Japan Isn’t Going Nuclear Free After All
Last week the Japanese government unveiled a plan that would wean the country off of nuclear power by the 2030s, seeming to echo similar efforts in Germany. (See, “The Great German Energy Experiment.”) The plan came in response to the disaster at the Fukushima power plant last year. Eliminated nuclear would have been difficult–Japan relied on it for a third of its power before the disaster–and would almost certainly have increased the country’s reliance on imported fossil fuels. Now the government is backtracking, saying only that it would consider the tentative nuclear-free plan as it puts together a long-term energy strategy for the country, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The article said that one of the biggest reasons for the reversal was pressure from the business community:
[T]he plan has met fierce opposition from the business lobby, which argues that going nuclear-free would lead to higher electricity fees and unstable power supply, hindering economic activity.
“The business community absolutely cannot accept this strategy,” Hiromasa Yonekura, the chairman of Keidanren, Japan’s largest business lobby, said on Tuesday.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.