Energy Planning:

What's Reasonable?

I was startled to see an article recently about Japan's plans to revise the country's energy policy. I knew that Japan had stated its intent to revise its energy plans. The surprise was not that fact, but rather, the time period proposed. Japan's new Trade Minister, Yukio Edano, stated that they would form a panel under the energy advisory committee to "probe a road Japan will take over the next 100 or 200 years."

One or two hundred years??? I have seen 5-year plans, and 10-year plans, and in certain areas of endeavor, I have seen plans 10- or 20- or even 50-year plans. But 100 or 200 years?

Two-hundred years ago, 1811, I'm not sure everyone thought the United States would exist in 10 years, let alone 200 years. And none of the technology we take for granted today was even remotely near to being developed.

One-hundred years ago, early automobiles were on the road and the Wright brothers had demonstrated flight, but I don't think too many people would have believed that either automobiles or airplanes would become major modes of transportation. And nuclear power? The use of the word nucleus to refer to the center of an atom hadn't even become standard terminology yet.

A little more than 60 years ago, my father tells me he built a TV from an RCA kit, and it was the very first one in his neighborhood. People used to crowd around our kitchen table to watch with fascination whatever limited programming was available on the small, flickering black-and-white screen. Who would have guessed that a TV would come to be considered practically a requirement for modern living, and that most households would have multiple TVs, and that they would have large, color images and hundreds of channels of programming?

It was just 60 years ago that the EBR-I put electricity onto the grid. Look what's happened to that technology in 60 years.

And just think of all the gadgets that we now can't live without and how they have evolved, even in just the last couple of decades: the telephone--and then the cell phone, and then the smart phone; large computers in laboratories--and then the computer on every desk at home and at work, and laptops and tablets in every briefcase; etc.

So, had we made a 200-year plan in 1811 or a 100-year plan in 1911, what would we have assumed for our energy sources and our energy demands in 2011?

I know that a country like Japan can't completely shift its energy patterns in a very short time-frame, and therefore that a 20-year plan, or even a 50-year plan, won't show the "final" outcome that some may wish to see. Nevertheless, it is really not meaningful to present the public and the decision-makers with a plan that spans such long periods of time. Even if such a plan is reviewed and readjusted periodically, it does not contribute any more certainty to have a 200-year plan than it does to have a good 20-year plan.

I would urge Japan to adopt a shorter-term plan that can be adjusted to respond to new developments and new issues. What if some new consumer technology ramps up electricity demand a lot more than we anticipate today? What if rare earth limitations restrict today's plans to build windmills? What if climate change significantly alters wind patterns, or cloud cover, or river flows, or sea level? What if fusion is developed in the next 50 years?

The panel may not be able to show the complete transition they would like to show in a period of a few decades, but whatever they do propose is likely to be more realistic and achievable. It seems to me that it is far better to have a short term plan that is realistic for the period it covers and that is periodically revisited to look ahead to the next few decades and extend as the potential needs and opportunities become clear, rather than presenting the public with a long-term plan that can only be regarded as pure fiction after the initial couple of decades.

While this may seem like a distinction without a difference--after all, in either case, the plans need to be revisited--the difference is that it is dishonest to tell the public that the problem is solved by a plan that extends such a long time and I expect that such dishonesty will eventually cause the public to lose faith in the plan altogether. A short-term plan can have an aspirational goal, but it should not be in terms of specific technologies so much as it should be in terms of broader objectives, such as reduced CO2 emissions. More importantly, the initial plan should acknowledge that it addresses only the first increment of the process of getting there.

I realize it is tempting to be able to show the public that the government has a plan that provides a complete transition. But such a plan would not, in the long run, provide Japan any better prospects than a shorter-term plan with a solid basis.

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The Japanese Government and Transparency:

Another Issue for Nuclear Reactor Regulation

Left: Damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Japan. Right: President Jimmy Carter arriving at Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant after accident.

Just when I thought I'd said about all I could say on aspects of the Japanese government organization and operation, two excellent articles come to my attention. One addresses an issue that I have not directly covered in my previous posts. The second provides more background on an issue I did cover before. I will spend most of this post talking about the first issue, which is the lack of transparency in the way the Japanese government has acted in the past.

An interesting article in the Japan Times in the past week highlights differences in transparency in the US and Japan, using TMI and Fukushima as examples. It looks at both similarities and differences. Journalists covering both events described information coming from the respective government agencies as the events unfolded as "chaotic," "confusing" and "contradictory." Part of the real-time problems in both cases may be the almost inevitable confusion that seems to arise when information is coming in piecemeal and being redistributed the same way. In the case of Japan, however, the problems the journalists observed may have been exacerbated by the fact that it now appears that some information was withheld.

But what the article observes is the real difference between the two incidents is in the ability to reconstruct after the event what happened and what was discussed as the incident unfolded. In the US, even in the midst of the crisis, and I might add, at a time when the technical options were more limited, the NRC continued to follow the requirement to make records of all discussions that occur when a majority of the Commissioners meet. Because some of these meetings took place at odd times and places, the article reports that NRC staff carried tape recorders that they could turn on any time three Commissioners were present. Later, transcripts were made which provided a valuable record of what the NRC did and did not know.

By contrast, the rules in Japan are different. While important decisions must be recorded, until recently, the discussions leading up to those decisions did not necessarily have to be recorded. In particular, transcripts are required for formal meetings but not for impromptu meetings. The legal standing of the group holding the meeting also has allowed many meetings to take place without a record of them being made.

The good news is that a new law went into effect at the beginning of the Japanese fiscal year in April that establishes the same recording requirements for all government agencies, and extends recording requirements to cover the whole decision-making process. The bad news is that this law was not in effect in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima. Therefore, many critical meetings were held following Fukushima for which no records exist, and it may prove impossible to fully figure out what did happen in the interactions between the government and TEPCO. As a result, it will be more difficult to assure that any shortcomings are corrected in the future.

Japan does have an equivalent to the US Freedom of Information Act--the Information Disclosure Law which has been in effect since 2001. Under this law, citizens can request whatever governmental records do exist regarding the accident. However, the record will clearly have major gaps due to the lack of complete records relating to decisions, and some critics cited in the article believe that government officials will take a bureaucratic anti-disclosure stance. The fact that the world's eyes are upon them may make this more difficult. Time will tell.

The second article of interest to me this past week, also in the Japan Times, was about a reformist bureaucrat. Of particular relevance were his views on amakudari, which I addressed in an earlier blog post. The article covers much of what I covered before--that is, the Japanese government is an "up or out" system, so many bureaucrats must leave the government with inadequate pensions and years of productive working life left. The system that has evolved has them outplaced into government-affiliated organizations or private companies that are connected in some way with the ministry where they worked. Therefore, they have a powerful self-interest in protecting and supporting the industries they are supposed to be regulating. The article adds some further details and examples. It also observes that private sector workers may have the same inclination to manipulate systems to their own benefit, but the competition between their firm and other firms helps keep this tendency in check. There are no such "checks and balances" within the government.

At present, there is a bill in the Diet (the Japanese Parliament) that would institute some government reforms. However, the article says that the prospects for the success of this bill are uncertain, and in any event, it does not address the system of amakudari at all.

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