Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
Hard road on Japan’s nuclear policy
By Kevin Krolicki
Suddenly Taro Kono doesn’t look like quite the lonely maverick in Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party.
Kono, a member of the lower house of parliament, has been an unrelenting critic of Japan’s pursuit of nuclear power since he was first elected in 1996. That made him an odd fit with the LDP, which ruled Japan almost continuously from the mid-1950s to 2009 and put nuclear power at the center of Japan’s energy policy.
“For the past 15 years, it has felt like Taro Kono against the LDP,” he told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit.
But since the Fukushima Daiichi accident triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Kono’s call to scrap nuclear in favour of renewable energy and conservation has moved from the fringe to something closer to the mainstream of political opinion.
About 50 lawmakers attended a recent study group he sponsored on energy policy, out of 722, and Kono sees a prospect for a kind of “green alliance” between sympathetic LDP lawmakers and some in the Democratic Party of Japan.
from The Great Debate:
Nuclear power: pros and cons
As part of the Reuters Summit on global climate and alternative energy, Reuters.com asked Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club and Ian Hore-Lacy, director of public communication for the World Nuclear Association to discuss the role of nuclear energy. Here are their responses.
(Carl Pope's rebuttal was posted at 8:30 a.m. ET on September 10.)
Fossil fuels will eventually become more expensive to locate and obtain. It has very important uses such as chemicals and plastics; things we really can’t go without for our economy. Eventually we will need to stop burning it up.
Something will need to fill the gap for cheap power generation. And that is going to be nuclear.
Green energy is too good to be true. You can’t get energy for nothing. The costs of upkeep compared to the power returned by green energy will be the greatest problem science will need to solve in the generations to come. And it is something that will not be solved in time.
In the meantime, we will inevitably turn to nuclear power. It is a resource which can easily meet the power demands which the fossil fuel crisis will eventually bring.
To those who fear the future consequences of nuclear power? Why do you fear? We used fossil fuels all this time, didn’t we? And we all knew the other shoe would drop.
Humans have the capacity to not only understand the long term consequences of their decisions, but to learn how to live with those consequences.
Plus, as you are no doubt aware, necessity is the mother of acceptance. The developed world is fully aware of the many dangers of nuclear power. If the alternative is an energy crisis leading to a collapsing economy, or even society, then nuclear power is something people will simply accept. It is what we do best.
The future is not only here, but positively glowing!
