Prime Minister Naoto Kan's decision to ask Chubu Electric Power Co. to shut the Hamaoka nuclear power plant in Shizuoka Prefecture met with mixed reactions. The residents of nearby Omaezaki are concerned since the facility employs about 2,800 people, but Chubu's subsequent announcement that it would agree to Kan's request until after it erected a taller seawall to protect against potential tsunami has given the prime minister a slight spike in his approval ratings, which was the obvious intent.
The opposition is already chipping away. Last week on the TV Asahi talk show "Sunday Front Line," Liberal Democratic Party point man Shigeru Ishiba took issue with Kan's selectivity. If nuclear power is so dangerous, Ishiba pointed out, why did he ask that only Hamaoka be shut down?
It was a transparently cynical argument: The LDP is the architect of Japan's nuclear policy and doesn't want any plants to be turned off. Without addressing Hamaoka's specific dangers — that it is close to Tokyo and sits on an active fault which experts say has an 87 percent chance of delivering a massive earthquake in the next 30 years — Ishiba implied that Kan's Democratic Party of Japan is following its own impulses by exploiting people's unease about nuclear power without "proper scientific explanation."