Nuclear waste plan turns neighbor against neighbor in a struggling Japanese fishing village

Nobuka Miki was flustered by the television reporter’s question. She was happily spending the day with her daughter, enjoying a Buddhist festival on the main street of her village in northern Japan, when the question came.

What did she think about the proposal to build an underground storage site for Japan’s high-level radioactive waste in Suttsu, the struggling fishing town where she lives? “As long as it’s not dangerous, then it should be OK?” Nobuka briefly answered before fleeing the uncomfortable exchange.

Until that 2020 interview, Nobuka, who owns a local beauty salon, had no idea the Japanese government was considering her village as the site for a huge underground vault capable of holding all of Japan’s high-level nuclear waste for thousands of years.

As soon as the television news clip was broadcast and calls from her worried friends started lighting up her phone, Nobuka had second thoughts.

“Everything was lovely and suddenly, I heard ‘nuclear waste’,” remembered Nobuka, who has since changed her mind and is now helping to voice the local opposition against the waste proposal. “I felt surprised.”

The bigger surprise came when Nobuka learned that years earlier, Suttsu’s own leadership had volunteered to be considered for the site, in an attempt to revitalize a community whose primary industry, herring fishing, has been declining for years.

Suttsu’s mayor, Kataoka Haruo, applied for the survey in 2020 to investigate if the village can be a permanent site for Japan’s high-level radioactive nuclear waste after a subsidy incentive was promised. The subsidies for the first stage of the survey were up-to-2 billion yen ($19.4 million), and seven billion yen ($48.6 million) for the second stage.

Five years later, the proposal remains highly divisive in Suttsu, which has a population of less than 3,000. Neighbors who know each other through generations of friendship have stopped talking. Their kids no longer play together.

“People who support the decision wouldn’t come to my salon and I wouldn’t go to their shops either,” Nobuka said. “The first two years were the hardest.”

At the latest public meeting Nobuka attended early this year, proponents and opponents of the government’s plan to proceed with preliminary investigations sat on opposite sides of the audience. Each side accounted for almost exactly half of all participants, she said.

Proponents of the waste plan are open to the survey. “It brought the issue home,” Tanaka Noriyuki, a local resident who runs an electronic shop, told Nippon.com. “We all benefit from nuclear power, after all, so I don’t feel any group has the standing to oppose the survey process or object to discussing what to do with the waste.”

The situation has gotten slightly less heated recently after a series of community meetings, Nobuka says, but nothing is resolved yet. Suttsu remains one of three candidates for the waste disposal site — the other is another isolated northern town 60 kilometers farther up the coast — despite growing opposition centered on safety concerns, including the possibility of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Japan needs to have a nationwide discussion about the waste issue, which has not attracted much attention beyond the potentially affected communities, said Takumi Saito, a professor who studies nuclear power at the University of Tokyo. He believes that for energy security, a natural resource-deprived country like Japan needs nuclear power.

The conflict in Suttsu is a small manifestation of a worldwide debate over what to do with highly radioactive waste products of nuclear power, especially spent fuel rods. As of 2023, Japan has generated more than 19,000 tons of used rods and other highly radioactive waste since it opened its first commercial nuclear reactor in 1966. Currently that waste is in temporary storage on the grounds of Japan’s 15 nuclear power plants, a situation experts say is risky considering that the waste will remain dangerous for more than 10,000 years.

Many other countries are in the same boat. More than a dozen nations are trying to develop underground storage facilities for high-level nuclear waste, but none are open yet, and many are mired in controversy. In the United States, the federal government has been pushing for the construction of a high-level waste storage facility at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain since 1987, but the proposal is now moribund after intense opposition from lawmakers and the public.

At a time when many countries are talking about building a new generation of nuclear power plants to reduce dependence on fossil fuels that drive global climate change, the lack of approved long-term waste storage facilities has been a critical hurdle — both in countries with long-established nuclear power programs and in many smaller nations that would like to develop their own.

“It is always hard for newcomer nations to get over the hump,” said Paul P.H. Wilson, a nuclear engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “For nations with existing nuclear [power], to the extent that our global attention remains fixed on concerns with climate change, I think globally, that’s still true, even if domestically it’s less true at the moment. I think that nuclear [power] is seen to be an important piece of that puzzle. ”

As both low and high-level radioactive nuclear waste piles up every day at nuclear power plants, few countries have made long-term advances to address this issue.

“We need to find a way to safely manage the waste, both high-level and low-level radioactive waste,” said Naoko Watanabe, who studies the nuclear industry at Hokkaido University. “But there aren’t any other countries with a real plan for constructing” a long-term repository. “The repositories are necessary, but nobody wants them in their backyard. And I think it’ll be the same wherever you go. It’ll be similar in the U.S. as well as in France, Finland, and all other countries.”

Japan has been working on this problem for decades, but the devastating 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was a huge setback, prompting the shutdown of all 50 of the country’s nuclear reactors, many of which are only now reopening.

Even so, the drive to develop a long-term waste storage site has picked up steam since the government’s 2022 announcement of its Green Transformation Policy. This includes expanding nuclear power’s share of the country’s electricity from 6% to more than 20% by 2030. Already 14 nuclear reactors have restarted, 11 more are seeking restart approval, and two are under construction.

Like many other countries with nuclear power, Japan is also trying to make progress on building a plant to reprocess and ultimately reuse spent nuclear fuel. France and Russia have been operating similar plants for years. In Japan’s case, reprocessing is crucial because the country is determined to reuse as much material as possible before it is shipped to the long-term storage site.

Critics are skeptical. The reprocessing facility in the town of Rokkasho “has been under construction for 30 years. [It was] supposed to be finished by September 2024. But it’s delayed again [until 2027],” said Satoshi Takano, a researcher from Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, an anti-nuclear group in Japan. “The policy is not working. We need to reconsider it.”

Plans to build the long-term storage site have been under consideration for almost as long. Suttsu’s leaders had volunteered their town for consideration more than 20 years ago, in response to a nationwide call from the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan. The government promised billions in financial subsidies to the chosen community, but ultimately only three put themselves forward, including Suttsu.

In 2020, the government disclosed the names of the three communities. That was news to many local Suttsu residents, including Nobuka.

At the time, she didn’t even know what nuclear waste was. Even the devastating 2011 accident at Fukushima felt like a distant issue, 800 kilometers to the south. She and others quickly learned otherwise, not only because of the waste site proposal but also because of a plan to reopen the nuclear plant at Tomari, just 50 kilometers up the coast.

Their anxiety grew last November, when the government announced that a long-awaited review of the scientific literature on local geology showed that Suttsu and another northern coastal town, Kamoenai, were potentially suitable sites.

There are still numerous other steps, however, including drilling surveys and test tunnels — work that could take another 18 years, the government estimates.

The government’s plan is to build an underground storage site 1 to 2 kilometers wide and a depth of 300 to 500 meters, according to Satoshi. “If the site were to be built, it would be enough for the current waste in Japan,” he said

Nobuka, though, is one of many locals who say they are determined to stop it. She has made nuclear waste her second career, joining the Town Residents’ Association to speak out in opposition.

“People who are interested in this issue are quite doubtful about the decision” to name Suttsu as one of the finalists, Satoshi said. “The safety is not clear.”

Nobuka’s biggest concern is that nuclear accidents caused either by a natural disaster or man made malfunction will destroy Suttsu. But she worries that the project may already have too much momentum to stop, especially with the government’s drive to expand nuclear power.

She feels excluded from the government’s decision-making process. “Nobody showed up and asked about our concerns,” Nobuka said. “We’re not getting enough attention and I feel less and less hopeful.”

After the report of the first step survey was released, the mayor of Suttsu responded that “we’ll continue our efforts to deepen understanding” of the engineering requirements. The head of Japan’s powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Muto Yoji, meanwhile, promised at a press conference that the government “will take the lead in carefully addressing the voices of local communities and the general public.”

Watanabe, the University of Hokkaido academic, says it makes sense to continue to study the site: “I don’t think it hurts to do more evaluation.” But she added, no one is sure whether the community will be able to eventually back out if it wants to. “Those procedures are not clear.”