Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance

Japan’s traditionally weak system for regulating nuclear safety, created by the long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party and its allies, allowed what came to be known as the 3.11 disaster (after the March 11 earthquake in 2011), when a tsunami spurred the meltdown of one of the nuclear power plants at Fukushima. The disaster happened to occur when the opposition Democratic Party of Japan was in power for the first and only time. (The party has since dissolved.) The Democratic Party government was not able to phase out nuclear power as some of its leaders had wanted. But it pushed through the creation of the independent Nuclear Regulation Authority, which boasted a full-time board, its own technical staff, sanctioning powers against electric utilities, and even the right to draft nuclear safety bills for submission to the Japanese Diet. Later Liberal Democratic cabinets tried to weaken the NRA’s powers so they could more quickly restart closed reactors and extend the lives of existing ones. But the NRA defended its independence, with the support of public opinion and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Koppenborg skillfully traces the politics of the NRA’s creation and survival. It remains one of only two authentically independent regulatory agencies in Japan’s otherwise politicized regulatory system.