What about a nuclear-free Japan?

April 5, 2015

INSIGHT: Why not talk more about a nuclear-free future for Japan?

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/column/AJ201504050005

By NAOHITO MAEDA/ Senior Staff Writer

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is moving to pull the plug on nuclear power in her nation, was visiting Japan on March 9, I met with a former Lower House member.

“In my view, Japan does have energy politics but has no energy policy,” Satoshi Shima, 56, emphatically told me.

Shima currently serves as an adviser to Softbank Corp., a telecommunications company led by Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son, a high-profile entrepreneur. Having served eight years as head of the CEO’s office at the company, Shima, a stalwart champion of a nuclear phase-out, has been working behind the scenes to link policy with politics with regard to renewable energy sources.

In Shima’s opinion, “politics” is about making arrangements as to who will gain profits, whereas “policy” is about deciding the best choice from an overall perspective.

“Germany has chosen to go nuclear-free after properly studying energy policy,” he said. “But Japan, as it stands now, has nothing more than a sum of stakeholders’ lobbyism. Nuclear opponents are no match for pro-nuclear lobbies, which are so influential.”

The Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 prompted Shima and Son to call for pulling the plug on nuclear energy and using more renewable energy sources.

Shima backed Morihiro Hosokawa and Junichiro Koizumi, an alliance of former prime ministers, who campaigned under the banner of “zero nuclear power” during the February 2014 gubernatorial election in Tokyo. But Hosokawa failed to win the governor’s seat, and nuclear opponents have barely made any headway since. They have now come to a grinding halt.

Japan is headed, without serious debate, toward a continued reliance on nuclear power. It is a foregone conclusion for the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that the country’s nuclear reactors, all of which are idled now, will eventually be restarted. No in-depth debate is being made in the Diet over what to do with nuclear power.

The adversity notwithstanding, Shima is still pinning his hopes on elections. He showed me a paper that outlined a policy timeline related to renewable energy sources, and pointed to an entry that said 2016.

“This is the year when the electricity retail market will be fully liberalized,” he said. “And there will be an Upper House election in the summer of that year. To begin with, we need a political force that will fight those who will move to obstruct new entries into the market at that stage.”

The crucial moment, in Shima’s view, will be the process of “unbundling,” scheduled for 2020, whereby the power transmission and distribution operations within major utilities will be spun off from their power generation operations and will be turned into separate entities. That policy process is believed to hold the key to spreading the use of renewable energy sources.

“That process could be emasculated if we go on like this,” Shima said. “To prevent that from happening, we need to develop politicians who will put up a fight during the Upper House election in the summer of next year. Upper House members have a term of six years, so they can afford to work in a longer perspective. They are not quite like Lower House members, who are intimidated into silence under the overwhelming power of lobbyists.”

The Democratic Party of Japan, which Shima belonged to as a Diet member, has set the goal of pulling the plug on nuclear power by the end of the 2030s. But the party is hard-pressed to come up with a clear-cut stance on whether nuclear reactors should be restarted, split as it is between the pros and cons of such a measure. In fact, the DPJ once made a decision to temporarily restart nuclear reactors when the party was at the helm of the government.

When Akira Nagatsuma, then acting DPJ president, ran unsuccessfully for the party’s presidency in January, he was the most cautious of all candidates about restarting nuclear reactors. He was visibly exasperated by the current situation, wherein calls for a nuclear phase-out are gaining little traction.

“There are three conceivable crises that can put a state’s survival at stake: war, nuclear disaster and financial collapse,” Nagatsuma said. “Why not eliminate nuclear disaster, which is the easiest risk to eliminate? The Diet is full of what I cannot figure out, but this one is among the hardest to comprehend.”

It would be too early to forget the nightmare of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which has yet to be brought under control. I believe that from the perspectives of both policy and politics, we need to talk a lot more about a phase-out of nuclear power and about Japan’s future.