A few weeks ago, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) took back control of the Japanese government and named Shinzo Abe Prime Minister. If this name seems familiar, he was Prime Minister for 1 problem plagued year from 2006-2007. This is the same party whose nearly uninterrupted half century in power was resoundingly broken in 2009 by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ was on watch when the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear plant disaster occurred in March of 2011 and though a party can’t take the blame for a natural disaster, it certainly can take the blame for its handling of the response to the nuclear crisis. So yet again, the Prime Minister has changed – for the 7th time since 2006 – and so has policy.
One movement that came out of all the Fukushima catastrophe was a fairly strong push to move toward renewable sources of energy and even more expensive LNG instead of relying on nuclear power. Mr. Abe’s predecessor floated a plan to stop building more nuclear plants and actually totally abandon nuclear power by 2030. This goal now seems in jeopardy. “The new reactors will be totally different from those at Tepco’s Fukushima No.1,” Abe said on TV the other day. “We will be building them with consent obtained from the Japanese people.” Regardless of your stance on nuclear power, it seems a shame to lose the interest in fundamentally moving the energy reliance of the country from non-renewables to sustainably produced energy that was spurred by Fukushima. While there are numerous eco-villages and many other large and small scale green projects popping up around the country, a clear national policy to phase out nuclear power would give industry and citizens the incentive and certainty to pursue greener energy alternatives.
