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Applications for the NRA’s safety reviews have also been submitted for 17 other reactors at 12 nuclear power stations. These reactors are waiting in the wings for the NRA’s approval.

DIVIDED PUBLIC OPINION

To bring an offline reactor on stream again, the operator also needs to win the consent of the prefecture and municipalities where the reactor is located.

In the case of the Sendai plant, the local assemblies of Kagoshima Prefecture and the city of Satsuma-sendai voted last autumn to support the plan to restart the reactors. The Kagoshima governor and the mayor of the city have also decided to approve it. The will of the local communities concerned has been made clear according to formal procedures.

But the will of the nation as a whole concerning the issue is different.

In a survey The Asahi Shimbun conducted in November, 56 percent of the respondents expressed opposition to restarting reactors, against 28 percent who supported the move. We have been asking similar questions since our survey in June 2013, and all the polls showed that a majority of the people were cautious about the idea of bringing reactors back online.

The opinions of the local governments concerned represent the popular will, as do the results of opinion polls.

If the will of the people concerning other reactor restarts is represented in the same way as in the case of the Sendai plant, the desire of many Japanese to see an end to nuclear power generation in this nation could be ignored as the NRA accelerates its safety screenings of the reactors. Is that acceptable?…….

MANY ISSUES DEMAND BROAD CONSENSUS

The division of public opinion over nuclear energy is not limited to the one between the will of the nation as a whole versus the will of local governments concerned.

Since the Fukushima disaster, there have been disagreements among local governments over the scope of “local communities” that should be involved in the decision-making process on such issues as whether to approve construction of a nuclear power plant and a restart of an offline reactor.

In April last year, Hakodate, Hokkaido, sued the state and Electric Power Development Co., or J-Power, to halt construction of the Oma nuclear power plant in Oma, Aomori Prefecture, which is located across the Tsugaru Strait.

Hakodate is located within 30 kilometers of the plant, and its citizens would be exposed to serious threats to their health if a severe accident were to occur there.

Hakodate’s legal action is based on the notion that its vicinity to the nuclear plant should qualify it for involvement in decisions on whether to approve construction.

A heap of issues related to nuclear power generation should be settled through broad consensus and agreement. They include the program to provide state subsidies to local governments hosting nuclear plants, storage of spent nuclear fuel and disposal of radioactive waste.

Public opinion will be divided in various ways over all these issues. If there is no effective system to build consensus on such contentious issues by overcoming wide disagreements, the government will have to repeat the futile choice of either forcibly executing or postponing its decisions………

If the government is concerned that the traditional approach to policymaking may not work with this challenge, it should change the way it makes decisions now.

What is the best way to measure people’s views and opinions and integrate them into the decision-making process? The issue of nuclear power generation raises this fundamental question about the way policy decisions are made. http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/editorial/AJ201501060058