Search

The Fukushima Daiichi accident raises various kinds of social unease in Japan. Especially, unease for radioactive contamination around the Fukushima Daiichi plant is serious. Also, around the other nuclear power plants, local residents would feel unease for a similar accident in the future. Although the government and the electric power companies have already implemented or plan to implement several measures to mitigate such unease, it is difficult to progress their policies effectively because the effect of each measure is not quantitatively clarified. The purpose of our research is to evaluate these effects by analyzing fluctuations in local property values and local residents economic welfare, which are monetary indexes reflecting the social unease, to construct information that is useful to plan an optimal package of mitigation measures in each nuclear power plant site from the viewpoint of cost-benefit analysis. In this paper, we explain the immediate plans of this research and its academic and political contributions.

This study examines several nuclear power plant sites in Japan by hedonic house rent analysis. As a result, for some plants, the neighboring houses are negatively evaluated by the residents, that is, their economic welfare get worse by living near the plants, whereas there are no or positive evaluations for the other plants. Meta analysis is carried out to examine social factors causing these differences – such as plant's attributes (operation years and past accidents) and host community's attributes (population density, change in employment and industrial structure, financial condition and change in social infrastructures).