Japan's Last Nuclear Reactor Shuts Down 452
AmiMoJo writes "Japan's last active reactor is shutting down today, leaving the country without nuclear energy for the first time since 1970. All 50 commercial reactors in the country are now offline. 19 have completed stress tests but there is little prospect of them being restarted due to heavy opposition from local governments. Meanwhile activists in Tokyo celebrated the shutdown and asked the government to admit that nuclear power was no longer needed in Japan and to concentrate on safety. If this summer turns out to be as hot as 2010 some areas could be asked to make 15% power savings to avoid shortages, while other areas will be unaffected due to savings already made."
Good job japan! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's securing your nation's future in the post-oil world! /s
Re:Good job japan! (Score:5, Insightful)
Adding to this:
At current LNG prices Japan pays additional $200 billion a year for its elecricity generation from gas compared to what nuclear generation would cost. The anti-nucreal crowd can calculate the cost of Fukushima disaster as they want, but in no way they can deny the fact that cheaper elecricity would cover the cost of the disaster in few years. The bigger economic cost was not the nuclear disaster itself, but that the reactors shutdowns afterwards.
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Seems like they are securing their future in a post-nuclear world pretty well though.
Re:Good job japan! (Score:4, Informative)
Wind doesn't work, too intermittent (even off shore wind, and that won't cover the midwest)
We were talking about Japan. I don't know about the US, but Japan and the UK both have enough off-shore wind to supply all their base load needs on a 100% reliable basis. Out in the Pacific and the North Sea the wind always blows enough to provide the minimum level of energy required with spare capacity if you build enough turbines. Yeah, you need a lot, but that isn't beyond our ability to do or anything like as expensive as what nuclear has cost.
Solar isn't dense enough for major cities, think eastern seaboard of the USA, NYC, DC, Boston, etc. or any other major city, Chicago, Minneapolis, Saint Louis.
Again I don't know about the US specifically but 0.3% of the Sahara gets enough solar energy to supply all of western Europe. That is why the EU wants to build solar thermal plants in north Africa. Distance isn't an issue now we have efficient DC voltage conversion and besides which the "fuel" is free and will never run out anyway.
It seems like there should be plenty of places in the southern states where the US could do something similar. The northern states are obviously not well positioned.
Hydro... methane...
Geothermal? Japan has lots of that.
It would also seem that making nuclear power plants a comercial venture, corners will be cut, plants will operate longer than designed to, back up and spare power will not get tested as often as it should.
I agree, but what is your proposed solution? Until the early 1980s all UK nuclear facilities were run by the government and they still had accidents. You don't even want to know how they handled our nuclear arsenal. The government has a limited budget too and a strong desire to cut costs.
All I'm saying is that you should look again at the viability of renewable energy and maybe instead of spending all that time and money developing new nuclear devote it to developing safer forms of energy.
Re:Good job japan! (Score:5, Informative)
The activists have a point. The reactor designs are relatively unsafe compared to modern designs, though it took a hell of a lot of punishment to show it.
Here's hoping Japan makes the switch to thorium.
Except the Activist are against the building of newer safer designs.
Re:Good job japan! (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter if its coal, gas, wind, hydro, solar, nuclear, tidal, or anything else these people are always there protesting its construction.
Re:Good job japan! (Score:5, Insightful)
You speak the truth. Coal fired power plants have spewed more radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere than all the nuclear disasters ever did.
The only rational thing to do is ignore the radical environmentalists and get on with building the next generation of nuclear plants.
Renewable energy remains a sick joke, coal and oil aren't going to last forever, nor should we wait until it reaches a crisis point.
Suggestion (Score:5, Funny)
I suggest Japan switches to powering itself with Activists.
An average size activist has a mass of approximately 70Kg (counting the younger people and women into the average).
70Kg of a raw unadulterated activist contains about 6.3 Ã-- 1018 J, which translates to 6Ã--1015 BTU, or 1.7Ã--1012 KW/hr.
Thus only one activist fully converted into energy should in principle be sufficient to power Japan for about 25 years.
Of-course this is assuming that an activist can be fully converted into energy, but since an average activist is against all forms of energy that people actually need to live, we can also conclude that activists are generally against human survival, and thus they are self-defeating. If the activists get their way, there will be no humans, but there also will be no activists, so by converting activists into energy even in less efficient ways (an open fire stove), would still provide us with some energy and bring the Earth closer to the blissful moment, when the people are removed from it, starting with the activists.
Greenies have won while the majority in Japan lost (Score:3, Insightful)
While nuclear can be done safely, there seems to be no effort to do so - as it would deny environmentalists a chance to remake the power grid in their own way.
Environmentalism - as practiced today - has been about control versus the original intent of cleanliness and efficiency.
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How about the simple fact that "environmentalists" are celebrating the shut down of nuclear reactors while ignoring the coal and oil based power plants?
When solar and wind power becomes widespread then we can celebrating shutting down nuclear power plants. Until then, all you're doing is trading one evil for an even greater evil.
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:5, Insightful)
It sort of looks like these environmentalists are celebrating the fact that ALL nuclear power plants have been shut down in Japan. While I will admit there might be some bad plants that needed to be shut down and that some changes needed to happen, was it necessary to shut all of them down at the same time?
Keep in mind that the celebration is over the last of the nuclear power plants being shut down. They are celebrating the death of even the concept of nuclear energy.
If there was a real concern about the environment, they would be far more worried about increasing dependence on coal and oil for electrical power. Heck, just by restarting some of these older coal power plants they are going to be introducing more radioactive debris into the environment than had they simply left the nuclear power plants running. These environmentalists are in that way celebrating a nuclear future AND the destruction of the environment on a massive scale, where many more people will die because these plants are being shut down.
If you were genuinely concerned about safety, you would be insisting that these nuclear power plants be restarted ASAP. If you look strictly at deaths directly caused from mining coal to replace these nuclear power plants, I think that would more than offset any potential deaths caused from even casual handling of spent nuclear rods, much less the risk of having another Fukushima-type disaster happening in the next few years.
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Well, of course. It's long been known that the Greens are only interested in forcing people to take specific actions (shut down all nuclear plants) but not interested in producing specific results (lowering the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere). The fact that what they're demanding will have exactly the opposite effect from what they claim to
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:5, Informative)
They want modern clean technology like wind and geothermal.
Instead of just guessing what they want why not try simply listening to them.
Though, I'm not originally from here, I live in Japan. You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I talk to Japanese people every day. They are against nuclear power. At best, people don't mind wind power. At least most people don't actively complain about the new windmills being put up (and there are a lot going up). But nobody is calling for them as far as I can tell. But people here do NOT want geothermal. There is a fear that it will somehow destroy the onsens (hot springs). This is a major problem, because we have *no* domestic base load generation capacity except geothermal. Even now, as far as I can tell, there is *no* move to find new geothermal wells.
There is, unfortunately, a media fuelled misconception that solar power will solve all the problems. Granted, where I live, it is quite feasible to run most of your house on solar power. But we still need base load generation and we don't have it.
Don't get me wrong. As far as I'm concerned, nuclear was only a stop gap for Japan. It gave us some time to sort out new technologies. It's not like Japan has a domestic supply of nuclear fuel. But by shutting down all the reactors, it really puts the pinch on. I just hope we end up going the right direction in the end...
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course he doesn't have any evidence. The pro-nuclear crowd wants to pick and chose the best parts about nuclear... they want to pretend that each plant lasts for 40-60 years--so that the cost of nuclear is competitive with coal,etc.. and then when those 50 year old reactors are found to be unsafe, they say it's because they are out of date.
Well... if they were rebuilt every decade with the latest safety improvements, they would not be cost competitive. So chose: unsafe reactors... or uncompetitive energy prices.
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Do you see coal plants or even solar power farms being rebuilt every ten years?
It takes time to phase in changes in engineering and design, where certainly nuclear energy plants built in the early 1960's perhaps ought to be phased out and shut down. Then again that was over 50 years ago. I would agree that 50 year old nuclear power plants should be decommissioned and perhaps even rebuilt. Sadly too many of plants that age are still being used because the new plants aren't being built to replace them.
Ther
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Do you see coal plants or even solar power farms being rebuilt every ten years?
Solar power farms don't have the same problems when they fail, and the panels we had in the 1970s could repay the energy cost of their production in seven years. Why in hell have you brought them into this conversation? To make Nuclear look shitty?
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are you saying that the reactors we have now were designed with KNOWN safety issues?
Of course that's ridiculous... everyone THOUGHT they were safe when they were designed and built. It's not until decades later we find out if they were wrong.
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There's evidence of this in the US by the government propping up companies like Solyndra - while blocking oil, coal, and nuclear from having any chance to be usable.
If you want green energy, fine. Just be prepared for when it fails to deliver as promised.
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:4, Interesting)
So 12 billion a year across a wide industry, of which how many companies went bankrupt? Didn't Solyndra get 2 billion? Wasn't there a few other billion-dollar handouts to solar firms that have gone belly-up?
Government money should not be involved in the creation or propping up of business and industry. Research, yes, and if such research leads to advancements that are economically feasible and viable.. money will find and support those advancements.
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I'm not sure you understand how R&D works... sometimes all you get out is 5 paths you know won't work and 10 more to look at. It would be pretty easy to go through quite a bit of money developing power generation equipment just to find out something doesn't scale up like you though for your first full scale test.
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Ah that's alright, considering Japan seems to be going full bore towards coal power plants. They're buying up every coal mine in western Canada that they can get their hands on so they can export it. I'm sure this is a much better option.
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Environmentalists seem to be more concerned with gross pollution, as opposed to pollution per capita or per kwh, and seem to neglect the fact that you need more of something that produces less power to get the same output.
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Re:Greenies have won while the majority in Japan l (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear isn't done so much in the US because of litigation. The instant somebody announces they're going to be looking at building a nuke plant anywhere, the lawyers come out from the rocks and start burying the courts in paperwork, trying for injunctions to stop any and all nuclear construction.
Nuclear plants are expensive. They wouldn't be nearly as expensive if it weren't for the legal fees associated with the word 'nuclear'. When you have an activist-lawyer go in front of a camera and say "The only phisics I know is Ex-Lax', you know you're dealing with idiots.
Just read the history of the Perry Nuclear Plant. Most of the 'construction time', the plant was idle, nothing was moving due to the injunctions. They weren't even allowed to do maintanance on what they already had up, so when the injunctions lifted, they got the construction crews in there to inspect 100% and replace anything that even LOOKED like it had a rust spot, or they wouldn'tve received their operating license. And they had to keep full construction crews on the payroll even while they were waiting for the injunctions to crawl through the courts because if they didn't, the crews would vaporise off to other jobs with no guarantee of getting them back. Half the time they just barely got through with the inspection and maint before they got hit with yet another injunction. The lawyers made tons of money on that project.
All told, Perry cost $6 billion and took 9 years to build, mostly due to the injunctions. They never did finish the #2 Unit because of cash flow problems from all the litigation. Even though all but the containment vessel is done for #2, they stopped construction on it in '85 & 'abandoned' it in '94. They still have to do maintanance on the empty building in order to keep their license to operate since it's considerted legally to be 'one complex'. It could have gone online with both reactors at half the cost and within 3 years of groundbreaking if it wasn't for all the injunctions.
Thorium Nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
We need to start making some of these Thorium reactors [youtube.com].
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Liquid thorium reactors do not require active cooling once shut down. Once they drain their fuel into holding tanks they are passively cooled.
A Fukushima-style meltdown is hard to imagine, especially since they are already molten.
Re:Thorium Nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike molten salt reactors, a class of fast breeders utilize liquid sodium, which reacts violently with water- and has been a bit of a problem (very costly) when heat-exchangers, reheaters, and similar equipment fails.
Molten salt reactors, like the one prototyped at Oak Ridge National Laboratories back in the 60s, ran for years. The corrosion issue stems from the inadvertent production of tritium (from an undesired isotope of lithium in some formulations of the salt) which can combine with the fluorine (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor/LFTR) to produce a strong acid. These and other problems appear to have very viable solutions (from listening to the relevant scientists and engineers), and should not be used to disparage the technology.
To compare this fission technology that has already been demonstrated in principle with a prototype, to fusion which has not even achieved break-even demonstrates a serious lack of understanding of the issues involved. The primary advantages of the molten salt reactor to energy production are the following:
- based on fission which is a well-understood phenomena; U-233 liquid-fueled reactor already demonstrated in principle decades ago (found to be very reliable)
- a liquid fuel system that operates at low pressure and high temperature which allows for very high levels of safety and efficiency
- the above which contribute to the high likelihood of low-cost reactors
- low cost reactors will dramatically lower the cost of carbon-free energy
- high temperatures allow for more efficient cogeneration; example: ammonia synthesis which could be used as an energy carrier on the scale of petroleum, which would address both concerns about fuel supply and carbon emissions
- high temperatures also allow for the use of dry cooling (as opposed to "wet" cooling which uses a lot of water), necessary for an efficient thermodynamic cycle
- thorium fuel is about as abundant as lead (3-4 times more abundant as uranium), and so very low cost
- fissile startup requirements are minimal (less than a tonne of 20% enriched U-235 is possible)
- system is very proliferation resistant (lots of technical details in the specifics)
The disadvantages:
- we must face our fear of nuclear energy
- more R&D (substantially less than $10 billion) will be required before this technology is a commercial reality
- bureaucratic and industry resistance to a new technology (they've already committed themselves to something else which is not suited for solving our systemic problems)
- the general public remains woefully ignorant of the risks it is facing by foregoing nuclear energy
The potential is that we have a nuclear system that is so safe and efficient that it may have the convenience, but at lower cost, than modern and ubiquitous natural gas plants. We are looking at perhaps the greatest technology humanity has ever developed, at best critical to our transition to a sustainable existence, and at worst, an essential technological step to reduce the risk we currently face. The United States may lack the technical leadership to step into a new era of low-cost carbon-free energy, but its rivals are seriously looking at this approach (China is apparently putting around $100 million annually into this), and if it proves viable on a commercial scale (all signs so far showing absolutely "yes"), the US will be left behind. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this issue to national security. Our economic well-being is dependent upon the cost and convenience of energy, and "farming" low-density energy sources dramatically increases our risk in this area. Lower the cost of energy and you will facilitate wealth creation, otherwise we face recession and decline.
Re:Thorium Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? Liquid Sodium cooled reactors are nothing new [wikipedia.org].
And none of them have been run successfully as a commercial unit. If someone could build one successful sodium cooled power reactor, and have it run for a decade with decent availability then sodium-cooling might be viable. Based on current evidence, the technology for a successful plant does not exist.
Math? (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the accident 27% of Japan's energy came from nuclear power. Even if everyone could 15% (which is impossible because many big users are already conserving due to costs) that still leaved 12% unaccounted for. Sure green power can make up for some of that in the long term but in the short term it means increased import and burning of fossil fuels [washingtonpost.com]. A 54% increase in fossil fuel base electricity production in one year is significant.
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Re:Math? (Score:4, Informative)
There was a lot of excess capacity in the system. All power sources are unreliable, including nuclear, so there needs to be spare capacity available in case it one goes offline. Japan was able to use that capacity and run its non-nuclear generators harder than usual (postponing maintenance to low demand periods etc.) The electricity grid had been upgraded to allow power to be distributed more efficiently and further to even out local demand too.
The 27% figure is for all nuclear installations, and in normal operation a significant number of them were offline for maintenance and safety checks anyway. They have magnitude 5 or 6 earthquakes every single month in Japan so need to regularly look for damage to reactor casings, plumbing and so forth.
The 15% figure is on top of what has been done so far, which has reduced power consumption significantly. Most of it is simple stuff like turning off lights in shops that are not open or turning air-con down. Government ministers turned up to work in Hawaiian shirts to encourage people to dress less formally at work and reducing their cooling needs.
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The numbers I quoted are production number and not capacity numbers. How do you get around a 54% increase in fossil fuel based production with a 15% possible reduction in consumption?
You seem to think that the 15% reduction is supposed to cut out all the extra fossil fuel based production. It isn't, the goal is simply to avoid power rationing.
So by closing of the nuclear power plants is projected to increase overall CO2 emission from Japan by 15%.
Yes. Not sure what your point is. The people celebrating yesterday understand this and are not disputing it, they are merely saying that this increase is a better alternative than re-starting the reactors and that it could be reduced by increased use of clean energy sources.
What exactly are you arguing with?
Contradict much? (Score:2)
Meanwhile activists in Tokyo celebrated the shutdown and asked the government to admit that nuclear power was no longer needed in Japan
If this summer turns out to be as hot as 2010 some areas could be asked to make 15% power savings to avoid shortages
Would seem to me that it is very clear that nuclear power is still needed in Japan if areas have to make cuts in power draw to avoid shortages.
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It's the activists that claim we don't need nuclear power, but the majority of them don't realize that as the reactors are being refused activation licenses there has been a massive increase in the reliance coal and natural gas - which has increased power generation costs, has large carbon footprint, and is neither sustainable nore feasable for long-term power needs. We absolutely need nuclear power, and even now there's no reason not to restart the Chubu Denryoku and Touhoku Denryoku reactors.
Of course the
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Anyway, the latest research gives nuclear higher carbon footprint than nuclear
That's a contradiction.
Latest, meaning all the easy fuel having been pretty much used up, and having to dig deeper and more cubic miles of the ore to get more fuel to expanding market... all done by oil-based machinery.
Right, because it's in no way possible to power machines with electricity.
See, while coal plants become better at CO2/MW decade by decade,
There's a natural lowest limit for their carbon footprint dictated by the chemical reaction of carbon and oxygen. You can get much lower than this limit with most other energy sources, be it nuclear or "renewables" (nonsense, but let's pretend the sun will shine forever, for the sake of this discussion, it's a reasonable first approximation).
Alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
And despite what the greenies say, wind and solar aren't always reliable, especially near the ocean -- clouds come and go, as do storms, and wind fluxuates, whereas power demand is constant. Not only that, but the efficiency of solar panels isn't high enough yet to be a replacement in an urban area -- panels have to be installed outside the city and cover large tracts of land. That may work in America, but it will not work for an island city-state.
Japan is taking a step backwards here because of political pressure and disinformation about the safety of nuclear power: Fukishima wasn't a failure of engineering, it was a failure of management, and it's something every government has to contend with when they hand over to capitalists and industrialists anything that can go boom; They are asked to balance profit with safety, but invariably when the two conflict, profit wins.
Re:Alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it is not uncommon for air monitoring alarms to go off in a nuclear plant from the effluents from and adjacent coal plant when the wind is wrong. Japan probably had a spinning reserve of about 15% just like the US but now even with all of nuclear units down there is no reserve even with a massive conservation effort and there is a significant shortfall that will have to be picked up by coal. Wind and solar have a place but they cannot be the baseload. Energy storage is extremely difficult and costly rendering them appropriate for peaking but not much else. Nuclear plants have an incredible safety record when it comes to direct industrial safety and I would bet that there are far more injuries playing on windmills than in the entire nuclear fuel cycle in a given year. Are solar panels made out of toxic materials? I would expect so. Without subsidies use of solar panels to produce electricity works out to about a dollar a kilowatt. Nuclear about a nickel at the bus bar (poor performer). The news emphasised the scary nuclear plant which had 3 fatalities (2 drownings and 1 heart attack) at the expense of a human tragedy that cost 18000 people their lives. A large area was exposed to numerous chemical carcinogens that are a part of modern life that probably exceeded the risk from radiation. In a couple of years a lot of the area quarantined may be reclaimed. The nuclides that are causing the concerns are Cesium and Strontium both of which have about a 30 year half life but both of which are relatively soluable, weathering will result in quite a bit of removal over time. The bigger concern for the area would be the social stigma for those that moved back into the area because of ignorance.
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Coal gassification plants offer a much cleaner way to burn coal (or any biomass really). Not that I'm a proponent of growing dependence on coal, but there have to be sustainable alternatives (nuclear is not sustainable) like geothermal (might be very promising in Japan), wave and wind (I know it fluctuates, so you overbuild. There is consistent wind pattern and excess power generation could be stored in hydrogen)
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Most people who oppose nuclear power don't realize the amount of radioactive material that is raining down on them near a coal plant.
These days, as a sum total for the whole planet, it's somewhere around six or seven Chernobyls of radioactive material annually. Not once per a quarter of century, like with nuclear power plants.
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The main alternative to nuclear is coal. Most people who oppose nuclear power don't realize the amount of radioactive material that is raining down on them near a coal plant. It's enough to trigger radiation alarms if they aren't recalibrated from 'nuclear' to 'coal'.
They understand, and this is not their concern. They are worried about accidents.
Fukishima wasn't a failure of engineering
Yes it was. The original design didn't take into account a very large earthquake causing a very large tsunami, or the prospect of the emergency cooling generators being flooded and no other power source being available.
There were management failings as well, but the designers and engineers are not blameless.
And despite what the greenies say, wind and solar aren't always reliable, especially near the ocean -- clouds come and go, as do storms, and wind fluxuates, whereas power demand is constant.
No, there is always enough wind available offshore in Japan to supply its entire power needs. All year round, 24/7, no exc
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There is not an electric grid on the planet that uses wind or geothermal as base loads,
This statement is not true. [wikipedia.org]
Admit nuclear energy isn't necessary? (Score:2)
Until it is. Desperately. Hydrocarbons aren't long for this world from an "energy return/aggregate price" point of view. Do they expect to pull power from the behinds of pink unicorns and baby godzillas?
Which would, admittedly, be pretty cool.
There are reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
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(I suggest you use paragraph breaks -- it really makes your post easier to read.)
I think there's another key factor that you've overlooked: The damage done by the tsunami was huge, while the damage done by the reactor's failure was pretty small. But the reactor is something they can do something about, while there's simply no way to stop a future tsunami. An excessively-strong reaction to the tiny bit of the event which can be addressed is a natural, if irrational, response to the larger but completely
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The problem with conservation is that you can't conserve or recycle your way out of a shortage. It can be something to be done as a temporary measure, but it shouldn't be viewed as a long term solution. I'm all for wise use of our resources, so don't take this as being against higher efficiency devices, but you also must take a more pragmatic way of thinking about this stuff. BTW, Obama was justifiably ridiculed over his comment of inflating tires while doing things like shutting down oil pipeline constr
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Living in the prefecture containing most of the auto-manufacturing industry as I do, you are completely wrong. All of the major auto-makers had to restrict production due to lack of energy. And that was even on the west side of the energy divide, which didn't have rolling blackouts. Conservation for residential and office workers is not a problem. People are already used to setting their air conditioners to 28C (and heaters to 15C in the winter). Every second light standard is turned off where I live a
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They let most of their reactors run over the winter to provide the needed power.
WRONG. I was there in January and there were two out of 50 reactors running.
Then things will cool down a bit and winter will hit.
Winter did hit and it was fine. Summer is when demand goes up because people want air-con.
Japan has already proven that they will cope by having 80%+ of their nuclear power shut down for over a year.
Re:There are reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
This is pushing up the price of oil. (Score:5, Informative)
Japan has essentially no internal oil or natural gas resources. Everything has to be imported. As a result of the nuclear shutdown, imports are up. Way up. So are prices.
From the Financial Times: [ft.com]
As utilities last year met the shortfall of nuclear power, Japanese consumption of LNG rose by 56 per cent, crude oil for direct burning by 27 per cent and fuel oil usage by 20 per cent. The trend, which is helping to keep spot LNG prices in Asia and global oil prices higher, is set to accelerate in the next few months as utilities burn more hydrocarbons to compensate for the lack of nuclear power.
Energy analysts say utilities have maximised LNG-fired electricity output, leaving crude oil and fuel oil to meet additional needs. Oil traders believe that Japan's nuclear cutback could add between 450,000 and 800,000 barrels a day to world demand for crude and fuel oil. The figures are significant. The bottom end of the range equals the production of Ecuador and the upper end matches the output of Qatar.
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About the only significant natural resource Japan ever had was coal.... which is one of the reasons why it industrialized in the first place. Much of that coal has already been extracted though, so Japan generally does need to look elsewhere for their energy needs.
It is a good point to make though that oil prices are going to skyrocket due to this action in Japan. That will have some interesting impacts on other parts of the world.
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IIRC, that was one of the reasons for the attack on Pearl Harbor that got the US involved in WW2 when the Americans decided to cut petroleum and metals imports to Japan in order to slow them down a bit in their war effort in China. Of course, I was taught that 45 years ago back in the Stoned Age of the 60's in high school, they obviously
You Can't Repeal Murphy's Law (Score:2)
You Can't Repeal Murphy's Law
Fukashima
BP oil spill\
Costa Concordia Cruise Ship
Exxon Valdeze
Titanic
We were all allsured that they were foolproof. Wrong -- we found the fools.
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So the take away is what? Go back to living in caves in the dark and eating our food raw because fire isn't safe?
Give me a fscking break.
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No, you don't get to take anything away yet. Many things could happen:
1. Japan has a comparative disadvantage in energy resources and a comparative advantage in manufacturing finished goods. It is a huge net exporter of finished goods, and has lots of economic room to import more energy. One could argue that Japan *should* be importing more energy, rather than subsidizing more expensive domestic energy production. Reducing net exports by importing more would also help Japan balance its current account, whic
Biggest social disaster in millenia. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You have lived for too long in the Fallout universe, time to return to real life. Fission reactors are - at best - an intermediate technology until fusion power is finally working, not some kind of a holy grail.
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Apparently Japanese do not understand winter very well, or else they had more houses with central heating. Besides, heating with electricity is very inefficient.
There is a way for NP to thrive (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time this topic comes up, there is the same string of irrelevant nonsense. Wake up.
There are only two long-term, large, successful, safe nuclear power projects on Earth - the U.S. Navy's and France's. Last year, the Navy logged its 6,500th reactor-year of experience w/out a single serious accident - nuc subs Thresher and Scorpian went down for reasons unrelated to their power plants. Both the Navy and France use a high degree of standardization between plants, rigorous operator selection and training, and procedures enforced by iron-fisted independent regulators - anathema to the unregulated free-market mavens designing and selling reactors and the natural-monopoly privatized power companies either trying to maximize profit or with guaranteed profit margins regardless of efficiency. The U.S. nuc power system failed as much because of the heterogeneous designs afoot - and resultant inability to insure standardized reliable performance and procedures, as because of the political resistance. But, the two are highly related - that is, there was good reason to be skeptical of promises of safe, long-term operation. A small, compact variation of the Navy's system is being marketed to U.S. communities for local power production at this time, but its adoption is meeting strong resistance in the regulatory agencies and congress due to big power and big energy special-interest influence - i .e. corruption.
So yes, there is a way to have safe, long-term nuclear power right under our feet and it is only our inept corrupted political system that keeps us from realizing it.
Save Face, not Environment (Score:5, Insightful)
You have it wrong --- this is "we can save face if we blame the problems we had with our nuclear reactor on nuclear energy being inherently unsafe, not the fact that we totally f**ked up the safety management and planning in multiple ways".
BTW, at least one of these errors is being made practically everywhere in the world: stopping research into new, possibly safer reactor designs because of the public's knee-jerk fear of technology. (Maybe not so much in China, though.)
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Also, stopping to do research and improvements seems like a bad idea to me, even if there are alternatives. Are you THAT confident in any other technology that you can rule out all potential improvement on nuclear energy as irrelevant? This is science, you never know where the breakthrough are going to come from, and exploring options is the way to move forwa
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Save Face, not Environment (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you seriously trying to pin dam failure on hydroelectric power? In all cases were dams have failed and killed people those dams were not built simply to provide electricity, rather the turbines were a nice added extra on a project to control a large volume of water. It would be like blaming your car stereo for the chassis falling apart.
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Yes, here's the worst dam failure, where 171,000 people died and 11m people were made homeless:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Note also that the Chernobyl death toll is estimated at 4,000 by other sources. 1m is by no means an undisputed figure.
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And where did you get Hiroshima from?? That's not related to nuclear power... That's related to a nuclear weapon designed to kill people...
Check this page... people killed per TWh for different energy-sources..
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html [nextbigfuture.com]
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"Why does it have to be nuclear? Why are you so intent on using nuclear, even if better options exist"
But, just in case, you fail to name anyone.
On the other hand, technologic research is, you know, that thingie about advancement of civilization and then, is terribly doubtful because everything we currently know about the physical world around us, that there's any source of energy with more potential than nuclear (both fission and fussion) with the exception, maybe, of matter/antimatter reaction which is pr
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What little antimatter that's been produced (and we're talking femtograms here) has been expensive as hell to
Re:Save Face, not Environment (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does it have to be nuclear? Why are you so intent on using nuclear, even if better options exist ...
What better option?
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Supposedly one that does not kill us. "Better" is not just a matter of engineering; it's about having the basic sense not to do anything that will render our habitat useless.
A better nuclear-plant like a thorium reactor does not go critical. It does not risk the same problems as the old reactors that where built during the 50-80'ies.. The problem with nuclear power is not safety, it's the inability for people to accept development of them since they think all nuclear devices are harmful without actually having an idea of what is safe or not and this is causing the politicians to stop accepting new, safer, reactors to be built and we are stuck with the old ones since we still ne
Re:Save Face, not Environment (Score:5, Informative)
1. We are using, in one way or another, 50% of all *SOLAR* energy that falls on this planet
Are you joking? Do you have any idea how much energy are those 50% of Earth's total incident solar radiation? Our civilization is in no way consuming anything near those 87,000 TW. It's currently somewhere around 15 TW.
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Try Nature's Power (Score:4, Funny)
I can think TWO better options. We can reduce the global dependency on uranium by switching to nature's organic power.
1. fuels created from organically-fed, free-ranging dinosaurs.
2. 100% Certified Organic Coal (also reduces dependency on hydro from dams)
Of course, reducing power consumption is part of the equation.
1. Stop reading slashdot using manufactured, powered devices and switch to better alternatives.
2. Stop distributing slashdot using manufactured, powered devices and switch to better alternatives.
Toss your power-hungry, multi-core laptops in the landfill and invest in clay. "Tablets" are power-efficient and will be next big thing in global communications.
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"It's not safe now, so why bother developing something that is safe?" My ghost will remember this when my grandkids are freezing cause they can't afford to buy heating oil at any price.
Re:Oh Great (Score:5, Informative)
According to this [wikipedia.org] Fukushima 4's fuel was removed soon after the disaster and therefore has been shut down for some time.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't convince the anti-np crowd or conspiracy theorists with facts. They just keep on repeating the same misinformation hoping it will eventually override all the evidence.
Re:Oh Great (Score:5, Funny)
You can't convince the anti-np crowd or conspiracy theorists with facts. They just keep on repeating the same misinformation hoping it will eventually override all the evidence.
don't worry, the day you prove p=np they will all bow before you. /mutates & /ducks
It's not just misinformation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's not just misinformation (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble with Hydro power is the disasters are so bad, and sooner or later the dams get privatized and some wealthy jackass cuts funding to safety.
See what I did there?
Heres a tip, find every stat you can on nuclear deaths. Go ahead, even include the hypothetical assumptions about who got cancer but might not have. Now compare it to a single hydro dam failure. Or to estimated coal mining deaths.
All of a sudden it starts to look a lot less terrible.
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The trouble with Hydro power is the disasters are so bad, and sooner or later the dams get privatized and some wealthy jackass cuts funding to safety.
Which is why we don't build very large dams much any more, unless absolutely forced to. Perhaps you can agree that the same logic should apply to nuclear power.
Heres a tip, find every stat you can on nuclear deaths.
Death is not the only consequence of a nuclear disaster. Look at the economic damage and the cost of fixing the problem. A large area of Japan is uninhabitable, a large number of people were displaced and are now jobless and living on benefits just outside the exclusion zone. You can argue all you like about whose fault it is and if the actions taken
Re:It's not just misinformation (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why we don't build very large dams much any more, unless absolutely forced to. Perhaps you can agree that the same logic should apply to nuclear power.
In a lot of the world, large dams aren't being built because the suitable sites either already have a dam or have a large number of NIMBYs in residence. The geology matters; build in a limestone area, and your reservoir will never hold water as the rock will always be too permeable. (Put the dam itself in a bad area and it will collapse. That's occasionally happened, until everyone learned not to do that, and far more died from that "learning" than have ever died due to nuclear accidents.)
Look, we don't claim that nuclear power is 100% safe (it clearly isn't) but we do claim that you're putting a falsely low estimate of risk on the alternatives. Remove those rose-tinted glasses!
Death is not the only consequence of a nuclear disaster. Look at the economic damage and the cost of fixing the problem. A large area of Japan is uninhabitable, a large number of people were displaced and are now jobless and living on benefits just outside the exclusion zone. You can argue all you like about whose fault it is and if the actions taken were justified, but none the less it happened.
But most of that is due to excessive caution and fear-mongering. If you can't measure the radiation or the chemical pollution, by what possible standard is it unsafe? Mystic karmic vibration disturbance?
If Fukushima had been a geothermal plant, if instead there had been large off-shore wind farms, even if there had been a coal plant on that very same spot this would not have happened.
That is true. It is also the case that the pollution produced by that plant's normal operation would have caused many cases of respiratory diseases and low-to-medium levels of chronic poisoning. Furthermore, the cost of importing all that coal (Japan has none to speak of domestically) would have resulted in the Japanese people having significantly less money to spend on other things (such as healthcare, but it's really a long list of missed opportunities). As I said before, take off those rose-tinted glasses; don't just see the downsides of one alternative, look the others fairly too and weigh them all in the balance.
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Geothermal plants are so few and produce such low amounts of power that it really can't be used as a legitimate comparison. Besides, there aren't enough sources of geothermal power to be able to produce the energy of even a single nuclear power plant.
You might be surprised though about industrial accidents in geothermal plants, and certainly on a per kilowatt-hour of power generated it would at least be comparable to nuclear power plants, if not a bit higher because nuclear plants have much higher training
Re:It's not just misinformation (Score:5, Insightful)
The coast would have still been fucked up to hell and back by that little tsunami, that you know did all the minor damage that killed over 30.000 people, left hundreds of thousands homeless and a whole lot of other bad things.
But let's whine about Fukushima instead. Because radiation is scarier then big ass waves and earthquakes, since we can see big ass waves and earthquakes. Actual lethality and damage potential is irrelevant when faced with illogical feeling of fear of something we cannot see!
Re:It's not just misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
Some context for others reading your post:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam [wikipedia.org]
Effectively Hydro is the king of devastating disasters in the power industry. Yet most people haven't even heard about this incident.
Radiation (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of the is policy and radiation fears.
They are people (quasi-illegally) living in the exclusion zone.
And they aren't all dropping dead of cancer. Imagine that.
If the US became as radioactive as the exclusion zone, and smoking decreased by 5% and people exercised 5% more, and 5% more people would get colonoscopies the overll cancer rate would PLUNGE.
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The overwhelming contribution to radioactivity from Chernobyl is presently Cs-137 [wikipedia.org]. Current typical dose rates in the exclusion zone, except in the immediate vicinity of the plant itself, are from 2-20uSv per hour. That would have to decrease by a factor of roughly 100 to return to levels compatible with background (~.1uSv/hr). With a halflife of 30 years, that means a wait of roughly 200 years maximum.
Expect the exclusion zone in almost all of Fukushima to be lifted within 10 years
Re:It's not just misinformation (Score:5, Informative)
Your ignorance is showing. The notable fission products released from a nuclear plant accident are 131I, 137Cs, and 90Sr. 131I has a half-life of just over 8 days. In 80 days, it's 1/1000 the level, in 160 days, 1/1M, in 240 days 1/1B. It's a short term hazard.
137Cs and 90Sr each have a half-life of ~30yrs, making them a factor for up to 600 years. Both are beta emitters, so they're primarily a hazard only when inhaled, ingested, or with direct skin contact. However, 90Sr isn't produced in large quantities, so it's not a major factor. That leaves 137Cs. The main concern with 137Cs is with unknown/untreated exposure. It's easy and fairly cheap to treat exposure (including land) if you know about the contamination. 137Cs and 131I are the primary isotopes released at both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
So, what about the others. 238U (4.4B yrs) and 235U (700M yrs) in the fuel have such long half-lives and are primarily alpha emitters, such that you can hold them with just gloves.
Uranium fueled reactors will produce small amounts of 239Pu (24,100 yrs), 242Pu (373K yrs), and 241Pu (14yrs) The 241Pu is the most radioactive of these, but it's produces in much lower quantities than the other two. The other two are less radioactive, and are produced in small quantities. Contrary to urban legend, Pu is not "the deadliest substance known", in fact, the body generally won't absorb it even if eaten (definitely not recommended). The real risk from Pu is if it's inhaled, and still, due to the long half-life of 239Pu and 242Pu, you would have to inhale a notable number of atoms to have any likelihood of increased risk.
And if you switch to thorium fueled reactors, they produce virtually no plutonium, and no weapons grade uranium. The do produce some different isotopes that need to be managed. Overall, they're significantly "cleaner" and "safer" than a uranium fuel cycle.
In either case, using fuel reprocessing, you drastically reduce the nuclear waste. If you do it well, you can separate it into short-lived waste that needs only to be buried for ~400 years, and long-lived waste, which is less of a risk, and could be safely mixed in with the original ore from which the Ur or Th was mined. That ore would be less radioactive than it was before mining. Yes, I did just say that we could dispose of "radioactive waste" by putting it back where we originally mined the Ur/Th, AND that that would leave LESS radiation in the environment than was there naturally.
That would require people get over the fear of the terms "nuclear" and "radiation" (which we're exposed to constantly), and it would require changes in environmental regulations. I know it sounds scary, to put the waste back into the tailings from which it was mined, but that's actually the safest way to dispose of it, and it has a net effect of reducing radiation in the environment.
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Re:It's not just misinformation (Score:4, Informative)
No, but Hanford, and Savannah River are products of creating plutonium for bombs, not nuclear power. Those were also experimental sites before we understood radioactivity well. They bear no particular relevance to using thorium fuel reactors.
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You can't convince the anti-np crowd or conspiracy theorists with facts.
What mis-information, what conspiracy theory? That if you mis-manage a nuclear power plant it fails like Fukushima or Chernobyl.
They just keep on repeating the same misinformation hoping it will eventually override all the evidence.
Well the nuclear crowd is presented with overwhelming evidence that the Nuclear Industry has problems and they still can't accept it. They can't even accept that there is room for improvement. Instead all the comments from the nuclear crowd is that Fukushima is an example of why nuclear power is safe.
For the record I am neither pro or anti nuclear, just that it is an unfortunat
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My bad; I was at least closer to the truth.
Re:Great step. Now about the plutonium. (Score:4, Informative)
That is why nobody listens to anti-nuke people. How is someone outside Japan affected? The rods won't go critical if the building comes down, so there'll be no fallout. So "humanity" isn't under any threat at all. It can't hurt most of the world. So humanity won't care.
Considering that debris and radioactive waste from Fukushima landed in my back yard, it does become somewhat of an issue. And no, I don't live in Japan... but I do live downwind from Japan. At least the Pacific Ocean offered a little bit of protection so the bulk of the cloud from that disaster didn't hit my house. There are some large scale issues with nuclear engineering, and sometimes you do need to consider the effects outside of the immediate area where the reactors are built.
This said, I do think the GP post was way over the top and exaggerating things a bit. The storage of the rods isn't all that difficult to deal with, but it does take some creative solutions.
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Oh, I'm sorry. A little radiation is just fine, right? So I'm sure you'll ask the dentist to take a few extra x-rays. No harm, no foul, right? Every little bit doesn't count, huh?
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Stupid Morons (Score:3)
TEPCO is building new gas power plants INSIDE Tokyo Metropolitan area to make up for the lost capacity of the nuclear plants and canceled plans to decommission older plants that are not enough efficient, or that are in other populated areas. Even Roppongi Hills have their power plants running full time. Gas burns way cleaner than coal but still you have combustion gases going out. Maybe those "environmentalists" learnt how to make photosynthesis because for the rest of the population of Tokyo this means low