Global Insight
July 13, 2014 5:54 am
Beware the safety myth returning to Japan’s nuclear debate
Debate on future energy needs must be wider
Is the “safety myth” creeping back into Japan’s nuclear debate?
After Fukushima Daiichi power station melted down in 2011, Japanese commentators rushed to declare that the myth of nuclear safety had been shattered. For many, the phrase was more than a way of disparaging atomic power generally; it was an attempt to explain specific failures that led to the disaster and to apportion blame.
The safety myth idea came to stand for the foolishly simplistic way that nuclear power had been sold to the Japanese public, and, as a consequence, of the way it had been regulated. Back in the 1960s, when Japan’s leaders pitched the technology to a nation that still vividly remembered Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they glossed over the risks. Civilian atomic power was not just safe, they said, it was absolutely, unquestionably, always-and-no-matter-what safe.
Those leaders knew better, of course. But absolute guarantees were the only way to bring the national psyche into line with what were, in an energy-poor country, powerful political and economic incentives.
The strategy worked. Japan ultimately built 54 commercial reactors, and before the Fukushima disaster there were plans for more. But the approach did nothing to make those reactors safer, and arguably made them less so. The need to maintain the myth prompted utilities and the government to dismiss suggestions that standards could be improved. After all, to make something better – to heighten a tsunami wall, to move a crucial back-up generator away from flood danger – would be to admit that it was once less than perfect.
As one post-Fukushima investigation concluded, those in charge were “caught up in a safety myth that deemed a severe accident such as a core meltdown to be impossible, and were not prepared for the reality that a crisis could occur right in front of them”.
Today, all of Japan’s surviving nuclear reactors remain offline, despite efforts by successive governments to restart them. Shinzo Abe is the most pro-nuclear prime minister since the accident, and also the most popular. Yet much of the public remains sceptical. This week regulators are expected to certify the first plant since tighter safety standards were introduced a year ago, a move that could lead the restart of nuclear power production as early as autumn.
The governor of Kagoshima prefecture, home of the soon-to-be-certified plant on the southern island of Kyushu, says he will support its return to operation – which could come as early as this autumn – only if Tokyo “guarantees safety”. In May, a court in Fukui prefecture in central Japan prohibited another plant from being restarted on the grounds that there was no way to prove that the risk of doing so would be zero – a fundamentally impossible task. (The decision was overturned on appeal.)
Certainly, the government and utilities have a responsibility to ensure that risks from nuclear plants are vanishingly small, and there are many lessons to be learnt from Fukushima. But one of those lessons was supposed to be that promises of absolute safety are illusory and dangerous.
A debate that focuses solely on them elides other important considerations, such as the comparative harm inflicted by fossil fuels, vastly more of which Japan is now burning. And if the pro-nuclear side wins and reactors are again operated based on the safety myth, there is a potentially bigger harm: that the old pre-Fukushima complacency will set back in.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.
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