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Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)
00:42:56
An interview with Florentine Koppenborg
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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi, my name is Nathan Hobson and I'm a host for New Books in Japanese Studies, a member of the New Books Network. Today I'll be talking with Dr. Florentine Koppenberg about her book Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance. The book, which is out from Cornell University Press in 2023, begins with the understated observation that the Triple disaster of March 2011 exposed severe deficiencies in Japan's nuclear safety governance. This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and of how they created a new system with a strong, independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down even as the political tides have changed, and also of what this has meant for energy policy in Japan in the past dozen years or so. Copenborg's history of nuclear power regulation in Japan also seriously considers the implications of this dramatic break for regimes in other countries. This is a case study that provides a complex and thought provoking contribution to considerations of the role of nuclear power and independent regulation in global efforts to decarbonize our energy supply. Okay, Dr. Koppenborg, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. So we're going to be talking about your book Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance. So I wanted to ask you first how it is that you became interested in this specific topic. Obviously, the nuclear disaster was an event that sort of caught all of our attention. But what is it that got you interested in specifically the safety governance side of that question?
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First of all, thank you so much for having me and I'm happy to give you two reasons. One is a personal one and the other one is a research related one. The personal reason being that. Well, I was born in 1986, shortly after the, shortly before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And so before I was even one year old, I had this experience of basically my mother keeping me inside for a few weeks just to be safe and struggling to network with other mothers to find out as much as possible about the risks involved and also trying to just find baby food produced before the accident and all of these things. So one of my first experiences was actually this uneasiness that people and especially mothers felt as there was no reliable information about radiation and the risks of nuclear power. So yeah, I experienced the risks related to nuclear power firsthand when I started my PhD and this is now the research related reason. I initially had no plan to write it about nuclear safety. Rather I was interested in climate politics and policy in Japan. So in 2015, you know, the year where the Paris climate negotiations were scheduled, it came time for Japan to submit its own national climate mitigation strategy to the Paris negotiations. And at that time, nuclear power issues really came to the fore. So basically the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry at the time refused to set climate mitigation goals for Japan until the Japanese government adopts a concrete plan for the future of nuclear power. It sort of held climate policy hostage to push for a decision on nuclear power. And to me that really highlighted the relevance of nuclear power. And also I had no time to waste on my three year PhD scholarship. I just couldn't wait. So I turned to nuclear power. Well, many scholars were already writing about the policy aspect. And when I started looking into it, I found the safety regulation and the nuclear power politics aspect fascinating. And that's why I decided to basically make that my research topic.
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That's really interesting. I grew up in Pennsylvania, the site of what's sometimes considered the world's first nuclear disaster, Three Mile Island. And I remember my parents having similar discussions about what does this mean for bringing a child into the world? And so on and so forth. And you also made me feel old because I was old enough, I'm old enough to remember Chernobyl, but I also remember the enormous fear and anxiety that that caused even in the US and we were much further separated from that, of course. So all those personal reasons make a lot of sense to me as well, and of course, the connection to Japan as well. So this is, you know, it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is this obviously has a personal as well as a research component for me, I think, you know, as somebody who lived further north but in Tohoku for a long time, and I have lots of family and friends there, it was very personal as well as part of that research interest. It's fascinating just that we sort of share a little bit of that history. So I want to jump into the book and talk about the sort of overall scope of the book, as you put it in your introduction. You're trying to quote, explain the the puzzling existence of an independent nuclear safety regulator, which is set up after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. And I think the most puzzling aspect of it is, as you put it, that it does not that it hasn't backslid on stringent safety measures. And again, I'm using your words here, and that's even after the political environment has changed, after the regime that put in place that nuclear safety regulation system has been replaced by a sort of return to power of the political and the economic interests that had, you know, built up Japan's nuclear power regime and enabled, to some extent at least, the disaster itself. And so even more than that, you're not just looking at this as a Japan problem, but thinking about nuclear regulation overall. And so I want to think about sort of historically, you know, how we get to that place of 2011. So I want to start with laying the groundwork of what's called the nuclear village, right? That's this term that gets thrown around the path dependency, the regulatory capture in the nuclear power industry in the half century or so before 2011 and the manufactured consent of the public via this very aggressive promotion of the myth of safety. So I want to ask you to unpack the following thing that you write in the book, which is, quote, in Japan's nuclear energy policy domain, pro nuclear actors successfully limited public participation, shaped public opinion and devised ways around local protest in order to develop Japan's nuclear power program. That was the case at least until 3:11. So let's talk about first the part that comes before that.
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Yes, I'd be happy to do that. So it all has to do with nuclear power promotion, which I also call strategic information management. So I would like to begin with that and Then afterwards talk about the so called dengan sample, which is the three laws for the promotion of infrastructure projects, as well as this strategy to work around local protests by expanding existing sites. So nuclear power promotion was a really important instrument, right? Also after World War II, right. So after the US started promoting its Atoms for Peace program and Japan had set its mind to developing a civilian nuclear power program, it basically promoted the benefits of nuclear power to garner support for civilian nuclear power development. Because of course public opinion was skeptical after the traumatic experience of two nuclear bombings. So nuclear power promotion had been in place already and has nuclear accidents. So outside of Japan, like the Three Mile island accident you mentioned in the US but also then Chernobyl in what is now the Ukraine, challenged this positive narrative. So strategic information management became an important tool to conceal the risk of civilian nuclear power. And one main narrative was to stress that Japanese technology was safe, so that the kind of accidents that happened in the US in what was then also in what was then the Soviet Union, could not happen in Japan. And that the government was doing everything in its power to ensure safety. But in reality, safety standards did not improve much, at least not for the existing nuclear power plant. So rather than really reforming safety standards, the government or pro nuclear actors more generally were promulgating this idea that Japanese technology is safe. And also there was this pro nuclear bias in the press coverage, plus there was the state sponsored education on the benefits of, of nuclear power. And all of that became known as the safety myth. And really was this tool to shape public opinion. Now of course, there were some that were unsatisfied with Japan's nuclear power program and also the way it was regulated, but they lacked access to decision making. So apart from elections, the political system mainly offered entry points at the local level. So we saw that over time anti nuclear protests at the local level grew and they took the form of these, not in my backyard protests like NIMBY protests against individual plants or individual sites. Now this is where the dengan sample came in this law to subsidize large infrastructure projects. And here, well, for example, Daniel Aldrich wrote about it at length in his book side Fights. And the title I think is to the point because local opposition focused on preventing the sighting of a nuclear power plant. But once this opposition had been overcome and it had been decided that a nuclear power plant would be built, simply adding more reactor units became a really useful strategy to work around local protests. And here, there I actually draw on this really nice table that a Japanese scholar, Kikawa Takaya, put together where he really tracked when nuclear reactors were built and showed that Starting in the 1990s, not a single new site was developed, but rather all the reactor units were just added to existing ones. So this became an important strategy. And then one more aspect that I think is important to mention here is the rule of the judiciary. So if anti nuclear activists try to use courts to make their voices heard in this political conflict over nuclear power, Japanese courts generally ruled in favor of the state. And there isn't much research on this, but in the interviews that I did, I kept coming across this phrase, seifu ni makasero, that amongst judges there was this idea that it was more of a political decision whether Japan should or should not develop nuclear power. So the Japanese judiciary dismissing these cases against nuclear power plants or ruling in favor of them in favor of the plant being developed, this really buttressed the power of pro nuclear actors and kept citizens out of this conversation. So in a nutshell, these are the mechanisms that I'm referring to.
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Yeah. And I thought that the second one, the idea that you could once you cited, you know, created a plant, you could just build new reactors, that was actually, that was something that was quite shocking for me. I had not realized that at all. It was really enlightening to think about the way that nuclear power grew in post war Japan. And it reminds, I guess it reminds me a little bit of the problems around something like Narita Airport, right. Do you sort of create a fait accompli and then no matter how much protest there is afterwards, again you have the judiciary which says, well, it's, you know, it's political decision, it's not up to us to rule. You have the protesters who are never going to. It's kind of treated as a local issue, even when it's a national issue. To some extent. You have this with the, you know, US bases, especially in Okinawa, that sort of that same feeling that like, well, this is. It's not really our place to get involved here, or it's not really a national issue or something like that that always kind of gets in the way. And so at some level, I guess it makes sense that that would be the same for nuclear power. But I was also quite surprised to find that at the same time, so that you've sort of led us up to that crisis moment in March of 2011 with the little historical background that you've given us, and the crisis of 311 is the moment when that sort of gives birth to Japan's nuclear regulatory agency, the nra. It's Combined with the fact, you know, the crisis itself is combined with the fact that you have the Democratic Party, the dpj, in power at the time, which is a historical anomaly in and of itself. But you write that the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency was done with awareness of the need to break with the path dependent system of regulatory capture and put in place an institution that championing independent decision making, more stringent safety standards, transparency, and in house training programs to raise expertise levels. So in other words, if I'm understanding you correctly, this passage that I just read, you're arguing that there are four elements responsible for what is so far a success for the NRA at providing rigorous oversight. And so I want to just run them down and then ask you to explain a little bit about them. So there's one which is independence, formal and informal, the ability to create binding safety standards. By itself, the agency has that power, the transparency with which it is worked, and the avoidance of regulatory capture. So if you could sort of go through each of those and unpack those a little bit, starting with independence and the kind of stress test that we had in 2017 for that in particular, I think that sort of helps to, not only to understand what your book is saying about Japan, but of course why you think that this case study is relevant beyond Japan.
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C
The question of independence is fascinating and really important beyond Japan. So I would actually like to start with the bigger picture. And here I was very fortunate to find a study that looks at independent regulatory agencies around the world across sectors, and finds that on average, risk and safety related agencies tend to be weaker than those, say, who regulate the communications sector, the telecommunications sector or the finance sector. So that on average, nuclear safety agencies around the world have less political independence than their counterparts in other sectors. Now then, when we turn to Japan, Japan itself has hardly any tradition of independent regulatory agencies. The only other example would be the Japan Fair Trade Commission. And I mean, that was actually established still, I think, under US occupation. So I mean, this isn't necessarily a very good example for a very Japanese independent agency, so to speak. So this makes it all the more surprising that the NRA became so independent. I would like to dive a little bit into the reasons why it's independent, but I think first it's important to stress that during the reform process, independence was seen as a way to regain trust by meeting international standards, by meeting international safety regulation standards promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, but also by the US So that really was one aim, to meet international norms, to regain trust. How they Achieved that was basically by giving the NRA a very independent legal status. They made Japan the so called Article 3 Independent Commission Organization. So rather long name. But what is important here is this Article 3, because this is also used to establish ministries. And so the NRA has the right to draft its own budget proposals, to determine its own staff policy, and it has the right to draft bills and submit them to Diet via the Ministry of the Environment, which the NRA has actually, or which the NRA board members have used to introduce additional independence criteria into the NRA act, for example, transparency. So I thought that was absolutely fascinating, that actually the first five members of the NRA board were rather proactive in using their political independence in order to, well, first of all introduce transparency far beyond the Japanese norm. And I will say a few words about that in a second, but also to decrease their political vulnerability. So for example, they realized that all board members having the same terms of office would give one government the chance to completely replace all board members. So what they did is they adopted staggered terms of office between two and five years to make sure that board members would only be place sort of one by one over the years, not all at once. Now this reform orientation I think can be traced back to the first chairman, Tamaka Shinichi, who was a government advisor after the 1999 JCO criticality accident and again after 3 11. And it just seemed that he, he felt the need to really put do things differently this time. Also the first board included Oshima San, who was actually, he was a survivor of the Black rain, right in 1945. And as a diplomat he was instrumental in putting together a report about the aftermath of Chernobyl. And he was a member of this nuclear accident independent investigation committee in 201112 that came to this shattering conclusion that the Japanese safety regulation system was inherently flawed. It was captured the independence and I quote, was a mockery. And they really put their mind to breaking away from this tradition and establishing something entirely different. Now that I think was actually very important. So moving on to safety standards, they soon after establishing the nra, the first board adopted safety standards. And they actually adopted two things that the LDP had vehemently opposed during the reform process. So there was a discussion about whether two specific rules should be written into the law, and that was limiting the reactor lifespan to 40 years and introducing the so called backfit system. The backfit system means that if the safety agency makes changes to the safety regulation, operators have to introduce these changes even after receiving a license. So basically the license becomes contingent on the operator's willingness to also implement new safety standards. These two things were put forward by the DPJ government at the time. But since the LDP had the majority in the upper house, they used that power to make sure that these two things would not be included in the NRA Act. And a few months into its existence, the NRA adopted exactly that. And this is crucial because the backfit system gives it leverage over, well, basically the operators. This is something that didn't exist before. Before. Once a license had been granted, the nisa, the agency before, had very little leverage to actually force operators to make any changes. They could only make recommendations. So by introducing the backfit system, the NRA basically gave itself more power over the industry. And then the next thing is the 40 year limit. This is also something that the LDP was very opposed to. Now it's not a strict 40 year limit because in the end it just meant that the first license would be limited to 40 years, but operators then have the chance to apply for a second license that's valid for another 20 years. So it was never a strict limit in that sense. Since we talked about opposition before, I just want to note that having this limit on the first license, this 40 year limit, and introducing the backfit system means that now anti nuclear activists have another opportunity to sue against nuclear power plants. So this strategy that they devised before working around local protests doesn't work anymore because every reactor needs a new license and many of them are actually sort of between 30 and 40 years old. So they will need another license soon. And every license is an opportunity to sue. So basically every reactor is up for discussion again in a way. And yeah, this has unintentionally created more opportunities for protest. Now, something I don't mention in the book, but I feel like I should mention this here, is that actually this year the LDP government under Prime Minister Kishida has for the first time successfully tried, you could say, or at least tried to limit the NRA's regulatory competencies. Right. So this year the government made the decision that the reactor lifespan should not be limited to 40 years. They basically said, actually METI gets to decide how long reactors can be operated. And METI was very happy to say that they can be operated somewhat indefinitely. The NRA in response, tightened the licensing system. So they've officially lost the ability to say we have a lifespan limit. But what they did is to say, well, in that case, the, the first license is only valid for 30 years and each subsequent license is only valid for 10 years. And that again creates more opportunities for anti nuclear lawsuits, but also means that for the operators there will be more work that will have to go into doing refurbishments and going through the licensing process again and again. So, yeah, it's become a bit more infernal, but I wouldn't say that the licensing system has necessarily become less strict.
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Yeah. And so this brings us to the current place of sort of great tension between the government and the regulatory agency. And this is one of the things that, you know, again, thinking a little bit beyond the scope of what's actually in the book, which is a history up till now, thinking about the future of Japan's nuclear industry, of the regulatory agency, and again, the implications beyond that. You warn in your conclusion that, quote, should the NRA continue on its current trajectory, it will become somewhat weaker in the longer run. And you've already sort of addressed a little bit of that in your comments just a moment ago. And this gets to this question that I have, which is, you know, not to. It's not exactly pushing back on the narrative that you have in the book, but, you know, you've presented the Nuclear Regulatory Agency in Japan up till now as something of a success story, right? Not unbridled and perfect success, but something of a success story. And I wanted to maybe think about what these tensions might mean about the future. So, you know, I was thinking as I was reading the book, is it possible that the Nuclear Regulatory Agency is going to become its own kind of new path dependency? Right. And you point out that, you know, for a lot of reasons, nuclear power has had its troubles even up, you know, before 2011. And on the other hand, there's this question is, you know, is nuclear power the only real chance we have for bridge technology as we move away from fossil fuels? And so in that context with, I wondered about the role of the NRA in that transition because to sort of put a finer point on it, right, Japan's fossil fuel dependency after 2011 has gone up as a result of not having access to any and then not as much nuclear power. We're at a point where coal alone accounts for about a third of all the electricity in Japan. And that's, you know, only, only a fourth comes from sustainable technologies and atomic power combined. Is this a problem, right, in terms of thinking about the need for stringent safety on the one hand, and also the need to transition away from hydrocarbons on the other, you know, where are we in this process and what does your history of the NRA tell us? About the future.
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C
You've just raised, I think, three really interesting questions. One, of course, being about the political conflict or the political tensions. And there I thought it was fascinating how politically smart, in a way, the first board was. So the LDP was very much a proponent of independence during the reform process. That became the mantra. We need to create an independent agency that meets international standards. However, when it came to actual safety regulation, they prevented that from being introduced. And also a few years after, I think it was in 2014, some LDP politicians, including those who were calling for independence during the reform process, approached the NRA saying that actually it's isolating itself and it should listen to political concerns more. So you can clearly tell by that that the NRA has become more independent than the government wanted it to become. And this is certainly creating tensions because, yes, the safety regulation has increased technical safety costs quite a bit, and also the social acceptance cost by creating more opportunities or more access points for protests. And this, in a way, has led to the many shutdowns in nuclear power plants that we've seen since 2015. So what has happened is that in response to an independent safety agency that implements these stringent safety standards, operators have shut down older and smaller nuclear reactors. So all the ones where investments are not economically viable. And by now, Japan actually does not have enough nuclear reactor units left to even meet its own nuclear power policy goals. Right? This idea that Japan will produce between 20 and 22% of its electricity from nuclear power by 2030, that is off the table because Japan just does not have the capacity anymore to do that. So I thought that was fascinating, that basically an unexpectedly independent agency has undermined policy implementation. That, of course, was never the goal. The goal was for the NRA to facilitate restarts. And here we can clearly see this in the NRA act, that nuclear safety in order to facilitate restarts was clearly put under the NRA's authority, but other areas, not so much. And this includes decommissioning. So the decommissioning of nuclear power plants is actually not mentioned in the NRA act at all. And now I'm coming to your second question about this possible path, because as the increasing costs of nuclear power due to higher technical safety costs and social acceptance costs lead to decommissioning, arguably a result of the NRA successfully establishing itself as an independent agency, the NRA is starting to oversee a process that it was never tasked to oversee and where it has pretty much no power. So it was, I think it was in 2013 or 14 that the NRA said, well, we need to oversee the process of decommissioning the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. And then as more reactors were put forward for permanent shutdown and decommissioning, they also took that on. But because it's not mentioned in the NRA act, they have no legal basis for doing this, in a way. And unless they find a clever way to devise a licensing system for the decommissioning that gives them leverage, all they can do here is utter public criticism as a way to put pressure on those operators decommissioning plants. So I think this is really fascinating that the new path established by the NRA in the area of commercial nuclear power plant safety, with high and a high degree of independence and costly safety regulation, will undermine its independence in the long run. In the long run, in the sense that it leads to more shutdowns and therefore the rising importance of an area the NRA has less power over. Yeah.
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That's just really interesting how complicated that is. Yes. So, in other words, that by making the problem more about decommissioning, and then that's something that technically they don't have control over, therefore they're taking away their own power, which they didn't really have anyway, which. Yeah, it's quite a head scratcher. But thank you for explaining it so well. Yeah.
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In a nutshell. Yeah.
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I mean, it does have such interesting, you know, implications. Right. Both for Japan and for thinking about how to set up a regulatory agency somewhere else.
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Oh, absolutely. And here, thinking ahead or planning ahead is very important. And obviously no one thought about decommissioning becoming such a topic. And so now the NRA is overseeing it. But also it's not as easy to gain leverage because whether or not to restart a nuclear power plant is the decision you can make. Decommissioning is something that has to happen. So the context is rather different. Therefore, it's going to be very difficult for the NRA to gain more power in this area. Other areas, such as nuclear safeguarding and nuclear security, are partly under the NRA's authority. But of course, with nuclear security issues, this is really a security and foreign policy topic. So there, the NRA only has partial authority. Therefore, really, nuclear safety is where it has established a new path. And its own success might, in a way, be its own downfall because it's so independent that operators can't afford to operate in the system.
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A
Yeah. And I think this is. On the other hand, you have the government perspective where you created an agency that at some level was supposed to guarantee legitimacy for rebuilding the industry roughly along the lines that it was before, undoubtedly, but that that has come crashing down. And so you have unintended consequences on that side as well. And I actually thought that this was in some ways. The overall, in some ways message that I got from the book was really about unintended consequences. You have unintended consequences of the nuclear industry itself, of the disaster and the setting up of regulatory agency, of the regulatory agency finding places it wasn't mandated to regulate. And you just see these unintended consequences over and over again, which, as a historian, of course I understand that's how things work. But at the same time, it was just fascinating to see that's the recurring theme throughout, that kind of underlies everything. And I think that's a really strong sort of stark warning in thinking about regulation and policy and that I took away from Voak. So, yeah, and again, thank you for sort of bringing that out here in the podcast as well.
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C
Thank you for sharing this perspective because that's really fascinating to hear to me as a political scientist. Unintended consequences are not something that I think about a lot. But since I did use the historical institutionalism theory, which also talks about unintended consequences, this was something I thought about. But I was also surprised to what extent this was the case. And I think this also leads over to the third question that you had about whether stringent safety measures are actually getting in the way of reducing emission. And here I'm a bit torn. I would say that initially, yes, but not anymore. And I think I'm going to have to explain that a little bit. So we look at Japan's greenhouse gas reduction strategy. Nuclear power has long been a pillar of that. And right after 311, the risks of the strategy became very evident as the gap created by the shutdown of all nuclear power plants was filled with fossil fuels in order to generate enough electricity to meet the demand, which led to rising emissions. And at the time, there was no alternative. That was 12 years ago. You could argue that the government could not have known that independent and stringent safety regulation would have such an effect on nuclear reactor restarts. However, it was in 2015 that the agency for Natural Resources and Energy, which produces energy policy documents, published a document that included worst case scenarios for nuclear power that clearly included this option of not being able to meet the goals. And around 2015, 2016, it also started becoming apparent that nuclear reactor restarts were not progressing smoothly. So it was around that time that operators began permanently shutting down older and smaller units. Now, that was about seven years ago. So by now I would argue the government had ample time to plan for low carbon alternatives such as renewable energy. But rather than pushing renewable energy development, I find it somewhat puzzling and striking that the LDP has reduced the feed in premiums for renewable energy and switched over to a tendering system and overall has taken steps that have depressed the somewhat impressive renewable energy growth rates Japan has seen between 2012 and 2017. So by now I would say, rather than blaming it on stringent safety measures, I see this development being more due to successive LDP governments applying the principle of hope to its nuclear power policy and by extension, climate policy. So policymakers ignoring the science and failing to plan for low carbon alternatives is the more appropriate explanation in my opinion, because at some point you have to recognize unexpected outcomes and start addressing them.
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A
Yeah, the idea that politicians ignoring the science and obvious outcomes would be the moral of the story is perhaps, perhaps unsurprising, as depressing as it is. So that's very interesting though, and thank you for really taking that question on very directly because it was something that for me, as somebody who's not in political science, I don't really have the same understanding of how that kind of decision making is happening. So thank you for that. So we're nearing the end of our time here and I did want to ask you, now that you have the book out, what is it that you're up to these days? What's keeping you busy?
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C
Well, I'm happy to talk a little bit about that. So the book has really inspired further research. Especially the fact that safety governance reforms led to this unmanaged phase out of nuclear power has sparked my interest in this idea of phase out. Also, being German and having grown up with the nuclear phaseout debate, I felt it was important to explore this more. So I was very happy to find a number of co authors, Greg Trencher, Danny Rosenblum, Adrian Brinscheid, who were also interested in this concept. And we really mapped this out and how it has been studied. Now we really found that there's been a wave of scholarly interest in nuclear phaseouts after every nuclear accident. So it's a topic that comes and goes. But there's also another development and that is a turn towards climate related issues such as the fossil fuel phase out. And based on that, I'm now interested in phase out debates and policies in two contexts. One is the comparative context. So I'm currently working on the paper that compares the nuclear power debates post 311 in Germany and Japan to identify the sociopolitical factors that were key for Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power versus Japan's decision to retain nuclear power. But I'm also interested in phase out debates in the international climate negotiation context. I'm actually really happy that I'm attending climate negotiations in Dubai in December this year to follow the fossil fuel phase out discussion there, including Japan's part in it, because Japan is trying to not phase out coal and that I find fascinating. I want to look into that more.
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A
Yeah, that's a topic that fascinates me as well. So I'm glad that you're following up on that and hopefully we will be able to have you back here on the podcast with another book that puts that research into print sometime soon. But until then, thank you so much for joining us today and for discussing your book with us.
- [40:59]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
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C
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