Japan is wasting the opportunity of the Fukushima disaster by failing to use the crisis and public opposition toward nuclear reactors to form an energy mix more reliant on renewable energy, Canadian author, environmentalist and geneticist David Suzuki says.
“Fukushima gives the opening that if they really want to get off nukes, then they really have to go and do something else,” said Suzuki, who joined the board of the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation last year at the urging of Softbank Corp. founder Masayoshi Son.
Suzuki’s comments echo a common refrain among critics of nuclear energy that leaders could have used the atomic meltdown to push alternative forms of energy. That effort suffered a setback last month when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told lawmakers he’ll restart Japan’s reactors once safety measures are in place.
“There’s a huge opportunity that the government, because it is so tightly tied to the private energy sector, has refused to acknowledge,” Suzuki said in an interview. “It is an opportunity being squandered in the drive to get the reactors up and running again.”
Two years after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and crisis in Fukushima led to the closing of all except two of Japan’s 50 nuclear plants, Japan gets only a fraction of its energy from clean sources. About 7.4 per cent of primary energy came from renewables in the year ending March 2012, with 3.4 per cent from hydro and 4 per cent from others such as solar, geothermal and wind, according to data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
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