Current Prime Minster Shinzo Abe announced a restart of all reactors within three years in his 2013 New Year’s Address. But after prolonged energy policy deliberations a new Basic Energy Plan published in 2014 still failed, for the first time ever, to include numerical targets for Japan’s future energy mix.
Numerical targets were included in the Energy Mix 2030 document published in 2015, which sees nuclear power making up 20–22 per cent of overall electricity generation by 2030. This marks a significant reduction compared to the roughly 50 per cent planned for 2030 in the Basic Energy Plan published in 2010. Still, it might be an overly ambitious goal considering that only three reactors are currently in operation. So what are the chances that this goal will be successfully implemented?
Finding the answer requires examining another development in the aftermath of the triple disaster: the reform of Japan’s nuclear safety oversight regime. Attempts to improve regulatory oversight culminated in the creation of the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) in September 2012. The NRA published new safety requirements in July 2013 and began undertaking safety reviews of reactors as a prerequisite for restarts. When applying for a review of nuclear reactors, utilities have to make considerable investments to meet the new safety requirements, including installing fire-resistant cables, building sea walls and constructing filter vents.
The new requirements are therefore affecting the viability of nuclear power as a profitable business model. To date, the NRA has received safety review applications for a total of 25 out of the 43 existing commercial reactors. A poll conducted by Asahi Shimbun among utilities currently updating their reactors showed that the costs of upgrading equipment to meet the NRA’s requirements are rising. In January 2013, 10 operators estimated that they will be spending a total of 1 trillion yen (about US$8.9 billion). That figure rose to 1.6 trillion yen (US$14.2 billion) by January 2014 and to 2.4 trillion yen (US$21.3 billion) by July 2015. And that is not including the costs associated with implementing anti-terrorism measures, which the NRA requires operators to meet by 2018. Operating nuclear power plants has become an increasingly costly business.
A look at the reactors that have submitted safety review applications reveal that the future profitability of the plant is a major consideration for operators. There is a clear trend toward submitting applications for younger reactors with a large generation capacity — in other words, those that exhibit the highest chance of generating enough profit in the future to make the necessary investments worthwhile.
It is questionable whether the same utilities will submit safety review applications for older and generally smaller reactors, which require more updates and have a shorter remaining life span. It is also unlikely that review applications will be submitted for the four reactors at Fukushima Daini as it lies within the 20 kilometre exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
If Japan is to meet its goal of generating 20–22 per cent of its power through nuclear energy by 2030 it needs to reopen 30 reactors. So far only 25 reactor review applications have been submitted to the NRA. In terms of power generation capacity, the 25 reactors currently under review amount to about half of the installed capacity available prior to the Fukushima accident.
Before the triple disaster, nuclear covered 29 per cent of Japan’s electricity demand. Assuming a stable electricity demand, the reactors under review could provide close to 15 per cent of Japan’s electricity demand by 2030. But even this is not certain. Most of these 25 nuclear reactors need to pass not only the initial safety review but also a later lifespan extension review, which would allow them to run into the 2030s. Japan’s ability to reach its nuclear energy generation targets seems far from certain.
An unnamed source in the Cabinet Office told a Japanese journalist that the 20–22 per cent nuclear power goal for 2030 serves the sole purpose of showing that the Abe government will continue to promote nuclear power — the specific targets are by no means fixed. Five years after the Fukushima accident, and three years after Prime Minister Abe announced a restart of all reactors, Japanese nuclear power policy is still in a state of disarray.
Florentine Koppenborg is a PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin researching post-Fukushima nuclear regulatory reform in Japan.
This author is correct in concluding that Japan will never reach Abe’s goal of nuclear energy providing 20+% of power for the country. It has too many aging reactors which would never meet the NRA’s newer and stronger safety standards….assuming of course that the NRA sticks to its standards.
It is important to note, however, that this article highlights only one aspect of the ‘disarray’ which is evident in Japan’s nuclear power policy and decision making. Another more important one, in my humble opinion, is the fact that the NRA does not stick to its supposed principles. For example, the plants recently approved for restart in Kagoshima (southern Kyushu island) did not bother to even try to obtain the approval of all the local municipalities that might be affected by a problem. This is because the vast majority of them probably would not have approved of the restart.
Another example: a plant in western Honshu was more recently approved for a restart before a specific and credible evacuation plan for its surrounding communities has been developed. There are over 200,000 people living within an evacuation zone without adequate roads or other means of evacuation in the event that this is necessary.
Discussions are ongoing now about restarting another plant where an active earthquake fault is reportedly underneath the plant. The owners, of course, dispute this. But there is information to suggest otherwise. Will the NRA follow its own rules in this case? Or will it, as in the other two instances noted, fudge on its own rules in order to comply with PM Abe’s agenda? So much for the NRA being an ‘independent’ body!
Thank you for pointing out a number of unresolved issues within the process of restarting nuclear power plants. The issues of obtaining approval from local municipalities and of approving evacuation plans are very much tied to the question of what actually falls under the NRA’s jurisdiction and what does not.
Beginning with obtaining local approval, the NRA has made it clear on numerous occasions that it sees its own responsibility as ensuring that plant specifications are in line with the safety requirements it specifies. However, the decision to actually deem a power plant safe enough to be restarted remains a political one. The NRA is often criticised for this, but personally I think that it makes sense as nuclear power is a technology with a considerable remaining risk and the decision as to whether the public has to bear that risk should be made by elected politicians and not by technical experts alone. In line with this, obtaining local approval is not part of the NRA’s tasks. Furthermore, the NRA does not have a say in these matters as approving local consent is a mechanism based on a contract between the utilities and local municipalities. As I understand it, the power to actually expand this to cover other municipalities lies with the Japanese government not the NRA.
The lack of rigidity in examining evacuation plans is another aspect the NRA receives a lot of criticism for. Theoretically, both spelling out guidelines for evacuation plans and examining whether evacuation plans proposed by a utility are in line with the guidelines lie in the hands of the NRA. In practice, however, this is not the case. In practice, the NRA formulates disaster response and evacuation guidelines, but overseeing everything related to the operational aspects of it has been –rather quietly- moved to a committee situated at the Cabinet Office and officially chaired by PM Abe himself. This Emergency Response Committee or Council handles the implementation of the NRA guidelines for this specific area and, as such, examines and approves evacuation plans proposed by the utilities.
In what can well be described as an ongoing struggle between PM Abe and the NRA, the fact that these facts are rarely known and lead to the NRA being criticised for decisions that are ultimately political ones, seems to be in the interest of the Abe administration. Continuing ‘disarray’ in these areas makes the NRA is the perfect scapegoat for failures by PM Abe and his government.
All that being said, the issue of examining fault lines and how the decision will turn out in the end is a good indicator of how the NRA’s independence. The same applies to the ongoing struggle between the NRA and the Ministry of Education Sports Science and Technology over the fast breeder Monju and whether the JAEA is equipped to operate it. The outcomes will say a lot about whether the NRA has been able to reach its self-proclaimed goal of independence.