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Editor’s Note: Civil Beat’s Joe Rubin spent nine days in Japan last month on an international reporting fellowship. This is the first of a two-part series that examines Japan’s efforts to ensure clean and reliable power and what Hawaii might learn from the island nation.

Gazing out the window here at Civil Beat’s offices and watching palm trees sway in trade winds, I’ll admit Hawaii isn’t the most obvious place to write about nuclear power. We are after all about as far as you can get from a nuclear plant.��

After experiencing a triple meltdown on 3-11 (as its known in Japan) that left a swath of the nation uninhabitable and will take decades and tens of billions of dollars to clean up, the elephant in the room in Japan is��the nuclear question.�� What to do with 50 dormant reactors (taken off line after��Fukushima) that used to provide 30 percent of Japan’s energy has become Japan’s most pressing national issue. Without nuclear power Japan’s already sky-high energy prices have gone even higher. Most people in Japan favor a phase-out of nuclear energy, replacing that with other forms of energy, particularly renewables.

The argument that is playing out in Japan is in a lot of ways the same one that is churning out here in the middle of the Pacific — and around the world. Is renewable energy a viable replacement for fossil fuels in the near term or is that reality a far-off pipe dream?��

Hawaii and Japan have other commonalities. Both are isolated island chains, painfully dependent on��expensive, polluting fossil fuels shipped over long distances. Though from a renewable energy perspective, blessed with abundant sun, wind, and geothermal activity, Hawaii has advantages over Japan.

Politically the debate in Hawaii isn’t as intense as the one that rages in Japan. As Brian Schatz told me (a few weeks before he went from��lieutenant governor and clean energy czar to U.S Senator): “In terms of our energy mix, it’s very, very similar.”

“But there are a couple of major differences,” he said. “We have settled our public policy questions.�� What we tend to argue about is which one of the clean energy technologies is better, how much of a premium in terms of a front-end investment we ought to be willing to pay,��those are all important details.

“But it’s not the same as us still having not decided whether we want to move in the direction of clean energy. We’ve decided, it’s a matter of law.�� But I think Japan is still addressing the question of whether to move in the direction of clean energy.”

Following the accidents it seemed like Japan’s nuclear industry was in a free fall. Protests against atomic energy, from Tokyo to the hinterlands, became a national phenomenon.

The Japanese government held a series of town halls across the nation to��educate the public about energy choices and to get input into the future of nuclear energy. People were given three choices — 25 percent nuclear energy in 2030, 15 percent or 0 percent. The overwhelming choice was the elimination of all nuclear energy, with many voicing a desire for an immediate and permanent halt rather than waiting until 2030.
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Meanwhile, once-obscure players in Japanese politics — anti-nuclear activists — were enjoying a far more prominent role. Tetsunari Iida, who for decades has been a lonely voice warning about the dangers of nuclear power and advocating for renewable energy, suddenly became a key advisor to mainstream and popular figures like Osaka’s Mayor Toru Hashimato. Iida, a novice politician, also narrowly missed being elected a prefectural governor this past summer.��

But what Iida says has been most gratifying has been seeing his renewable energy ideas taking hold on a national stage.

Back in 2000, based on similar systems he had studied in Europe,��Iida wrote a proposed a feed-in-tariff law for Japan. Feed-in tariff��(FIT) systems give a boost to solar, wind and other green energy projects by setting a fixed price and requiring utilities to buy energy from renewable producers.

While��there is no national feed-in tariff program in the United States,��Hawaii is one of seven states that have adopted FIT programs.��Twenty-four nations from Algeria to Great Britain have FITs in place.

Germany has the most comprehensive system, put in place following the Chernobyl disaster as a way to wean Germany off of nuclear energy. The��1990 Stromeinspeisungsgesetz feed-in tariff law��was put implemented in 1990.�� After years of clean energy development,��last spring��Germany achieved a kind of renewable energy Holy Grail. On a particularly sunny day, more than 50 percent of the industrial giant’s power was created through solar energy.��

Prior to Fukushima, Japan’s plan to achieve greater energy independence and lower carbon emissions was essentially the nuclear option. The goal was to build more nuclear plants and have 50 percent of energy be produced through atomic energy by 2030. After Fukushima that plan seemingly went out the window.��

Just a couple of months ago It seemed clear Japan was heading in another direction. After years of languishing, Japan finally adopted Iida’s Feed-In-Tariff law this past July.

I caught up with Iida as he was campaigning for parliament in national elections last month.�� Although he acknowledged that green energy still only accounts for a fraction of a percent of Japan’s energy portfolio, he says the country is heading in the right direction.

“Explosive,” he said. “Two gigawatts of power has gone on line in three months time, the equivalent of two nuclear plants.”

A Nuclear Comeback

It’s been nearly two years since the Fukushima disaster.�� Back in 2011, when much of the international press corps showed up as reactors melted down, it was a riveting story.�� I remember watching Anderson Cooper, who was doing his CNN show live from about 50 miles from the plant, reacting as word spread of an explosion at reactor No. 3. He asked one of his guests, a nuclear expert, if he and his crew should evacuate. It was both a terrifying moment and great TV.

By this winter, interest in Fukushima has dwindled to a trickle. In December, I attended an IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) sponsored conference on global nuclear power safety held in the heart of Fukushima Prefecture in the city of Koriyama. There were plenty of industry people and regulators there. All told attendees came from more than 110 nations.

But the pressroom was virtually empty. As one of the few international reporters who registered for the conference, I was invited for a tour of the exclusion zone, an area about half the size of Oahu that has radiation levels that remain too high for people to live in. I also toured the still smoldering plant, walking on top of wrecked reactor building that contains 1500 spent fuel rods, which still pose a potentially catastrophic threat. This was only the third time that the Japanese government has allowed journalists into the plant. Still only Jürgen Döschner, a German radio journalist, and myself signed up for the tour.

Wandering around in a radiation suite is eerie, but finding the biggest story of 2011 virtually abandoned was eerier still.��

Fukushima is definitely not forgotten in Japan. Its aftershocks permeate political and economic discussions.�� While everything in the U.S is seemingly up for debate among cable TV pundits, there actually is a consensus in Japan that Fukushima was a colossal human screw up and preventable.

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric, which ran the` plant) executives have internalized the art of apologizing for the disaster. I met several of them and they openly spoke of a safety culture permeated by over-confidence, of a regulatory system that was tragically intertwined with the industry rather than regulating it.
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The official government report on the accident offers a withering critique. In painstaking detail it outlines specific warnings that were ignored about the potential threat from a tsunami at Fukushima Daichi plant. The report also outlined the obvious potential for station blackout posed by back-up generators situated at ground level near the sea.

“This was a disaster ‘Made in Japan,'” the report says. “Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.”

Near the top of a Tokyo skyscraper, I��visited the offices of Keidanren, an association of��Japanese corporations including the powerful utilities that own Japan’s nuclear plants. I asked Masami Hasegawa, a senior��analyst with Keidanren if leaving 50��of Japan’s nuclear reactors off line for so long was an over-reaction to the accident at Fukushima. After all no plants in the United States, many with similar designs as in Japan, went off line following the accident.

I expected him to say yes. Especially after he told me that the prolonged shutdown was costing Japan 50 trillion yen or $300 billion per year.

But he said: “You’ve been to Fukushima, it’s a horrible place. We believe it is very important to rebuild confidence, and it may take time.��But we are facing the reality that we need electricity.”

The shock of the extra cost of purchasing oil and coal to power generators, the decontamination project at��Fukushima and the huge clean up from the tsunami has sent Japan into a recession. The recession became official just days before national elections on December 16. That announcement was bad timing for the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which was trounced by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

During the campaign Shinzo Abe, Japan’s new prime minister, made it clear that his party favored a return to nuclear power. Now Abe is going a step further, this week reversing a campaign pledge of his party that opposed building new plants.

In an interview with the national network TBS, his first interview since taking office, he said,��“They will be completely different from those at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. With public understanding, we will be building anew.”��

Japan’s new, independent��nuclear��regulatory agency plans to announce new safety standards in July. The new agency is showing signs of being tough on issues like seismic safety and aging plants. Still power companies like Tepco (which has 13 remaining reactors) and Abe’s government��hope to restart many of the dormant plants after the announcement.

A chastened return to nuclear energy seems a certainty in Japan.��

A Renewable Energy Miracle Or A Communist Plot?

While restarting many of Japan’s nuclear plants seems a certainty, the question of Japan’s long-term energy policy is far from settled. Nuclear power has its advantages in Japan. Billions of dollars of expensive infrastructure has already been built. When it works well, nuclear power doesn’t create air pollution or contribute to climate change.

But it’s difficult to imagine Japan’s nuclear industry ever escaping the Fukushima shadow. According to polls, 70 percent of Japanese favor eliminating nuclear energy by 2030. As is the case here in Hawaii, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in Japan who openly welcomes the specter of polluting, expensive and unstable fossil fuels for the long term.

Japan has pulled off incredible economic feats from creating many of��the world’s leading car and electronic manufacturers to building a national system of bullet trains. For those advocating transitioning out of nuclear toward renewables, the question is if Japan can pull off that miraculous transition.��

Keidanren, the pro-nuclear business group isn’t a believer.��“Renewable energy is very inefficient and unstable,” analyst Masami Hasegawa said.

Hasegawa also told me something I found surprising. His organization strongly opposes Japan’s feed-in tariff program, a step many experts says is the best way to encourage capital to invest in the clean energy sector encouraging innovation and expansion.

“The feed-in tariff is a strong intervention into the market, it’s a communist policy,” Hasegawa said.

I raised my eyebrow at the mention of a link between communism and a policy backed by many nations and ardent capitalists like former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle.

Hasegawa reiterated his stance. “It’s a fixed price, price is very, very important factor for the market economy.”

A few days after the election I took a subway to the outskirts of Tokyo to the offices of the Institute For Sustainable Energy Policy (ISEP), a think tank which advocates a German-like energy transition for Japan. Over green tea, while I waited to interview��Yamashita��Noriaka, a senior researcher with��ISEP,��I perused comic books created by the institute that teach Japanese children about renewable technology.
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I asked Noriaka if, given the election of Abe and the��pro-nuclear LDP, Japan could still pull off a green energy miracle. His answer made me realize how American and impatient my question was.

“I think that the miracle does not happen abruptly,” he said. “We just started the energy discussion after Fukushima. Before that, there was no public discussion. On the other hand, Germany began their nuclear discussion after Chernobyl. They had a 30-year head start.

“In Japan we just started. After 10 years or 20 years, we can make some miracles happen. So we need to be patient.”

Coming Wednesday: How Hawaii’s renewable energy development compares with Japan