Japan Press Weekly

Tweet

2011 August 31 - September 6 [NUCLEAR CRISIS]

Mysterious large donations to municipalities hosting plants

Structure of reliance on NPP money (Part1)


Wakasa Bay in Fukui Prefecture, a well-known location for the finest bathing beaches on the Japan Sea, has a concentration of 15 nuclear power reactors within a 25-kilometer radius. Local politics in this region has been distorted by a tremendous amount of money poured in to building these reactors.

Oi Town, one of the municipalities facing the bay, has Kansai Electric Power Co. (KEPCO)’s Oi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). The town, with a population of around 9,000, has long received a vast amount of contributions.

The town authority has kept secret from where it received the money, but no one denies that the donations came from KEPCO to ease the concerns of local residents about the NPP.

It all started with the money totaling 500 million yen being sent to the coastal town in 1986, seemingly from KEPCO. The local authority deposited the money in a bank, setting up a fund to distribute its interest to all of the town’s 63 districts. These districts have been provided with up to 1.8 million yen each year, which they can use at its disposal. They have spent the money on such local activities as festivals and cleaning up. As these are district-based activities, every resident including those against NPPs feels compelled to take part in them.

Japanese Communist Party Oi Town assembly member Saruhashi Takumi said with anger, “The money was poured into our town economies to alleviate the anxiety of local people about the construction of Oi NPP’s No. 3 and No.4 reactors, which began in 1987. They tried to buy over the whole residents in the town’s all districts.”

Meanwhile, Mihama Town, which hosts the Mihama NPP, received 1.23 billion yen in its general account budget for fiscal year 2006 and 1.02 billion yen for fiscal year 2007 from an unknown donor.

The No. 3 reactor at the Mihama NPP caused a steam leak accident in August 2004, killing and injuring a total of 11 people. Nevertheless, the Fukui governor in May 2006 accepted the restart of the reactor, and its operation began again in February 2007.
(To be continued)