Nuclear Energy and Climate Change

Hirokazu Miyazaki

Meridian 180 was formally launched just a few weeks after Japan's earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 2011, with two forums—“A Grand Coalition for a Rise in the Consumption Tax is the Only Way,” coordinated by Professor Yuji Genda and “Cry from the Scene,” coordinated by Professor Naoki Kasuga—both of which addressed Japan's pressing issues following the disaster. Professor Genda's forum focused on the country's fiscal/financial crisis while Professor Kasuga's forum focused on the crisis of trust in information. We also organized two forums in March 2012 prior to an international conference held at Cornell University to commemorate the first anniversary of the disaster—“How Can We Bring Closure to Crises?” (coordinated by Professor Genda) and “What Role Can Intellectuals and Professionals Play in Crises Like Japan's Natural and Nuclear Disasters?” (coordinated by myself).

The two forums together confirmed a lingering sense of crisis—a crisis of expertise and a crisis of hope, respectively—one year after the disaster. In the “Secrets in the Age of Transparency” forum coordinated by Professor Katherine Biber in September 2013, Ms. Yuki Ashina, a lawyer who had worked with victims of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in their lawsuits against Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of Fukushima Dai-Ichi Power Plant, posted a comment in which she drew attention to her own and others’ frustration with the lack of accurate information about the nuclear disaster. By then, the uncertainty associated with the condition of the troubled reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ichi and a broader condition of long-term low-level radiation exposure in Eastern Japan had become so profound and unbearable that many citizens just wanted to move on and embrace the excitement about Abenomics and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Two of Japan's nuclear reactors have already been restarted, and the Japanese government and Japan's nuclear plant manufacturers are now eager to export power plants overseas.

Many progressive intellectuals expected Japan and the world to change their view of nuclear energy and the future of humanity, more generally, after the disaster in Fukushima. What has unfolded since the disaster instead, however, is a layering of dissonances of all kinds—dissonances between people in Fukushima and the rest of the nation, between the official rhetoric of kizuna (bonds) and many citizens’ quiet acts of self-protection and preservation, between the unknowability of the condition of the troubled reactors and the government's official declaration that the crisis is over, and between the ongoing crisis and the anachronistic dream of economic growth associated with Abenomics.

From the outset, our goal has been to develop a global/transnational perspective on Japan's multi-layered crises. We hoped to break open Japan's domestic debate about the future of nuclear energy deeply conditioned by vested interests of all kinds and hopelessly dictated by the unproductive disagreement about the relative safety of radiation vis-à-vis other kinds of everyday risk. In this new forum, we seek to follow this spirit to advance our thinking one step further by re-visiting Japan's nuclear crisis, which is still continuing if not deepening, in relation to the increasingly heightened and shared concern about climate change. What do Japan's (ongoing) layered crises—a crisis of expertise, a crisis of trust and a crisis in the economics of nuclear energy—tell us about the future of nuclear energy for the rest of the world? How can highly technical issues related to nuclear technology and climate change be brought into conversation with the question of hope that encompasses Japan's and the Earth's crises? I especially welcome thoughts and reflections from Japan-based members.

Amy Levine

First, I wish to follow up on the 'vested interests' that Professor Miyazaki described working in Japan. In South Korea those interests are often called 'nuclear mafia' and there is so much more mainstream awareness of them in the wake of the Triple Disaster in Japan. Just a few years before, in contrast, those images of 'construction mafia' or other types of mafia were mostly confined to activists and progressives in South Korea.

Just after the IAEA's official report on Fukushima came out in September of this year and reactors had been restarted on Kyushu island, I happened to be giving a paper at a joint conference of Japanese and South Korean academics and the anxiety and interest in any discussion of a 'nuclear mafia' was impossible to miss. Both Japanese and Korean academics were keen to share the latest examples of questionable behavior by their respective governments. It was a rare moment of unity and common cause--around discussions of 'nuclear mafias' in Japan and South Korea--after just a month before when the two nations seemed so distant and tensions again ran high with all that surrounded the commemorations of end of World War II, Korean liberation from Japanese colonial rule, etc. in August of this year. Many were particularly interested in former PM Koizumi's critical comments about PM Abe's nuclear energy policies.

Second, following up on Prof. Slayton's introduction and previous comments on the Laudato si forum, one of the 'radioactive Greens' who supports nuclear energy penned this column in USA Today on recent news out of the Paris climate talks: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/12/02/fracking-ends-climate-change-wars-clean-energy-solutions-column/76663456/

The 'end of climate wars' pronouncement around the successes of fracking and shale gas technologies present a potential point of comparison and contrast to nuclear energy debates. This comparison need not be on the Breakthrough Institute's terms (http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/frackings-war-on-coal); is there another compelling read of that history and the incremental, pragmatic implications Breakthrough wishes to see?

Satsuki Takahashi

Inspired by earlier postings, what I would like to contribute to this forum is to pose questions regarding the relationship between hope and the future. In doing so, I would like to share some stories from Fukushima.

Based on my research on fishing communities in and near Fukushima since 2004, I hear more stories of hope and the future now than I did 10 years ago. It is true that, since the meltdown, the conditions of the marine environment are highly precarious. For over four years since the accident, marine scientists have been trying to figure out the mechanisms of radioactive contamination in the sea. But what they have learned so far is tiny, compared to what they haven't figured out. The lives of fishing families are equally precarious. Due to the radioactive contamination of fish and also the consumers’ fear of eating any fish from Fukushima, fishing families are still living on disaster compensation payments from TEPCO. And yet, despite these highly precarious conditions, post-disaster discourses of Fukushima have been filled with the bright future. The quintessential example of this is the Fukushima Floating Offshore Wind Farm Demonstration Project.

Entrusted by the government, the project's consortium itself emphasizes that it is an “All-Japan” team, consisting of 1 university and 10 corporations. According to the team leader from Marubeni Corporation, the new energy project “opens up the nation's future.” Symbolizing the bright future, the consortium named the first windmill, “Fukushima Mirai (Future).”

According to the consortium's leader, the project will open up the bright future for not only the nation's energy but also fisheries. By building an “ocean farm” underneath floating windmills, he argues that it will increase fish population. The image of the ocean farm multiplying fish in the radioactive ocean sounds like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story. But for some Fukushima fishers, the ocean farm was a hopeful proposal that might allow them to survive in their precarious future. They told me that “Fukushima Future” is their future.

Having these stories in mind, I am interested in understanding the conjuncture between hope and the future. As we know both from our own personal experiences and from scholarly works on these concepts, hope and the future are intimately connected. But how are they actually related? Related to this, I am also interested in the diverse projections of the future. When multiple narratives for a hopeful future emerge, how can we best make sense of the multiplicity in imagining the future? As Kirksey et al. remind us in their insightful essay, “Hope in Blasted Landscapes” (2015), hope can emerge in the midst of the worst industrial disaster, like the BP Oil Spill. I witness similar hopeful narratives in the case of Fukushima, but I wonder how hope generates different imaginaries of the future. As Professor Slayton nicely summarizes, debates of nuclear power and climate change alike ask about the future. But what is the future? What does hope do to the making of the future?

Vincent Ialenti

The chances of a nuclear renaissance occurring in North America or Western Europe on a scale large enough to significantly mitigate climate change currently seems low.

Today's Gen III reactor building projects have very high up-front costs in the billions. With new reactor designs, profit is sometimes not seen for four decades-- financial risks poorly fit for more shallow corporate investment horizons. Then there's the pricey challenge of continually producing highly-trained nuclear personnel for a reactor's 75+ year operating life as universities see reduced student demand for nuclear education, high instruction costs per nuclear student, uncertain government funding futures for research reactors, and increasing worries about liabilities associated with keeping nuclear materials on campus. Without subsidy, why would a private university invest in bulky pricey Big Science departments – like space science or nuclear engineering – when they could instead invest in less-expensive more-lucrative information-, communication-, or computer-sciences departments that seem, to paying students, more in line with the times? On top of this, in the rare event of a major meltdown, enormous cleanup costs render Gen III reactors uninsurable: states/taxpayers must always bail them out. All this leads many to see nuclear as untenable without military-style government purchasing (to, say, achieve fleet effects), without clean energy state subsides like those seen by wind/solar/hydro in the US/EU, or without strong sovereign support for nuclear like that in China, India, or Russia today.

I suspect a lot would first have to change politically, economically, and culturally in North America and Western Europe before the regions could see enough new nuclear reactors built, and fossil plants not built, to have a meaningful impact on total yearly carbon emissions.

Yet some put hope in Gen IV small modular reactors (SMRs) currently under development. SMRs, it is said, would be safer because they "need fewer operators and safety officers, less robust containment structures, and less elaborate evacuation plans." But many contest this. It is also said that SMRs could lower nuclear's staggering initial investment costs: the smaller, lower-output, simpler reactor designs could be factory-built uniformly in one place and then transported via trucks/trains to individual installation sites with minimal on-site assembly. Today's Gen III reactors, by contrast, must be tailored to specific locales, customized for specific regulatory contexts, acquire their own unique construction licenses, be subject to more extensive safety analysis, and be assembled mostly on-site-- creating costly non-uniformities between projects. Even if SMRs do lower costs, would they be lowered enough to make nuclear widely viable? How much (state) funding for further R&D and innovation would be necessary before SMRs are refined enough to be commercially successful? Once running, would SMRs ever realistically be subsidized as clean energy sources like hydro/wind/solar?

Gabrielle Hecht

I strongly second Ialenti's skepticism about the ability of GenIII reactors to meet climate change goals. As for GenIVs: we'd do well to remember the long history of disappointments that followed 1950s atomic enthusiasm, symbolized by the (in)famous “too cheap to meter” claim. As a former US NRC Chair argued in a recent editorial, “The reality with nuclear power is that it has proven time and again to take longer and cost more to develop than predicted. There is nothing in the new designs nor the performance of the industry today that suggests this trend will end.” Even putting questions of safety aside, nuclear plants cannot be built quickly enough to offer a realistic means of mitigating climate change.

Billions of people on this planet still do not have access to electricity. Providing such access is essential. But we need to understand that arguments about the need for centralized baseload electricity are technopolitical claims that seek to keep power in the hands of large-scale corporations and the states that support them. This is true in North America and Europe; it's equally true in Asia and Africa. 2 quick examples:

Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi have just signed an MoU for Japan to help India build a new fleet of reactors. The deal gives Japan's nuclear industry a new lease on life. It enables Modi to claim that he can electrify the whole nation. And it gives both countries a means of countering China's growing economic and industrial power. But for many Indian citizens – such as those who live near the Russian-built Kudankulam nuclear power station, who have been protesting for years because of serious concerns about shoddy construction practices, India's willingness to properly regulate the industry, and the likelihood of an accident in their backyard – the deal represents a dangerous attack on Indian democracy. And this doesn't even take into account India's history of uranium extraction, among the most shameful and devastating in the world.

A similar conflict is brewing in South Africa, where President Jacob Zuma is pushing for his country to sign a deal to build 9 new nuclear reactors, probably with Russia. He's encountering vocal opposition from all corners, from mistrustful citizens to his own finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, who argued that even with foreign financing, South Africa could afford no more than 2 new reactors. One undercurrent in this whole affair: there's good reason to suspect that any large contract would come with lucrative payoffs for top officials. Zuma rewarded Nene's efforts to stem corruption by sacking him.

Obviously there's a lot more to say. I've written elsewhere about African dreams for nuclear power. I join those who argue that massive investments and rapid deployment of solar, wind, and hydro are the only realistic means of quickly providing energy to those who so desperately need it, while remaining within a “safe operating space” for humanity.

Haejoang Cho

I am in deep agreement with Professor Hecht's comment, and I also recall Ulrich Beck's concept of a ‘risk society.’ Beck divides modernity into two phases, modernity and second modernity. Where modernity is characterized by rapid economic growth, second modernity systematically produces risk. In a risk society sustainability and reflexivity becomes more important than economic production, and emphasis is placed on the capability to overcome and manage crises and disasters. In that sense Germany is a model case of a second modernity state: after meticulously reviewing the risks of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, it reached a national consensus to place a moratorium on new nuclear plants. On the other hand, those economic powerhouse states that take reckless risks for the sake of raising their economic indices, even after Fukushima, do so at the peril of bringing about global disaster.

I have always argued that once a country's per capita GDP exceeds $20,000 it must wean itself of the paradigm of growth. However, former President Lee Myung-bak of Korea (from 2008 to 2013), elected around the time its per capita GDP reached this threshold, made the so-called 747 Pledge (7% growth rate, GDP per capita of $40,000, and seventh largest economy in the world) and spurred forward large-scale construction projects including nuclear plants. The current president made a similar 474 Pledge (4% potential growth rate, 70% employment, GDP per capita of $40,000) and last year announced the construction of 13 more nuclear plants by 2029, despite her promise as a candidate to take public safety seriously.

There is increasing exchange between Japanese and Korean activists since Fukushima and the anti-nuclear movement is gaining strength in Korea, exposing the "nuclear mafia” that Professor Levine mentioned. However, the prospects for success are not bright because the "nuclear construction mafia" is backed up by state power and comes equipped with an incredible publicity machine that turns lies into truth, not to mention the financial capacity to buy off local communities. Last week the credit rating service Moody's raised Korea's credit rating again, meaning these construction interests will be all the more eager to push forward their hugely profitable projects while this window of opportunity lasts. Moreover, a solid 30­-odd percent of the electorate are swing voters ready to be seduced by the slogan of economic recovery.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago President Putin of Russia followed Prime Minister Abe of Japan in concluding an agreement for the construction of nuclear plants with Prime Minister Modi of India, a deal that is also said to include a program for the sale of arms. The success of the "nuclear environmentalists" at science marketing is as devastating as it is dazzling. Just as accumulation by dispossession (David Harvey) marches on after the Wall Street crash of 2008, the nuclear industry appears set to continue business as usual in the wake of Fukushima with the backing of its state sponsors.

Despite everything, I still believe that we can achieve “energy shift, energy down” and hope that we can discuss this possibility at the Okinawa conference this summer. 2016 is the year of the clever monkey and I am waiting for Sun Wukong (孫悟空), the legendary trickster Monkey King from the Chinese novel Journey to the West. Professor Genda is the one who put the playful theme “Asobi” to the conference; could he play the Monkey King that the year and the times call for?

Shuhei Kimura

In March 2015, after four years since the Great East Japan Earthquake, I visited Rikuzen-takata city, which was a tsunami disaster area (not a nuclear disaster area). I have visited there many times since the earthquake disaster happened, although I wish I could have been there immediately after the disaster. During the last four years, there have been different changes. Rubble piles and muddy coast have become a vast vacant lot, and the only surviving pine tree from the tsunami disaster has become a tourist spot, and BRT was inaugurated instead of reconstructing a railroad. Yet, these changes were less shocking for me than another scene which I saw at the time.

I am speaking of a bridge, which was called a “bridge to hope.” However, to be honest, I felt that it was grotesque. The conveyor belt was 33 feet in width and a couple of miles in length. One of its edges is located on the mountain across the river, covering the vast area where so many things were destroyed or artificially developed. With its undecorated steel bridge piers, was working on its own under only a few operators, the bridge looked like a gigantic automaton. People call this belt conveyor a “bridge to hope” (the name was chosen from submissions from the public), and it “can convey , in one day, the amount of soil which a 10 ton truck can convey 4000 times, thereby shortening construction time from about 10 years to about 2 years.”

In addition to this landscape, my shock stemmed from the fact that this “machine” was referred to as a source of “hope.” When the disaster happened, many people spoke hopefully of the future despite all of its confusion and uncertainties. People said that Japan would change and Japan had to change. However, four years later, it is this giant automaton that is the “hope” of the disaster area (or, at least, people are unwillingly calling it the “hope,” considering the governmental policy). There are infrastructures inevitably, systematically, and “solemnly” being created by this gigantic automaton. It is raising the ground level, which increases local people's anxiety day by day. They are worried that the project is irreversible and so on. Are people limited to imagine their future under these grotesque infrastructures? Whose future and what kind of “hope” do these infrastructures represent?

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Thank you very much for your important suggestion, Prof. Slayton. Since Prof. Miyazaki commented “I especially welcome thoughts and reflections from Japan-based members,” I was thinking about what I could say, based on my experiences. For the past five years I have sometimes participated in research concerning the tsunami victims. Nevertheless, I was not able to gather my words easily. Considering that there are so few comments from Japan-based members, I guess that their difficulty in saying something indicates a current reality in Japan.

Mr. Hiroshi Kainuma, who analyzed the historical process of building nuclear plants in Fukushima in On Fukushima (Fukushima-ron), simply narrated the current discursive situation in Japan: ordinary Japanese people feel that “it is so difficult to say something to Fukushima problem.” (Introduction to Fukushima Studies). That is, we are still caught up in “Japan's domestic debate … hopelessly dictated by the unproductive disagreement.” Moreover, I feel that this situation is about to become more serious. Briefly speaking, in the current discursive sphere in Japan, the tendency is that all discussion about nuclear energy is framed either as approval or disapproval of the Abe administration). If we were to escape from this dichotomy and look at diverse values and interests in our society (which originate from the simple reason that it is so difficult to change the ways and places of our lives), we would find it difficult to say something. For instance, concerns about health risks from exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation will still seriously influence local farmers. They are carefully measuring radiation levels around Fukushima and cultivating crops under the condition that such risks were not scientifically verified based on enough data analysis. This is just one example. Even among those who are opposed to nuclear plants, there is no common ground. Under this condition, Mr. Kainuma, who was born in Fukushima prefecture, argued strongly that outsiders pretending to have knowledge shouldn't say anything. However, ironically, his argument cannot convince those who already believe that their arguments are correct, and makes it uncomfortable for those who try to listen to different voices to speak frankly.

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Following Prof. Slayton, I would like to reconfirm the significance about the problem at a specific ‘level’ or ‘order.’ We need to “identify outstanding questions about nuclear power, and explore possibilities for addressing those questions.” Addressing the climate change problem needs “global scale” imagination. While the nuclear power problem as it relates to energy or economic issues could be discussed at the level of individual states, some comments in this forum argue that we should discuss the problem at an international level. In contrast, following Prof. Takahashi, I would like to argue that it is important to carefully consider about how this problem would appear on a smaller scale. And we should also try to connect multiple-scales to each other. This argument might be contrary to what Ulrich Beck said, that is, that radioactive substances move beyond borders. Having said that, the reason why I think a small-scale perspective is important is because in Japan, at least, it is not states or electric companies, but municipalities who decide to build (or accept) new nuclear plants.

In Japan, I think that this suggests a question: “in what scale we could resolve problems without falling into a strict discussion such as the above?” I think that some cities could provide clues to consider, such as Kubokawa-cho where residents discussed building nuclear plants for a couple of decades (Kohei Inose, Village and Nuclear Plants) and ultimately succeeded in rejecting them. Or we could consider Kashiwa-shi where citizens and farmers held a round-table meeting about confidence-building in farming in hotspot areas generated by Fukushima nuclear plants disaster, and shared their experiences in overcoming their situation (Yasumasa Igarashi, The Form of “Relief” which Everyone Has Chosen).

1) Once people begin to discuss or share their arguments about nuclear energy on Twitter, SNS, or other digital media, they are immediately connected to pro-Abe or anti-Abe camps by politically partisan people, and strongly criticized by partisan groups. Those who try to find common ground between pro-nuclear energy and anti-nuclear energy are severely criticized. However, the simplified formula (anti-Abe = anti-nuclear plants = anti-the US-Japan Security Treaty = the cooperation policy with other East Asian countries based on accepting Japan's war responsibility) and its reversed formula begin to twist due to the “resolving” of the Korean comfort women problem in the end of 2015.

Yuki Ashina

I am a lawyer working on relief efforts on behalf of victims since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident of March 2011. I feel strong anger and sadness at the current situation; while about five years have passed since the accident, nuclear reactors all over Japan have been restarted almost as if the accident never happened. Moreover, technologies of building nuclear power plants are being exported from Japan to the rest of the world.

In the first place, electric power technologies aim to make people happy by making their lives convenient. But there is no “perfect” technology. Any technology will definitely have its demerits as well as merits. I believe that if a technology with excellent merits also has demerits which make people unhappy, it shouldn't be used by human beings.

Up until now, some have argued that the merits of nuclear power generation include its low cost, low environmental pollution, and high contributions to resolving the earth warming problem. I'm not a specialist of nuclear power generation, but I can understand that these merits are some of the reasons why nuclear power plants have been built all over the world.

Having said that, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident clarified the worst demerit which nuclear power generation has. That is, if a nuclear power plant accident occurs, people's lives around the plant will be fundamentally and irrevocably destroyed. I don't think that the aforementioned merits of nuclear power generation offset these demerits. I have seen people in despair, the lives they painstakingly built for themselves completely demolished by this accident. I would like to present some examples of the victims’ sadness and anger. Behind the following examples there is an enormous number of victims.

First of all, I have to say, it was not only “workplaces” or “houses” (which are easily convertible into money) that were lost, but also “home towns” themselves. Even if victims received some compensation money, some things are not recoverable: their former classmate cohorts who have supported them even decades after graduation, the murmur of a mountain stream where they enjoyed fishing with their friends over the summer holidays, or the casual conversations with neighbors as people exchanged the vegetables which they harvested on farms cultivated with care and toil.

Moreover, I would like to stress that most victims cannot identify what they have lost, even now. They are so busy trying to sustain their everyday lives that time to truly comprehend their loss. Even after five years, the nuclear power plant disaster – which is not contracting, but actually expanding every moment – must be weathered and will be forgotten in time.

I think that the first starting point to consider is the sustainability of nuclear power energy. All specialists and ordinary people, as well as victims, should seriously think about what would be lost in a “nuclear accident,” this worst demerit of nuclear energy generation. “Seriously” means to walk a mile in the victims’ shoes and imagine what it would be like if a nuclear power plant accident happened near your home. What would this mean for your life? Could you bear such a severe situation? If, together, we consider the possibility of nuclear energy generation technologies going out of control, then we have to imagine the potential misery for each of us as individuals and for our loved ones. Only after this consideration can we really think about whether pursuing such technologies is the correct course of action.

Hiroyuki Mori

Although almost five years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, there are still more than 100,000 refugees living in refugee camps in twelve municipalities. According to the latest environmental epidemiological research, the incidence rate of thyroid cancer in children at Fukushima is 20-50 times higher than normal, and an increase in future cancer rates seems unavoidable. If we considering this situation sincerely, it is obvious that it will take a very long time to restore the areas around the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

The Ashio Copper Mine mineral pollution incident has been regarded as the worst incidence of pollution in Japan. It occurred around the Watarase River in the Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures in the late of the 19th century. The development of the Ashio Copper Mine resulted in the emission of many different kinds of pollutants including smoke, polluted gas and polluted water polluted into the surrounding area at that time. Many villages were forced to be closed by this mine pollution. The influence of this disaster on the environment continues even to the present day. However, the pollution incident in Fukushima is quite more overwhelming and is really beyond comparison in Japanese history.

The true cause of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident has not been clarified yet. Even so the Japanese government and municipalities are restarting nuclear power plants all over the country one after another. I believe that requests from the business community and local stakeholders are strongly promoting that.

As a specialist of local governmental finances and economics, I have researched the Fukui Prefecture, which has the biggest agglomeration of nuclear plants in the world. I realize that this area is confined by a social-economic structure which depends on nuclear power plants and their potential to bring in enormous fixed asset tax, grants, subsidies, public works projects and consumer demand. At the same time, during my research, I felt that there was a strange atmosphere which did not permit us to speak about the nuclear power plant problem inside of the area. There was a horrible situation in which power companies attempted to conciliate local interested parties with bribes and municipalities put pressure on local residents who were opposed to nuclear power plants.

Following the precautionary principle in protecting health and the environment, which is common practice throughout the world, reducing and closing nuclear plants is inevitable. We should not cause other historical catastrophes. Toward that end, we have to take measures in areas already bound up within the structure of nuclear power plant dependence, fully mobilizing every kind of public policy such as monetary policy, financial policy, industrial development and citizen participation. I think it will take this kind of mobilization to abolish nuclear power plants.