Siting Ikata — a nuclear plant the town asked for (1970)

Who asked for it, and where it was put

Seen as a management decision, what stands out is less the choice of technology than the way the door was opened. Having lost its candidate site at Tsushima, Shikoku Electric Power was in the position of having to find the next parcel of land itself. Into that came an invitation from the other side — from a town struggling with depopulation — and agreement accumulated in order: a town-assembly resolution, a prefectural-assembly vote, then the signing of fisheries compensation. Land acquisition, the most time-consuming step of all, could therefore move quickly; but the geological and environmental assessments ran in parallel with the purchase, and that sequence left a point that would be cited again and again in later safety arguments.

Forty years on, the siting shows the company two faces. Three reactors, 2,022 MW and a mix roughly 40% nuclear underwrote the stable earnings of the 1990s; the shutdown of the same equipment produced three consecutive loss-making years and a tariff increase in the 2010s. That a single siting decision can determine the amplitude of earnings for decades is a measure of the time horizon a regionally monopolistic utility carries. The later moves to spread the revenue base into overseas generation and telecommunications belong on the same line of questioning — how to damp that amplitude.