By Mariko Katsumura, John Geddie, Katya Golubkova and Nobuhiro Kubo
As Fukushima fades, Japan embraces nuclear-powered future
IWAKI, Japan, March 9 (Reuters) - Takuma Hashimoto was three years old when a massive earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11, 2011, triggering nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant just an hour's drive from his home.
As the worst nuclear disaster since Chornobyl unfolded, his terrified family was trapped, unable to flee like their neighbours because they couldn't find gas for their car.
Now 18, Hashimoto wants to become part of Japan's next generation of nuclear talent.
"I don't think nuclear power should be treated as something that's automatically dangerous," said the engineering student at a technical college in Iwaki, where a monitoring station still keeps check on local radiation levels.
Reuters spoke with Hashimoto, as well as a former crisis management official and a nuclear industry veteran, ahead of the 15th anniversary of the disaster. Their stories illustrate how Japan is pivoting back to a power source it had all but shunned.
Resource-poor Japan was once one of the world's biggest proponents of nuclear power, which provided roughly 30% of the country's electricity from 54 reactors.
The Fukushima disaster saw public opinion swing dramatically against nuclear, and all reactors were ordered to be shut down for safety inspections and upgrades. In 2012, the government even decided to phase out nuclear energy. That decision was reversed two years later, but reactor restarts have been slow and many have been shut permanently.
A PRO-NUCLEAR PM AND GROWING PUBLIC SUPPORT
Now Tokyo's staunchly pro-nuclear leader Sanae Takaichi, buoyed by a thumping election win, is pushing to accelerate restarts and advance new nuclear technologies to wean the country off costly imported fossil fuels.
The restart of one of the seven reactors at the world's biggest nuclear plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, in January was a milestone. That said, only 15 of 33 reactors in Japan that remain operable are back online.
Middle East chaos unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump's attack on Iran - a region that accounts for 95% of Japan's oil supplies - and an anticipated surge in energy needs of power-hungry AI data centres promise to bolster a shift in public opinion.
A slim majority of people - 51% - are now in favour of the restarts, an Asahi newspaper survey last month found. That's up from 28% when it began polling on the issue in 2013. The most supportive are young people aged 18 to 29 - at 66%.
Hashimoto's school, which has sent him on visits to nuclear power plants, receives government funding to nurture workers in nuclear power, regulation and decommissioning.
But securing enough talent may be a bottleneck in Japan's nuclear renaissance.
There were just 177 students admitted to nuclear-related courses across Japan in 2024, versus 317 just before the Fukushima disaster and a peak of 673 in the early 1990s.
Hashimoto knows not everyone agrees with him. Almost every week, he encounters a vocal band of anti-nuclear protesters at the train station on his commute to school.
But he says: "What matters is using nuclear power properly, having measures in place in case something happens, and developing technology to make sure accidents don't occur."
'FROM EMOTION TO TRADE-OFFS'
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Seiji Inada, 49, was part of the government's crisis response team in 2011. Tasked with tallying the dead, he hunkered down for days with hundreds of officials in an underground bunker beneath the prime minister's office in Tokyo.
Inada remembers being in the crisis room, watching aghast footage of a building that housed a reactor exploding.
Around 150,000 people living around the plant were evacuated, many of whom never returned, while the government assessed the risks that Tokyo, one of the world's biggest cities, might be blanketed in a radioactive plume.
"I remember during my short lunch break, I called my dad and I told him: 'Well, I can't tell you any details, but just prepare for the worst case scenario," recalled Inada, who now works for private consultancy FGS Global.
An inquiry published in 2012 blamed plant operator TEPCO, regulators and the government for failing to develop safety protocols that could have contained the damage, calling it a "man-made" disaster.
The prime minister at the time, Naoto Kan, quit after he was criticised for bungling the response.
"The lesson of 3/11 is humility: low-probability shocks happen. What matters is governance," said Inada.
Back then, Inada, like most other Japanese, found it hard to imagine that the country would ever return to nuclear power, but "time heals trauma", he added.
"The shock of 2011 was profound and it shaped attitudes for years. Over time, the debate shifted from emotion to trade-offs."
A SAFER INDUSTRY WITH RENEWED MOMENTUM
Nuclear industry veteran Keiji Matsunaga, 59, is putting the lessons learned from Fukushima into practice by developing safer reactors at his company Toshiba.
Joining the firm straight from university in 1991, five years after Chornobyl, he's always been conscious of the stigma attached to the industry.
Fukushima made that worse and some years after the disaster, his teenage daughter ended up in an argument with a teacher at her school who said nuclear power was dangerous and Japan shouldn't be using it.
But even as Toshiba's nuclear business faltered in the wake of Fukushima and the bankruptcy of its U.S. unit Westinghouse, Matsunaga says he has never wavered from the view that Japan needs nuclear for energy security.
And the gradual increase in restarts is helping business.
Though Toshiba, now a private company, does not release its nuclear power division earnings targets, another big player, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, told Reuters last week that sales for its nuclear power unit will hit a record 400 billion yen ($2.5 billion) next year, a target it didn't expect to reach until 2030.
Any new plants that might be built have been designed to be much safer, says Matsunaga. For example, buildings housing reactors would have roofs fortified with steel plate and concrete that can resist the impact of falling aircraft.
The plants would also have more failproof natural circulation systems, in addition to other systems, to keep the reactor cool. That would help avoid a situation like Fukushima when the loss of air-conditioner cooling functionality contributed to the meltdowns.
"By adopting these measures, we believe events like Fukushima can be prevented," he said.
(Reporting by Mariko Katsumura in Iwaki, Fukushima and John Geddie, Katya Golubkova and Nobuhiro Kubo in Tokyo; Additional reporting by Tim Kelly; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)