Will the World’s Biggest Nuclear Power Plant Get a Restart?

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Last winter, on a windy, chilly morning, Bloomberg's reporter Shoko Oda arrived in a tiny rural city called Kashiwazaki. It's on the western coast of Japan, surrounded by mountains and rice.

Fields, and it's about a two hour bullet train ride from Tokyo, and it's known for heavy snow during the winter, so there's a lot of ski resorts. The other thing that it's really well known for is really good quality of rice, so there's a lot of sake brewers that are making sake there as well.

But Shoko wasn't there for skiing or sak tasting. She was invited to tour the world's biggest nuclear power plant, known as kk SO.

KK stands for Kashawazaki Kadiwa, and it's named after the two cities that it straddles over, and it has seven nuclear reactors and it's it's also the world's biggest nuclear power plant, with eight point two gigabot capacity. If kk ran smoothly without any problems at a very conservative maintenance schedule, it would produce enough power for roughly thirteen million households in Japan.

That's enough to power double the homes in Tokyo. Now, KK doesn't allow electronic devices in its facility, so Shoko couldn't record anything, but she walked us through her visit.

You know, nuclear power plants are one of the most highly secured places in Japan. Lots of checkpoints. They also give you protective gear. And then we went inside the actual reactor. You'd at number seven where we were taken to an observation deck and you could kind of see through the glass the operating floor where there's a spent nuclear fuel pool. That's where they keep the used fuel. There's lots of pipes and wires. Some places are quite small.

Sho goo. What was going through your head as you were walking through this power plant?

Well, I mean, it really hits you when you're inside the actual facility itself. Of course you follow the roles on the protocol, but you know, it makes me wonder sometimes what happens if an earthquake strikes at that point, how will we be getting out of the facility? In times like that. So that's something that crosses my mind whenever I'm at a nuclear power plant.

Shoko's worry was once a living nightmare for about one hundred and twenty eight million people living in Japan. In twenty eleven, an earthquake hit the east coast of the country and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear power plant. That facility is owned by Tokyo Electric Power

I mean, Kashawazaki Katiwa is incredibly symbolic. It's symbolic in a sense that it's the last nuclear power plot operated by TEPCO, the company responsible for the Fukushiba Daichi disaster, and if this world were to be able to restart, I think the Japanese government sees it as a positive thing that boosts sentiment to adopt more nuclear power use. So I think the government really is looking at it as a critical piece of the puzzle.

Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Wanha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies and the markets TAIKUUS and businesses that drive this ever shifting region. Today on the show, will the world's biggest nuclear power plant get a Second Chance? Japan has a relatively long history of developing nuclear power. The country's first nuclear reactor began operating in nineteen sixty six.

So Japan's always been resource scant. We import a lot of our energy needs from abroad. In the nineteen seventies, Japan was impacted by the oil shocks. That was one of the drivers for Japan then to turn to use of nuclear power because they thought that it's important to reduce dependency on imports of energy. So at one point, Japan had a goal to boost nuclear power used to fifty percent of its power box by twenty thirty.

With that goal, Japan boasted fifty four nuclear reactors throughout the country in twenty eleven, among the most globally, and made nuclear energy a strategic priority, and it worked. At one point, nuclear was about a third of Japan's power mix until Fukushima.

So in March eleven, twenty eleven, there was a massive earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern coast of Japan.

Boady seen wipes four meters high, that's thirteen feet. We saw houses being swept into rice fields. Then now.

And these tsunami overwhelmed top coast Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant, and it led to a power loss and failure to cool down the nuclear reactors there, and it caused a meltdown. An evacuation was ordered less than an hour ago for residents that live within about two kilometers of.

A reactor in the prefecture of Fukushima. The Fukushima disaster is regarded as the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in nineteen eighty six. In the aftermath of Fukushima, Japan suspended operations of all of its fifty four nuclear reactors and permanently scrapped about a third of them.

Fukushiba basically changed everything. The disaster really changed Japan's energy policy. Japan took all of its nuclear power plants offline to chuck for safety, and they also put in place a due regulatory framework that requires utilities to follow that process before they can bring nuclear reactors back online.

Since Fukushima. Japan has restarted twelve nuclear reactors and five more are waiting to come back online pending additional approvals. That includes two reactors at KK. Shoko spoke with Raphael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He thinks it's important for Japan to be able to rely on nuclear energy again.

He thought that Japan has all these nuclear reactors sitting idle in the country, all of that capacity that's wasted, that's sitting there has potential to lower carbon emissions from coal and gas plants, but it's just the restart takes such a long time and that it just remains there collecting dust.

Today, Japan relies almost seventy percent of its power mix on imported fossil fuel like coal and liquefied natural gas, which makes Japan incredibly vulnerable to the swings in energy prices.

So whenever there's a spike in let's say an LNG price, Japanese utilities get impacted. Then the same goes for like coal. On top of that, you know, the yen has been at historic weakness against the dollar, which makes it even more expensive for utilities to procure energy from abroad. Just to give a figure. Japan imported like twenty seven trillion yen of energy last year. That's about one hundred and seventy three billion dollars.

One hundred and seventy three billion US dollars. That's more than what Japan made exporting cars last year. That big energy bill means there's little room for debate on why Japan needs a new way to power its four tillion dollar economy, and Shoko says the regional wars and conflicts in recent years made this need even more urgent.

The invasion of Ukraine really had a big impact. After the invasion, you know, cobodity prices went flying through the roof, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida explained that in order to achieve energy security but also achieve climate goals because nuclear can provide carbon free energy, the Prime Minister himself said that Japan should restart as video of its reactors as possible, so long as it's passed the safety protocols, but also

There are other reasons why Japan wants to harness nuclear power more. For one, it wants to attract more semiconductor manufacturers like TSMC to make chips in Japan, and that's expected to increase electricity demand significantly. Plus there's also a move to revive nuclear power around the world.

China has plans to roll out more nuclear power plants, there are talks in the US to try to bring some back online. Even developing countries or looking at nuclear power, including Bangladesh, India. So it's really not just a path, but every other country is looking at atomic energy as a way to secure energy.

This year, Japan started a review of its national Energy Strategy to set a target for the country's power mix in the future. The strategy says Japan will aim for nuclear to be up to twenty two percent of its power mix by the end of the decade. In fiscal twenty twenty two, nuclear accounted for just five percent of the energy mix, and next month, lawmakers and Nigata, the prefecture where KK is based, will meet and likely consider whether to support a restart.

I spoke with some of these lawmakers and they're very wary about restarting KK, and many have said that it's not the right time to be even discussing whether KK should be restarted or not.

After the break, what it takes to restart a nuclear reactor, and the challenges ahead Shoko. Earlier, we talked about how Japan wants to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant to tackle soaring energy costs. How do you even go about doing that? I mean, obviously it's not like restarting a computer. You're not just flipping a switch.

Yeah, it's an incredibly complicated and long winded process. So basically, Japanese utilities have to submit a plan to the nation's regulator, and that's submitted to the Nuclear Regulation Authority and they check whether it matches the new framework that came into

And that blessing from the local governor, it's not even a legal requirement. Technically, idler reactors just need regulators approval to restart. Companies like TEPCO typically seek consent from the local governor and a STEM, but citizen lawsuits or protests can slow that down. For KK, two of its seven

And the reason for that is Japan saw another earthquake on January first, and it happened to take place somewhere close to Nigata. It shook quite a lot in Nigatta. The lawmakers themselves said that they saw a lot of people trying to evacuate, and the roads were getting congested because everyone's trying to evacuate all at once. All of this gets compounded, and so they don't think the evacuation plan put in place is adequate enough. They don't think

And even if all these safety concerns are addressed, the residents in Nigata don't actually have much to gain from restarting KK.

Tokyo Electric operates KK. That means if Tokyo Electric were able to cut back off fossil fuel imports at lower power bills, all of that benefit goes to people like me living in Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures. Nigata is actually covered by a different utility, and so they don't get the benefit of, let's say a lower power bill. All they get is just the risks.

A Bloomberg NEF report forecasts that Tepco could resume operations at kk's Number seven reactor as soon as October. For now, there's no official target date, and for many Japanese today, the memory and trauma of Fukushima still loom large.

Obviously, Japan is one of the most sizifically active places in the world. You know, every single time there's an earthquake, I as an energy reporter, the first thing that comes to my mind is what's the closest nuclear power plant to where the earthquake took place? And so it's the key sticking point for people when they debate whether nuclear is safe or good or not. The Trade Minister once said that it takes years and years to gain trust and it only takes a second to lose that trust.

Shoko. Despite the trauma of Fukushima, it seems that the reality and the needs on the ground are making people think differently about nuclear.

In Yeah, I think. I mean, it was a very traumatizing event for the country, but at the same time, it's spent thirteen years and public sentiment toward nuclear in Japad has shifted, especially with the invasion of ukraateive power bills going up, people started to kind of warm up to the idea of nuclear power because if that means lowering fuel imports and lowering power bills, then you know, why not.

Thanks for listening to The Big Take Asia podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm wan ha. This episode was produced by Young Young Naomi, Jessica Beck, and Alex Sugiera. It was mixed by Blake Maples and fact checked by Naomi. It was edited by Bill Ferries and David Stringer. Naomi Shaven and Kim Gittleson are our senior producers. Elizabeth Ponso is our senior editor, Nicole Beemster is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Please follow and review