Local public bads and dread risks

National military defense, clean air, and lighthouses provide benefits to large numbers of people and come with relatively diffuse costs. The burden of maintaining these public goods is spread out over much of the population of a region or nation; no single person, political entity, or group of people is fully responsible for covering the maintenance or upkeep of these institutions. Economists would point out that such ideal public goods are non-excludable, in that one ship captain cannot be excluded from using the lighthouse because he failed to donate to its construction. Further, the lighthouse is non-rivalrous, as one ship's use of the lighthouse does not detract from another ship's use. Similarly, failure to pay taxes is unlikely to exclude one from US military protection in the face of an invasion, and failure to donate to a public radio campaign will not stop radio waves from arriving at one's receiver.

However, facilities that bring benefits to many people but have very focused costs stand in sharp contrast to such public goods. Everyone wants a place in which they can dispose of their garbage, but few want disposal facilities near their own homes or their children's schools. For residents in many societies, facilities such as trailer parks, bioweapons laboratories, and waste treatment facilities are seen as unwanted and controversial, if not actually harmful. Local residents may object to these local public bads because of their unwanted aesthetics, property value loss, crime, transience, and potential accompanying health or environmental risks and rally to stall or block their siting (Aldrich and Crook, Reference Aldrich and Crook2008). The benefits from these types of institutions spread out to a larger population – a nuclear reactor complex can provide power to an entire region, for example – with the costs geographically circumscribed around the project. The fact that these facilities are seen as necessary for modern societies makes handling contention over them challenging for authorities around the world (Aldrich, Reference Aldrich2010).

Nuclear power plants serve as paradigms of these public bads as they provide focused costs on populations near the facilities and diffuse benefits to the often-distant residents and businesses consuming the power produced there. Pro-nuclear organizations, such as the Nuclear Energy Institute, point out that with 14,000 cumulative atomic reactor years of operation, there have been only two large-scale accidents (Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011) and one contained accident (Three Mile Island in 1979). Scientists continue to debate the health effects caused by the radioactive contamination from Chernobyl's fallout (Rahu, Reference Rahu2003) and there is no consensus on this point on whether or not the low doses of radioactive exposure will increase cancer rates among Fukushima residents. Hence the accompanying negative externalities of nuclear power plants may less tangible (such as measurable health impacts) and more psychic.Footnote ⁶

Extensive surveys have shown that residents in Japan (and, in fact, around the world) envision nuclear-related problems with the highest levels of dread. Dread risks are low probability, high consequence events such as large-scale terrorist attacks and nuclear meltdowns. Nuclear waste, nuclear war, and nuclear accident stand out as the highest dread fears for people in the United States and Japan. The authors of one such survey suggested that ‘it is not nuclear power itself but rather its potential malfunctions that give rise to the fear’ (Hinman et al., Reference Hinman, Eugene, Kleinhesselink and Lowinger1993: 455). Kai Erikson (Reference Erikson1991: 38) pointed out that ‘[w]hat truly grips us is the spectacle of suddenly vanished competence, of men utterly routed by technology, of fail-safe systems inexorably failing’. Accurate or not, some have seen the risks of nuclear power ‘as involuntary, delayed, unknown, uncontrollable, unfamiliar, potentially catastrophic, dreaded, and severe (certainly fatal)’ (Slovic et al., Reference Slovic, Fischhoff, Lichtenstein and Monroe1981: 500). While scientists and technocrats may envision these concerns as exaggerated and unreal, they nonetheless remain real for a large percentage of the population. The costs of living near a nuclear facility have become all too clear to residents who may now face active discrimination and new (mental) health challenges.

While we lack systematic data on experiences of discrimination against Fukushima survivors due to fears of the ‘spread’ of radioactive contamination, a great deal of earlier research on Japan showed that ‘different’ members of Japanese society regularly faced ijime [discrimination or bullying] in their classrooms and workplaces (De Vos, Reference De Vos1992; Ruiz and Tanaka, Reference Ruiz and Tanaka2001). Japanese students studying abroad regularly reported bullying upon their return to Japan, with bullies focusing on their supposed ‘difference’ after their education out of Japan. Following the 3/11 event, a number of anecdotes indicate that the problem of radiation-based discrimination is a real one. Journalists confirmed that a woman called off her engagement after her potential in-laws worried out loud about the possibility of having a healthy child, and a number of child evacuees told of being bullied and singled out because of their supposed contamination (Wallace, Reference Wallace2011). Some gasoline stations have reportedly refused to service cars with Fukushima license plates, and a courier company had to alter its delivery strategies when some customers would not accept trucks coming from the area. One teacher in Fukushima has invested many classroom hours to explaining radioactivity to his elementary students, explaining ‘I want them to become adults who can explain how they've been dealing with the situation when they may face discrimination, and not let any stigma hinder them’ (Japan Times, 24 March 2012). The children of a nuclear plant worker from Fukushima reported that other children refused to allow them to play nearby because their homes were near the crippled reactors (Japan Times, 12 June 2012). The stigma of being a survivor from Fukushima who has been exposed to radiation is one negative externality, and the anxiety comes as another.Footnote ⁷

Rather than radiation sickness or cancer, the largest tangible health effects on Tohoku residents have come from anxiety. One psychiatric researcher argued that after a nuclear accident like Fukushima ‘[t]he central public health issue often becomes health-related anxiety, concerns about the future, about the future health of the children’ (quoted in Harris, Reference Harris2012). Data collected by medical professionals in Fukushima have confirmed this trend. Medical students at Fukushima Medical University have been working with public health nurses to look at parenting concerns in Fukushima. A comparison of 82 cases in 2010 (before the event) and 88 in 2011 (after the disaster) showed a large shift in concerns, with roughly one-third of the parents’ 2011 concerns focused upon radiation. None of the complaints the previous year reflected this concern (direct communication, Fukushima Medical University personnel, April 2012). In addition, one-quarter of the patients hospitalized with mental illnesses following the 3/11 disaster were there due to anxiety about and fear of radiation, and one-third of all outpatient visits to the 27 Fukushima hospitals were directly related to the accident (Mainichi Shinbun, 26 March 2012).

These measurably deeper anxieties have altered the ways in which parents are raising their children in the Tohoku region. Many parents have restricted children's access to the outdoors so that kindergartens' playgrounds, school jungle gyms, and public parks have sat unused for the past year (Fuller, Reference Fuller2012). Even after topsoil from these public play spaces has been scraped off and replaced with brand new soil, many parents have been reluctant to let their children play outside (Asahi Shinbun, 22 December 2011). Concerned about exposure to radiation, parents and schools now have children in the area carry radiation monitors with them and many educational institutions have installed outdoor radiation monitoring machines in highly public areas. The accident has already motivated the creation of new play spaces. For example, the Fukushima City government built a new facility known as ComCom which provides a number of varied, indoor play spaces, workshops, and other activities for children who may not be allowed outside.Footnote ⁸

To drive home how dread risks about nuclear power drives behavior, as the Three Mile Island emergency developed in the United States in the 1970s, Pennsylvania's governor suggested that some 3,500 local residents – mostly pregnant women and children – depart from their homes to ensure their safety. Instead, some 200,000 people living in the area evacuated, and some drove more than 100 miles in their flight to safety (Kai, Reference Kai1991: 35). These ‘shadow evacuations’ – when people deemed to be not at risk flee the area and potentially disrupt the planned evacuationFootnote ⁹ – are not unique to the United States. In Japan, for example, as evidence of the growing problems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant became public, the Ministry of Justice calculated that more than half a million foreigners (defined officially as non-resident, non-Japanese individuals) fled from Japan along with 10,000 dependents of U. military personnel stationed there (Stars and Stripes, 31 May 2011). A year after the disaster, the population of foreigners in Tokyo remains 12,000 short of pre 3/11 levels (Mainichi, 9 June 2012). Foreigners are not the only demographic group that has departed the area (Osnos, Reference Osnos2011). Widely reported anecdotes showed that many Japanese women left Fukushima prefecture with their children, leaving behind husbands holding local jobs, while other locals fled the Tohoku region for safety in other parts of Japan or abroad (Japan Times, 14 June 2011). Given the realities of dread risks about nuclear power and the rising anxiety about radioactive contamination, to what degree has distance to the plant driven concerns and opposition?

Distance decay function and host communities’ benefits

Social scientists have long argued that the folk wisdom of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is grounded in empirical reality. Psychiatrists have understood since the late nineteenth century that the use of mental health services depended on their distance to the end-user (Jarvis, Reference Jarvis1850) and geographers sought to model this kind of relationship using computers more than 40 years ago (Tobler, Reference Tobler1970). Called the ‘distance decay function’ this theory envisions ‘a decrease in intensity of opposition the further the facility is located away from a residence’ (Wynne-Edwards, Reference Wynne-Edwards2003: 11).Footnote ¹⁰ People living further from a controversial facility may not see it, encounter any aesthetic externalities such as smells or sounds, or come into contact with its health or environmental hazards. In contrast, residents next door to homeless shelters, garbage dumps, or nuclear power facilities may have higher levels of anxiety due to their regular contact with the institutions (Takahashi, Reference Takahashi1998). Based on this approach, it would make sense to believe that host communities in Japan which have nuclear power facilities in their backyards would have become strongly anti-nuclear following the 3/11 events, while towns, villages, and cities further away would demonstrate less opposition. This, however, was not the case.

Interviews with and available data on host communities and their neighbors show that host communities remained supportive of nuclear power after the accident while nearby neighboring communities grew more opposed. The town of Tsuruga in Fukui prefecture, for example, hosts five reactors which place the 70,000 residents within a six mile radius of the plant. Tsuruga's mayor Kazuhara Kawase told a reporter after the 3/11 accident that ‘Nuclear power is our hometown industry, so of course we fully support it. It makes no sense to give up on it overnight. We expect nuclear power to play a big role in Japan's energy supply for at least another 50 to 100 years.’ But the mayor of Nagahama, located 30 miles away, strongly opposed restarting the nuclear plants. As one journalist summarized the reasons for these stark differences, ‘communities slightly farther away from the reactors, which get almost none of the subsidies, and which have no voice in plant operations or evacuation plans’ are far less supportive than direct host communities (Dawson, Reference Dawson2011: A11).

Direct host communities envision their relationships with nuclear power plants primarily in economic and financial terms. The city of Ohi in Fukui prefecture hosts nuclear plants run by Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO) directly in its backyard, with the elementary school less than a half mile from the facility, the command center six feet above sea level, and a single route off the peninsula bottlenecked by a single, two line bridge (Dawson, Reference Dawson2012). Despite any increased anxieties following 3/11, at a town council meeting in Ohi city held on 14 May 2012 one of the pro-nuclear speakers argued that ‘without electricity [from the plant] our livelihoods cannot continue, so I believe it is the most important thing to move towards restarting the plant’ [denki ga nakute wa seikatsu dekinai kai to itte mo saikadou wo susumete iku koto ga ichiban daiji da to omoi] (NHK, 14 May 2012). Following a number of similar statements from members, the council voted 11–1 to restart units 3 and 4, citing potential damage to the local economy and a potential rise in unemployment from the prolonged halt of the reactors. Kinya Shintani, chairman of Ohi town assembly, said the local economy had been affected by the reactor shutdowns. ‘Recognizing the necessity of nuclear power and taking into consideration residents’ opinions as well as the impact on consumers’ livelihoods and the economy, we decided to agree to a restart’ he said in an official statement (Seig and Kubota, 2012). Restarting Ohi's reactors 3 and 4 has been a core plan of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda who has argued that he seeks to protect the livelihoods of Japan's citizens [kokumin no seikatsu wo mamoru tame ni. . .] (Voice of America, 8 June 2012).

Toshitsuna Watanabe, the mayor of the town of Ōkuma in Fukushima prefecture (home to the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors), described in an interview with journalists the reasons that his community accepted the potential hazards of hosting a nuclear power complex, and they were remarkably similar. Pointing out that for much of the postwar period the local industries and livelihoods in Ōkuma had revolved around agriculture, he and the other residents envisioned nuclear power as allowing fathers to stay in the area during the winter, as opposed to traveling to urban areas for jobs. ‘If nuclear power plants come, we don't have to leave home during the winter [to find employment elsewhere]. We could get better jobs with steady incomes, instead of relying on volatile agriculture. We can receive an education in nice school buildings. Grants will make the town rich’ (quoted in Katatae, Reference Katatae2012).

In cities like Rokkasho, for example, which hosts some 12,000 people along with an extensive reprocessing, storage, and disposal complex for nuclear fuel run by Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited (JNFL), a representative of the mayor's office argued that for most local residents (and for him), their beliefs about the safety of nuclear power had not been altered by the Fukushima accident. He pointed out that 25 years ago, roughly three-quarters of the population was involved in fishing and farming, and this has flipped to one-quarter thanks to the jobs provided by the nuclear fuel reprocessing and storage facilities built in the town. Beyond the changes in sectoral employment, Rokkasho has benefited from tremendous amounts of grants provided by the Three Power Source Development Laws, and ending such subsidies would be ‘hard on the village’ (interviews with Rokkasho City Hall personnel, 28 March 2012). These side payments from the central government have been used to promote local businesses and manufacturing in an area with no universities, no large-scale highways, and few other options for industrial manufacturing bases.

Omaezaki City in Shizuoka Prefecture hosts the Hamaoka nuclear plant complex which was shut down by its operator, Chubu Electric Power Company in May 2011 at the request of then Prime Minister Naoto Kan following the disaster. Officials in Omaezaki's city hall acknowledged the depth to which their local economy depends both on the employment and taxes from the plant along with the grants and subsidies from the central government. As one of them told me in an interview, ‘[i]f we said that weren't concerned about losing the funds from the Three Power Source Development Laws, we'd be lying’ (29 March 2012). While residents in Omaezaki City have remained supportive of the plant and see it as part of their economy, the municipal council of the nearby Makinohara City has passed a resolution indicating their desire to have the plant shut down permanently. Makinohara City, with roughly 51,000 residents and sitting 10 km from the plants, has a strong manufacturing base with a large Suzuki Motor Corporation plant in the city, and observers believe that its residents have few economic attachments to the Hamaoka complex. One estimate put Makinohara's nuclear-plant related revenues at 1% of its overall income in contrast with 40% of Omaezaki city's revenues (Goto, Reference Goto2011). After the accident, the Suzuki company hinted it might move its factory out of the city because of concerns about seismic instability, but many saw the move as a reaction to potential accidents at Hamaoka itself. Further, Makinohara and several others cities may be included in a new, expanded emergency planning zone but have received little or no grants because of the nuclear power plant (interviews with Chubu EPCO personnel 29 March 2012). Now forced to confront the potential of working with citizens to practice a mandated evacuation plan, Makinohara, Omaezaki, Yaizu, and Fukuroi – all nearby cities – have been unified in their opposition to nuclear power restarts.

The mayor of Minamisoma in Fukushima Prefecture – which borders the Fukushima exclusion zone – explained his opposition to nuclear power by saying that ‘it has become clear that the safety of residents and the environment is not guaranteed’. Similarly, the mayor of Iitate in Fukushima Prefecture (which, as mentioned, sits well outside the evacuation zone but had to be emptied of its population due to the drifting plume of radiation), said, ‘If Japan declares it will seek economic growth through nuclear power stations, the international community will turn its back on us.’ Nevertheless, Ōkuma's mayor Toshitsuna Watanabe, head of the village which hosts the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactor complex, remained supportive of Japan's overall nuclear policy despite the disruption of his own village and radioactive contamination. ‘It's difficult to secure substitute energy sources if all the nuclear power stations in Japan are stopped’, he said, advocating for stronger safety measures and standards, but not for a shutdown of the plants. In a meeting on 4 April 2011, the mayor of Futaba along with officials representing seven local governments which directly host nuclear power plants petitioned the prime minister to maintain the government's drive to build more nuclear power plants (Fukushima Shinbun, 5 April 2011). Similarly, the mayor of the Onagawa, host to the Onagawa nuclear plant, pushed for restarting nuclear power plants while simultaneously investing in alternative technologies (Mainichi Shinbun, 8 March 2012).

Direct host community mayors have been conspicuously absent from various anti-nuclear groups formed by other local government representatives from across Japan. A number of local government officials and former mayors have joined together to form an organization seeking a nuclear-free society; the 64 members include the now-famous mayor of Minamisoma, Katsunobu Sakurai, whose public appeal for assistance after the tsunami received a great deal of attention. The group sought to push the use of non-nuclear, renewable energy sources, assist in planning for the evacuation of children in the case of a nuclear accident, and ensure safe food chains for consumers (Kyodo News, 7 April 2012). Tokai Village's mayor,Tatsuya Murakami, participated as the only nuclear power host community official (Sumikawa, Reference Sumikawa2012); none of the other nuclear plant host community officials joined him.

While local communities may envision job creation and higher per capita income as the positive side effects of nuclear power plant hosting, careful econometric analyses of these benefits have shown them to be more varied than typically imagined. Ando (Reference Ando2012) divides locations into three categories: those with nuclear power plant facilities, those with part of a site, and neighboring cities/towns. His analysis finds strong differences in the economic benefits among these communities. For example, the city of Oshika ‘did not gain large fiscal benefits through N[uclear] P[ower[F[acility]-related property tax revenue while it received some other fiscal benefits and probably employment opportunities’ (ibid. 12). Further, unlike many direct host communities, the city received little tax revenue and actually found its per capita income decreasing following the siting of a nuclear power plant nearby (Ando, Reference Ando2012: 31). This outcome strongly contrasted with the economic outcomes of cities such as Rokkasho, which experienced high income growth due to the plant (ibid. 34) and was the site of strong anti-facility opposition for a number of years (interviews with JNFL employees, 28 March 2012). In the language of economics, there were heterogeneous effects on per-capita taxed income levels in host communities, meaning that not all host communities benefited equally from their facilities. Other studies have shown that despite the benefits provided by the central government's subsidies and the property taxes from the plants themselves, many host communities have faced deteriorating finances (Onitsuka, Reference Onitsuka2011).

Further, 3/11 showed that communities neighboring nuclear power plants are not free from the accompanying (and tangible) negative externalities. The 7,000 residents of the town of Iitate in Fukushima prefecture, for example, sit well outside the 30 km radius exclusion zone drawn around the reactors of Fukushima Dai-ichi. In fact, the town sits closer to 45 kilometers away, but wind carried the plume of radiation released by the reactors directly into the town, resulting in roughly 2,400 square kilometers of contaminated soil due to exposure to more than 5 milliseverts of radiation (The Economist, 8 October 2011). By August of 2011, all but 100 of the residents had left the village; as of October 2012 the government stated its intention to lift the mandatory evacuation order for the area by spring 2014, but recognized it might be delayed if decontamination was not completed (Kyodo News, 20 October 2012).

Normal accidents or sea-change

This article has illuminated the ways in which the local-level political economy of nuclear power has deeply influenced the variation in crisis management responses from nuclear power host communities. Cities, towns, and villages which directly host such facilities have remained supportive of nuclear power while towns further away from the reactors have been uniformly anti-nuclear. This article has argued that the direct and indirect benefits from the nuclear industry, including large property tax revenue, jobs, and extensive subsidies from the central government, have been focused on direct host communities.Footnote ¹¹ In these towns, villages, and cities the local government and local residents receive compensation for the negative externalities generated by the plants. While the actual, per capita income level benefits may be mixed, town leaders and mayors can easily point to millions of dollars in subsidies, new projects, and taxes generated by the plants annually. In contrast, neighboring communities have the same tangible and intangible costs from hosting the plant, as exemplified by the radioactive contamination in the city of Iitate, but have only a small fraction of the financial benefits (if any).

Charles Perrow (Reference Perrow1984) argued long ago that high risk systems with interactive complexity and tight coupling, such as nuclear power plants and chemical manufacturing facilities, are inherently vulnerable to ‘normal accidents’. He postulated that such facilities will break down and fail despite beliefs about their safety by engineers and decision makers; some have called these beliefs the ‘safety myth’ about nuclear plants. By labeling errors as normal, Perrow implied that they would be inevitable and part of standard outcomes, despite the best attempts to provide backup systems and mitigation against such failures. For leaders in direct nuclear power plant communities, such as Ōkuma in Fukshima prefecture and Ohi in Fukui prefecture, the 3/11 disaster has been seen as a ‘normal accident’, explainable by poor engineering choices. They continue to support nuclear power and believe that ending nuclear power would deeply disrupt their local economy and ability to provide for their citizens.

In contrast, cities further away and Japanese civil society as a whole have envisioned the Fukushima meltdowns as triggering a sea-change in their relationship to nuclear power due to the clarity of its potential negative externalities. Rather than being willing to dismiss the accident as a ‘black swan’ event, which is unlikely to be repeated in other locations, these localities and citizens have a new, strongly negative vision of nuclear power. For these individuals, the accident has brought about a sea-change in their perspective on atomic energy. Anxiety about radiation leaks and a desire to alter the ways in which citizens participate in decision making has driven a number of new forms of activism and protest. Many have moved beyond the passivity which has characterized much of Japan's civil society for the past several decades to new types of mobilization. Residents in Tohoku have formed new nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, such as the Fukushima Network for Saving Children from RadiationFootnote ¹² and the Citizens’ Radioactivity Measuring Station,Footnote ¹³ to work collectively to further their causes. Many citizens have purchased their own radiation detectors, dosimeters, and Geiger counters and then uploaded their radiation measurements to open source, citizen science frameworks, such as SafeCast.Footnote ¹⁴ These forms of civil society mobilization sit alongside large-scale demonstrations, such as the 60,000 who gathered to protest nuclear power in the fall (Economist, 24 September 2011), petitions, citizens referenda (jumin tōhyō), and new mass lawsuits against the central government and TEPCO (see Aldrich, forthcoming).

Because utilities have granted only direct host communities veto power over the siting process and over restart decisions, they remain politically more powerful than their neighbors. These direct host communities have become more vocal in their demands for stronger regulation, more transparency, and greater accountability; their crisis management responses involved only incremental changes in existing policy. Nevertheless, even more distant communities and the broader civil sphere have made their voices clear through informal and formal channels; these groups have seen broader lessons from the event and sought more radical policy shifts from their representatives. A government analysis of more than 7,000 comments submitted to the government on the topic showed that 80% favored immediate abolition of nuclear plants, with only 4% supporting to permitting its continued use (Mainichi Shinbun, 23 August 2012). As a result of this broader pressure from society, the Japanese government has already backed away from pre-disaster plans to increase the percentage of domestically generated power through nuclear plants and has vacillated between a complete phase-out by 2040 and keeping nuclear energy as part of the overall energy mix. Before the Fukushima accident and the accompanying sea-change in public opinion, it would have been difficult to imagine a Japanese government even discussing the possibility of ending the use of atomic energy.

While past research has argued that forms of response to nuclear power has been determined by national level political structures (Kitschelt, Reference Kitschelt1986), this article has instead pointed to the very subregional political economy as influencing reactions to the 3/11 accident. Strong economic incentives have pulled local leaders to maintain their allegiance to the nuclear power regime, despite the tragedies of the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. Nearby communities, now much more cognizant of the potential risks, and aware of their lack of substantive side payments, have moved against the industry. In this way, the ‘blind spot’ in Japanese environmental activism – the fact that it did not develop into a preventive movement despite successes against pollution – may now start to be erased (Avenell, Reference Avenell2012). Japan's nuclear future depends on the goodwill not of broader civil society – which remains largely opposed but regularly marginalized from the decision-making process over nuclear energy – but instead on local government officials, mayors, and governors. Whether or not Japan's future will involve a handful of active, operating plants or instead decades of decommissioning will rest on the decisions made at the local, not national, level.

About the author

Daniel P. Aldrich is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University (on leave for academic year 2012–2013 as a Fulbright research professor at Tokyo University) who was an AAAS fellow at USAID, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Tokyo's Law Faculty in Japan and an Advanced Research Fellow at Harvard University's Program on US–Japan Relations. He has published 21 peer-reviewed articles along with multiple book chapters, articles, book reviews, and op-eds for general audiences in four main areas: disaster recovery, controversial facility siting, fieldwork practices, and sex differences in political behavior. His book Site Fights: Divisive Facilities and Civil Society in Japan and the West was published by Cornell University Press in 2008 and his second book Building Resilience: Social Capital in Disaster Recovery in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press.