Safety blunders fuel Japan’s mistrust of nuclear power

But keeping most reactors shut down in the wake of Fukushima is hampering efforts to cut carbon emissions

Fission impossible: recent mistakes mean the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa power plant is likely to remain mothballed as it has been since the Fukushima meltdown in 2011 © Hiroto Sekiguchi/Yomiuri Shimbun

Robin Harding JULY 22 2021

Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is the biggest nuclear power station in the world. Tucked away on a remote Sea of Japan coastline, the plant can generate almost eight gigawatts of electricity from its seven reactor halls — about 5 per cent of Japan’s total demand.

In the past 10 years, however, this symbol of the atomic age has not generated enough power to turn on a lightbulb. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa shares the same owner, Tokyo Electric, and the same basic design as the three reactors that melted down in Fukushima after a tsunami knocked out their cooling systems in 2011.

Fukushima Daiichi was one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. In its wake, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa — along with all Japan’s other reactors — was shut down to review safety. Nine out of Japan’s 33 operable reactors have since restarted. But a decade later, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is still offline, with profound consequences for Japan’s carbon emissions, for its energy policy and for the financial stability of Tokyo Electric (usually known as Tepco).

“For Tepco’s management, nuclear restart is a very big issue,” says Norimasa Shinya, an analyst who follows the company at investment bank Mizuho Securities in Tokyo. “Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is very important for cash flow and profitability.”

Tepco refused requests to visit the plant or to make an executive available for interview.

Shinya estimates the restart of just two reactors at Kashiwazaki would be worth ¥30bn-40bn ($270m-360m) a year in profits to Tepco after five years. The cash flow benefit would be even larger — approximately ¥70bn-80bn — because Tepco would have less need to buy fossil fuels to burn in other plants.

Carbon or uranium?

With Tepco on the hook for billions of dollars in spending to decommission the stricken Fukushima site, and the company now majority owned by the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation, the company’s financial performance matters to Japan’s public purse.

It highlights one of the main dilemmas in Japanese energy policy over the past decade: the quickest, cheapest way to cut carbon emissions would be to restart the dozens of nuclear reactors that sit idle; doing so would also generate mountains of cash for the utility companies, making them reluctant to consider any other option.

In 2010, nuclear provided more than 11 per cent of Japan’s total energy, including transport and heating, and the country had ambitions to increase that figure further. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, nuclear fell to zero so Japan burnt coal, natural gas and fuel oil, instead.

Attitudes towards nuclear power may change. The atmosphere even now is shifting

Taishi Sugiyama, Canon Institute for Global Studies

However, tough new targets for carbon emissions in 2030 and 2050, combined with a freezing winter that brought parts of the country close to power cuts this year, have given fresh hope to the nuclear industry. “I think attitudes towards nuclear power may change,” says Taishi Sugiyama, research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, a think-tank. “The atmosphere even now is shifting a bit.”

The public, though, remains firmly opposed to nuclear restarts — and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is part of the reason why. Plagued by scandal throughout its operational existence, recent problems at the plant are emblematic of Tepco’s failure to regain public trust.

In 2002, the company confessed to “systematic and inappropriate management” of inspections at the plant, after it failed to report cracks in reactor components to its regulator. In 2007, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was struck by a magnitude 6.6 earthquake, more powerful than that allowed for in the plant’s design, but Tepco did not learn lessons that could have prevented the Fukushima disaster.

Since 2011, Tepco has been trying to convince regulators and the local community in Niigata prefecture that the giant plant is safe enough to restart. In 2017, the number six and seven reactors won clearance from the Nuclear Regulation Authority, but not from the prefectural government.

Credibility gap

Earlier this year, however, a sequence of events ended any chance of a restart in the near future. In January, Tepco announced it had completed safety renovations on the number seven reactor, which turned out to be incorrect.

It then emerged that security on the site was lax, with one Tepco employee using a colleague’s ID card to gain access to the main control room in 2020, and problems found with intruder detection equipment. In April, the regulator banned Tepco from moving nuclear fuel at the site.

Suga’s net-zero pledge sparks fierce debate

“Credibility is the key issue, I think,” says Shinya. “The current incident is very severe for lost credibility, especially with local residents and the local government.”

Tepco’s corporate culture was heavily criticised after Fukushima, with an independent report citing misplaced deference and reluctance to question authority within the company as root causes of the disaster, along with many other factors.

These constant failures to get a grip on its operations at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, or release reliable information, raise fears about whether the company has truly changed. One underlying cause of the ID card incident, the company said in a report, was a “corporate climate that hinders strict security measures”.

Hinting at the underlying issues, an independent monitoring committee, chaired by former US nuclear regulator Dale Klein, said Tepco should not forget the principle that “people will make mistakes”. “Tepco must not engage in abstract reflection about how ‘safety awareness was lacking’,” the independent monitors said, “but rather examine the extent to which safety culture has permeated throughout each layer of the organisation, from upper management to personnel in the field.”

Energy is the world’s indispensable business and Energy Source is its newsletter. Every Tuesday and Thursday, direct to your inbox, Energy Source brings you essential news, forward-thinking analysis and insider intelligence. Sign up here.

Contacted by the Financial Times, Tepco said it took the incidents at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa “very seriously” and would “use this opportunity to remember our regrets and the lessons learned from [Fukushima] as we aim to improve power station safety”.

Many energy experts, especially those who concentrate on geopolitics, believe that Japan will need nuclear power if it is to reduce carbon emissions while maintaining security of supply. But unless the country’s biggest power company shows it can be trusted to run the world’s biggest nuclear power plant, an atomic renaissance is unlikely.