The Atomic Projects The Guide to Nuclear Japan Fernanda Gómez|Carla Rojas|Chiara Sanguin|Vivian Siqueiros Abstract
The main goal of this research is to present the situation of nuclear energy in Japan, within its urban, technological, political and social context. Japan is a poor fossil fuel country. This is the main reason for which the government has put a great emphasis on the development of the nuclear energy. Nevertheless, the nuclear energy involves certain limitations. In the urban field, it faces severe challenges given the seismic activity the region faces and how japanese villages work outside the context of the city. In the technological field, the several accidents occurred in Japan and abroad have put in the open the myth of the security. So, regulations and the safety measures need to be fortified. In the political context, given the centralized nature of it’s politics, Japan’s government faces almost to no resistance to all it’s political desicions, but when it comes to nuclear energy and the construction of new nuclear facilities, the government has had to change a lot of their plans given to public outrage in the past few years. Therefore, in the social field, the citizens are increasingly demanding more participation in the decision making process of the nuclear energy policies, and the governments recognize that to continue developing the nuclear industry, it is required to regain the public confidence, to open the participation channels, and to make more transparency in the information.
The research will focus itself into two different power plants, built in between the 60’s and 70’s on different areas in Japan. We chose this two plants because they each show the different approaches the government took towards developing “atomic urbanism” and how some of them succeeded more than the others. At the end of each chapter we will reflect on the lessons learned from each power plant and how this may or may not have influenced the way Japan carried on with ts atomic urbanism. The research has the name guide, in hopes that in the future more people can contribute more chapters that go into different power plants in Japan, so perhaps in the future the guide will be the result of a collective effort to map and research the past and present of nuclear Japan, and perhaps get a hint of what the future will be.