Nuclear power boosters used climate change to ride to energy supremacy

Nuclear power boosters used climate change to ride to energy supremacy
January 25, 2012 (Mainichi Japan)


In 1997, in the midst of the international negotiations that would eventually result in the Kyoto Protocol, the Japanese delegation was pondering whether it could realistically accept the protocol's main point: a commitment to a 6 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels. They were also grappling with what such a commitment would mean for Japan's energy supplies.


Strangely enough, though the Japanese delegation was grappling with issues of carbon emissions and energy needs, there was not a single representative of the then Environment Agency on hand. Osamu Watanabe, vice minister at the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry at the time of the talks and now president of Japan Petroleum Exploration Co., sums up Japan's thinking like this:


"Taking nuclear power into account was a prerequisite for accepting the 6 percent reduction. Speaking for the industry ministry, we thought that the more nuclear power we had, the more we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions."



http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree



Meanwhile, at the Environment Agency -- which became the Environment Ministry in 2001 -- there were many staff who took a more cautious attitude to the promotion of nuclear power. Their skepticism did not, however, often find effective expression.


"The industry ministry put up a lot of resistance to the Environment Agency getting involved in energy policy," a senior agency official from the time says. "We just couldn't get a word in."


The threat of climate change gained traction in the global imagination after the end of the Cold War. And as warming worries grew, nuclear power became an anti-emissions trump card in the eyes of many, fueling a reactor building spree. Another former Environment Ministry official with long experience in climate change policy told the Mainichi, "Government policy came to incorporate promotion of nuclear power. It was taboo for us to even make an issue of it."


Even after the Kyoto Protocol was agreed on, the Environment Agency and its successor ministry had a very rough road trying to defend climate change policies. The agency tried to organize domestic support for the protocol's ratification, but was met with fierce opposition from the governing party and business world figures who worried about the effects on industry and condemned the protocol as an "unequal treaty."


"We thought getting the protocol ratified was the greatest environmental policy measure we could take, but drawing on nuclear power never entered our minds," the former senior Environment Ministry official says. It was, however, on the minds of some people in government. When the government finalized its basic principles for climate change policy in March 2002, the document included a provision for "promotion of nuclear power," and set a goal of increasing nuclear power output by 30 percent by 2010.


The Environment Agency also came under direct pressure to fall in line behind nuclear power even before the rumblings around the Kyoto Protocol. Just after the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, as the agency was undertaking revisions to laws providing capital to environmental NGOs, it was forced by the then ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to insert provisions banning funding to groups that were opposed to nuclear power. Many senior officials were also cornered by governing party lawmakers demanding the agency back nuclear power.


The push for nuclear power deepened when the Democratic Party of Japan came into power in 2009. In September that year, then Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama declared to the world that Japan would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020. Just after that announcement, speaking on the environmental assessment for the construction of a third reactor at Kyushu Electric Power Co.'s Sendai nuclear power plant, the environment minister stated that "to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to guarantee safety, steady promotion of nuclear power is necessary." This was the first time official pronouncements in favor of nuclear power were made over an environmental assessment.


Even leading Japanese climate scientists were given a part to play in nuclear power promotion. University of Tokyo professor emeritus Ryoichi Yamamoto -- a climate change policy advisor to both the Abe and Fukuda administrations -- put together a 2008 report calling for the expansion of nuclear power as a vital part of global warming strategy when he was chairman of an Atomic Energy Commission panel.


"I thought nuclear power would be a powerful tool," Yamamoto says of the report. "But it can't be controlled when there's an accident, so it can't really be called a 'technology.' I've come to understand that there are ethical considerations with destroying the lives of local residents. I regret that I could not point out those issues when I wrote the report."


Furthermore, "I think the government, which seemed to be blocked and drifting on how to get reactor construction moving and the problems of radioactive waste disposal, just latched onto the global warming issue when climate change countermeasures reached a critical juncture. We thought that the risks of global warming were far greater than those of nuclear power, but in this earthquake-prone nation of Japan, the opposite is true."