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Will Japan change energy policy, or will powerful nuclear lobby prevail?

The fate of the Shimane plant could provide clues to whether a serious shift in energy policy is in store or whether powerful interests backing nuclear power will stage a comeback……..

Japan city grapples with nuclear doubts after Fukushima crisis By Linda Sieg   May 27, 2011 MATSUE, Japan (Reuters) – For decades, local politician Tomoaki Tanaka campaigned on a platform promoting nuclear power as a safe form of energy and a welcome economic boon to his hometown of Kashima, nestled between mountains and the sea in southwestern Japan.

Like many politicians in the rural backwaters that host Japan’s 54 nuclear power plants, Tanaka was a small player in a nexus linking local interest groups with powerful forces in Tokyo promoting atomic power and, critics say, ignoring the risk of disaster in this earthquake-prone land.

Now, after watching the world’s second-worst nuclear accident unfold at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant far to the north following a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, Tanaka is having second thoughts….

“I used to say that nuclear power was safe, that nothing was safer,” said the 67-year-old, now an assembly member of Matsue City, which merged with the town of Kashima in 2006.

“After the Fukushima accident, I thought – can this really be safe? Now I feel responsible for what I myself have promoted,” he said in an interview at city hall in this drab provincial city, just 9 km (5.6 miles) from Chugoku Electric Power Co’s <9504.T > (TEPCO) Shimane nuclear plant……

The Fukushima crisis has prompted Prime Minister Naoto Kan, whose Democratic Party of Japan swept to power for the first time in 2009, to call for a complete review of a national energy policy under which nuclear power would have provided 50 percent of electricity by 2030, up from 30 percent now.

SHIMANE GIVES CLUES TO ENERGY POLICY

But the substance of the policy shift is vague and questions remain how much really can change.

The fate of the Shimane plant could provide clues to whether a serious shift in energy policy is in store or whether powerful interests backing nuclear power will stage a comeback……..

Shimane’s No.1 reactor came on-line in 1974 – the same year that Japan, stunned by soaring oil prices, enacted three laws enabling the central government to provide even bigger subsidies to communities willing to host nuclear plants.

Such subsidies became even more crucial after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States fanned previously muted local concerns about safety.

Yasue Ashihara, then a mother of two small children, joined the anti-nuclear power movement around 1980, but the activists gained little traction even after Chernobyl in 1986.

Ashihara and other critics say political and economic dynamics also prompted the nuclear industry to turn a blind eye to the potential risk of damage from earthquakes, although Japan accounts for one-fifth of the world’s tremors of magnitude 6.0 or more.

In 1999, activists filed a lawsuit seeking the plant’s closure after researchers discovered an active seismic fault near the facility despite Chugoku Electric’s long-standing assertions that none existed.

Over the next decade, the utility acknowledged data indicating the existence of a fault more than 20 km (12 miles) long, but a district court ruled last year that the plant was nonetheless safe.

“Their premise was that if the government had approved the safety, then it was safe,” Ashihara said.

The Fukushima crisis has struck a nerve in Matsue…….Japan city grapples with nuclear doubts after Fukushima crisis | Reuters

May 28, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, politics