Siting Hokkaido’s first nuclear plant — moving it from inland to coastal Tomari (1978)

What could be conceded, and what could not

Read the Tomari siting as the fruit of patiently persuading the locals and you lose sight of the move that actually worked. Nine years passed from the choice of a site, and what had stalled the negotiation was not a shortage of persuasion but the plan itself — a scheme to carry nuclear fuel and waste by dedicated road from Iwanai port. By moving the site to coastal Tomari village in 1978 and erasing that transport route, the fishery cooperatives that had kept opposing shifted to conditional approval. Placing the object of concession in the content of the plan rather than in the technique of negotiation can be seen as the core of this judgement.

Yet meeting the requirements and winning understanding were two different things. Even after the fishery compensation agreement of September 1981 satisfied the three conditions the state required, Hokkaido after Chernobyl saw a petition of 800,000 signatures submitted to the governor, and unit No. 1 began operating in June 1989 with that opposition still in place. Local agreement could be obtained by moving the site; prefecture-wide opinion would not move by the same means. These fifteen years show that siting a nuclear plant required two separate consents.