The town of Miyama, Mie Prefecture, will hold a plebiscite Nov. 18 on whether to ask a power company to build a local nuclear power plant, Mayor Tatsuo Shiotani said Tuesday.
The town will be the third municipal government to hold a legally nonbinding vote on a nuclear power plant, following two plebiscites in Niigata Prefecture.
Unlike the votes in Niigata Prefecture, however, the Miyama referendum is chiefly supported by proponents of nuclear power, and no power company has proposed yet that a reactor be built there.
Miyama residents will be officially notified of the vote on Nov. 13 and be asked to cast ballots between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. on Nov. 18. The vote tally is expected to take about an hour.
Miyama, which has a population of about 10,000, is close to the towns of Nanto and Kisei, where strong opposition forced Chubu Electric Power Co. to abandon a plan to build a nuclear power plant in February 2000.
Miyama was one of Chubu Electric's candidate sites in 1963 before it picked Nanto and Kisei.
Since the 1980s, members of the local business community have been pressing Miyama to ask the utility for a nuclear reactor in hopes of reviving the area's economy.
In February this year, about 5,600 Miyama residents, or 64 percent of its eligible voters, filed a petition in support of the plant. Antinuclear power residents filed one against it.
The ordinance on holding the plebiscite, passed by the town assembly in September, stipulates that a majority opinion in the plebiscite would be respected.
Japan's first plebiscite on the construction of a nuclear power plant was conducted in August 1996 in the town of Maki, Niigata Prefecture. Most Maki residents voted against the proposed plant.