Economy minister Yukio Edano seemed to be a convinced supporter of a nuclear-free Japan when he appeared before the Lower House Committee on the Economy, Trade and Industry on April 13.
Economy minister Yukio Edano seemed to be a convinced supporter of a nuclear-free Japan when he appeared before the Lower House Committee on the Economy, Trade and Industry on April 13.
“It is a clear government policy to reduce dependence on nuclear power generation as much as possible toward zero,” he told members of the committee.
But Edano’s comments during a visit to the Fukui prefectural government the next day, part of a government drive to get the reactors at the Oi nuclear power plant restarted, seemed to have a very different emphasis, raising questions about what exactly he had meant by “as much as possible” in his remarks to the committee.
“Given the current situation of the Japanese economy,” said Edano, the minister directly responsible for the electric power industry, “it is necessary to continue to utilize nuclear energy as an important power source.”
As the Noda administration prepares to work out a basic policy of future energy policy this summer, supporters of a nuclear-free Japan are worried that the momentum of government policymaking is running against them. Doubts are even being raised about the possibility of reducing the number of nuclear reactors in Japan.
During his campaign for the leadership of the Democratic Party of Japan last summer, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda was solid in his support for his predecessor Naoto Kan’s policy of making Japan nuclear-free.
However, observers noted a change of emphasis in a policy speech in September, immediately after he became prime minister.
“The government will reduce dependence on nuclear power generation (only) in the middle- and long-term,” he said.
In January, a Noda policy statement was even more conditional. “The government will lower its dependence on nuclear energy as much as possible in middle- and long-term,” he said.
The current frontline of the battle over Japan’s energy policy is a behind-the-scenes fight over the figures that will be used as the basis for the government’s basic energy policy to be compiled this summer.
Suggested future ratios between nuclear and other types of power generation, which are expected to serve as a basis for the new policy, are currently being considered by a committee of the resource energy research council of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).
In late March this year, the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, which is affiliated with METI and serves as the secretariat for the committee, suggested four possible shares of national energy generation in fiscal 2030 for nuclear power: zero, 20 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent.
Those ratios were strongly criticized in some quarters because nuclear energy’s share of Japan’s electricity production in March 2011, immediately before the reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, was between 20 and 30 percent.
One of the members of the METI committee, a supporter of Kan’s nuclear-free policy, said 35 percent should never even have been an option.
Another battleground is the baseline from which any policy of reducing reliance on nuclear power will be calculated.
While some bureaucrats say that it will be worked out from the nuclear industry’s 20 to 30 percent share of electricity generation immediately before the Fukushima crisis, other officials are arguing that it should be calculated from the 53-percent goal for nuclear power generation in fiscal 2030 that was decided in 2010. That goal, which excluded privately generated electricity, was dropped by the Kan administration after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
There are also subtle differences between Cabinet members on the issue. Edano said that the calculation should be made from “the percentage figure as of March 11, 2011,” but Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said it did not matter what percentage was the baseline.
Motohisa Furukawa, state minister in charge of the basic policy on future energies, was noncommittal: “I will consider it based on the results of discussions at a related council.”
With two key supporters of restarting Japan’s nuclear reactors—Seiji Maehara, chairman of the DPJ Policy Research Committee and Yoshito Sengoku, acting chairman of the committee—positioning themselves for leading roles in writing the new basic energy policy, the government may be heading for head-on conflict with a powerful movement against the nuclear industry.
Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, whose Osaka Ishin no Kai party is considering fielding candidates in the next Lower House election, is opposed to the restart of reactors at the Oi nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture and says he will topple the DPJ-led government.
On April 12, about 40 DPJ lawmakers set up a group to support a nuclear-free society and plan to submit a proposal to the government this summer setting a specific date for achieving that objective.
Kan, who took part in the meeting, told reporters: “The issue of abolishing nuclear reactors should be an electoral issue. More than 90 percent of the Japanese people believe Japan must change.”