power-free? The country's atomic power industry and many big business clients say “No”, arguing the step would boost electricity bills and pollution and hasten the hollowing out of Japanese manufacturing. But the Fukushima nuclear disaster is galvanizing a coalition of safety-conscious voters and future-minded companies that increasingly believe Japan cannot afford to stick with the status quo if it wants to be globally competitive. “Japan has a span of about a year to assert itself as a clear leader in clean energy, storage batteries, solar cells. They can compete, but they are no longer the only guys in the global game,” said Jesper Koll, director of equities research at JP Morgan in Tokyo. “This is where government policy helps — it can create a domestic market that is captive and rich and creates jobs and puts Japan on the map as a global leader.” To be sure, short-term economic pain is in store if utilities, faced with deep public mistrust after the world's worst radiation accident in 25 years, are unable to restart reactors taken off-line for checks. “We will have real pain for the next one to two years due to the holes opened up by the lack of nuclear energy,” said Martin Schulz, an economist at Fujitsu Research Institute. “But the pain is there because of what was done in the past. The moment you focus on future opportunities, it's not so painful anymore.” Even nuclear power proponents acknowledge that their dream of supplying more than 50 percent of electricity from atomic energy by 2030, up from about 30 percent before Fukushima, has been dimmed by the radiation disaster. More than 70 percent of voters in a Kyodo news agency survey published on Sunday supported Prime Minister Naoto Kan's call last month for a future free of dependence on nuclear power. The vision has sent shivers through the nexus of political, business and bureaucratic interests dubbed Japan's “nuclear village”, which has responded with dire warnings. “If we completely abandon nuclear power generation ... I think most industries would lose competitiveness and go out of Japan,” Masakazu Toyoda, chairman of the quasi-government Institute of Energy Economics, told Reuters. “But 50 percent might be too much. Twenty-five or 30 percent might be digestible.” KAN has promised a blank-slate review of the 2010 national energy plan and vowed to promote renewable sources such as wind and power with a law that would require utilities to buy electricity from a wide range of sources through generous feed-in-tariffs — subsidies paid by end-users. That law, originally conceived as a way to promote renewables as a replacement for fossil fuels rather than nuclear power, looks likely to pass in a week or two. Proponents see the legislation as a welcome step toward moving away from reliance on centralized nuclear power production to a model of dispersed electricity producers linked by a high-tech “Smart Grid”. Japan's massive public debt, already twice the size of its $5 trillion economy, means finding government funds to invest in new technologies and upgrading the power grid will be tough. “The current strategy to rely on nuclear to replace fossil fuels is a non-starter. Nuclear power is much more expensive than people believed given decommissioning costs, long-term uranium costs and (waste disposal) costs,” said Robert Feldman, chief economist at Morgan Stanley MUFG in Tokyo. “But we can't just snap our fingers and have great energy technology ... We have to orient with a 50
