Last month, Japan commemorated the 15th anniversary of the 3/11 triple disaster. The magnitude nine earthquake, the tsunami with waves reaching 40 metres above sea level and nuclear meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant left the country with major scars.

Japan suffered a death toll of almost 20,000 people and property and infrastructure damage estimated at 16.9 trillion yen (US$200 billion at 2011 exchange rates) as a result of 3/11. The decommissioning, decontamination and compensation costs of the Fukushima nuclear disaster continue to mount. Over 26,000 evacuees (down from 332,000 in December 2011) are still registered as displaced and yet to return home.

Another major consequence of the triple disaster has been its impact on Japan’s nuclear energy industry.

Before the disaster, nuclear energy accounted for roughly one-quarter to one-third of Japan’s electricity generation. Japan had grand plans to become a nuclear superstate under its 2010 Strategic Energy Plan, aiming to increase the share of nuclear power to 53 per cent by 2030.

After the triple disaster, Japan’s nuclear power industry underwent a near-nationwide shutdown until 2015. And while the government aims to recover nuclear energy as a major baseload power source, the industry has struggled to achieve its long-promised revival. Nuclear power’s share remained stalled at 8.3 per cent of Japan’s electricity supply as of 2024.

As Florentine Koppenborg explains in this week’s lead article, Japan’s long-planned nuclear revival ‘is more wishful thinking than reality’. ‘Japan’s 7th Strategic Energy Plan, adopted in February 2025, promises 20 per cent nuclear energy by 2040’. This extends by a decade the previous 2030 target of 20–22 per cent nuclear power set in 2015.

Reaching the government’s target requires restarting more reactors more quickly. At present, 13 of the 54 nuclear reactors operating pre-3/11 are generating electricity, 20 are theoretically operable pending restarts and 21 have been permanently decommissioned. But the Japanese government faces an array of challenges in seeking restarts.

The gap between government ambition and reality reflects a clash between improved regulatory standards post-3/11 and sceptical public attitudes towards nuclear energy on the one hand, and the persistence of the Japanese nuclear village on the other hand.

Regulatory review post 3/11 is, perhaps unsurprisingly, slow and rigorous. The old Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) sat within the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) — a direct conflict of interest given METI’s concurrent drive to expand nuclear power. NISA was replaced by the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), established in September 2012 under the Ministry of the Environment. This addressed the regulatory conflicts of interest and gave the NRA true independence and real regulatory teeth, duly eliminating any possibility of restarts being politically expedited before safety standards are met.

Addressing earthquake risks associated with Japan’s extreme seismicity — given its location at the convergence of four tectonic plates — alongside the implementation of mandatory anti-terrorism infrastructure and safety upgrades, has proved to be a regulatory bottleneck.

Public attitudes toward nuclear energy have softened in the years since 3/11. Opinion polling by the Asahi Shimbun in 2023 suggested that a majority of the public favoured limited restarts of reactors for the first time, driven by rising energy costs in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

But there is still an undeniable sense of scepticism toward the long-term use of nuclear energy. A plurality of respondents in the Asahi poll opposed the construction of new nuclear facilities. Public opposition is further reflected in a lack of local government consent for restarts in many areas.

These obstacles to more nuclear reactor restarts clash with the deep institutional inheritance of the Japanese nuclear village’s broader industrial policy culture. Energy targets continue to be set by METI, which maintains its longstanding network of relationships with nuclear experts, the utilities and the nuclear sector. This policy culture manifests in a refusal to abandon nuclear as a major baseload source in energy planning, driven by a combination of false confidence in nuclear energy’s necessity for energy security and decarbonisation, as well as vested commercial interests.

Security considerations have also been invoked that help make Japan’s nuclear energy targets politically convenient. LDP politicians, such as former prime minister Shigeru Ishiba, have long argued that maintaining commercial reactors provides Japan with a ‘tacit nuclear deterrent’ by preserving the technical capability to produce a warhead at short notice.

The consequences of Japan’s nuclear wishful thinking are twofold.

The first consequence is environmental. As Koppenborg documents, ‘coal has made a stealthy comeback as contentious debates over nuclear power and renewable energy capture the public’s attention. The share of coal in electricity generation … remained high at almost 29 per cent in 2025, still 3 per cent above the envisaged share for 2030. The country that led Kyoto Protocol negotiations in the late 1990s’ has watched its climate pledges deteriorate to an ‘insufficient’ rating — a trajectory shaped by fossil fuels filling the gap that nuclear was supposed to close.

The second consequence is strategic. Filling the nuclear gap with fossil fuels leaves Japan exposed to geopolitical shocks. ‘Supply disruptions caused by the war in Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz serve as an uncomfortable reminder of what import dependency actually costs’. As Koppenborg concludes, ‘countries that rely on nuclear ambition rather than nuclear capacity to anchor their energy strategies may find, as Japan has, that the reckoning arrives before the reactors do’.

The answer to Japan’s energy security challenges lie not in stubbornly defending nuclear targets that have repeatedly slipped beyond reach, but in proactively scaling up renewable sources. Even though solar costs remain higher in Japan than in most countries, building and operating new solar capacity now costs no more than simply running existing coal plants. Japan’s volcanic archipelago gives it some of the world’s richest untapped geothermal resources. Offshore wind — particularly the floating turbine technology that Japan’s deep coastal waters require — and expanded grid interconnection also offer longer-term pathways toward a genuinely diversified energy base.

The Takaichi government’s recent decision to end subsidies for large scale solar installations, while maintaining support for fossil fuels, points Japan in the wrong direction as it trails other G7 members in its share of renewable energy.

Fifteen years on from 3/11, the lesson should be clear: the transition Japan needs will not wait for reactors that may never restart. It must be built on renewable capacity scaled up now — before the next reckoning arrives.

The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Law, Policy and Governance, The Australian National University.

https://doi.org/10.59425/eabc.1776672000