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Ryota Takakura was working at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on March 11, 2011, packing low-level radioactive waste into drums when the ground began to shake and then shook like a ship in a storm.
The lights went out, leaving Takakura and his colleagues in total darkness, as the largest earthquake in recorded Japanese history shook the plant and its waste disposal building. But the worst was yet to come 40 minutes later when a tsunami the height of a four-story building crashed onto the shore.
The wave killed more than 15,000 people in northeast Japan. It also destroyed the auxiliary diesel generators at Fukushima Daiichi, causing three reactors at the plant to collapse, one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.
Takakura worked on the cleanup effort, but 10 years later he still feels betrayed by operator Tokyo Electric’s security promises. “When I watch the news now, I still don’t trust what Tepco has to say,” he said.
Their mistrust sums up Japan’s debate on nuclear power. The government and the power industry are still pushing to restart the reactors but, due to strong opposition from the public and the courts, most of them remain offline.
As Japan faces the new challenge of reducing net carbon emissions to zero by 2050, after approaching power outages this winter, the country finds that it cannot live on nuclear power and cannot do without it.
“The prime minister has set himself the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, but not everyone understands what that means,” said Masakazu Toyoda, president of the Tokyo Institute for Energy Economics and a member of the government’s advisory committee on energy policy.
“Even with nuclear power it is not easy,” he said. “In my opinion, without nuclear weapons it is almost impossible.”
Over the past 10 years, every government review of energy policy has returned to the same conclusion: even with a massive increase in renewables, there will still be a gap of about 40 percent of energy demand in 2050, which must be satisfied by either fossil or nuclear fuels.
But no matter how many white papers the bureaucrats produce, they have not eased the visceral opposition from the public, reminiscent of the terrible days when the Fukushima reactors were melting.
A recent opinion poll for national broadcaster NHK found that only 3 percent of the public want to use more nuclear power, while 29 percent are willing to keep things the way they are. That’s a little higher than 10 years ago, but about two-thirds of the public want a phase-out of nuclear power or its immediate abolition.
The Fukushima site itself remains a monument to disaster. Despite having promised to dismantle the plant, experts said Tepco did not yet have a viable plan to handle the highly radioactive waste inside the affected reactors. The government has controversial plans to release tritium-contaminated water from the site into the Pacific, a constant reminder of the disaster.
“We know it’s not safe, we know it’s expensive, we don’t have anywhere to dispose of waste. . . that smart people still push [nuclear power] it’s something I can’t understand, ”Junichiro Koizumi, Conservative Prime Minister from 2001 to 2006, said at a recent event with Naoto Kan, Prime Minister of the Democratic Party at the time of the disaster.
Reaching 100 percent renewable energy is perfectly possible, Kan said, and only vested interests kept nuclear power alive. “The forces that continue to promote nuclear power are the ‘nuclear village’, who want to protect their existing privileges,” he added.
Opposition from local mayors and prefectural governors, or from activists submitting injunctions, means that only nine of Japan’s 60 nuclear reactors have been restarted. Despite all the repeated claims by the government that nuclear power was essential, officials said they had no plans for legislation to stop these relentless local battles.
The likely outcome, therefore, is that Japan’s nuclear industry will slowly wither away. “That is the biggest problem,” Toyoda said. “Nuclear engineers have already started working in other industries. Simply operating existing reactors is not enough to maintain nuclear capacity in Japan. “
Takakura said it was fine for him. “I am opposed to nuclear energy. I think it’s dangerous, ”he said.
The disaster forced its local community near the plant to evacuate and 10 years later it has not recovered. “Very few people have returned,” he said. “Everything is gone.”
