Japan had been generating about thirty percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors before the Fukushima disaster in March of 2011. Following the disaster, all of Japan's 54 power reactors were shut down. Since then, there has been a debate about whether or not the power reactors should be shut down permanently. The Abe government wants to restart the reactors and to make export of nuclear technology a big part of Japan's international trade. Skeptics are concerned about geological faults near nuclear plants, possibility of flooding, lack of corporate competence and transparency and failure of government regulation. While the anti-nuclear faction is fighting the restart, the government has passed new laws restricting reporting on nuclear problems and assured the public that Japan will apply the lessons learned from Fukushima to keep the Japanese public safe.
Japan is very poor in fossil and nuclear fuels. It is dependent on other nations to supply fuel for electrical generation. It was hoped by many critics of nuclear power generation that Japan would move aggressively into alternative energy. Japan has resources in wind, tidal and geothermal resources that could supply all the energy it needs. In addition, the Japanese are very advanced in research and manufacture. Alternative energy generation will be a huge market in the years to come and could serve as a major part of Japan's future international trade.
Unfortunately, instead of a crash program for alternative energy sources, Japan has chosen to increase its use of fossil fuels to make up for the loss of nuclear generation capacity. An estimated extra thirty five billion dollars a year is being spent by Japan to purchase additional fossil fuels. This is increasing Japan's carbon emissions and increasing its trade deficit by over a hundred billion. Electricity consumers have seen their rates increase from twenty to thirty percent.
Following Fukushima, Japan created a new regulatory agency called the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) with more power than the weaker pre-Fukushima regulatory agencies. One of the big concerns that critics have had is that some of Japan's nuclear power reactors are near major geological faults. It is estimated that a third of Japan's power reactors might need to be permanently abandoned because of the danger posed by earthquakes. Prior to Fukushima, a geological fault was considered to be "active" if it had moved within the last ten thousand years. After Fukushima, the NRA decided that they would classify an active fault as one that had moved in the last one hundred and twenty thousand years. This is a change of an order of magnitude which supporters of nuclear power claim is not warranted.
One of the things a U.S. review of the Fukushima disaster found was that while a great deal of attention was being paid to designing a "safe" nuclear reactor, not enough attention was being paid to external threats such as the earthquake, tsunami and flood that destroyed the Fukushima power plant. While the probability of extreme events is very low, the destruction that can be caused by extreme events is huge. It would probably be better to err on the side of caution than going with optimistic estimates of the low probably of extreme events.
