The reactors never really went away. They sat idle across the Japanese archipelago for years, concrete monuments to a catastrophe that had reshaped the national psyche. But silence, it turns out, is not the same as closure. And nearly fifteen years after the ocean swallowed the eastern coast and irradiated an entire prefecture, Japan is arguing about nuclear power again, loudly, and this time the argument has teeth.
Energy has become the defining fault line of the country’s upcoming lower house election, scheduled for February 8. The timing is awkward, and not only because memories of Fukushima remain raw. Fresh data fraud allegations at Chubu Electric Power’s Hamaoka plant in Shizuoka Prefecture have reignited public anxiety about whether nuclear regulators can be trusted at all, and whether the reactors now being lined up for restart are as safe as their operators claim.
The Price of Principle
To understand how Japan arrived at this crossroads, it helps to remember what principle cost. After the March 2011 disaster at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima No. 1 plant, the national consensus tilted sharply against nuclear energy. Reactor after reactor was taken offline. The 2012 lower house election became a referendum of sorts, with parties across the spectrum competing to sound the most alarmed. Some demanded immediate shutdown. Others promised a nuclear-free Japan by the 2030s. The direction of travel felt settled.
Then the electricity bills arrived.
With domestic nuclear capacity suspended, Japan turned to imported fossil fuels to keep the lights on. Costs climbed. Then Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and energy markets convulsed across the globe. Japan, already paying a premium for liquefied natural gas, felt the pressure acutely. The idealism of the post-Fukushima moment began to collide with the arithmetic of household budgets and industrial competitiveness.
Artificial intelligence added another layer of urgency. The anticipated explosion in data centre electricity demand has forced governments worldwide to confront the gap between clean energy ambitions and raw generation capacity. Japan was no exception. By February 2025, the government had formalised its pivot, enshrining a policy of maximising nuclear utilisation in its revised basic energy framework.
Reactors Returning
The political shift has translated into physical action. Under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who took office last October, the process of obtaining local community consent for reactor restarts has accelerated noticeably.
In January of this year, the No. 6 reactor at Tepco’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata Prefecture was brought back online after nearly fourteen years of dormancy, though it was subsequently halted again due to a separate technical issue. Hokkaido Electric Power’s Tomari plant is expected to follow next year, with its No. 3 reactor cleared for return to service.
The direction of the restarts maps closely onto the electoral positions now being staked out.
A Spectrum of Positions
The ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party, are both backing reactor restarts for units that have cleared the post-Fukushima safety standards. The Democratic Party for the People joins them in supporting restarts, framing the issue around decarbonisation targets and supply security rather than ideological preference. Team Mirai has set itself the most ambitious numerical target, aiming to raise nuclear power’s share of the energy mix from 9.4 percent in fiscal 2024 to 20 percent by the end of the decade.
The most significant repositioning, however, belongs to the newly formed Centrist Reform Alliance, a merger of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and Komeito, until recently the LDP’s coalition partner. The CDP had previously committed to eliminating nuclear power as swiftly as possible. The CRA’s new joint platform is softer, tolerating restarts where local consent exists while gesturing toward an eventual post-nuclear future. Whether that represents pragmatic evolution or quiet capitulation depends heavily on who is doing the judging.
Further left, the positions harden. The Japanese Communist Party opposes nuclear power outright. The Social Democratic Party pairs its opposition with an explicit push toward renewables. Reiwa Shinsengumi is calling for an immediate halt to all nuclear generation, a position that admits no ambiguity whatsoever.
The Fraud That Complicated Everything
Into this already charged debate landed the Hamaoka revelations. Data irregularities at Chubu Electric’s plant, disclosed earlier this year, suggest the company may have deliberately understated seismic risk estimates during regulatory review. Japan sits atop some of the most geologically volatile terrain on earth. The suspicion that a utility might have gamed safety data to push a restart through screening does not merely raise questions about one plant. It raises questions about the entire regulatory architecture the post-Fukushima era was supposed to have repaired.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority, established in the disaster’s aftermath precisely to restore public confidence, now finds its credibility under renewed scrutiny. For voters already uncertain about how much trust to place in operators and overseers alike, the Hamaoka affair arrives at the worst possible moment.
What the Ballot Will Decide
Japan’s February election will not resolve the nuclear question permanently. No single vote ever does. But it will signal something real about the public’s appetite for risk, its tolerance for rising energy costs, and its judgment about whether the institutions meant to keep reactors safe have earned back the trust they lost in 2011.
Fifteen years is a long time. Long enough for electricity bills to change minds, for geopolitical shocks to reorder priorities, for the clean certainties of crisis to weather into complicated trade-offs. The turbines are still spinning in the national debate. The question now is which direction the wind is blowing.
