The remarkable thing about the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident was that, ultimately, it was man made. The Japanese know that their islands sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a tectonic plate boundary, and consequently that they are at risk of devastating earthquakes and tsunamis. They built Fukushima to withstand a tsunami wave of 10 metres – in the end, the tsunami that struck in March 2011 was significantly higher than this (14m). The plant withstood the violent assault of nature and the only fatalities at the plant on that day lost their lives through drowning. The nuclear excursion which struck in the days following the cataclysm resulted from the plant operator’s failure to keep the reactor cooling pumps running by allowing them to run out of diesel.
Japan, more than most, has reason to live in fear of the potential destructive power of an unbridled nuclear chain reaction and in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, all of the nation’s nuclear generating capacity (providing 30% of the country’s electricity) was taken off-line for safety checks. Currently, due to political considerations, all of Japan’s reactors are shutdown, but the nation’s need for power is as great as ever.
A direct, though arguably unintentional, consequence of “Abeomics” has been the devaluation of the Yen against other major currencies; notably the US Dollar. Japan has no fossil fuel reserves to speak of and so has to import the fossil fuels it needs to make up for the shortfall of electricity generation caused by the mothballing of its nuclear capacity. These raw materials are priced in Dollars and so have become more expensive as the Yen has depreciated. As a consequence of this, Japan now has its worst ever annual trade deficit with imports costing the nation $115 billion more than the value of the goods it exported. Of course, the energy situation alone is not responsible for the shortfall, but it does constitute the major component of it. Japan’s nuclear generation capacity could be brought back online quickly, but the problem is more political than technical.