More than a year has passed since a massive earthquake and a series of tsunamis triggered the worst accident at a nuclear power plant since Chernobyl in 1986, but the epic debacle at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station remains front and center in Japan, at the very core of a historic debate over the future of nuclear energy—one that comes down to a fundamental question: Should nuclear power, which prior to the accident last year generated 30% of the electricity for the world's third-largest economy, have any future at all in Japan?
On April 13, the government of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda tipped its hand. With summer approaching, and with it peak demand for electricity, the Japanese government approved the restart of two nuclear reactors in the small fishing town Oi, in Fukui prefecture on Japan's west coast.
The nine power companies in Japan have the legal authority to fire up the nuclear plants once they have received regulatory approval from Tokyo, in practice. But the Noda administration now must seek the assent of the local and prefectural governments affected by a restart--as it will have to do for each of the other 48 reactors across the country should it seek to bring them back online in order to avoid crippling brown outs this summer.
That assent won't come easily. Public opposition to nuclear power now runs hot in Japan. Far from fading over the last year, opposition seems to have expanded to a solid majority of citizens nationwide, putting both Noda's government and Japan's big business community (which needs the electricity) in a very difficult spot. The reason for that is the debacle of Fukushima Daiichi—the six-reactor power station owned and operated by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) —and the many questions that still surround the terrifying events that began on March 11, 2011.
For the past year, through interviews with employees of TEPCO (some officially sanctioned by the company, some without its knowledge), government officials and nuclear industry experts in Japan and abroad, we've attempted to answer two of the most fundamental issues at the heart of nuclear debate now roiling Japan: how could the accident at Fukushima Daiichi have happened—and how, in particular, could it have happened in Japan, a country once known, not so long ago, for its sheer management and engineering competence?
The answers are bracing. The epic disaster at Fukushima Daiichi represents failure at almost every level, from how the Japanese government regulates nuclear power, to how TEPCO managed critical details of the crisis under desperate circumstances.
As horrific as the natural disasters that occurred on March 11, 2011 were, the Japanese government itself has concluded that the nuclear crisis effectively began more than four decades before that, when one of the world's largest electric generating stations was located at the ocean's edge, in a country in which earthquakes—huge ones— are facts of life, and have been for centuries. This story recounts not only the fearful days that followed the Great Tohoku quake, but what led TEPCO, and Japan, to be in such a position of vulnerability to begin with.
