Beyond Fukushima: Toward a Post-Nuclear Society by Koichi Hasegawa (review)

This important new book tackles a question that has vexed many observers since the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants in Japan. While in the early 2000s many observers had proclaimed the start of a global nuclear renaissance, the inability of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to prevent and then successfully contain a nuclear accident at Fukushima put that on hold. A number of governments around the world, including those in Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, used Japan's nuclear accident, rated at the maximum level of the International Nuclear Event Scale, as a policy window to change their energy policies. Uranium prices have dropped precipitously as the market envisions less global demand for nuclear fuel; the countries building the most new nuclear plants are primarily authoritarian ones (for example, China and Russia).

Domestic critics of Japan's advanced commercial nuclear power program envisioned that Japan would follow suit. They believed that the Fukushima meltdowns along with massive antinuclear rallies (some of which had more than 150,000 participants), citizens' referenda on energy selection in several major cities, and widespread opposition to nuclear would provide sufficient weight to their arguments and shift Japan away from atomic energy. The forced evacuation of more than 140,000 residents from towns like Namie, Futaba, and Ōkuma near the Fukushima plants and the continued dislocation of thousands of evacuees in temporary shelters throughout the country even now remain front page news.

TEPCO's mismanagement of the disaster site, its inability to stop the outflow of contaminated water, and its need for financial rescue from near bankruptcy due to compensation for evacuees have caused dismay. Yet the current Japanese government under Prime Minister Abe Shinzō continues to push for full nuclear restarts for its remaining 48 commercial reactors and for a closed fuel cycle complete with fuel reprocessing. In this book, Hasegawa, like other scholars, including Richard Samuels and Richard Hind-marsh and Rebecca Priestly,¹ explores why Japan's energy policy has not changed course more drastically as a result of the catastrophe. Through a comparative policy analysis of Japan and other advanced, industrial democracies, Hasegawa reveals what may help move Japan beyond Fukushima.

Hasegawa argues that institutions, and not ideas or interest groups, have been the primary movers behind Japan's policy choices about atomic energy. A framework of financial redistribution to depopulating host communities known in Japan as the Dengen Sanpō (Three Power Source Development Laws, Dengen sanpō kōfukin seido) has given incentives to rural towns to invite in nuclear facilities.² Once the initial plant is completed and the town budget has been boosted by hundreds of millions of yen a year in new buildings, roads, elder care facilities, assistance for business relocation to the area, and other infrastructure, host communities often are forced to invite in additional plants. The amount of money received from the initial plant wanes over time, so local officials must ask for additional plants to keep up their budgets and avoid dropping spending levels. Critics have called this a "cycle of addiction" and a "culture of dependency,"³ and others have pointed out that the actual economic impact of hosting is, at best, mixed.⁴

As a result, a number of towns host as many as seven nuclear power plants (such as the the city of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Niigata) while others, like Futaba, hosted six. Beyond the demand side for nuclear facility hosting, other institutional factors such as a well-insulated nuclear bureaucracy (p. 27), site selection in impoverished rural areas with weak civil society organizations (p. 34), and a national judicial system which rarely takes activist or antigovernment stances (p. 202) have helped Japanese authorities develop their nuclear program from the top down. Japan also lacks a Green Party which has made environmental issues a top priority and has been able to serve as a coalition...