Nuclear Energy in Japan: The Scandal Widens

Recently, we were all fairly interested to see the effect in Japan when it was revealed that Kyushu Electric Power Company carried out an e-mail campaign to get its employees and the employees of some of its contractors to essentially "stuff the ballot boxes," as it were, at a public symposium on nuclear energy. The negative backlash from this discovery was the instant reversal of the opinion of local governments who had said that they would allow the restarting of the Genkai station.

SEE APR'S POST ON THIS TOPIC FROM JULY 6.

The backlash now apparently includes at least in part a campaign by one Professor Hiromitsu Ino, a professor in metallurgy who has written a paper concerning Genkai-1's pressure vessel and passed it to a major anti-nuclear group in Japan.

SEE APR'S POST ON THE GENKAI PRESSURE VESSEL FROM JULY 26.

We have further evidence that there are a growing number of anti-nuclear blogs launching in Japan, having been linked a few over the last several weeks by commenters and e-mailers.

Now, there is another revelation which begins to seriously undermine the credibility of the major operative nuclear overseer in Japan, the NISA. Today a number of outlets in Japan are carrying the story that Chubu Electric Power Company essentially carried out the same kind of campaign that Kyushu did, but did so back in 2007 at a live forum in Shizuoka. The company both helped fill the conference venue with participants and arranged for pre-written questions to be asked, apparently some by citizens.

Chubu reports that this was done at the request of NISA.

I have commented here, on the ANS Nuclear Cafe blog where I guest posted recently, and in various e-mails that the relationship in Japan wherein the operative nuclear overseeing agency is a part of the ministry of industry/trade is questionable at best in terms of intent, and this revelation begins to support some of our deeper fears about what such an arrangement might allow or even encourage.

We learned this lesson a long time ago here and made the moves necessary to ensure that such a thing cannot occur. The part of the government responsible for promoting nuclear energy is NOT the same part that regulates nuclear energy (DOE Office of Nuclear Energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, respectively.) The functions used to be under the same roof -- the old AEC -- until 1974. Worries about central requirements of promotion and safety regulation led to the split.

In Japan, however, the arrangement is much different as noted and it now appears, if all of the things Chubu Electric has mentioned are true, that the kind of thing the Japanese public have been suspicious of since Fukushima has probably been occurring a lot longer. This may turn out to be one of the larger nuclear energy regulatory scandals ever unfolded - especially if more cases like this are turned out by other companies.

This is the last sort of thing that nuclear energy in Japan needs. It may bear out that the future of nuclear in Japan will have little to do with SBO mitigation, tsunami barriers or SSE criteria but will instead simply hinge on something more basic and more familiar to anyone anywhere, which is trust.

5:20 PM Eastern Friday July 29, 2011
ATOMIC POWER REVIEW