Monday, August 22, 2011

Pendergast: Japan at Critical Tipping Point

From: Bill Totten

Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2011 5:01 PM

 

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Japan at Critical Tipping Point

 

by Mark Pendergrast

 

Special to The Japan Times (August 17 2011)

 

Colchester, Vermont - Japanese trains run to the minute, and the

country's businesses pride themselves on energy-efficiency. The Japanese

boast of their eco-services for eco-products in eco-cities. Yet they

rely primarily on imported fossil fuel and nuclear power, live in

energy-wasteful homes, and import sixty percent of their food. That may

be changing in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Maybe.

 

Japan is at a crucial tipping point. As an island nation, it offers a

microcosmic look at the problems facing the rest of the globe, including

peak oil and climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions. And as

Japan tips, so may the world.

 

I landed at Narita airport on May 11 2011, two months after the

magnitude 9.0 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake triggered a devastating

tsunami that killed an estimated 20,500 people on the coast of

northeastern Japan's Tohoku region and left a swath of destruction up to

ten kilometers inland. That zone included the Fukushima Number One

nuclear power plant, where a loss of electric power led to a full

meltdown of three out of six reactors.

 

In the same way that people in the United States refer to the terrorist

attacks of September 11 2001, simply as "9/11", the Japanese shorthand

for March 11, the day of their triple disaster, is "3/11".

 

Before 3/11, as an American writer I had been awarded an Abe Fellowship

for Journalists to visit five out of thirteen so-called Eco-Model

Cities. I figured that because the Japanese import virtually all of

their fossil fuel and are technologically sophisticated, that they must

be doing innovative things with renewable energy.

 

And indeed, during my six-week odyssey, which took me to Tokyo and the

Eco-Model Cities of Kitakyushu, Yusuhara, Kyoto, Toyota and Yokohama, I

saw solar panels, micro-hydro generators, wind turbines, electric

vehicles, hydrogen power, biodiesel, wood-pellet factories, compost made

from human excrement, geothermal systems, and model sustainable homes.

 

But ... I had been naive. The Eco-Model City program was thrown together

in a hurry so that then-Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda could announce it at

the Group of Eight summit held in Japan in July 2008, and the cities

received very little funding. They are doing some interesting piecemeal

things, but not enough.

 

Japan lags far behind Europe, the US and even (in some respects) China

in terms of renewable energy efforts. Currently only photovoltaic panels

receive a central government subsidy. And Japan is mired in bureaucracy,

political infighting, indecision, puffery, public apathy, and cultural

attitudes that make rapid change difficult.

 

Yet Japan is also one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with

friendly, resilient people who can, when motivated, pull together to

accomplish incredible things. I happened to land there at a crucial time

for Japan, when the country has an opportunity to rethink its energy

policy and entire future. It could show the way to create an

ecologically sustainable world and, in the process, rejuvenate its

economy. In a way, Japan is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. As

an industrialized island nation, it is facing the same issues as the

rest of the globe, only sooner and more urgently.

 

In 2010, Japan's total energy consumption derived primarily from

imported fossil fuels: 45 percent oil, nineteen percent coal and

fourteen percent natural gas. Nuclear power accounted for fifteen

percent and renewable energy seven percent. Almost all of that small

renewable share came from large hydropower dams built a half century

ago. In 2010, the Japanese government announced plans to build fourteen

more nuclear reactors to boost the country's nuclear share of electrical

generation to fifty percent .

 

Now that plan has been scrapped. In addition to the Fukushima reactors,

the Hamaoka nuclear power plant's five reactors, which are located near

a fault line 201 kilometers southwest of Tokyo in Omaezaki, Shizuoka,

have also been closed. So what will happen next?

 

Tetsunari Iida, the former nuclear engineer who heads the Tokyo-based

Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP), has a plan. Formerly a

lone voice crying in the wilderness against nuclear power, he is now a

media star and consultant to the country's leaders. Iida sees Japan's

nuclear power and fossil fuel use gradually dwindling to nothing by

2050, while renewable energy swells to account for fifty percent of

current use. The other fifty percent will be covered by energy savings

and efficiencies, he says.

 

Prime Minister Naoto Kan has apparently been listening to Iida and is

now a born-again renewable energy advocate. Yet because of political

in-fighting and a looming no-confidence vote, Kan announced that he will

resign soon - the sixth Japanese prime minister to do so in six years He

says he won't go until the Diet votes for renewable energy subsidies for

wind, biomass, geothermal, solar hot water, micro-hydro and so forth.

 

But the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry

(METI) really run the country, in league with the electricity monopolies.

 

Each of the ten regional utilities jealously guards its borders, so that

there is limited cooperation between them, and they don't like the

fluctuating levels of renewable energy. Worse still, the northeastern

half of Japan uses a fifty-hertz frequency, while the southwest operates

at sixty hertz, making it impossible to share power between them without

huge transformers.

 

METI has funded a program to dabble in smart-grid technology in four

test cities, but Japan needs a drastic overhaul of its electric grid and

massive support for renewable energy. Building codes and renovations

must support well-insulated homes styled after traditional machiya, with

natural ventilation. Home gardens and large-scale greenhouses need to

provide more domestic food.

 

Fallow rice paddies can grow abundant strains for bioethanol. Rural

inhabitants could heat with wood. The country could take advantage of

its huge untapped potential for geothermal and wind power. And surely

its electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids could predominate.

 

The whole world is watching Japan in its post-3/11 struggles. Let us

hope that we see a true eco-model country rising from the nuclear

meltdowns and devastation.

 

_____

 

Mark Pendergrast is the author of Inside the Outbreaks (2010) and other

books. He is writing a book called "Japan's Tipping Point". Pendergrast

can be reached through www.markpendergrast.com.

 

(c) All rights reserved

 

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