"Reason for the Proposal:
Taking advantage of the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, the Japanese government is trying to shift its policy again to promote nuclear power generation. However, to overcome the crisis, nuclear power generation is not effective in terms of both cost and energy security.
It takes over ten years to construct a nuclear power plant, and costs are rising so construction costs will exceed 1 trillion yen per site. Even worse, decommissioning and waste treatment require high costs and considerable time. The costs for small modular reactors (SMR) and next-generation innovative reactors are even higher. In contrast, the costs of natural energy are continuously dropping, and the cheapest solar energy is lower than 2 yen/kW.
Moreover, the war in Ukraine has shown that once a nuclear power plant is under attack, it becomes a nuclear weapon against the citizens of the country. Particularly, spent fuel pools have little protection. Once they were destroyed, they could not keep functioning cooling system and radiation would be released. The best way to realize energy security is to increase natural energy that is sourced and consumed locally, does not emit CO2 and requires no fuel cost.
By withdrawing from nuclear power generation and reducing thermal power generation, we shall shift the baseload power source to natural energy."