JAPAN’S ENERGY POLICY

REACTOR RESTARTS, BUT JAPAN'S ENERGY POLICY IN FLUX

Linda Sieg

Reuters, July 4, 2012

TOKYO (Reuters) - Buffeted by industry worries about high electricity costs on one side and public safety fears about nuclear power on the other, Japan's leaders are still struggling to craft a coherent energy policy more than a year after the Fukushima disaster.

Critics say Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, whose top priority is raising the sales tax to curb bulging public debt, is caving in to Japan's "nuclear village" - a powerful nexus of utilities, bureaucrats and businesses - by restarting the first of Japan's 50 reactors to come back on line since the crisis.

Kansai Electric Power Co's No. 3 unit at its Ohi plant, in western Japan, will resume supplying power to the grid as early as Thursday, and its No. 4 unit will also restart this month, as the government seeks to avoid a summer power crunch.

Many experts, though, say the nuclear interests are unlikely to win the longer-term battle given the hidden costs of atomic power exposed by Fukushima and a new set of forces pushing for a bigger role for renewable sources of energy such as solar power.

"They (the nuclear interests) are fighting with their backs to the wall ... and assuming that after one restart, the rest will fall into place," said Martin Schulz, a senior researcher at Fujitsu Research Institute. "But basically, there is very little they can do to turn the clock back."

Nuclear power supplied almost 30 percent of Japan's electricity before last year's disaster, when a huge earthquake and tsunami devastated Tokyo Electric's Fukushima plant causing meltdowns, spewing radiation and forcing evacuations.

In the months following the accident all the country's reactors that had been online were shut down for maintenance, with public safety fears preventing them from restarting.

The knock-on effect has posed the biggest challenge to Japan's energy policy since the 1970s "oil shocks" of rising fuel import prices that drove resource-poor Japan's big push into nuclear power, as well as huge gains in energy efficiency.

(...) [artículo aquí]