Environment | Daily Report

Allison Yohimura/FlickrAround 40 percent of Japan's energy comes from nuclear power plants.

California is not the only major world economy working to restrict the amount of greenhouse gas emissions it contributes to the atmosphere.

Several countries have implemented policies to achieve reductions in their fossil fuel consumption, and Japan is no exception.

In June, I accepted a fellowship from the Japanese Foreign Press Center to spend 11 days traveling around the country, to look at the nation’s “clean” energy systems.

Japan has set a goal to reduce its greenhouse gases by 25 percent, down to its 1990 levels, by the year 2025.

And officials think they can achieve this by increasing their renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal, as well as their nuclear output.

Roughly 40 percent of Japan’s energy is produced by nuclear power, followed by coal (about 25 percent), natural gas (about 20 percent), then hydroelectric, oil, geothermal, and wind and solar.

The country would like to increase its renewable sources to 10 percent by 2025.

So I’m now here in Japan visiting different energy sites and trying to figure out which aspects of Japan’s energy challenges are similar to California’s.

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting a journal of sorts about what I have learned and how that knowledge might be applied to our own state’s energy situation.

On Tuesday, I visited a nuclear site in the city of Genkai, which is in the Kyushu, the southern region of the country.

The nuclear site is one of the oldest in the country, built in the 1970s. It is one of 20 operating plants (54 reactors) in the country. Its four reactors provide energy to nearly 4 million people in the surrounding region.

Nuclear energy is not a possibility in California. The state has a law that bans the construction of any new nuclear facility, although 12 percent of our energy comes from existing nuclear sites.

And while the storage of nuclear waste is an issue everywhere, in California, there is the added concern of earthquakes and tsunamis – two factors that Japan is hardly immune from.

But the officials at Genkai assured me that earthquakes were not an issue in that region of the country.

They say the Nagoya fault, which lies just off the coast and only a few miles from the site, does not generate earthquakes large enough to be concerned about.

“In this area, we don’t have many earthquakes,” said Masayusu Murashima, the managing executive officer and general manager of the Genkai Nuclear Power Station.

However, Sachio Ehara, a professor of geothermal and volcanological research at Kyushu University, disagreed.

He said just because a fault has not generated a large earthquake in the past doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. And he’s not convinced that the area is immune to earthquakes.

“Japan is a seismically active country,” he said. "And the western part of Kyushu is no exception."

But Murashima said even if there were a large earthquake, the plant has safeguards to protect it. Indeed, should an earthquake of strong magnitude strike near the plant, the reactor will sink into the ground, where it will be protected from the seismic forces.

California has banned new construction of nuclear sites for more than three decades. But there are rumblings by policy makers to consider it again.

Just last month, state Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Pacoima, told KGO-TV that "there are people out there who suggest that the only way we can achieve the goals we've laid out for California is to have nuclear energy a part of our future. We shouldn't take it off the table."

And a legislative committee has begun evaluating the moratorium, evaluating the pros and cons of keeping nuclear energy out of the state.

On Wednesday, I will visit a geothermal site in Kyushu, where heat from inside of the earth is providing clean – and, plant managers say, sustainable – energy for tens of thousands Kyushu-area customers.