Disagreeing with ‘local agreement’: a survey of public attitudes toward restarting the Hamaoka nuclear power plant

Abstract

The resumption of Japan’s NPPs has become a controversial issue since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. Although local agreement is a significant process of the resumption, the attitude of the general public toward the local agreement process has received little attention. This study uses a postal questionnaire survey with stratified random sampling to investigate the case of the Hamaoka NPP. Results show that the conventional way of seeking local agreement is not generally supported by the public. This may be explained by apparent widespread support for the participation of broader geographical areas, including those affected by reputational damage and urban areas consuming electricity, and by a general distrust of local governments/assemblies and the ‘experts’. It was also found that respondent attitudes regarding local agreement differ depending on the respondent’s position on the restart as well as the area in which the respondent resides.

Keywords:

• LULUs
• nuclear power plant
• local agreement
• questionnaire survey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Agency for Natural Resources and Energy “The status of nuclear power plants in Japan as of March 16, 2020” URL: https://www.enecho.meti.go.jp/category/electricity_and_gas/nuclear/001/pdf/001_02_001.pdf (retrieved on March 18, 2020)

2 Now defunct.

3 Aldrich and Fraser (2017) categorises factors which affect the restart in Japan into flawed energy diversification efforts, embedded interests in national politics, economic dependence of local governments, diversity within host communities, safety agreements, and judicial weaknesses.

4 A variety of voluntary approaches are possible, from an incentives-based approach to a partnership approach, and from trust-based voluntarism to competitive voluntarism, precarious voluntarism and passive voluntarism (Di Nucci 2019).

5 The arguments were extracted from the records of local assemblies of Shizuoka prefecture, Kakegawa city, Kikugawa city, Makinohara city and Omaezaki city.

6 As for the history of the safety agreement, see Shizuoka Shimbun-sha (2011, 2013).

7 The arguments were extracted from the records of local assemblies of the seven municipalities.

8 For the details, see Nuclear Safety Control Division, Shizuoka Prefecture, “The Process of the Citizen Initiative for Referendum on the Restart of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plants in Shizuoka Prefecture,” (2012), [in Japanese], URL: http://www.pref.shizuoka.jp/kinkyu/documents/siryou_matome.pdf (retrieved on October 10, 2018).

9 The arguments were extracted from the records of the prefectural assembly of Shizuoka.

10 There is no great difference between the population of Shizuoka prefecture and the respondents in social attributes. For more details, see Tatsumi and Nakazawa (2021).

11 The questionnaire (in Japanese) is available at https://lap.inf.shizuoka.ac.jp/document/publication/a6046c25-0fce-4071-917c-97ddbcde2e9e.pdf.

12 The statistic was calculated using R (version 4.0.1).

13 The sample size of respondents in Omaezaki city was too small to draw statistically significant results.

14 The neighboring municipalities showed positive influence for the inclusion of ‘directly damaged’ areas (S1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JST CREST, [Grant Number JPMJCR15E1], Japan.