FUKUSHIMA PREFECTURE, Japan — Fifteen years ago, this mountainous region on Japan’s northeast coast suffered one of the world’s worst nuclear power accidents.
Abandoned homes, offices and shops still dot the landscape — remnants of the evacuation after an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and released radiation. In the accident’s aftermath, nuclear power’s future seemed bleak, with Japan shutting off all its reactors as public opinion soured against the technology.
But the country is now rapidly moving to restart nuclear power plants, as artificial intelligence increases electricity demand and foreign wars throttle natural gas supply. Japan relies on natural gas for 30 percent of its electricity, almost all of it imported. The Iran war has further helped the case for nuclear, which can displace some of the liquefied natural gas that is stuck in the Strait of Hormuz.
This week, Japan will open its 16th reactor since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident — at a nuclear plant run by the same utility that oversaw Daiichi during the meltdown.
Toyoshi Fuketa, former chair of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, said the debate over whether to go back to nuclear power took years.
“After the accident, we had furious discussions,” Fuketa said in an interview. “One of the most influential issues was the war in Ukraine. This country heavily relied on the natural gas imported from Russia, and all the energy sources are coming from the outside.”
Japan stopped expanding its use of Russian gas when the country invaded Ukraine, and aims to become less reliant on those imports. Now, the Iran war risks forcing the country to cut back on its gas imports from other countries.
About 10 percent of Japan’s LNG imports come through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran all but closed after the U.S-Israel attacks began in late February. This week, the U.S. began its own blockade of Iranian ports in the waterway, which is now a choke point for roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil.
The Northeast Asia LNG benchmark, which captures deliveries to Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan, reached a three-year high earlier this year.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi hopes to double Japan’s nuclear power production by 2040. But Japanese residents aren’t fully sold on nuclear power. Polling by Hiroshi Yamagata, a researcher at Nagaoka University of Technology, shows that only 37 percent of Japan supports restarting nuclear power plants, compared with 23 percent opposed and 40 percent uncertain. Only 24 percent support building new plants.
Those tensions are being tested as Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, plans to put reactor 6 at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant into commercial operation on April 16.
Environmental groups, like Friends of the Earth, have joined some local residents in protesting the restart, citing Tepco’s handling of the Fukushima disaster, security management at Kashiwazaki-Kariwaand control rod malfunctions that delayed the planned restart earlier this year.
But even in Iwaki, the nearest big city to the 2011 disaster, these nuclear resurrections aren’t black and white.
“The new plant is in Niigata prefecture, it’s not in Fukushima, and the people around the plant agreed to have the reactor. We cannot make that decision,” said Yujiro Igari, speaking through an interpreter. Igari is the manager of Iwaki’s Crisis Management Division, which directs citywide disaster preparedness. “People in this area just hope for the Japanese government to take care of the reactor and take responsibility.”
From energy town to ghost town
Futaba is nestled in the shadow of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Built on coal mining in the 1890s, it was reborn as a nuclear power town in the 1970s. That’s when Tepco began construction on the “Daiichi” and “Daini” plants, which translate as “first” and “second.”
The utility put time and money into getting community buy-in, even sponsoring contests where children made pro-nuclear posters that are now on display at the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum.
One sixth grader designed a massive sign that was erected over Futaba’s main street in 1991. It read: “Nuclear power: the energy for a bright future.”
The nuclear power plants brought stability to the old coal town. While Fukushima prefecture’s population declined by about 5 percent between 1970 and 1995, Futaba — anchored by the plants’ jobs — grew by roughly 12 percent.
That all changed on March 11, 2011. That day saw a 9.1 magnitude quake — the worst in the country’s history — spawning waves that crested at 13 meters. That’s 3 meters higher than the region’s previous record — and 7 meters higher than architects had designed the nuclear plants to withstand.
Daini was successfully brought to a safe shutdown. But at Daiichi, rising core temperatures melted fuel capsules into hydrogen gas.
The next day, the trapped hydrogen gas exploded in the Unit 1 building. By March 15, two other reactors had suffered the same fate.
The initial 2-mile evacuation order grew to 12 and finally 19 miles. But people struggled to get out of harm’s way — partly because the tsunami’s destruction made it difficult to deliver gasoline.
“People were evacuating by car, [and] cars need gas, so people lined up at gas stations,” said Kenichiro Hiramoto, head of planning and public relations at the museum. “But the tsunami’s destruction was preventing resupply.”
Hiroshi Aita, assistant manager of Iwaki’s Crisis Management Division, remembers that week vividly. One day last December, he drove with Igari through his hollowed-out hometown of Tomioka, which is home to the Daini plant.
The town, just south of Futaba, was known before the disaster for its cherry blossom festival. Aita turned down a street flanked by columns of leafless sakura trees waiting for the spring.
“After I graduated from kindergarten, we moved to Iwaki,” Aita said through an interpreter. “When I heard the news of the accident, I thought of this area. At that time, I didn’t imagine I could come back here — and finally I can.”
Igari recalled how firefighters gathered at a beach in Iwaki as a makeshift response center, while nuclear crews took short breaks for sleep at a nearby soccer training facility.
In the six years after the disaster, the government assembled 70,000 workers and cleared 16 million cubic meters of contaminated topsoil. Bales of radioactive dirt are still encamped along the highway.
The Sakura Festival returned to Tomioka in 2018, and in 2022, restrictions on Futaba were lifted, allowing people to return. But Tomioka’s population is still down 90 percent from 16,000 residents in 2011. Only 100 residents from a pre-disaster population of 7,000 returned to Futaba.
“The evacuees have already established a new life in a new area, a new town. They got a new job, and then their children also started to go to school,” said Noboru Takamura, the museum’s director.
Regulatory independence
By April 2011, the Daiichi plant was under control. The country moved to shut off all nuclear reactors as investigators searched for what went wrong in Fukushima and the public debated whether nuclear power should be part of Japan’s future.
In the eyes of most of Japan’s nuclear sector, there was a central takeaway: The regulatory body overseeing the nuclear industry must be independent.
“Before the Fukushima Daiichi accident, the government sector responsible for promotion of the nuclear industries and the regulation of nuclear were in the same department,” said Fuketa, the former Nuclear Regulation Authority chair. “We did not have an independent regulatory body, and there were lots of conflicts of interest.”
Japan’s legislature, known as the Diet, released an official report of the incident finding that regulators let operators apply regulations on a voluntary basis and colluded with the industry and the political ministry.
The report recommended creating a new nuclear regulator that would be independent from operators, politics and organizations promoted by the government. The Diet responded by creating the Nuclear Regulation Authority.
The U.S. is going in the opposite direction, with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission now only making major decisions with the consent of the White House or the Department of Energy. President Donald Trump has overhauled the agency, firing a Democratic commissioner and replacing the NRC chair.
The Trump administration is also pursuing a “wholesale revision” of the nuclear regulator’s rules as it funds next-generation nuclear reactors — technology with little traction in Japan — and supports the restart of retired nuclear plants.
Fuketa believes the U.S. is in a “critical situation.”
“That should not happen in [Japan],” he said of politicians firing regulators. “The most important difference between before and after the Fukushima Daiichi accident is the independence of the regulator.”
The energy calculus
By 2022, the appeal of a robust nuclear sector was impossible to ignore. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatened Japan’s natural gas supply, and inflation jumped nearly tenfold.
That year, Japan’s prime minister pledged to reactivate 16 nuclear reactors by the summer of 2023. While the timeline slipped, the message was — and remains — clear: Japan is getting back into nuclear energy.
The coal and gas plants that supply 60 percent of the country’s electricity are fed by imported fuels that are subject to price changes and restrictions beyond Japan’s control. While Japan also imports all of its uranium, the element is plentiful worldwide and incredibly energy dense, meaning missing a few shipments won’t shock energy markets as severely.
The Iran war has put that energy calculus in sharp relief. One analysis estimated that a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz could reduce Japan’s GDP by up to 3 percent this year, in large part due to reductions in natural gas supply and corresponding increases in electricity prices.
Nuclear power should offer long-term padding, but even short-term respite is within reach. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s Unit 6 restart “could displace approximately 1.3 million tons of liquefied natural gas.”
The nuclear restart will also help the country reach its goal of cutting planet-warming emissions to 46 percent of 2013 levels by 2030.
Then there’s the fact that reactors are already built and operable. Nuclear plants can cost billions of dollars to build, but little to run.
“They are a money-making machine,” said Yuriy Humber, president of the investment research firm Yuri Group.
“They produce a lot of electricity; it’s just a small fuel cost,” Humber continued. “There is obviously maintenance, as well as safety stuff, but just running an existing reactor, I mean, it’s a great business. Who doesn’t want to be in it?”
Tepco, the Tokyo-area utility that ran the Fukushima Daiichi plant and is overseeing the restart at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, said nuclear plants are also needed to meet growing energy demand.
“With the increase of the data centers and the semiconductor plants over the coming 10 years, we expect the electricity demand will increase by 6 percent,” said Masakatsu Takata, Tepco’s risk communicator, said through an interpreter. “It is the utility power company’s responsibility to cope with the increasing power demand and also provide the electricity in a stable manner. So, we will just do that.”
There’s still a political hurdle to clear: Restarts depend on consent from local leaders who weigh jobs and tax revenue against the potential risk. But that consent is generally given, Humber said — even when some concerned locals object.
“In the last five years, most of the mayors, leaders of villages or towns, et cetera that get elected are pro restart,” Humber said.
“It comes back to the same thing: It’s the local economy. It’s people’s jobs,” he added.
The restart of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa’s Unit 6 this month will be followed by the restart of Unit 7 in 2029, Takata said.
Elsewhere in Japan, two more reactors are slated to restart, possibly in 2027, with another eight being reviewed for future operations. Three brand new reactors are under construction, but two of those still need permits.
Takata said Tepco has learned from the accident that happened on its watch 15 years ago. The utility, he said, is pursuing “multiple redundancies” at the Unit 6 restart.
“We have measures against high tsunami waves, multiple sources of power supplies, and multiple measures of cooling the reactors if the normal cooling function is lost,” he said. “We believe the biggest lesson learned from the Fukushima accident is that there is no such thing as absolute safety.”
