Six years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear accident, the nuclear emergency declaration announced in March 11, 2011 still continues, and we face a wide range of hurdles that should be overcome at both onsite and offsite. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, risk governance deficits in Japanese nuclear fraternity are partially corrected, but critical deficits such as interface problem among stakeholders and a lack of appreciation or understanding complexity of socio-economic-political fabric still remain. And behind risk governance deficits, there are affirmative awareness and attitude of justifying and maintaining the status quo. These awareness and behavior still pervade even after the Fukushima in bureaucratic government. Consequently, as of January 2017, two PWR plants only are in commercial operation again.
The Fukushima nuclear disaster still yields the ripple effects through the fabric of society, and brings about a wicked problem with huge impacts. For example, political discussions on reform plan including realignment of the major utilities' nuclear power divisions, new scheme for burden sharing of compensation payment using liberalized electricity retail market etc., are led by the METI. Considering the situation, among others, Japan’s energy transition policy aiming at low carbon society tends to deviate politically and now at crossroad.
Most of cascading events originated in the Fukushima nuclear disaster are not the “unexpected” or “unforeseeable” consequences. Nuclear power in Japan has been tightly and complexly interlinked with and interdependent on socio-economic-political activities and has also produced nested or collective interests everywhere. The present crisis results from not only a lack of realization of the above-mentioned but also inaction of continuous consideration and undertaking about behaviors of interconnected socio-economic-political system accompanied by changes of endogenous conditions. It is a critical deficit of risk governance in modern society. So far the Fukushima problems have been addressed by the restricted stakeholders in the limited contexts such as nuclear safety regulation and nuclear energy policy without including the relevant policy domains. TEPCO and the government have taken actions with a myopic view/ framing in worrying too much about loss of societal trustworthiness, while evading realistic estimates and deliberations about future scenarios including wild card scenario. As a result, policy options for dealing with our challenges become to be limited, consequently resilience of policy lost. It is needed to construct long-term and cross-sectoral framing/management of interconnected events in order to reconstruct resiliently sustainable energy system.