Explaining how expensive electricity is in Japan: Explained with the case of paper business

Especially after having turned nuclear power plants in Japan off since the last nuclear accident in Fukushina in March 2011, electricity in Japan is considerably expensive.  Even before then, it was expensive compared to the other countries because of its relatively heavier reliance on the thermal power plant fuelled with fossil fuels imported from abroad. 

It is difficult to explicitly display how expensive it is in Japan because there are so many variables to be compared with the significance of the electric power price influencing an economy there. So, one industrial case is introduced here to explain how significant Japanese electric price is as a significant variable cost incurred upon this industry.  This is paper manufacturing introduced here as an explicit example

Pulp is the base raw material of papers manufactured by a paper machine. Paper manufacturing needs cellulose fibres obtained most notably from woods. The more expensive finer alternative material can be cotton.

There are mainly two methods of producing pulp: chemically processed one and mechanically processed one.  The chemical pulping process uses chemicals and heat to convert woods into pulp meanwhile the mechanical pulping process grinds woods by mechanically defibrating wooden fibres into pulp.

The price of chemical components tends to influence the chemical pulp price whereas the usage volume of machinery consuming the high-volume electricity affects the mechanical pulp price. Supply of the chemical materials is often volatile and requires their characteristics of quality to match a particular level for pulping.

The mechanical pulping is not so prone to the conditioning as much as the chemical counterpart. Electricity is electricity whatever and whenever it is produced. The general specification of these pulping machines is not extensively dissimilar to each other in this world. 

In terms of the ordinary world situation, the former is more expensive than the latter, so the proportion of which pulp content to use determines the quality of papers as follows:

• 上質 (directly translated as "high quality") : "Fine" paper/pulp: Chemical pulp 100%
• 中質 : Medium quality": Mix of chemical pulp and mechanical pulp.

However, this is the way around in terms of Japanese paper & pulp business. The latter can be more expensive than the former despite their naming. This is because the latter requires to consume higher-volume electricity while their pulping processes. This factor indicates how expensive electricity generated in Japan even while taking the volatile chemical supply and price into consideration.

Having observed this paper business case, Japan is indeed urged to increase a far more efficient method of generating electricity overall. This current high electric bill price suppresses both business growth and individuals' utility by squeezing their household budget as an unavoidable cost for these activities. 

Nuclear power generation should be reactivated at least to repress the currently already intolerable cost inflation.  Perhaps, the research and development (R&D) inventing a new technology allowing Japan to fundamentally overcome from the high electricity generation cost is worthwhile to implement even its feasibility is questionable for the time being. 

The imaginable example is the nuclear fusion possibly enabling to supply the electricity satisfying the total demand of the entire Japan maybe even by replacing all the other existing electric power plants. It can be rather more productive to invest into efforts and time into increasing this feasibility to accomplish building this functional nuclear fusion power plant. 

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I consider that the nuclear power technology should be considered as a public good so I claim for the integration to a good government management or at least the civic-cooperative management looked after by several private individuals (The Classical Economics) rather than the current administration by one single private gigantic corporation detached from the fair market competition!

Well, this nuclear management industry has such a humongous economic of scale whose competition is nearly infeasible. So, I recommend either the full integration (the cohesive monopoly under a single public body such as government) or a cooperative management (classical economics example: democratically managed by several individuals living in this community)