The government of Shinzo Abe is poised to declare its long-term commitment to nuclear energy, reversing the previous administration’s decision to shut all of Japan’s atomic power plants after the Fukushima disaster. More than a year after Mr Abe took office vaguely promising to "rethink” Japan’s post-Fukushima repudiation of nuclear power, the draft of a Basic Energy Plan was made public, calling nuclear an "important baseload electricity source”. The volte face will provide a fillip for the nuclear energy industry, which has been hard hit by a worldwide change of attitude towards civilian atomic power prompted by the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi power station in 2011, according to a Financial Times report.
The restart of Japan’s reactors could also have implications for world energy markets. Japanese imports of liquefied natural gas shot up after it closed its nuclear plants down, pushing up the price of LNG in Asian and European markets. Any moderation in Japanese demand could take some of the heat out of the global LNG market. So far, Mr Abe’s efforts to salvage Japan’s nuclear industry have focused on the short term. The prime minister is supporting efforts by electricity utilities to restart about a dozen of the 50 still usable reactors, all of which are shut pending safety reviews. That effort still faces hurdles and any restarts must be approved by safety regulators and local governments.
However, the energy plan, expected to be approved by Mr Abe’s cabinet by the end of March, could open the door to a nuclear revival, possibly even including the construction of reactors, note energy analysts in Tokyo. Though polls show a majority of Japan’s population is against atomic power after Fukushima, there are pockets of support in some areas that are home to plants, which bring jobs and subsidies.
In an election for governor in western Yamaguchi prefecture on Sunday, Tsugumasa Muraoka, a former interior ministry bureaucrat supported by Mr Abe’s Liberal Democratic party, defeated a pair of anti-nuclear candidates who had campaigned against plans to build a reactor in the town of Kaminoseki. The construction plan was approved before Fukushima but has been on hold since.
The issue of nuclear energy still remains highly sensitive in Japan. Toshimitsu Motegi, industry minister, sought to play down the degree of change in energy policy, noting that the energy plan still committed the country to "reducing its reliance on nuclear power as much as possible”. The draft also avoids quantifying the ultimate role of nuclear energy, which provided close to 30 per cent of Japan’s electricity before the accident in March 2011. Japan’s "appropriate energy mix” is to be determined at an unspecified later date.
But the plan nonetheless represents a clear break from the datsu genpatsu – "escape from nuclear” – declaration of 2012 made by Naoto Kan, a more left-leaning predecessor of Mr Abe. "If we had indicated ‘zero nuclear’ without any basis, one could not call it a responsible energy policy,” Mr Motegi said. After the Fukushima disaster, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium all moved to close down or phase out their nuclear programmes. Meanwhile in the US, reactors have struggled to compete with gas-fired power plants riding the shale gas boom. Four nuclear plants have been closed in the US in the past 18 months.
In Japan, even the most ardent supporters of nuclear power concede that the industry will not return to its pre-Fukushima scale. Yet the commitment by Mr Kan to eliminate nuclear power before 2040 was undermined almost from the start. Mr Kan’s own cabinet offered only qualified endorsement of the policy, and Mr Abe’s government has in effect ignored it. Business groups, a core constituency of Mr Abe’s LDP, have opposed Mr Kan’s plan. They point to the rising cost of electricity that has accompanied the closing of Japan’s reactors, and the damage to Japan’s trade balance from sharply increased imports of fossil fuels.
