other industrialized nations should follow his country's example and combat climate change by building new nuclear power plants. Hardly any other participant in the summit is as obsessed about building its nuclear energy program as Japan. With its 55 reactors, the world's second-largest economy already satisfies one-third of its demand for electricity with nuclear technology, and by 2017 it plans to increase this share to at least 40 percent by building additional nuclear plants.

The majority of the citizens of this island nation agree on the strategic necessity of nuclear energy. Japan depends on imports for 80 percent of its energy, a dependency with which the Japanese associate a historic trauma. One of the main reasons the Japanese empire risked attacking the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941 was that the Americans had previously isolated Japan by imposing an embargo on its oil and commodities supplies. When Japan's industrial planners launched their ambitious nuclear program in 1954, it was initially met with collective fears, and for good reason. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan became the world's first, and only, victim of nuclear bombs.

To diminish Japanese antipathy to atomic energy, the country's nuclear planners developed elaborate PR campaigns in which "Pluto," a cute comic-book hero created especially for this purpose, was enlisted to do the necessary convincing. The nuclear PR effort worked. Unlike Western Europe, Japan did not see the development of a nationwide antinuclear movement.

Paying little attention to economic efficiency, Japan's nuclear strategists promoted sinfully expensive technologies that had long been controversial abroad. One is the fast breeder technology, in which plutonium, produced as a waste product in the combustion of uranium in conventional nuclear power plants, is burned. Given years of low uranium prices, other countries abandoned their plans to build fast breeder reactors. Nevertheless, Japan has clung all the more steadfastly to its dream of eventually being completely independent of uranium shipments.

At the end of this year, Japan's Monju fast breeder reactor will be restarted. The model plant on the country's west coast had to be shut down in December 1995, only a year after going online, because more than half a ton of liquid sodium, a highly flammable coolant, had leaked from a pipe. At the time, the plant's operators attempted to cover up this serious accident with doctored video recordings. This time around, it also remains uncertain as to whether Monju will be restarted as planned. It was recently revealed that a few of the 403 sensors designed to detect coolant leaks were improperly installed. This incident was also covered up at first.

Uncontrolled Nuclear Chain Reactions

Breakdowns, negligence and cover-ups are par for the course in Japan's nuclear industry. The biggest nuclear accident since Chernobyl happened in 1999, at the Tokaimura uranium processing plant, 115 kilometers (71 miles) north of Tokyo, when workers manually filled uranium into a tank, triggering an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction. The government evacuated 310,000 people, many residents were exposed to radioactive contamination and two workers died painful deaths as a result of the disaster.

Nevertheless, concerns over rising oil prices and warmer global temperatures are prompting the Japanese, already relatively unconcerned over nuclear power, to downgrade the issue altogether. There is no debate over the pros and cons of nuclear power, not even between the country's two main political parties.

And even the high frequency of earthquakes has failed to significantly affect Japan's energy consensus. One year ago, a quake shook the Kashiwasaki nuclear power plant in northwestern Japan, a facility with six reactors, so forcefully that 1,140 liters of radioactive water were flushed out of a storage pool and leaked it the Sea of Japan.

The plant, owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), suffered serious structural damage and had to be shut down. Since then TEPCO has partially offset the production gap with electricity from coal power plants. As a result, Japan has fallen further behind in its program to reduce greenhouse gases. Ironically, the Kashiwasaki accident has only amplified calls for more nuclear power plants in Japan.

Sitting on a Fault Line

The Japanese, as enthusiastic as they are about technology, refuse to be put off pursuing their nuclear strategy and have come up with tougher construction regulations to make their nuclear power plants safer. One of Japan's many geological fault lines runs beneath the Rokkasho reprocessing plant in the north-eastern section of the main island of Honshu. Rokkasho is the celebrated centerpiece of Japan's nuclear strategy. According to Professor Mitsuhisa Watanabe of the University of Tokyo, the fault line beneath Rokkasho, combined with an underwater fault line, extends for 100 kilometers (63 miles), and could trigger an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0.

Despite such concerns, the plant, built at a cost of 12.7 billion yen (about €75 billion or $116 billion), is expected to go into full operation this month. Even the protests of local fishermen, who claim that Rokkasho will emit 180 times as much radioactivity into the air and the Pacific as a normal nuclear power plant, were unable to stop the national project. Without the plant, Japan threatens to suffocate in all the nuclear waste its many reactors produce.

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