Fukushima lays bare Japanese media's ties to top
By DAVID MCNEILL
Special to The Japan Times
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012
SUNDAY TIMEOUT
Is the ongoing crisis surrounding the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant being accurately reported in the Japanese media?
Official lines: Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano on April 17, 2011, during his first visit to Fukushima after the disasters triggered by March 11's Great East Japan Earthquake.
No, says independent journalist Shigeo Abe, who claims the authorities, and many journalists, have done a poor job of informing people about nuclear power in Japan both before and during the crisis — and that the clean-up costs are now being massively underestimated and underreported.
"The government says that as long as the radioactive leak can be dammed from the sides it can be stopped, but that's wrong," Abe insists. "They're going to have to build a huge trench underneath the plant to contain the radiation — a giant diaper. That is a huge-scale construction and will cost a fortune. The government knows that but won't reveal it."
The disaster at the Fukushima plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) again revealed one of the major fault lines of Japanese journalism — that between the mainstream media and the mass-selling weeklies and their ranks of freelancers.
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The mainstream media has long been part of the press-club system, which funnels information from official Japan to the public. Critics say the system locks the country's most influential journalists into a symbiotic relationship with their sources, and discourages them from investigation or independent lines of analysis.
Once the crisis began, it was weekly Japanese magazines that sank their teeth into the guardians of the so-called nuclear village — the cozy ranks of polititicians, bureaucrats, academics, corporate players and the media who promote nuclear power in this country.
Shukan Shincho dubbed Tepco's management "war criminals." Shukan Gendai named and shamed the most culpable of Japan's goyō gakusha (unquestioning pronuclear scientists; aka academic flunkies).
Meanwhile, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper's well-respected weekly magazine AERA revealed that local governments manipulated public opinion in support of reopening nuclear plants. The same magazine's now-famous March 19, 2011, cover story showing a masked nuclear worker and the headline "Radiation is coming to Tokyo" was controversial enough to force an apology and the resignation of at least one columnist (though the headline was in fact correct).
Others explored claims of structural bias in the mainstream press.
Japan's power-supply industry, collectively, is Japan's biggest advertiser, spending ¥88 billion (more than $1 billion) a year, according to the Nikkei Advertising Research Institute. Tepco's ¥24.4 billion alone is roughly half what a global firm as large as Toyota spends in a year.
Many journalists were tied to the industry in complex ways. A Yomiuri Shimbun science writer was cited in "Daishinsai Genpatsu Jiko to Media" ("The Media and the Nuclear Disaster"; Otsuki Shoten, 2011) as working simultaneously for nuclear-industry watchdogs, including the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (sic). Journalists from the Nikkei and Mainichi Shimbun newspapers have also reportedly gone on to work for pronuclear organizations and publications.
Before the Fukushima crisis began, Tepco's advertising largesse may have helped silence even the most liberal of potential critics. According to Shukan Gendai, the utility spent roughly $26 million on advertising with the Asahi Shimbun. Tepco's quarterly magazine, Sola, was edited by former Asahi writers.
The financial clout of the power-supply industry, combined with the press-club system, surely helped discourage investigative reporting and keep concerns about nuclear power and critics of plants such as the aging Fukushima complex and Chubu Electric Power Co.'s Hamaoka facility in Omaezaki, Shizuoka Prefecture, which sits astride numerous faults, well below the media radar.
Throughout the Fukushima crisis, the mainstream media has relied heavily on pronuclear scientists' and Tepco's analyses of what was occurring. After the first hydrogen blast of March 12, the government's top spokesman, Yukio Edano, told a press conference: "Even though the reactor No. 1 building is damaged, the containment vessel is undamaged. ... On the contrary, the outside monitors show that the (radiation) dose rate is declining, so the cooling of the reactor is proceeding."
Any suggestion that the accident would reach Chernobyl level was, he said, "out of the question."
Author and nuclear critic Takashi Hirose noted afterward: "Most of the media believed this. It makes no logical sense to say, as Edano did, that the safety of the containment vessel could be determined by monitoring the radiation dose rate. All he did was repeat the lecture given him by Tepco."
As media critic Toru Takeda later wrote, the overwhelming strategy throughout the crisis, by both the authorities and big media, seems to be to reassure people, not alert them to possible dangers.
By late March, the war in Libya had knocked Japan from the front pages of the world's newspapers, but there was still one story that was very sought after: life inside the 20-km evacuation zone around the Fukushima atomic plant.
Thousands of people had fled and left behind homes, pets and farm animals that would eventually die. A small number of mainly elderly people stayed behind, refusing to leave homes that often had been in their families for generations. Not surprisingly, there was enormous global interest in their story and its disturbing echoes of the Chernobyl catastrophe 25 years earlier.
Yet not a single reporter from Japan's big media filed from inside the evacuation zone — despite the fact that it was not yet illegal to be there. Some would begin reporting from the area much later after receiving government clearance — the Asahi Shimbun newspaper sent its first dispatch on April 25, when its reporters accompanied the commissioner-general of the National Police Agency. Later, they would explain why they stayed away and — with the exception of government-approved excursions — why they continue to stay away.
Smoke signals: The leaking Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on March 20, 2011. Critics accuse Japan's mainstream media of failing to properly report the ongoing crisis.
"Journalists are employees and their companies have to protect them from dangers," explained Keiichi Sato, a deputy editor with the News Division of Nippon TV.
"Reporters like myself might want to go into that zone and get the story, and there was internal debate about it, but there isn't much personal freedom inside big media companies. We were told by our superiors that it was dangerous, so going in by ourselves would mean breaking that rule. It would mean nothing less than quitting the company."
The cartel-like behavior of the leading Japanese media companies meant they did not have to fear being trumped by rivals. In particularly dangerous situations, managers of TV networks and newspapers will form agreements (known as hōdō kyōtei) in effect to collectively keep their reporters out of harm's way.
Teddy Jimbo, founder of the pioneering Internet broadcaster Video News Network, explains: "Once the five or six big firms come to an agreement that their competitors will not do anything, they don't have to be worried about being scooped or challenged."
Frustrated by the lack of information from around the plant, Jimbo took his camera and dosimeters into the 20-km zone on April 2 and uploaded a report on YouTube that scored almost 1 million views. He was the first Japanese reporter to present TV images from Futaba and other abandoned towns (though images from the zone, shot during government-approved incursions, later appeared on mainstream TV news programs).
"For freelance journalists, it's not hard to beat the big companies because you quickly learn where their line is," Jimbo said. "As a journalist I needed to go in and find out what was happening. Any real journalist would want to do that." He later sold some of his footage to three of the big Japanese TV networks: NHK, NTV and TBS.
Says Abe: "The government's whole strategy for bringing the plant under control will have to be revised. The evacuees will never be able to return. They can't clean up the radiation. Will the media report this? I'm waiting for that."
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Germany’s nuclear endgame: the lessons
Germany’s nuclear endgame: the lessons
Paul Hockenos, 26 July 2011
opendemocracy
Subjects:International politics Democracy and government Civil society Germany europe democracy & power politics of protest
The historic decision by Germany’s government to end the country’s nuclear-energy programme is owed to the enduring vitality of the anti-nuclear movement. Paul Hockenos maps the implications for the rest of the world.
About the author
Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based journalist. He is editor of Internationale Politik-Global Edition and senior fellow of the World Policy Institute. He is the author of Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Routledge, 1993); Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars (Cornell University Press, 2003); and Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Germany’s anti-nuclear movement is the poster-boy of its kind in Europe, even worldwide. Over the course of nearly forty years this potent, enduring campaign swayed German public opinion decisively against nuclear power. In June 2011, Germany became the first industrialised nation to commit to abandoning the atom as an energy source once and for all by 2022 - a move unthinkable without the unremitting pressure of Germany’s tenacious anti-nukes movement.
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The reactor meltdowns in Fukushima, Japan, following the tsunami of March 2011 forced the German government’s hand; but it was the popular distrust and solid arguments against nuclear technology that left chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative administration with no alternative but to abruptly reverse itself, and pledge to a future based on renewable sources.
By late spring 2011, anti-nuclear activists had convinced the overwhelming majority of Germans and the bulk of the political establishment - finally, even conservatives - of three major points.
First, nuclear energy is unsafe. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima (as well as hundreds of smaller incidents) have confirmed beyond any doubt that the risks inherent in atomic-energy production are real and lethal. Second, there is not now, nor will there ever be, a solution to the problem of nuclear-waste storage. Third, the time of renewable-alternative energies has at last arrived - and nations that ignore it will miss out not only on clean, abundant sources of energy, but will also deprive their economies of profits and jobs.
All these points are applicable everywhere there are nuclear plants. In this sense, perhaps Germany’s groundbreaking shift is a harbinger of a nuclear-free world, one that simultaneously battles climate change and powers its factories with alternative sources. If Germany can do it, so can others, including the United States and China. But that will require more than merely following the German example. For Berlin’s plan to scrap nuclear power was a direct consequence of the efforts of the anti-nuke movement - and at present no other nation has anything comparable to it. In this sense its track record and best practices are vitally instructive for opponents of atomic technology everywhere.
The spirit of Wyhl
There have been in broad terms seven vital elements in the German anti-nuclear movement’s potency and endurance. The first is that from the outset the campaign was decentralised and rooted in local, grassroots opposition. The earliest anti-nuclear protests coalesced in West Germany’s southwestern-most corner in the early 1970s. As reactors began to crop up in rural locations across Germany, so local inhabitants - resident farmers, church pastors, educators, and parent groups - began to look more closely at this supposed miracle technology plunked in their backyards without their say.
An example is a reactor intended for the hamlet of Wyhl, which lay between the progressive college town of Freiburg and France’s fertile Alsace region. The conservative, church-going community had tended vineyards and pressed grapes for centuries. Now they saw their livelihoods endangered by the towers. By 1975, over fifty locally organised citizens’ initiatives had emerged around Wyhl, and in neighbouring towns in France and Switzerland, to protest the reactor’s construction. As word of the rising resistance got out, the grape-growers were joined by students and left-wing faculty from Freiburg’s university. The mobilisation at Wyhl thus radiated from the central core of the local people rather than being imported from the elsewhere.
The second element is non-violent civil disobedience. The precedent here was set at Wyhl in February 1975, when demonstrators stormed and occupied the construction site. The troupe improvised a makeshift camp complete with communal kitchens, teach-ins, and direct democracy. In the end, the energy giant Badenwerk and the local authorities caved in, postponing construction indefinitely. The Wyhl insurgents had achieved a double success: challenging their vastly more powerful opponents, and creating a model for the anti-nuclear movement.
The locally rooted, bottom-up character of the movement is still clearly evident in Germany’s more recent demonstrations, even when they attract as many as 250,000 protestors. This has been central to sustaining the momentum even through difficult years, such as the period of the “red-green” government (1998-2005) when the Social Democrat and Green coalition partners were negotiating a phasing out of nuclear power. The government eventually compromised by deciding to wind down nuclear power gradually over twenty-one years; this was sharply criticised by anti-nuke protesters, yet efforts to mobilise activists became much harder.
But activists continued to push the case, whose third element was to emphasise an issue that won’t disappear until the last reactor is closed: that there’s no solution for nuclear waste. The protests that continued, such as those at the Gorleben waste-storage site in northern Germany along the Elbe river, were sustained by local NGOs and the farmers of Gorleben. Nationwide groups, like x-tausendmal quer and Campact, focused their efforts on helping the Gorleben community to block - or at least delay - the incoming deliveries to Germany’s single repository.
The spirit of Wyhl also lives on in the movement’s fourth element, its un-ideological diversity. Germany’s urban leftists found at Wyhl common ground beyond their own ranks. “This diversity was - and still is - so important because it made it impossible for politicians and the energy lobbies to label the protestors as crazy, left-wing agitators”, explains Dieter Rucht, Germany’s leading expert on social movements. “They had to be taken seriously because they were the conservatives’ own constituency, upstanding folk with jobs and families who voted Christian Democrat.” For four decades, a single, familiar icon and message unified the anti-nuke movement: the smiling, red sun against a yellow background with the simple but powerful message - Atomkraft? Nein Danke! (Nuclear Power? No thank you!)
The green answer
In the wake of the victory in Wyhl, the anti-nuclear movement mushroomed across the country, its fiercest pockets of activism in out-of-the-way places with names like Kalkar, Brokdorf, Grohnde, and Neckarwestheim, where nuclear facilities were stationed or planned. Yet even though many demonstrations in the late 1970s gathered more than 100,000 - and were boosted enormously by the Three Mile Island disaster in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1979 - activists were unable to follow up on their success in Wyhl with similar victories. True, legal contests that cost the power companies millions of Deutschmarks; but the reactors hummed along, and Germany’s three main political parties backed nuclear power, including most of chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s ruling Social Democrats.
The answer to this stalemate was the Green Party, initially a hodge-podge of social-movement activists voicing their concerns in town and state legislatures. The fifth element is that the Greens wrote “no nukes” prominently on their banners and fought fiercely to advance the cause, from tiny village councils to the Bundestag in Bonn and the European parliament in Brussels. The Social Democrats and other parties eventually came around to their arguments, but the Greens were the pioneers.
The sixth element is that the Greens both represented the movement in legislatures and provided infrastructure and crucial logistical support, such as offices and copy-machines and access to nationwide public relations. Petra Kelly, one of the first Greens elected to the Bundestag, was prominent among those who gave the movement a recognisable face and even enabled it to reach across national borders and speak to an international audience, including in the United States. The anti-nuclear movement and the Greens, however, were never identical.
When the Greens entered national government for the first time in 1998, the majority of Germans were opposed to nuclear energy. The best the Greens could secure in discussion with their Social Democrat coalition partners was a phasing out of nuclear energy. The Green leaders promised that neither future governments nor the power companies could backtrack on the agreement; it was, they claimed, as good as written in stone. The Greens might even have believed this - but they were wrong.
By the time the Greens left power in 2005, the anti-nuke campaign had been laid low. With the conservatives’ return to power, the muscular energy lobbies of southern German were scoring points by arguing that nuclear energy was the answer to climate change. They claimed that Germany needed its own nuclear-power industry to avoid dependence on France’s nuclear energy and Russia’s gas. The renaissance of nuclear power in the United States and China seemed to reinforce them.
The power of no
But the movement had a potent new asset. This was delivered by the law the Greens had pushed through in office, offering subsidies and tax-breaks to consumers and producers of renewable energies. The outcome was a booming cottage industry around solar-panels and wind-turbines, which added nearly 400,000 jobs to the German economy and transformed Germany into a leading exporter of alternative-energy technology.
This entirely new approach was founded on the seventh element, the Greens’ and the movement’s forceful “argument that renewable energies translated into ‘green jobs’” (in the description of Sascha Müller-Kraenner, the Berlin-based Europe representative of the United States group, the Nature Conservancy). This line of attack was so convincing, notes Müller-Kraenner, that it even won over many Christian Democrats.
The eighth element of the movement was a new generation of activists in its fold, with organisations that reflected their diversity. Campact, for example, is based on the advocacy group MoveOn, which activists like Christoph Bautz had visited in the United States. “We were fascinated by the way they could mobilise people so quickly with the internet”, says Bautz. Campact has a 490,000-address email list that enables it to put together demonstrations like the one in Fukushima’s aftermath in a week’s time. It is also a platform for people to be engaged via the internet, through mass petitions, email campaigns, and blogs.
The nationwide group Ausgestrahlt focuses on supporting the network of smaller, local groups across the country with campaigning materials and ideas, enabling them with more clout. X-tausendmal quer specialises in blockades of nuclear-waste transports; another Gorleben-based group, Castor Shottern, takes civil disobedience a step further by sabotaging the railway tracks along which the waste transports run.
Germany’s scrapping of nuclear power was unthinkable without the pressure and persistence of the anti-nuke campaign. In other countries, the place to begin this rebellion is not at the top, but from below, like the Germans, in those localities directly affected by nuclear-power plants and waste-storage dumps. Until they say Nein Danke! to the power plants in their backyards, there’ll be no convincing anyone else.
Paul Hockenos, 26 July 2011
opendemocracy
Subjects:International politics Democracy and government Civil society Germany europe democracy & power politics of protest
The historic decision by Germany’s government to end the country’s nuclear-energy programme is owed to the enduring vitality of the anti-nuclear movement. Paul Hockenos maps the implications for the rest of the world.
About the author
Paul Hockenos is a Berlin-based journalist. He is editor of Internationale Politik-Global Edition and senior fellow of the World Policy Institute. He is the author of Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Routledge, 1993); Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism and the Balkan Wars (Cornell University Press, 2003); and Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Germany’s anti-nuclear movement is the poster-boy of its kind in Europe, even worldwide. Over the course of nearly forty years this potent, enduring campaign swayed German public opinion decisively against nuclear power. In June 2011, Germany became the first industrialised nation to commit to abandoning the atom as an energy source once and for all by 2022 - a move unthinkable without the unremitting pressure of Germany’s tenacious anti-nukes movement.
Web Hosting
The reactor meltdowns in Fukushima, Japan, following the tsunami of March 2011 forced the German government’s hand; but it was the popular distrust and solid arguments against nuclear technology that left chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative administration with no alternative but to abruptly reverse itself, and pledge to a future based on renewable sources.
By late spring 2011, anti-nuclear activists had convinced the overwhelming majority of Germans and the bulk of the political establishment - finally, even conservatives - of three major points.
First, nuclear energy is unsafe. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima (as well as hundreds of smaller incidents) have confirmed beyond any doubt that the risks inherent in atomic-energy production are real and lethal. Second, there is not now, nor will there ever be, a solution to the problem of nuclear-waste storage. Third, the time of renewable-alternative energies has at last arrived - and nations that ignore it will miss out not only on clean, abundant sources of energy, but will also deprive their economies of profits and jobs.
All these points are applicable everywhere there are nuclear plants. In this sense, perhaps Germany’s groundbreaking shift is a harbinger of a nuclear-free world, one that simultaneously battles climate change and powers its factories with alternative sources. If Germany can do it, so can others, including the United States and China. But that will require more than merely following the German example. For Berlin’s plan to scrap nuclear power was a direct consequence of the efforts of the anti-nuke movement - and at present no other nation has anything comparable to it. In this sense its track record and best practices are vitally instructive for opponents of atomic technology everywhere.
The spirit of Wyhl
There have been in broad terms seven vital elements in the German anti-nuclear movement’s potency and endurance. The first is that from the outset the campaign was decentralised and rooted in local, grassroots opposition. The earliest anti-nuclear protests coalesced in West Germany’s southwestern-most corner in the early 1970s. As reactors began to crop up in rural locations across Germany, so local inhabitants - resident farmers, church pastors, educators, and parent groups - began to look more closely at this supposed miracle technology plunked in their backyards without their say.
An example is a reactor intended for the hamlet of Wyhl, which lay between the progressive college town of Freiburg and France’s fertile Alsace region. The conservative, church-going community had tended vineyards and pressed grapes for centuries. Now they saw their livelihoods endangered by the towers. By 1975, over fifty locally organised citizens’ initiatives had emerged around Wyhl, and in neighbouring towns in France and Switzerland, to protest the reactor’s construction. As word of the rising resistance got out, the grape-growers were joined by students and left-wing faculty from Freiburg’s university. The mobilisation at Wyhl thus radiated from the central core of the local people rather than being imported from the elsewhere.
The second element is non-violent civil disobedience. The precedent here was set at Wyhl in February 1975, when demonstrators stormed and occupied the construction site. The troupe improvised a makeshift camp complete with communal kitchens, teach-ins, and direct democracy. In the end, the energy giant Badenwerk and the local authorities caved in, postponing construction indefinitely. The Wyhl insurgents had achieved a double success: challenging their vastly more powerful opponents, and creating a model for the anti-nuclear movement.
The locally rooted, bottom-up character of the movement is still clearly evident in Germany’s more recent demonstrations, even when they attract as many as 250,000 protestors. This has been central to sustaining the momentum even through difficult years, such as the period of the “red-green” government (1998-2005) when the Social Democrat and Green coalition partners were negotiating a phasing out of nuclear power. The government eventually compromised by deciding to wind down nuclear power gradually over twenty-one years; this was sharply criticised by anti-nuke protesters, yet efforts to mobilise activists became much harder.
But activists continued to push the case, whose third element was to emphasise an issue that won’t disappear until the last reactor is closed: that there’s no solution for nuclear waste. The protests that continued, such as those at the Gorleben waste-storage site in northern Germany along the Elbe river, were sustained by local NGOs and the farmers of Gorleben. Nationwide groups, like x-tausendmal quer and Campact, focused their efforts on helping the Gorleben community to block - or at least delay - the incoming deliveries to Germany’s single repository.
The spirit of Wyhl also lives on in the movement’s fourth element, its un-ideological diversity. Germany’s urban leftists found at Wyhl common ground beyond their own ranks. “This diversity was - and still is - so important because it made it impossible for politicians and the energy lobbies to label the protestors as crazy, left-wing agitators”, explains Dieter Rucht, Germany’s leading expert on social movements. “They had to be taken seriously because they were the conservatives’ own constituency, upstanding folk with jobs and families who voted Christian Democrat.” For four decades, a single, familiar icon and message unified the anti-nuke movement: the smiling, red sun against a yellow background with the simple but powerful message - Atomkraft? Nein Danke! (Nuclear Power? No thank you!)
The green answer
In the wake of the victory in Wyhl, the anti-nuclear movement mushroomed across the country, its fiercest pockets of activism in out-of-the-way places with names like Kalkar, Brokdorf, Grohnde, and Neckarwestheim, where nuclear facilities were stationed or planned. Yet even though many demonstrations in the late 1970s gathered more than 100,000 - and were boosted enormously by the Three Mile Island disaster in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1979 - activists were unable to follow up on their success in Wyhl with similar victories. True, legal contests that cost the power companies millions of Deutschmarks; but the reactors hummed along, and Germany’s three main political parties backed nuclear power, including most of chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s ruling Social Democrats.
The answer to this stalemate was the Green Party, initially a hodge-podge of social-movement activists voicing their concerns in town and state legislatures. The fifth element is that the Greens wrote “no nukes” prominently on their banners and fought fiercely to advance the cause, from tiny village councils to the Bundestag in Bonn and the European parliament in Brussels. The Social Democrats and other parties eventually came around to their arguments, but the Greens were the pioneers.
The sixth element is that the Greens both represented the movement in legislatures and provided infrastructure and crucial logistical support, such as offices and copy-machines and access to nationwide public relations. Petra Kelly, one of the first Greens elected to the Bundestag, was prominent among those who gave the movement a recognisable face and even enabled it to reach across national borders and speak to an international audience, including in the United States. The anti-nuclear movement and the Greens, however, were never identical.
When the Greens entered national government for the first time in 1998, the majority of Germans were opposed to nuclear energy. The best the Greens could secure in discussion with their Social Democrat coalition partners was a phasing out of nuclear energy. The Green leaders promised that neither future governments nor the power companies could backtrack on the agreement; it was, they claimed, as good as written in stone. The Greens might even have believed this - but they were wrong.
By the time the Greens left power in 2005, the anti-nuke campaign had been laid low. With the conservatives’ return to power, the muscular energy lobbies of southern German were scoring points by arguing that nuclear energy was the answer to climate change. They claimed that Germany needed its own nuclear-power industry to avoid dependence on France’s nuclear energy and Russia’s gas. The renaissance of nuclear power in the United States and China seemed to reinforce them.
The power of no
But the movement had a potent new asset. This was delivered by the law the Greens had pushed through in office, offering subsidies and tax-breaks to consumers and producers of renewable energies. The outcome was a booming cottage industry around solar-panels and wind-turbines, which added nearly 400,000 jobs to the German economy and transformed Germany into a leading exporter of alternative-energy technology.
This entirely new approach was founded on the seventh element, the Greens’ and the movement’s forceful “argument that renewable energies translated into ‘green jobs’” (in the description of Sascha Müller-Kraenner, the Berlin-based Europe representative of the United States group, the Nature Conservancy). This line of attack was so convincing, notes Müller-Kraenner, that it even won over many Christian Democrats.
The eighth element of the movement was a new generation of activists in its fold, with organisations that reflected their diversity. Campact, for example, is based on the advocacy group MoveOn, which activists like Christoph Bautz had visited in the United States. “We were fascinated by the way they could mobilise people so quickly with the internet”, says Bautz. Campact has a 490,000-address email list that enables it to put together demonstrations like the one in Fukushima’s aftermath in a week’s time. It is also a platform for people to be engaged via the internet, through mass petitions, email campaigns, and blogs.
The nationwide group Ausgestrahlt focuses on supporting the network of smaller, local groups across the country with campaigning materials and ideas, enabling them with more clout. X-tausendmal quer specialises in blockades of nuclear-waste transports; another Gorleben-based group, Castor Shottern, takes civil disobedience a step further by sabotaging the railway tracks along which the waste transports run.
Germany’s scrapping of nuclear power was unthinkable without the pressure and persistence of the anti-nuke campaign. In other countries, the place to begin this rebellion is not at the top, but from below, like the Germans, in those localities directly affected by nuclear-power plants and waste-storage dumps. Until they say Nein Danke! to the power plants in their backyards, there’ll be no convincing anyone else.
Vote Holds Fate of Nuclear Power in Taiwan
Vote Holds Fate of Nuclear Power in Taiwan
By ANDREW JACOBS
January 12, 2012
nytimes
TAIPEI, Taiwan — When voters here choose a president and a new legislature on Saturday, their decisions will also determine whether Taiwan pulls the plug on a state-backed nuclear power industry that provides the country with a fifth of its electricity.
Although the presidential race has mostly been about pocketbook concerns and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan’s relationship with China, the leading challenger has made the elimination of Taiwan’s reliance on nuclear energy a central plank of her campaign. Pollsters and analysts say that the challenger, Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party, has a good chance of unseating the incumbent, Ma Ying-jeou, whose party has long been a reliable backer of nuclear energy.
http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree
In recent months, Ms. Tsai has vowed to retire the island’s six aging reactors and has said that she would seek to mothball a problem-plagued nuclear plant that has been under construction since the late 1990s. The plant, whose price tag has nearly doubled to $9.3 billion, was supposed to begin operating this year, but further delays appear likely.
“After Fukushima, our society has realized that nuclear power is not only expensive but also unsafe,” Ms. Tsai said recently, referring to the nuclear disaster in Japan last March that contaminated a large area around the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The repercussions from Fukushima have been pronounced in Europe, where the governments of Germany, Switzerland and Belgium have promised to abandon nuclear power in the coming decades. However, countries across Asia continue to embrace it. China has 28 plants under construction, and India is building seven reactors and has plans for 20 more. And despite its proximity to Japan, South Korea, with 21 active nuclear reactors, is moving forward on 18 more. Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are all actively seeking to join the nuclear-power club.
But Taiwan — an island devoid of oil, gas and coal reserves — appears to be losing its appetite for the atom. Last spring thousands of protesters in Taipei demanded an end to the construction of the latest plant, the Lungmen nuclear project, or Nuke 4. Soon afterward, one of Taiwan’s richest tycoons joined the antinuclear chorus: Chang Yung-fa, chairman of the Evergreen Group, one of the world’s largest shippers.
Opponents say that there are a number of active seismic faults across the island and that more than five million people in northern Taiwan live within an 18-mile radius of two nuclear plants. For the 23 million people living on an island the size of Maryland and Delaware combined, there would be few places to run in the event of a disaster.
“Taiwan is simply ill suited for nuclear energy,” said Tsui Shu-hsin, secretary general of the Green Citizens’ Action Alliance, which has been waging a lonely battle against atomic power.
Through the years Mr. Ma’s party successfully beat back efforts to kill the Lungmen project, but he has lately softened his stance. Adopting Ms. Tsai’s talk of a “nuclear-free homeland” at a news conference in November, Mr. Ma eased away from a government proposal to extend the life of the existing plants, which were built in the 1970s when Taiwan was led by the Kuomintang under martial law. He also insisted that Nuke 4 would become operational only if it met much stricter safety guidelines.
Environmentalists have been heartened by such pronouncements. “Before, no one was interested in talking about the problems of nuclear power, but now it feels like history and politics are on our side,” said Gloria Hsu, a professor of atmospheric sciences at National Taiwan University and a former chairwoman of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union.
Proponents of nuclear energy say all the talk of a nuclear-free Taiwan neglects one important detail: how to replace the power generated by the reactors. Taiwan produces about 1 percent of its energy supplies and relies on a mix of imports: oil from the Middle East, coal from China and Australia and natural gas from Indonesia and Malaysia.
Ms. Tsai speaks of increased conservation and of shifting the Taiwanese economy away from power-hungry manufacturing. Part of her “2025 Nuclear-Free Homeland Initiative” also calls for the construction of gas-fired turbines and an expanded reliance on solar and wind power.
But Wey Kwo-dong, an economics professor at National Taipei University, said none of those options could quickly replace the loss of nuclear power. “Taiwan has to import 98 percent of its energy needs, so I’m not sure where people expect to get their electricity from,” he said. “The issue has become so political, no one is considering the impact on Taiwan’s economy.”
Mia Li contributed research.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 13, 2012, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Vote Holds Fate of Nuclear Power in Taiwan.
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