International Analysis

How Japan's nuclear industry ignored the disaster to come

Following the major earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th, the threat of a nuclear catastrophe caused by overheating at the country's damaged Fukushima nuclear plant increases hour by hour. The crisis has highlighted the perilous number of nuclear installations established in a country regularly rocked by quakes. Mathieu Gaulène reports on the history of Japan's nuclear energy programme and the past incidents that so clearly announced a disaster to come.

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This article is freely available.

Following the major earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th, the threat of a nuclear catastrophe caused by overheating at the country's damaged Fukushima nuclear plant increases hour by hour. The crisis has highlighted the perilous number of nuclear installations established on sites regularly rocked by quakes, and where the authorities have for decades ignored warnings of the significant dangers. Mathieu Gaulène reports on the history of Japan's nuclear energy programme, the third largest in the world, and the past incidents that so clearly announced a disaster to come.

The location of Japan's 17 nuclear power plants and their 55 reactors:

Click here to enlarge Nuclear Power Facilities of Japan map.

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Japan was hardly the most obvious candidate to build a nuclear power industry, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Yet it rushed to set up a nuclear energy research programme after the Allied forces had lifted their prohibition in 1952, and the government officially launched the scheme in 1955.

The country is now the world's third largest generator of nuclear power after the United States and France. Its nuclear industry provides 30% of its electricity1 and 12% of its primary energy needs2. Electricity generation is dominated by ten regional electricity generating companies, including Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the biggest, which operates the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa and Fukushima plants.

Although these companies are all privately owned, the government plays a key role in the industry through the powerful Ministry of Trade and Industry, known as MITI. The ministry's goal is to supply half Japan's electricity from nuclear power, following the example of France.

But Japan has had an uneasy relationship with nuclear power right from the beginning of the programme.

Contrary to popular belief, the country's anti-nuclear movement did not grow from the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but was a reaction to contamination of a fishing boat by an American nuclear test off Bikini Atoll in 1954. Rumours that radioactive tuna were being distributed around markets in the country created widespread panic and the controversy is still remembered today.

Three anti-nuclear organisations were set up in the early days: Gensuikyô, supported by the communists; Gensuikin, supported by the socialists, and Kakkinkaigi, linked to the political right. But all of them focused on military issues while putting civil nuclear power to one side. Kakkinkaigi even openly approved of it.

In the 1960s, MITI organised the first topographical and geographical studies of coastal areas to identify suitable sites for future nuclear installations, taking into account the presence of water for cooling the reactor core, seismic risk and the strength of local civil society. The importance of this last factor can be gauged from the various reports from the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (JAIF), one of the lobbies financed by the backers of nuclear power, which always state whether fishing cooperatives are present on the chosen sites.

Fishermen have in fact been among the most tenacious opponents of the nuclear industry, along with farmers and women. They fear not only the potential health impact of nuclear power stations but also the impact on their business if there were to be any contamination.

A coherent anti-nuclear movement began to emerge from the 1970s with the formation of numerous organisations such as the Citizen's Nuclear Information Centre (CNIC), a grouping of scientists opposed to nuclear power that provides an alternative scientific viewpoint. The movement gained strength after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986.

From the end of the 1980s most opinion polls in the country have shown clearly that the Japanese are opposed to nuclear power. But the industry's opponents have never managed to force a change in energy policy, even though local campaigns have sometimes managed to rein in MITI's plans.

Japan, like most countries using nuclear power, chose an American technology, the Light Water Reactor (LWR), for its plants3. But instead of trying to improve this technology, the country focused its research on new technologies. This resulted in a certain lack of interest in the established power stations, where serious security and maintenance problems appeared.

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1: The Agency for Natural Resources and Energy (ANRE) put the figure at 31% in 2005. Source: Fiscal 2006: Annual Energy Report, 2006.

2: According to Samuele Furfari, Le Monde et l'Energie (The World and Energy), 2008.

3: Four Japanese firms share the nuclear market:Mitsubishi, Toshiba and Hitachibuild power plants while Fuji Electric makes alternators and turbines. Mitsubishi signed with the American company Westinghouse in 1984 to build Pressurised Water Reactors (PWRs) under licence. Hitachi and Toshiba, which supply Tepco, signed a research agreement with General Electric for a new reactor type, the Boil Water Reactor (BWR). PWRs and BWRs are both forms of LWR.

A history of nuclear incidents

Among the consequences of this were several notorious incidents. In 1995 there was a major sodium leak at the Monju fast breeder reactor, the equivalent of the Phénix plant in France, which caused a huge fire1. The Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corp. (PNC), the body in charge of the fast breeder programme, admitted that it had concealed information and photographs, and its deputy director, Nishimura Shigeo, committed suicide after a press conference. Monju, an experimental reactor, was brought back into service in May 2010.

The accident had significant political consequences. Elected representatives for Fukui, Niigata and Fukushima Prefectures - in which 60% of Japan's nuclear power plants are located - asked the government to establish the causes of the accident and assign responsibility.

Two other fatal accidents occurred. The first was on September 30th, 1999, when two workers died and 225 were seriously affected by radiation in an accident at the Tôkai-mura uranium enrichment plant in Ibaraki Prefecture. The accident also affected 207 local people. Inhabitants of Tôkai village were evacuated and the local authorities decreed that the 310,000 people living within a radius of ten kilometres of the plant must stay indoors.

Then in 2004 a leak of radioactive steam from the Mihama nuclear plant killed five people and wounded seven others, making it Japan's worst civil nuclear accident until now.

And in 2007, an earthquake in Niigata region seriously damaged the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa power station. That was another instance where Tepco denied there had been a radioactive leak, although over 1,000 litres of radioactive water were discharged into the sea.

One sign of the stalemate between the industry and its opponents, which reflects the industry's difficulty in managing to persuade people to accept its power stations, is increasingly long construction times. In the 1970s, building a nuclear plant took an average of seven years, whereas nowadays it takes 16 years.

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1: From the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency's (NEA) publication, The Tokai-mura accident in Japan: Aspects of civil nuclear responsibility and compensation, Paris, OECD, 2000.

Japan's questionable choice of nuclear power

Besides these incidents, there is also a long history of opposition to the Rokkasho-mura complex. Here, a few square kilometres house a uranium enrichment plant, a storage facility for low-level radioactive waste and a so-called temporary storage facility for highly radioactive waste, which was processed in France.

There is also a nuclear waste reprocessing plant built using technology from French energy company Areva. The complex is the only one in the world to handle the entire nuclear fuel cycle from enrichment to spent fuel. Locals call it "the nuclear rubbish dump" (pronounced: kaku no gomi suteba).

Militants have waged campaigns against the complex. There have been petitions, it was made an issue in local elections, and during the 1980s there were demonstrations of several thousand people and a blockade of the port by fishermen when nuclear waste was delivered.

But nothing halted the long march of the nuclear industry and the electricity companies that together form Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited (JNFL), which decided to turn Rokkasho into an icon for the nuclear industry.

As part of the project, large numbers of jobs were created in Aomori Prefecture, where Rokkasho is located, which is one of the poorest areas in Japan. It also received significant funds from a variety of taxes levied on the nuclear industry.

Even so, the reprocessing plant at Rokkasho never opened. In December 2008 there was a leak of highly radioactive liquid in the vitrification workshop during final tests, and this has prevented the plant from functioning to this day.

Following the March 11th earthquake and tsunami in Japan, attention is currently focused on the Fukushima plant but it is worth noting that the Rokkasho-mura complex is also now functioning with emergency generators. It may also have suffered damage, since it is situated near the quake's epicentre, while the tsunami reached the Shimokita peninsula coast.

The question remains as to why Japan chose the nuclear route.

The industry's supporters often justify this choice in terms of energy dependence. Foreign sources supply something close to 80% of Japan's primary energy supply. Oil imports represent about half its energy consumption, which means it is highly exposed to oil price fluctuations.

However, Japan imports around 90% of the uranium used in its nuclear power plants1. Yamaji Kenji, a nuclear energy specialist and professor at Tokyo University2, says nuclear energy is assumed to be a domestic energy source in Japan because of the low cost of uranium.

Some forecasts suggest the world's uranium reserves will only last another 60 years, and uranium prices have been rising over the past decade3. So, if uranium imports are taken into account in the calculation, Japan's dependence on external sources for primary energy rises from 80% to 98%4.

The 1973 oil shock prompted Japan to launch an ambitious programme of power station building, with the aim of increasing nuclear energy's share of electricity production to 50% by 2000. It has spent 58.1 billion dollars on this since the beginning of the 1980s, the biggest investment in nuclear power of any of the OECD countries in the period5.

But faced with rising opposition to nuclear power and the advent of numerous safety incidents, MITI finally scaled down its plans. In 2006 it revised its earlier targets, seeking instead to increase nuclear energy's share of electricity generation from 30% to 40% of the total by 2030. This implies the construction of nine to 12 new reactors by 20176.

However, this could all change in the wake of the major nuclear accident at Fukushima, the worst Japan has ever known. The CNIC said in a statement that it had warned the government that the nuclear power plants were not built to resist very serious earthquakes and tsunamis. It called on the government to embark on "a slow and gradual exit from nuclear energy."

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1: ANRE. Strategy for Securing Uranium Resources in Japan. November 2007.

2: Interview with Yamaji Kenji, Professor of engineering at Tokyo University, done on March 19th, 2009.

3: International Atomic Energy Agency: Uranium 2005: Resources, production and demand. OECD Publishing, 2006.

4: Also from Samuele Furfari, Le Monde et l'Energie (The World and Energy), 2008.

5: IEA/OECD. Nuclear Power in the OECD. Paris: International Energy Agency, 2001.

6: MITI. New National Energy Strategy. May 2006.

English version: Sue Landau

(Edited by Graham Tearse)

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