Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Arena Magazine

Japan's wishful nuclear thinking: Tony Barrell looks at the problems with expanding the use of nuclear energy in Japan.

Article Excerpt
Nuclear power stations now produce about 17 per cent of the world's electricity. In France and Lithuania they provide nearly 80 per cent, in Britain about 25 per cent. In other countries, popular attitudes to nuclear power vary from apathy and indifference to fear and loathing. It remains to be seen whether the Australian debate benefits from the maturity enjoyed by the countries that have been using nuclear power for decades.

In Japan there are now 55 working nuclear power stations--known by the acronym genpatsu--which generate about a third of the country's electricity. The first genpatsu came on line in 1966, the most recent forty years later, in March 2006. A dozen more are planned to be operational in the next decade. So far, only one reactor has been decommissioned. Japanese nuclear power does not come cheap. By year 2010 it will cost a little under US50 cents a kilowatt hour to produce (the most expensive rate in the world).

Although in principle plans were devised in the 1950s, in 1973 Japan's genpatsu building program was defined as a 'national strategic priority'. The nuclear industry is dominated by nine regional power utilities and several big conglomerates like Mitsubishi, Toshiba and Hitachi, which construct power plants, and they are closely aligned to the central bureaucracy at the Ministry of Economics Trade and Industry (METI--which used to be MITI). As in France, there are generous government subsidies for research and development--much more than for renewable energy projects--and other significant costs are not included in the unit price of electricity, such as the eventual expense of decommissioning, a cost which is discreetly assumed taxpayers will fund to the tune of several billion dollars. Other costs such as spending on remote communities to persuade them to accept a genpatsu--or four--are also defrayed.

The central government, led by METI, has for decades made it a matter of unquestionable logic that Japan needs nuclear power for more and more of its electricity. This is usually explained in terms of a visionary response to Japan's poor natural inheritance: that because it has few energy resources (no oil or gas and only now unworkable coal mines), Japan has never been 'blessed by the Gods'. There is a mix of aggrieved nationalism, self-pity and mysticism informing this often repeated phrase. It implies that the Japanese are entitled to compensation for having been treated badly when the natural wealth of the world was divided among the nations. In the past, Japan's nationalists assumed it was their right, and destiny, to make up for their mother country's deficiencies by seizing resources of those countries which did not know how to use them.

Whatever its origins, 'not blessed by the Gods' has endured and recurred in many documents, since the late 1960s, which explain Japan's national energy/ security problem. It has been repeatedly expressed in METI's many instalments of Japan's 'Long Term Program' for energy as well as in numerous explanatory expositions put out by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In recent years, Japan's trading infrastructure conglomerates have scoured the world for cheap energy and have often driven hard bargains with host countries. An example would be the current development of oil and gas offshore near Russia's Sakhalin island, a joint venture by Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi (who share the Woodside LNG venture in Western Australia) to develop undersea oil and gas in the sea of Okhotsk. Before the Second World War, Japanese companies (including Mitsui) were involved in the mining of Sakhalin's oil and coal. The Sakhalin consortium's Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) with Russia was drawn up in 1994, so that all costs (suddenly doubled in 2005 to US $20 billion) must to be paid off before any rewards need be shared with Russia or Sakhalin, and royalties have been set at a stingy level. Critics like Ian Rutledge of the Sheffield Energy...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!