In late October 2004, nearly 200 people from around Japan gathered at a public hearing in Osaka to discuss the future of nuclear power. Sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, which is responsible to the prime minister, members of the “public” who were present included pronuclear power utility company executives on one side of the room and antinuclear activists on the other.

 

The Osaka meeting was the first since the AEC had said, just a few days prior, that it wished to go ahead with plans to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, despite revelations earlier in the year that the government had suppressed a report compiled in the mid-1990s that concluded burying spent fuel was cheaper than recycling it.

 

Such public hearings had long been derided by antinuclear activists as a government-sponsored farce that never led to real changes in Japan‘s pronuclear policies.  But there was reason to believe that the Osaka meeting would be different. In the audience were residents of Mihama, Fukui Prefecture, who had come to express concern over an accident in August that killed five people and showed that Kansai Electric Power Co., based in Osaka and responsible for the plant where the accident occurred, was guilty of gross negligence.

 

At 15:22 on August 9th, a fire alarm sounded within the building at the Mihama No. 3 plant that housed the turbine.  A pipe in the secondary coolant system had ruptured, and an estimated 800 tons of scalding water 140 degrees Celsius was released, scalding the five workers of Nihon Arm, a KEPCO sub-contractor.

 

As it turned out, the pipe had never been checked during the 28 years of the plant’s operation.  When originally installed, it had been 10 mm thick. But after nearly three decades, it had worn down to 1 mm.  In the following days, it was learned that Nihon Arm had warned KEPCO in April 2003 of potential problems with that particular section of pipe, but these warnings had been ignored.  While KEPCO President Fujii Yosaku bowed deeply in apology to the families of those who were killed, he did not apologize for KEPCO’s failure to follow up on the Nihon Arm report.  When quizzed by antinuclear activists immediately following the accident, KEPCO officials expressed regret and admitted they were ultimately responsible for the plant, but said it was not possible to say who was responsible for the accident.

 

Though KEPCO officials would not comment, antinuclear activists and even many nuclear physicists who supported nuclear power pointed to deregulation of the electric power market as one factor behind the accident. By law, each nuclear power plant has to shut down once a year for inspection.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, plants shut down for three or four months while thousands of workers from utility and related subcontractors conducted inspections.  But since then, the inspection times have gradually been shortened, and currently a plant might shut down for only about six weeks.  Prior to the Mihama accident, KEPCO and the other utilities were pressuring the government to lower the inspection time to just one month, in order to keep the plants operating as much as possible in the new age of deregulation.

 

Yet, even as the inspection time was shortened, the plants were becoming older, requiring more maintenance and careful inspection.  Back in the early 1970s, experts thought that the life of a nuclear power plant was about 30 years, perhaps 40.  Now that the Mihama No. 3 plant and many others are 30 years old or more, and operating in a period where deregulation means added pressures to cut costs, the utilities say that perhaps a plant’s life can be doubled to 60 years.  Yet, at the same time, the utilities claim that in order to continue to provide cheap electricity, it will be necessary to shorten the length of inspection time on these aging plants to just one month.

 

So the October meeting offered the chance not only to clarify further who was responsible for the Mihama No. 3 accident, but also to engage in real debate about basic issues related to nuclear power. But hopes for such discussion were quickly dashed. Antinuclear activists and pronuclear supporters simply retreated to long-held positions. “Japan

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