A new plant on Iwaishima Island?

November 12, 2014

COMMENTARY: Kaminoseki nuke plant plan should be scrapped to end community division

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/column/AJ201411120007

By YUSUKE OGAWA/ Staff Writer

KAMINOSEKI, Yamaguchi Prefecture--I realized the need for the earliest possible settlement after I covered a 32-year-old protest movement on Iwaishima island here opposing Chugoku Electric Power Co.’s plan to build the Kaminoseki nuclear power plant on the other side of a strait.

“The central government and Chugoku Electric are probably waiting for us to die,” one of the interviewees told me.

Iwaishima island is home to “Tsudoi no Ie: Ohisama” (Community home: The sun), where women in their 80s and similar ages gather twice a week. Kiyoko Sakai, a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima who was actively opposed to the planned nuclear plant, and her colleagues set up the establishment in a refurbished vacant house four months after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011.

About 10 women, who formerly were central members of the islanders’ protests against the planned nuclear plant, get together at the community home to chat over lunch.

Sakai died of lung cancer at age 87 in February 2013.

Takako Nakamura, the 84-year-old president of a local women’s association who has led protest marches, said fewer people are joining protests these days.

“I have only wished to pass on to posterity the seas and mountains that we inherited from our ancestors,” Nakamura said. “I would return as a ghost if a nuclear plant were to be built after I died.”

One can only ask how many islanders have died without seeing a resolution of the issue.

The plan to build the nuclear plant became public in 1982. The island had 450 residents as of Oct. 1, about one-third the number 32 years ago. Seventy-five percent of the islanders are aged 65 or more.

The entire town of Kaminoseki has also seen its population halved during the last 32 years.

Chugoku Electric began reclaiming land on the planned plant site in 2009, but announced suspension of the work immediately after the 2011 disasters. The utility applied in October 2012 for an extended license to reclaim land, but the government of Yamaguchi Prefecture has yet to decide whether it will approve or reject an extension.

When Yamaguchi Governor Tsugumasa Muraoka said in May that he would not be making a decision for another year, Toshiyasu Shimizu, 59, the leader of a group of islanders, moaned, “It’s like as if we are being kept in a protracted limbo.”

The town of Kaminoseki wants to host the nuclear plant because doing so would give it access to a lucrative revenue source.

The town government has received some 7 billion yen ($64.74 million) since fiscal 1984 in central government subsidies related to nuclear power, which it has spent on building facilities and providing services to its residents. It has annual town tax revenues of only about 200 million yen.

Kaminoseki Mayor Shigemi Kashiwabara has openly said there would be no need to have the nuclear plant built if only the livelihoods of the townspeople could be maintained.

The Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in April approved a basic energy plan, which defined atomic power as an “important base-load power source.” The document, however, stopped short of spelling out plans to build new nuclear reactors, which leaves the future of the planned Kaminoseki plant in limbo.

But existing nuclear plants in Japan are not even getting restarted. Some nuclear proponents in Kaminoseki have said they may not be able to see the nuclear plant built in their lifetimes.

Since the work on the nuclear plant was suspended, in the meantime, the town has been seeking ways to revitalize itself without relying on nuclear power, such as by tourism and the development of a so-called “senary" industry, which combines the output of farm and marine products (primary industry) with processing (secondary industry) and marketing (tertiary industry).

The Abe administration is calling for revitalization of regional communities. Given that, I would propose scrapping the plan to build the nuclear plant while providing a source of revenue for stemming depopulation and fostering new industries.

It would be too cruel to keep the plan alive and the local community divided.