Japan has to face the true trade-offs as the nation gropes to choose a future energy mix in the wake of last year's Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, an American scholar said at a recent seminar in Tokyo.
In this densely populated country, the cost of NIMBY (not in my backyard) has become an increasingly major component of electricity prices as it becomes more and more difficult and expensive to site and build new power plants. That will be an even more serious issue if the nation is to cut back on nuclear power and rely more on renewable sources like solar and wind, which will require far greater land area to match the capacity of nuclear reactors, said Paul Scalise, a postgraduate fellow at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Social Science.
Scalise was speaking at a seminar organized by the Keizai Koho Center on Aug. 3 to discuss the prospect of electricity and energy policy reforms, along with Kenji Yamaji, director general of the Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth and a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo.