"New subsidy system designed to expedite restarts of nuclear reactors"
January 15, 2015 As reported by the Asahi Shimbun, Prime Minister Abe's administration has budgeted $12.75 million, on top of another $775 million, in the form of grants to help jump start nuclear reactor restarts across Japan.
Remarkably, the article reports:
"Although the local governments will be able to decide how to spend the funds, the subsidies are expected to be used, for example, to conduct monitoring surveys to prevent the spread of groundless rumors about nuclear power. The central government also wants prefectural authorities to use the funds to hold explanatory sessions to convince residents of the safety of nuclear plants."
In the weeks and months following the beginning of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, it was reported -- including in the New York Times -- how the Japanese nuclear establishment in industry and government had coaxed communities into hosting atomic reactors.
In the case of Futaba and Okuma, the host towns of Fukushima Daiichi itself, very large town halls were paid for by Tokyo Electric Power Company. However, the town halls were so large, for such small towns, that the municipality had trouble later funding staffing levels to maintain them.
Another example was a semi-professional calibre baseball stadium, complete with a state of the art lighting system, provided by the nuclear establishment to a nuclear plant host town. However, the local little league were the only ones to use it, once per week.
Such "Faustian fission" contributed significantly to the collusion between industry, regulator, and elected official, concluded by the Japanese Parliament to be the root cause of the nuclear catastrophe -- what left Fukushima Daiichi so catastrophically vulnerable to the earthquake-tsunami disaster.
The well funded propaganda campaign harkens back to the beginning of nuclear power promotion in Japan, carried out by the U.S. CIA and Atomic Energy Commission in the mid-1950s. An indicted "Class A War Criminal" from World War Two, and a founder of the Liberal Democratic Party, Shoriki, was recruited as an agent of the CIA, to promote "Atoms for Peace" on Japan's biggest t.v. station, and in one of its biggest newspapers, both of which he owned. Pro-nuclear power has remained a central plank in the LDP platform to this day, as with the Abe administration.