5 THE POLITICS OF NUCLEAR POWER PLANT RESTARTS …
125
as well as empowering advocates of renewable energy and opponents of
nuclear power.
The vested interest factor is especially unpersuasive if it is understood
as predicting no change, a position that probably does not even capture
the EPCOs’ long-term preferences. Rather, the real issue has not been a
return to nuclear power or not, but how, and how slowly to proceed with
nuclear and fossil fuel phaseout, and how, and how quickly, to ramp up
renewable energy. Here, METI, if not the Abe administration, appears to
have acted as a balancer among interest groups, which has helped them
maintain significant independence from any interest group. 26
The thrust of METI’s policy appears to be the tried and true “convoy
model,” (Katz 2003, pp. 95–96) or what Richard Samuels calls “nurturance” (Samuels 1994, pp. 52–54), which is a policy of avoiding what
METI has traditionally viewed as socially damaging “creative destruction”
that produces bankruptcies, unemployment, and other social dislocations
in favor of gradually managed change that facilitates the orderly movement of capital, labor, and other resources out of declining industries and
into rising ones (Samuels 1994, pp. 53–54). In this sense, nuclear power
may now be like Japan’s domestic coal industry in the 1950s and 1960s,
whose decline METI managed. More immediately, METI and the Abe
administration have had an interest in preventing the sudden bankruptcies of most EPCOs, and the need to bail them out with taxpayer money
(which already proved necessary with the largest of them, TEPCO, in the
wake of the Fukushima Daiichi accident), which would almost certainly
become necessary if Japan were to suddenly abandon nuclear power.
As it stands, many nuclear plants have been scrapped and others will
probably never be restarted. A gradual phaseout of nuclear power from
an already greatly diminished base over several decades while simultaneously making a transition to renewables as the main source of energy is
the trajectory that Japan traveled during the Abe administration, and is
continuing on under the Suga administration. Japan, specifically METI
and OCCTO, is already devoting significant effort to tackling the secondphase challenges to the adoption of renewables that this book identifies,
namely grid upgrading through smart grid and expansion investments,
and investment in electricity storage. While Japan’s promotion of a renewable energy transition and phaseout of nuclear power is too slow from a
climate perspective, and from the perspective of nuclear opponents, it is
nonetheless the direction Japan is heading.
125
as well as empowering advocates of renewable energy and opponents of
nuclear power.
The vested interest factor is especially unpersuasive if it is understood
as predicting no change, a position that probably does not even capture
the EPCOs’ long-term preferences. Rather, the real issue has not been a
return to nuclear power or not, but how, and how slowly to proceed with
nuclear and fossil fuel phaseout, and how, and how quickly, to ramp up
renewable energy. Here, METI, if not the Abe administration, appears to
have acted as a balancer among interest groups, which has helped them
maintain significant independence from any interest group. 26
The thrust of METI’s policy appears to be the tried and true “convoy
model,” (Katz 2003, pp. 95–96) or what Richard Samuels calls “nurturance” (Samuels 1994, pp. 52–54), which is a policy of avoiding what
METI has traditionally viewed as socially damaging “creative destruction”
that produces bankruptcies, unemployment, and other social dislocations
in favor of gradually managed change that facilitates the orderly movement of capital, labor, and other resources out of declining industries and
into rising ones (Samuels 1994, pp. 53–54). In this sense, nuclear power
may now be like Japan’s domestic coal industry in the 1950s and 1960s,
whose decline METI managed. More immediately, METI and the Abe
administration have had an interest in preventing the sudden bankruptcies of most EPCOs, and the need to bail them out with taxpayer money
(which already proved necessary with the largest of them, TEPCO, in the
wake of the Fukushima Daiichi accident), which would almost certainly
become necessary if Japan were to suddenly abandon nuclear power.
As it stands, many nuclear plants have been scrapped and others will
probably never be restarted. A gradual phaseout of nuclear power from
an already greatly diminished base over several decades while simultaneously making a transition to renewables as the main source of energy is
the trajectory that Japan traveled during the Abe administration, and is
continuing on under the Suga administration. Japan, specifically METI
and OCCTO, is already devoting significant effort to tackling the secondphase challenges to the adoption of renewables that this book identifies,
namely grid upgrading through smart grid and expansion investments,
and investment in electricity storage. While Japan’s promotion of a renewable energy transition and phaseout of nuclear power is too slow from a
climate perspective, and from the perspective of nuclear opponents, it is
nonetheless the direction Japan is heading.