asianaffairs

Japan points way to nuclear-free planet

Japan's increased nuclear anxiety in the wake of the Fukushima disaster has left the nation with some tough choices to make on energy policies. But the crisis is also opening up new global prospects,

By David Watts

MELTDOWN: The Fukushima disaster is the largest nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986

Japan's historical 'nuclear allergy' that followed the Second World War attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been transformed into a full-blown nuclear phobia in the wake of the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear accident.

Just as Japan has lead the world in its opposition to nuclear weapons, so it is now working furiously to analyse its options as more and more of its nuclear power stations go off line for maintenance or because of local opposition to their continued operation.

But Japan is merely doing today what the rest of the nuclear world will do tomorrow. And its findings and the subsequent realignment of its policies could read across into more energy saving and more efficient climate change strategies from which many other nations could learn.

Just as the Japanese characters for 'crisis' contain the notion of opportunity, so the nation at the end of the world will likely help the rest of the globe move forward into this new era of reduced energy expectations by learning from its unique Fukushima experience.

The first and most basic requirement is to analyse more carefully the location of nuclear power plants, which appears to be an obvious point at first blush but is less so when one considers that a large number of nuclear power plants worldwide are located close to oceans even if they do not face the tsunami threat.

Japan, as any other modern industrialized nation, has to consider a wide range of issues in realigning its energy policies, taking into account the need to cut back the use of fossil fuels, increase use of renewable resources and adhere to climate change policies while calculating the effects of these policies in terms of cost to the consumer and industry. As Japan is finding out, there are no easy answers and responding to knee-jerk reactions by the public may well be counter-productive in the long run.

As with European nations, Japan has set ambitious targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases aiming for a 25 per cent reduction on 1990 levels over the medium term, conditional on other nations adhering to similar aims. These are international commitments and their achievement is a global obligation. But those obligations come expensive at an estimated cost of $450 per tonne of carbon dioxide.

The oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s pushed Japan into a rigorous policy of reducing its dependence on oil. With virtually no energy resources of its own, efficient use of energy has been a sine qua non of government thinking for many decades. As a result, Japan has one of the lowest energy uses as a ratio of its gross domestic product of any country in the world.

It also has no international borders across which energy can be traded, as in Europe and the United States, and very limited ability to move it from island to island in the Japanese archipelago, which makes it all the more vulnerable to outside considerations.

With all of these factors in mind, the nation set out a new energy policy in June of last year. With the Fukushima disaster less than a year in the future, it sketched out a greater dependence on nuclear power than previously foreseen to meet this complex array of parameters.

One of its first requirements on the demand side was to halve domestic emissions of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases by 2030 — a 42 per cent reversal over the previous benchmark.

On the supply side, the plan aimed to double the share of nuclear and renewable energy in the mix while in the power sector it aimed to double the use of non-fossil fuels from 34 per cent to 70 per cent. The share of power emanating from nuclear generation was to jump from 26 per cent to 52 per cent with the construction of 14 new nuclear reactors by 2030. The share of power emanating from renewable sources was to increase from eight per cent to nineteen per cent. With all of these measures in place, Japan could have expected to reduce its emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 and thus achieve its target.

All of that was pre-Fukushima but in the understated words of Jun Arima, director-general of the Japan External Trade Organization in London: 'Japan's energy policies are facing unprecedented challenges.'

The challenges come with the reality that 43 of the country's 54 nuclear plants are out of operation and that Japan has only got through a hot and humid summer and serious power shortages by unprecedented measures by industry and householders in reducing demand overall and shifting the main burden on the system to non-peak hours. Offices have been redesigning their work weeks so that staff attend at the weekend instead of during the week, and have undertaken other types of demand-shifting measures. This kind of mass re-engineering of the demand pattern would very likely be unachievable anywhere else given the high degree of co-operation and self-sacrifice required.

But what happens during this coming winter and through next summer? Can the country keep fighting its economic corner with these kinds of restraints in place?

The government cannot know for certain but the more fundamental problem for the long term and one that is likely to affect other countries which have major nuclear programmes and those that wish to develop them in the future is the degree to which local communities will assent to the operation of nuclear plants.

In Japan it seems that everyone has become an amateur nuclear expert. Householders all over the country are wielding Geiger counters to check on local levels of radiation, such is the level of nuclear paranoia. The government nuclear safety guidelines are well known, but such was the degree of uncertainty in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear crisis and the regular changes in the area of the exclusion zone that confidence levels are low.

The reputation of the company that runs the Fukushima nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, is so poor that its affairs have essentially been taken over by the government. It constantly understated the seriousness of the affair and has still not managed to bring the temperature of the reactor core under control. It now says that that is unlikely to happen before early next year.

As a result there are now serious questions as to how many of the nation's nuclear plants will be able to re-open even if they have passed the requisite safety tests.

Since all the plants will have been stopped by next June, the country will suffer a 30 per cent loss of electricity generation capacity if they do not re-open because of local pressure. That will inflict serious damage on the Japanese economy. And the prospect is that this is a scenario which could endure for three years if, as seems likely, the current uncertainties remain unresolved.

But if the Japanese public remains adamant and elects to have a nuclear-free future, the costs are going to be significant. Sticking with some form of fossil fuel solution would be pricey. Gas-powered reactors could be built relatively quickly but the price of the extra imported gas could run to $38 billion a year. That would translate into household bills increasing by 18 per cent and industry's costs up by 36 per cent. The implications for industry are devastating. In addition, the country's emissions would rise by 18 per cent above the 1990 levels, shredding its international commitments on global warming.

But alternatives such as the development of renewable energy do not present a cheap option. Replacing just one gigawatt of nuclear power output would require 1.9 million photo voltaic cells covering an area equivalent to 1,204 baseball parks and 4,000 windmills covering 4,442 baseball parks.

Replacing all of Japan's nuclear plants with renewables would require 200 gigawatts of photo voltaic cells covering 5,260 square kilometres and costing $1 trillion and 152 gigawatts output from windmills covering 5,000 square kilometres and costing $375 billion. And those costs take no account of the need for grid stabilization and for back-up power from batteries when the wind does not blow consistently. The 'green' alternatives then are far more costly than the thermal and nuclear alternatives.

'Widespread nuclear phobia after Fukushima is not surprising,' said Mr Arima. 'The Japanese people could choose a nuclear-free world, if it's their wish, but its economic consequences over the next 5-20 years needs to be fully analyzed beforehand.'

A senior executive of one of the Japanese companies most involved in building generation capacity around the world warned of the long lead times and uncertainties in setting up alternative generation programmes and the difficulties involved in those building and operating the plants making a fair return on their investment.
In setting up a wind or photo voltaic plant, the firm would first need to undertake an extensive period of data collection to ascertain whether the site was suitable before going through the process of acquiring the site and obtaining the necessary local permissions. Even this latter can be risky given vague parameters and unpredictable political conditions. Often extensive development of sites could be undertaken only to have permission refused at the last moment.

On one site in eastern Europe the firm recently had its period of operating the plant, when profits are typically generated, reduced from 15 to 13 years, seriously threatening the viability of the project and forcing the firm to consider pulling out.

Though the firm has had little success in Japan, it recently examined the possibility of building and operating an alternative energy generating plant there, only to find that while it would need to generate 4-6 yen per kilowatt hour to make it viable, only 2.6 yen could be expected.

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