SUTTSU, Japan – It looked like an easy payday. The Japanese government has conducted a study on potential sites for the storage of spent nuclear fuel – a review of ancient geological maps and research papers on local plate tectonics. It appealed to local residents to volunteer. Participation would not commit them to anything.
Haruo Kataoka, the mayor of a sick fishing village on the northern island of Hokkaido, raises his hand. His city, Suttsu, was able to use the money. What can go wrong?
The answer, he quickly learned, was many. A resident threw a firebomb at his home. Others threatened to recall the city council. A former prime minister traveled six hours from Tokyo to denounce the plan. The city, which spends much of the year in a snow-quiet silence, was shrouded in a media storm.
There are few places on earth that are eager to host a nuclear waste dump. Only Finland and Sweden have decided on permanent storage sites to weaken their nuclear energy programs. But the outrage in Suttsu speaks to the deep anxiety that still exists in Japan ten years after a huge earthquake and tsunami caused the core of three nuclear reactors in the Fukushima Prefecture, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
The black stamp left by the nuclear industry in Japan has profound implications for the country’s ability to manage the world’s third largest economy, while also meeting its commitments to combat climate change. Of the more than 50 nuclear reactors in Japan, all of which were shut down after the March 11, 2011 disaster, only nine have resumed, and the issue remains politically toxic.
As Japan’s share of nuclear energy fell by about a third of total power to single digits, the gap was partially filled by coal and natural gas, which hampered the country’s promise to be carbon neutral late last year. . by 2050.
Even before the Fukushima disaster, which led to three explosions and a release of radiation that forced the evacuation of 150,000 people, ambivalence towards nuclear energy was deeply rooted in Japan. The country is plagued by the hundreds of thousands killed by the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
Most Japanese, however, agreed with nuclear power and saw it as an inevitable part of the energy mix for a poor poor country that had to import about 90 percent of the materials needed to generate electricity.
After the nuclear disaster, public opinion swung decisively in the other direction. On top of a newly galvanized anxiety, a fresh mistrust has come in both the nuclear industry, which has built reactors that were susceptible to a natural disaster, and the government that made it happen.
A parliamentary commission found that the collapse was the result of a lack of oversight and collusion between the government, the owner of the plant and the regulators.
“Aid programs and the government and our nuclear experts have been saying, ‘Do not worry, there will not be a serious accident,'” Tatsujiro Suzuki, director of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Research Center, told Nagasaki University Now “people think the industry is not reliable and the government that drives the industry is not reliable.”
The Japanese government, which has raised safety standards for nuclear power stations, says it plans to bring more reactors online again. But Fukushima’s legacy now infects all discussions about nuclear power, even the question of how to deal with waste produced long before the disaster.
“Every normal person in the city thinks about it,” said Toshihiko Yoshino, 61, the owner of a seafood business and oyster shift in Suttsu, who has become the face of opposition to the mayor.
“It’s because that kind of tragedy happened that we don’t have to have nuclear waste here,” he said. Yoshino said in an interview at his restaurant, where large windows look out onto the snow-capped mountains that rise above Suttsu Bay.
For the time being, the politics surrounding the waste indicate that if it is not under Suttsu, it will find its way to a place like this: a city exhausted by the collapse of local industry and the steady weakening of its population. of migration. and age.
The central government tried to encourage local governments to volunteer for consideration by offering a payment of about $ 18 million for the first step, a literature review. Those going to the second phase – a geological study – will receive an additional $ 64.4 million.
Only one other city in the entire country, the neighboring Kamoenai – already next to a nuclear power plant – has joined Suttsu to volunteer.
One thing Fukushima made clear, said Hirokazu Miyazaki, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University who studied how communities were compensated after the disaster, was the need to find a fair way to reduce social and economic costs. of nuclear power.
The problem is symbolized by Fukushima’s partially uninhabitable villages and by a struggle over the government’s plan to release a million tonnes of treated radioactive water into the ocean.
The government says it will make small emissions in 30 years without affecting human health. Fishermen in Fukushima say the plan will ruin their long journey to recovery.
“We have this potentially dangerous technology and we still rely on it and we need to have a long-term view on nuclear waste and dismantling, so we need to think better about a much more democratic way of dealing with the costs involved,” he said. Miyazaki said in an interview.
Critics of nuclear power in Japan regularly point to the decades of failure to find a solution to the waste problem as an argument against restarting the country’s existing reactors, much less to build new reactors.
In November, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi took his campaign against nuclear energy to Suttsu at the invitation of local activists. In the city’s gym, he said that after visiting the Finnish underground landfill – a facility as proposed by the Japanese government – he decided that Japan’s active geology would make it impossible to find a workable place.
Japanese reactors have produced more than 18,000 tons of spent fuel in the past half century. A small portion of it was turned into glass – through a process known as vitrification – and encased in giant metal containers.
Nearly 2,500 of the enormous radioactive tubes sit in temporary facilities in Aomori and Ibaraki prefectures, waiting to sink 1,000 feet below the earth’s surface into large underground vaults. There they would spend millennia shedding their toxic burden.
It will take decades – if ever – before a website is selected and the project begins in earnest. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan, known as NUMO and represented by a cartoon mole carefully sticking its snout out of a hole, is responsible for finding a final resting place.
Long before he accepted NUMO’s offer to do a study in his city, Mr. Kataoka, the Suttsu mayor, took an entrepreneurial view of state subsidies.
Suttsu has a population of just under 2,900, spreading thinly around the rocky edge of a deep bay, where fishing boats sniff for mackerel and squid. From 1999, with loans backed by the government, Mr. Kataoka advocated an initiative to install a stand of high wind turbines along the shore.
Many people in the city were initially opposed, he said during an interview in his office, but the project yielded nice returns. The city spent the profits selling electricity to pay off debt. Villagers have free access to a heated pool, a golf course and a modest slope with a rope. Next to a sleek community center is a free daycare for the few residents with children.
The facilities are not uncommon for Japan in the small town. Many places have tried to ward off the decline by spending large sums on white elephant projects. In Suttsu, the effect is limited. The city is shrinking, and in early March there is snow on the eaves of newly built but shuttered shops along the main street.
Mr. Kataoka nominated Suttsu for the NUMO program out of a sense of responsibility for the country. He acknowledged that the subsidies were a good bonus. But many in Suttsu doubt the intentions of Mr. Kataoka and the government. The town does not need money. And they ask why he made the decision without public consultation.
At a city council meeting Monday, residents expressed concern that once the process began, it would quickly gain momentum and become impossible to stop.
The plan fiercely divided the city. Reporters flooded in and put the controversy on national display. A sign in the hotel next to the harbor makes it clear that the staff will not accept interviews.
In October, an angry resident threw a Molotov cocktail into Mr Kataoka’s home. It broke a window, but he suffocated it without any further damage. The offender has been arrested and is now out on bail. He apologized, Mr. Kataoka said.
The mayor remains bewildered by the aggressive response. Mr Katatoka insists that the literature review is not a fait accompli and that the residents will give the final verdict.
In October, he will compete for a sixth term. He wants voters to support his proposal, but whatever the outcome, he hopes the town can move forward together.
Losing the election would be bad, he said, but “the saddest part of it is losing the city’s trust.”
Motoko Rich reported from Tokyo.