SUTTSU, Japan – It seemed like an easy payday. The Japanese government was conducting a study of potential sites for the storage of spent nuclear fuel – a review of ancient geological maps and research work on local tectonic plates. He called for localities to volunteer. Participating would not commit them to anything.
Haruo Kataoka, the mayor of a fishing town on the northern island of Hokkaido, raised his hand. His city, Suttsu, could use the money. What could go wrong?
The answer, he learned quickly, was too much. A resident threw an incendiary bomb at his home. Others threatened to revoke the city council. A former prime minister traveled six hours from Tokyo to denounce the plan. The city, which spends much of the year in snow-covered silence, has been engulfed by a media storm.
There are few places on Earth eager to host a nuclear waste dump. Only Finland and Sweden have established permanent deposits for the residues of their atomic energy programs. But the furor in Suttsu speaks of the profound anxiety that remains in Japan 10 years after a massive earthquake and tsunami caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Fukushima province, the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
The black mark left on Japan’s nuclear industry has profound implications for the country’s ability to supply energy to the world’s third largest economy and, at the same time, fulfill its obligations to combat climate change. Of Japan’s more than 50 nuclear reactors, all shut down after the March 11, 2011 disaster, only nine have been restarted, and the problem remains politically toxic.
As the share of nuclear energy in Japan fell from about a third of total energy to single digits, the void was filled in part by coal and natural gas, complicating the country’s promise last year to be carbon neutral in 2050 .
Even before the Fukushima calamity, which led to three explosions and a release of radiation that forced the evacuation of 150,000 people, ambivalence about nuclear energy was deeply rooted in Japan. The country is haunted by the hundreds of thousands killed by the bombings atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
Still, most Japanese have come to terms with nuclear power, seeing it as an inevitable part of the energy matrix of a low-resource country, which must import about 90% of the materials it needs to generate electricity.
After the nuclear disaster, public opinion changed decisively in another direction. On top of a new galvanized anxiety came a new distrust both from the nuclear industry, which built reactors susceptible to being overwhelmed by a natural disaster, and from the government, which allowed this to happen.
A parliamentary commission concluded that the collapses were the result of a lack of supervision and collusion between the government, the plant owner and regulators.
“Utility companies, the government and nuclear power experts kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, there won’t be a major accident,'” said Tatsujiro Suzuki, director of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition Research Center at Nagasaki University. Now, “people think that the industry is not to be trusted and the government that is putting pressure on the industry is not to be trusted.”
The Japanese government, which has raised safety standards for nuclear power plants, says it plans to reactivate more reactors. But Fukushima’s legacy now tarnishes all discussions about nuclear power, even the question of how to deal with the waste produced long before the disaster.
“All the normal people in the city are thinking about it,” said Toshihiko Yoshino, 61, who owns a seafood company and oyster stall in Suttsu, who has become the face of opposition to the mayor.
“It’s because this kind of tragedy happened that we shouldn’t have nuclear waste here,” said Yoshino in an interview at his restaurant, where large picture windows look out over the snowy mountains that rise above Suttsu Bay.
For now, the policy around garbage indicates that if it is not buried under Suttsu, it will find its way to a place much like this: a city worn out by the collapse of local industry and the constant wear and tear of its population with migration and old age. .
The central government tried to encourage local governments to volunteer for consideration, offering a payment of about $ 18 million to take the first step, a literature review. Those who pass to the second stage – geological study – will receive an additional US $ 64.4 million.
Only one other city across the country, neighboring Kamoenai – already close to a nuclear power plant – joined Suttsu in volunteering.
One thing Fukushima made clear, said Hirokazu Miyazaki, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University who studied how communities were compensated after the disaster, is the need to find a fair way to distribute the social and economic costs of nuclear energy.
The problem is symbolized by the partially uninhabitable cities of Fukushima and a battle over the government’s plan to release one million tons of treated radioactive water into the ocean.
The government says it will make small releases over 30 years, with no impact on human health. Fishermen in Fukushima say the plan would ruin their long journey towards recovery.
“We have this potentially dangerous technology and we still have it and we need to have a long-term view of nuclear waste and decommissioning, so we had better think about a much more democratic way of dealing with the costs associated with it,” Mr. Miyazaki said in an interview.
Critics of nuclear power in Japan often point to decades of failure to find a solution to the waste problem as an argument against restarting existing reactors in the country, let alone building new ones.
In November, former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi took his anti-nuclear campaign to Suttsu at the invitation of local activists. Speaking at the city’s gym, he said that after visiting Finland’s underground garbage dump – a facility very similar to the one proposed by the Japanese government – he decided that Japan’s active geology would make it impossible to find a viable site.
Japanese reactors have generated more than 18,000 tons of spent fuel in the past half century. A small part of it was transformed into glass – by a process known as vitrification – and wrapped in giant metal cans.
Nearly 2,500 of the huge radioactive tubes are in temporary facilities in the prefectures of Aomori and Ibaraki, waiting to be lowered 300 meters below the earth’s surface in vast underground vaults. There, they would spend millennia getting rid of their toxic cargo.
It will be decades – if ever – before a site is selected and the project starts for real. Japan’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization, known as NUMO and represented by a cartoon mole who cautiously pokes his nose out of a hole, is in charge of finding a final resting place.
Long before accepting NUMO’s offer to conduct a study in his city, Kataoka, the mayor of Suttsu, had an entrepreneurial outlook on government subsidies.
Suttsu has a population of just under 2,900, spread across the rocky edge of a deep cerulean bay, where fishing boats look for mackerel and squid. Beginning in 1999, with government-backed loans, Mr. Kataoka advocated an initiative to install an elevated wind turbine support along the coast.
Many in the city initially opposed it, he said during an interview in his office, but the project has generated considerable returns. The city spent the profits from the sale of electricity to pay off debts. City dwellers have free access to a heated swimming pool, a golf course and a modest ski trail with a rope tow. Next to an elegant community center, there is a free daycare for the few residents with children.
Facilities are not uncommon in small towns in Japan. Many locations have tried to prevent the decline by spending large sums on white elephant projects. In Suttsu, the effect was limited. The city is shrinking and, in early March, snow has accumulated on the eaves of the newly built but closed stores along the main street.
Mr. Kataoka nominated Suttsu for the NUMO program, he said, out of a sense of responsibility to the nation. Subsidies, he admitted, are a nice bonus. But many in Suttsu doubt Mr. Kataoka’s and the government’s intentions. The city, they argue, does not need the money. And they question why he made the decision without public consultation.
At a city council meeting on Monday, residents expressed concern that, once the process was started, it would gain momentum quickly and become impossible to stop.
The plan divided the city fiercely. Reporters arrived, putting the discord on national display. A sign at the hotel near the port makes it clear that the staff does not accept interviews.
In October, an angry resident threw a Molotov cocktail at Mr. Kataoka’s house. He broke a window, but he smothered it without further damage. The perpetrator of the crime was arrested and is now on bail. He apologized, said Kataoka.
The mayor remains baffled by the aggressive response. Mr. Katatoka insists that the literature review is not a fait accompli and that the inhabitants of the city will have the final say.
In October, he will run for the sixth term. He wants voters to support his proposal, but whatever the outcome, he hopes the city can move forward together.
Losing the election would be bad, he said, but “the saddest part of all this was losing the city’s confidence.”
Motoko Rich contributed reporting from Tokyo.