What About Our Nuclear Energy Policies?

Obama gave me the feeling of a snake oil salesman during his energy address Wednesday. Did his vision and courageousness inspire you? I think the corporate Democrats like himself are in over their heads and don't understand the ramifications and the gravity of the situation in Japan, where public anger-- though restrained on the surface, especially if you're looking for anything like Côte d'Ivoire or Libya-- is starting to bubble over. As we saw a few days ago, the conservatives were ousted-- BY THE GREENS-- in Germany's richest and most conservative state on Sunday, Baden-Württemberg, where there was a near seamless transition from the Nazi Party to the CDU which ran the show there for nearly sixty uninterrupted years... until the public freaked over their pro-nuclear agenda. They rejected Angela Merkel's Obama-like happy talk-- and gave her a stinging rebuke at the polls. Japan is probably far more freaked out.

In downtown Tokyo last weekend, protesters chanted "No more Fukushima," referring to the nuclear plant damaged by the March 11 tsunami.

The protesters were typically polite and restrained, but the government is acutely aware that public anger against nuclear power is growing-- and that is forcing Japan's leaders to rethink the country's energy policies.

Analysts believe that any attempts at reform will face stiff resistance from the country's powerful nuclear energy establishment, which has successfully defeated previous efforts to overhaul the nation's energy policies.

But Prime Minister Naoto Kan has said a rethink is already under way.

"We must be creative in aggressively promoting new energy policy," says Noriyuki Shikata, director of global communications for the prime minister's office.

The prime minister, Shikata says, is "trying to make the case that the future policy may not be an extension or continuation of the current policy. There may be a drastic policy change."

Japan's national energy plan calls for building 14 new nuclear plants in the next two decades and raising the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear power from the current one-third to one-half.

But in the wake of this disaster, citizens are more likely to resist efforts to build nuclear power plants in their back yards. Of course, it has never been easy.

Purdue University political scientist Daniel Aldrich says government officials and power companies have had to conduct detailed surveys to find communities where labor unions and other civic society elements would not fight back.

"A critical aspect of what they're looking for are these pockets of weaker civil society," Aldrich says.

That's why Tokyo Electric Power Co, or TEPCO, built nuclear reactors that provide electricity to Tokyo in Fukushima. It's 150 miles from the capital, and the company incurs considerable expenses to transport the electricity to its destination.

Aldrich says that despite these efforts, communities have rejected the plants about half of the time. So the government and utilities have developed other policy tools to overcome public opposition.

"These range from, for example, literally middle school curricula being written by bureaucrats that emphasize the safety and necessity of nuclear power plants, to $20 million a year in money that flows to host communities, to all kinds of rewards for local mayors and city executives who cooperate with siting plans," he says.

Taro Kono, a lawmaker with the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, says the nuclear power lobby has hijacked Japan's energy policy.
"We've been depending on the nuclear energy so much," he says. "It's not the policy choice. It's because of those bureaucrats and the power company and the politician got some vested interest in promoting nuclear."
Those interests form a complex web. TEPCO's president, for example, is also vice chairman of the Keidanren, Japan's main industry association.

TEPCO employs many retired government regulators. And its labor unions gave the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, or DPJ, strong backing during the last election.

Andrew DeWit, a political scientist at Tokyo's Rikkyo University, argues that nuclear power's biggest backers are its customers in heavily polluting industries. And these manufacturers, he says, have prevented the rise of cleaner and more innovative industries.

"It's not that Japan lacks the capacity, the potential," he says. "It's that there are very real institutional reasons that new finance capital hasn't flowed into these areas. It's been locked up by the structure of interests that were able to make their reproduction, their survival the paramount policy goal."

A chunk of Fukushima could be uninhabitable for decades and the government is starting to talk about how many people will die from the incident, but here in America people seem more consumed with crap the Koched-up media feeds us about where Obama was born or what clownish teabaggers blurt out of their asses. The 400 families that rule the country must be laughing their asses off.