A geographer looks at community life and economics after the nuclear power plant leaves town.
On March 11, 2011, the fourth largest earthquake ever recorded rocked the coast of Japan. Walls of water more than 45 feet high slammed inland, causing tremendous damage. At the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, electrical power needed to keep the cooling systems running failed, and three reactors melted down, spilling radioactive material out across a 12-mile radius around the plant and leading to the eventual evacuation of some 154,000 people.
While the Fukushima incident is a dramatic example, the decommissioning or destruction of nuclear plants has far-reaching social effects, says Associate Professor of Geography and Asian Studies Daisaku Yamamoto, an economic geographer, who researches the social aspects of nuclear power, particularly regional responses to the decommissioning of power plants. While most people tend to study how communities oppose nuclear power, Yamamoto is interested in “how local communities that formerly hosted nuclear power plants respond when the nuclear power plant actually shuts down.”
Yamamoto’s research has included a collaboration on two different books about the impact of the Fukushima disaster, in addition to the impacts of closures of U.S. nuclear facilities like Connecticut Yankee, Vermont Yankee, and the Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine. His recent research has examined the long-term economic impact of nuclear plants on two host communities in Japan: Kariwa and Kashiwazaki.
Policies around nuclear power are very nation-specific, Yamamoto says. In Japan, nuclear power plants tend to be tied to the promise of rural economic development. In places like Niigata Prefecture — as in Fukushima — plants are built and operated by Tokyo Electric Power, a private company that receives various forms of support from the government. The electricity these plants produce does not stay in their respective cities and instead goes to fuel larger metropolises like Tokyo. In order to make this an attractive deal for rural communities, Yamamoto says, the government promises that local municipalities will get various subsidies and grants in return: revenue to build highways and public facilities and to renew city halls.
“The intention was to make what are called visible projects, so that rural areas would be attracted to the idea of allowing these power plants to be built,” Yamamoto says. “If you build these nuclear power plants, wow, you get all these kinds of benefits that are very visible and enhance the quality of living for the residents.”
But while the promises for nuclear-led economic development in rural communities can be high, Yamamoto’s research showed that in two host communities in Niigata — Kariwa and Kashiwazaki — the establishment of a nuclear power plant didn’t actually change their long-term economic development that much when compared to similar nonnuclear cities like Sanjo. “The idea was to use the plants to catalyze growth in the regional economies, by attracting high tech industries or creating more incomes,” Yamamoto says. But the study found that, while regional economies tended to get a boost during construction — an influx of construction workers who needed to be fed, housed, and who shopped in the community — after the plant was built, the economy went back to where it was before the construction.
One potential reason? Unlike a manufacturing plant, nuclear power plants don’t actually employ that many people, meaning that they don’t add many jobs to the local economy. And the nuclear industry also tends to have such a stringent standard for equipment and parts that existing local factories have a hard time breaking into the market. Meanwhile, nuclear power plant workers in Japan tend to migrate between different nuclear power plants as needed, meaning that their money tends not to spread much in any given community. While some large plants do lead to skilled people starting businesses, Yamamoto says that usually doesn’t happen.
“I think there might be some cities in East Japan like Fukushima that may have benefited, though now you’re seeing the downfall of that,” Yamamoto says. “But other sites that came later tend not to have anything but just a power plant and some contract workers in construction-type industries … They do get some municipal revenues, of course, through the government or through these grants, but in terms of employment, there may not be as big an impact.”
Nuclear plants thus provide a case study for evolutionary economic geography, a mode of study that tries to capture how resilient regional economies are: that is, how much they change (or don’t) over time. That resilience tends to be tested by disturbances like a disaster, an economic crisis, disease, or other external shocks. But according to Yamamoto’s research, economies can be resilient toward initiatives that might theoretically help them too. And so, while boosters for a nuclear power plant tend to say it leads to a deep structural impact on the community, that’s not necessarily true. “We would say the economy was resilient in somewhat negative ways.”
While in the USA local people are generally in favor of or indifferent to nuclear plants once they’re built, in Japanese communities, people tend to remain sharply divided for decades after the plant goes up. These disagreements can lead to disputes that affect everything from establishing green tourism to town planning of a new department store or park. “Things just don’t move as well,” Yamamoto says. “So people end up being more psychologically dependent on nuclear money.”
The trouble is that nuclear plants eventually close. Sometimes power plants cannot keep up with changing regulations and safety measures, and retrofitting them is too expensive. Sometimes surveyors find new geological faults, or equipment gets damaged. Whatever the reason, Yamamoto says, communities facing the prospect of their plant being shuttered remain sharply divided. There can be major economic impacts to a plant’s closure: not just unemployment, but also loss of revenue for municipalities and sometimes the need to cut public expenditures, which people don’t like.
“All these things have social manifestations,” Yamamoto says. “I don’t know if this is a very good way of running a city or town.”