JAPANESE people do not generally like doing things on their own, so the government usually introduces its annual White Paper on nuclear energy by confirming that the country is following part of an international trend towards nuclear power. But things became a little embarrassing for Tokyo last November. Noting that West Germany had abandoned plans to reprocess nuclear fuel, the White Paper went on to reassure the public that ‘France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union are promoting the continued development of nuclear power generation’. Between the report’s preparation and its publication, however, there was some shifting of the sands among the nuclear enthusiasts.
In France, reports of problems at a network of power stations along the Channel coast had damaged the prestige of the country’s powerful nuclear lobby. In the Soviet Union, the growing national revolts reinforced local objections to the siting of new nuclear power stations. And the British government, in the run-up to the privatisation of the electricity industry, was forced to reveal that its nuclear reactors are hopelessly uneconomic and that it was shelving plans to build more.
Britain’s decision was a particular blow to the Japanese government. Part of the reason lies in the commercial and technical links that exist between the two countries. Japan was one of only two foreign customers for Britain’s pioneering Magnox reactors, developed in the 1950s. British Nuclear Fuels also handles a crucial part of Japan’s fuel cycle: it reprocesses Japanese waste at its Sellafield plant. The government is even more concerned that any wavering abroad about the benefits of nuclear power will encourage the unprecedented and growing opposition to things nuclear inside Japan itself. This opposition has already forced Tokyo to postpone its ambitious nuclear timetable.
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Japan has the world’s fourth-largest nuclear industry after the US, France and the Soviet Union. The country’s 37 nuclear reactors generate around 27 per cent of its electricity. Coal, gas and oil-burning power stations provide most of the rest, with a contribution of about 12 per cent from hydroelectricity and a tiny amount from geothermal energy . The nuclear industry has grown with the consensus that there is simply no alternative. Every visitor to Japan – and every schoolchild – is drilled with the message that it is a small and overpopulated country with no natural resources. In fact, Japan is considerably larger than Britain and is less densely populated than the Netherlands. But the lack of fossil fuels is real.
In 1986, the most recent year for which figures are available, Japan needed to import fuels accounting for more than 80 per cent of its total energy. Of the leading developed countries, only Italy has a similar deficit in its energy trade. Japan’s dependence on foreign oil is almost total. The two oil shocks of the 1970s dealt traumatic blows to its postwar strategy of industrial expansion. This experience, coupled with memories of how an oil embargo by the US helped to trigger the Pacific War in 1941, left Japan firmly set on the nuclear path.
The fact that one political party, the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party, has ruled Japan without interruption for more than 30 years means that planners have not had to cope with political changes of direction. This could alter after this weekend: the recent public unhappiness with political corruption, combined with fury at a new purchase tax, may put opposition parties into power in Sunday’s general election. The largest of these parties, the Japan Socialist Party, has traditionally opposed nuclear power: if elected, its policy is not to build any further nuclear plant.
More worrying for the nuclear industry is the emergence of grass-roots opposition to new nuclear projects. It is not quite true to say that the Japanese public is apathetic about the environment: local issues have provoked vocal and even violent protests. But the antinuclear protests mark the first appearance in Japan of national campaigns on a particular environmental issue.
The appearance of the movement, most of whose members are women, startled the establishment. The cause was the Chernobyl accident of April 1986. Ironically, while the incident had very little direct effect on Japan, newspaper polls shortly afterwards showed for the first time that more Japanese people opposed nuclear power than supported it. This was followed by an extensive public relations programme, mounted by the nuclear industry and the government, and involving around 14 000 meetings between local groups and the nuclear community. A demonstration held in Tokyo on the first anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster attracted around 2500 people. But a year later, in April 1988, an unprecedented 20 000 attended a demonstration organised by around 150 local groups. Since then, the antinuclear movement has kept up its fight.
Yasumasa Tanaka, professor of political science at Gakushin University in Tokyo, believes that it took until the spring of 1988 for the Japanese to abandon their overall pronuclear attitude. One reason for the sudden outburst of antinuclear protests, he says, was the arrival of radioactively contaminated foods – mostly spices and nuts – imported from Europe. This caused a panic among Japan’s householders. Meanwhile, the country’s usually apolitical young people discovered in nuclear energy a cause for protest. In one celebrated incident, the Toshiba-EMI company refused to release a record containing antinuclear lyrics by the Japanese rock group RC Succession. Toshiba, a leading contractor in nuclear power, said that some of the songs were ‘not appropriate’.
As anywhere in the world, protests are most vocal at the proposed sites of new nuclear installations. The inhabitants of Rokkasho, in Aomori Prefecture at the northern end of Japan’s main island, Honshu, are bitterly divided over a plant for handling nuclear waste that is starting to go up in their back yards. Last April, around 10 000 people formed a human chain around the site. Apart from the site’s geological uncertainties, the campaigners say it is vulnerable to aircraft crashes because it is close to a busy US Air Force base.
Pressure from local opponents has already caused the Japan Nuclear Fuel Industry Company, which is building the Rokkasho plant, to make radical changes in the design of the storage for low-level wastes. The original proposal, in April 1988, was to store waste in concrete pits on a rock bed, and to cover them with 4 metres of soil. The new design, announced last October, involves building the pits into rock and covering them with 2 metres of clay as well as 4 metres of soil. The company will also build tunnels so that workers can make regular inspections for damage and leaking water; the previous design relied on instruments. But such measures did little to appease protesters. The nuclear complex became the main issue in the area’s mayoral election last December, in which two candidates opposed the Liberal Democratic Party’s mayor, who supported the development. The more moderate of the opponents unseated the mayor, and promised to put a stop to work on the project.
In late 1988, protesters attempted to disrupt the commissioning ceremony for a pressurised-water reactor (PWR) at Tomari on the northern island of Hokkaido. Tomari was the first nuclear power plant in Japan to come on stream after the Chernobyl accident. Opponents said that more than a million people – one-quarter of the island’s adult population – had signed a petition against the plant.
A steady stream of breakdowns and other incidents has also kept nuclear issues in the news. The Japanese nuclear industry is proud of its safety record. Thanks to good engineering and a motivated and stable workforce, ‘downtime’ in Japan’s reactors is around the lowest in the world: they worked to 79.4 per cent capacity in 1987. The Atomic Energy Commission of the government’s Science and Technology Agency also claims the industry has set records for low exposure of radiation to their employees. Breakdowns, however, still occur.
The most embarrassing recent incident was the failure of a cooling pump at the No. 2 Fukushima Plant, northeast of Tokyo, in January 1989. The boiling-water reactor began operations in 1987. Inspectors said that a 20-kilogram section of a metal plate attached to the shaft of a cooling water pump broke away, damaging the whole pump. The breakdown was the first of its kind in Japan and prompted the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), which has responsibility for promoting nuclear power in Japan, to set up a special committee to investigate. The plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, suspended operations at six other reactors for checks. To make up the shortfall in output, the company had to switch to its expensive oil-fired plants that it normally keeps on reserve for sudden surges in demand.
Less than a month later, inspectors found cracked bolts in cooling pumps of a PWR at Kagoshima in Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Yuhiko Araki, deputy head of atomic policy research at the Science and Technology Agency, said the incidents ‘cast a dark shadow over people’s trust in nuclear power’. To make matters worse, as in Britain and France, relations between the nuclear industry and the press are not always harmonious. Journalists say the industry is unnecessarily secretive. Nuclear engineers, for their part, complain of sensational and inaccurate headlines whenever the words ‘nuclear’ and ‘incident’ occur in the same article.
To counter the opposition to the nuclear industry, the government has increased its budget for public relations more than tenfold. One campaign is aimed at housewives – who the government claims are being misled by ‘extremists’ – and stresses that radiation is a natural phenomenon and that the alternative to nuclear power is to burn polluting fossil fuels. For the first ‘Nuclear Power Day’ in October last year, posters showing a happy couple expressing their gratitude to nuclear power appeared in railway stations and schools.
Nuclear power’s new image
Protests have also influenced the way the government announces its nuclear plans. The latest White Paper on nuclear energy deals with the industry’s safety record before it outlines plans for the future. This reflects the changing emphasis in White Papers from announcements of ambitious plans to reassurances about safety.
In another move, MITI has introduced a new system for classifying incidents at nuclear plants with the aim of making its reports of breakdowns and operating records less alarming to ordinary people. The government finally admitted last November that public opposition was forcing it to delay the more ambitious of its plans, particularly one to increase nuclear capacity to 53 gigawatts by 2000. The present capacity of the country’s 37 reactors is 29 gigawatts. Ministers are worried that a new, high-profile nuclear programme will stir up even more opposition to nuclear power.
Among the sensitive problems the government has to face is the decommissioning of the older power stations. The first work, perhaps as early as 1996, will be at the Tokai station, northeast of Tokyo. MITI estimates that it will cost 30 billion yen (Pounds sterling 130 million) to decommission the station’s single British-designed Magnox reactor. ‘But this is nothing but an estimate,’ says Araki at the Science and Technology Agency. The money, which power companies will have to raise themselves, is less than half the British estimate for dismantling similar reactors. Decommissioning of most of the country’s other reactors is not due to start for about 20 years.
A more immediate and much more sensitive subject is the disposal of wastes. At the moment, nuclear power stations store their own low-level waste on site. But in 1992, the vast new complex at Rokkasho in Aomori Prefecture, northern Japan, will start to handle this waste. Another plant – probably on Hokkaido island, though the government has not confirmed the site – will handle high-level waste. This will be vitrified, allowed to cool for between 30 and 50 years, and then stored several hundred metres underground. As in Britain, the location of the deep storage site is likely to be controversial. The Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, set up by industry, is now studying various Japanese geological layers, says Araki. ‘But it has not decided where the disposal site will be,’ he says.
The government is also committed to closing Japan’s fuel cycle. This means reducing its dependence on foreign countries to enrich nuclear fuel and reprocess spent fuel as far as possible. The result will be several more controversial projects. The first stage is a plant to enrich uranium for PWRs and boiling-water reactors (BWRs) at Rokkasho. The centrifugal enrichment plant is due to start operations in 1991, and will be capable of handling 30 per cent of the country’s needs for uranium by the end of the century. Japan imports its enriched fuel from the US. A reprocessing plant on the same site will begin handling fuel in the mid-1990s.
A fast-breeder future
But before then a reactor to demonstrate fast-breeder technology, known as Monju, is due to be in operation. The sodium-cooled reactor, which is due to be running by October 1992, is a key component of Japan’s long-term strategy. Fast-breeder reactors (FBRs) run on uranium enriched with plutonium, and in the process produce more plutonium. MITI sees them as a vital step towards eliminating its dependence on imported uranium and gaining complete control of its domestic fuel cycle from foreign governments.
Before Japan can reach that stage, however, its nuclear industry must overcome politically the most risky operation of all. This is to transport plutonium back to Japan from the nuclear fuel it has sent for reprocessing in British and French plants. The shipments are necessary because Japan owns this reprocessed fuel and must pay for its storage while it remains in Europe. Besides, Japan needs the plutonium for its FBR programme, which is due to begin in 1992, and it will not be able to reprocess enough of its own for another 10 years. The Japanese industry is keen to fuel its existing light-water reactors with fuel that is a mixture of the oxides of uranium and plutonium, known as MOX. Imports of fuel from Europe in this form would be less controversial than imports of plutonium: it would be much harder for terrorists to make a nuclear weapon from MOX than from plutonium.
Shipments of nuclear material between Japan and Europe are nothing new. A small fleet has been carrying spent fuel to the British reprocessing plant at Sellafield since 1969; the trade, which is under contract until 2002, is worth Pounds sterling 2.5 billion to British Nuclear Fuels. This sum makes the business Britain’s biggest earner of yen. Shipping plutonium the other way, however, is quite a different matter.
The Japanese government’s first choice was to cut the risk of hijack by transporting the plutonium by air, in nonstop flights over the North Pole by Boeing 747 aircraft. However, the American government has effectively prohibited this by refusing to set technical specifications for containers that would survive a plane crash. The US also effectively blocked the alternative, shipments by sea, by saying that these would need an armed escort. This opens a new can of worms. In theory, Japan has been an unarmed nation since 1945. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution says that ‘. . . land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, shall never be maintained’. This clause exists uneasily with Japan’s armed forces of about 250 000 men, equipped with 1100 tanks, 60 warships and about 450 aircraft; this military strength, says the government, is retained purely for self-defence.
Tokyo solved the problem in a superbly bureaucratic fashion, by giving the job of escorting the shipments not to the navy, but to the Maritime Safety Agency, a coastguard force. The only difficulty is that this will involve building a new armed escort ship that is capable of circumnavigating the globe nonstop, which may further delay the shipments. Japan has a depressed shipbuilding industry and so the government will not buy an escort ship from abroad. It set aside 20 billion yen (Pounds sterling 90 million) from 1989-90 to build the ship (‘Japan to send gunboat to Sellafield’, This Week, 25 November 1989).
One certainty is that the escort ship will not itself be nuclear-powered. Japan’s first experiment with this technology, the nuclear ship Mutsu, is still being refitted 15 years after a maiden voyage that turned into a fiasco. After running through a blockade by local fishermen, who feared that fish stocks would be contaminated and unsaleable, Mutsu broke down at sea. The ship drifted for 45 days while the authorities tried to find a port that would allow it to dock and the crew tried to block leaks in the reactor’s cooling system with boiled rice and old socks. Late this year, the rebuilt Mutsu is due to undertake further trials at sea from its specially built port at Sekinehama in Aomori Prefecture, not far from the Rokkasho complex.
This is uncomfortably close to the start of several high-profile projects, most notably the expansion of the Rokkasho complex. The planners in MITI must be wondering whether their already shaky nuclear policy can withstand even the slightest risk of another fiasco.