A Decade After Fukushima Disaster, Foes of Nuclear Power Reconsider

The war in Ukraine has "reshaped" energy markets, reports the Washington Post, with gas and oil shortages driving up the price of fossil fuels. The end result? "From Japan to Germany to Britain to the United States, leaders of countries that had stopped investing in nuclear power are now considering building new power plants or delaying the closure of existing ones."The shift is especially notable in Japan and Germany, where both turned decisively against nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.... This week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that his government is considering constructing next-generation nuclear power plants with the goal of making them commercially operational in the 2030s. The government may also extend the operational life of its current nuclear power plants. German policymakers, meanwhile, are considering prolonging the life of three final nuclear power plants that had been scheduled to go offline at the end of the year. The reprieve would be temporary - just a year or two to get through the current energy crisis - but it would still mark a significant policy reversal that has been a major focus of Germany political life for the last decade... Any decision in Germany would have to be approved by [German Economy Minister Robert] Habeck and his Green party - which was founded decades ago to focus on abolishing nuclear power. It remains a core policy position of the party - but so is opposition to Russia's war in Ukraine and a desire to be as strong as possible against the Kremlin. "We are in really special times," said Dennis Tanzler, a director of Adelphi, a Berlin-based climate think tank. "The bottom line is that German climate and energy policy has been shaped since Fukushima by a cross-party consensus that overall the technological risks, the security risks, are just too great." Even some prominent nuclear critics appear open to keeping existing plants online for longer, though they oppose building any new ones. "There's no connection between building nuclear power plants and dealing with the price spike caused by the loss of Russian gas," since they take at least a decade to construct, said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, a London-based climate think tank. But, he said, extending the life of existing reactors could make sense. "If you can do it safely, and it's worthwhile economically to do it, I don't see any good reason not to extend the life of nuclear reactors," he said.

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