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Japan Plans To Scrap Nuclear Plants After 40 Years
An anonymous reader writes with this news as carried by the San Francisco Chronicle: "After the nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima plant, 'Japan says it will soon require atomic reactors to be shut down after 40 years of use to improve safety.' If, however, a nuclear plant is deemed still safe it may continue operation."
I promised my neighbors I will stop burning cow dung after 10 years, unless I deem it doesn't still smell like sh*t.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Japan will continue to use nuclear plants after 40 years after some political/financial lubrication and rubber stamping a safety report, just like every other first world nation with old plants in the news lately.
War is peace; Freedom is slavery, etc...
Mmm...chocolate rations...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Doesn't seem like a change, unless they presently don't shutdown an unsafe plant before 40 years.
So... inspect old plants and shut them down if they're not operating safely. That sounds oddly reasonable.
40 years old nuclear plants will be shut down, unless they're still safe. --> 40 years old nuclear plants that are no longer safe will be shut down
One would assume that this has been the policy all along. Hell, if a nuclear plant is deemed "no longer safe" they should shut it down whether it's 20, 40 or 60 years old!
So, they'll keep doing what they have always been doing, except that they now introduced arbitrary time limit, which they can circumvent if they want to.
It'll be interesting to see if Gen 3+ and Gen 4 nuclear reactors will be allowed longer terms of lease, given that they have less parts to fail and more passive saftey systems. I think that nuclear could really be a keystone of Japan's nuclear energy future. That, and the Japanese have done research on how to extract uranium from the sea after Uranium prices spike in the future once easily mineable resources become exhausted. If we don't get breeders or thorium running, Japan has done the research.
http://www.jaea.go.jp/jaeri/english/ff/ff43/topics.html
Japan's only major energy resource is the sea. And the sea has enough Uranium to keep Japan ticking long after their population dwindles away due to their low birth rate.
So what have they done up to this point? Shouldn't all plants require safety inspections, all the time, and if they're not up to standards they get shut down? Age of the plant shouldn't matter at all -- in fact, a plant built 50 years ago should be held to the same standards as a plant built 2 years ago. It doesn't matter if putting generators in the basement next to the ocean was deemed to be okay in 1967. If current standards say your backup power has to be protected from tsunamis, then the plant has to be fixed, or shut down.
Speak before you think
They are dependent on nuclear energy obviously, and 40 years is probably quite a feat. But after those 40 years, when there is radioactive waste that will last for thousands, and after leaving certain zones inhabitable for centuries... was it worth it?
That also implies that if a plant is unsafe, it still gets 40 years. Otherwise, what does the time limit mean? At the end of 40 years, a plant is either safe or unsafe. If safe, they can keep going. If unsafe, why was it still running?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The engineering was fine, they just didn't have a backup backup generator that was hardened against tsunami. It surprises me a bit that nobody thought to plan for that eventuality being located where it is, but they didn't. The plant itself survived a significant earthquake and only had troubles because it couldn't cool down when it lost power.
Also look into Thorium for the reaction process, which has fewer risks and more advantages compared to Uranium.
Care to show me an active, commercial scale Thorium based reactor? There aren't any. India is presumably working on one.
Personally, I would rather take my chances with a well defined, well researched, well engineered technology than one that has yet to see the light of day in real world terms. By all means, do the damned research - make and run an 10 GW Thorium reactor and get back to us.
The problem isn't engineering - it's politics and economics. Politics in that companies running nuclear plants had managed big time regulatory capture (especially in Japan). That blew up in their face when both TEPCO and the Japanese government remained asleep at the wheel for over a decade. Recall that there were numerous geologic studies that indicated that Fukashima wasn't safe as originally built. TEPCO didn't want to put the money into the plant and the government didn't want to bother TEPCO. Just a couple of million dollars of sea wall and spare generators might have saved countless billions of dollars. Economics in the fact that the US government, at least, is basically insuring the nuclear power industry because private insurers think the risks too large. That makes non nuclear "alternative" energy less competitive that it should be. To really solve the problem for the long term, the playing field needs to be as flat as possible. For long term survival of nuclear power, the industry really needs to figure out a way to make the plants less expensive because they're really pricier than it looks. And solve the waste problem, but that, again, is more political than anything else.
I'd like my Unicorn now......
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you look at the history of the Research and Development of nuclear reactors you will notice they were scaled up from test reactors to full sized commercial reactors very quickly. Speaking in general terms if you look closely at the design of most commercial reactors they just look like big versions of the test reactors. Even the AP-1000 and the EPR reactors suffer from a plethora of design inadequacies that demonstrate the full life cycle of a reactor was not considered.
I reason this because the simplest and most obvious design change to Nuclear reactors would be to build them underground which would mean any nuclear accident would be automatically contained and the entire facility sealed off and, if necessary, flooded with water. It would also mean decommissioning and disposal of the reactor could take place in-situ and that would avoid the energy costs (around one third of the reactors lifetime output) incurred. I've only ever seen an IFR reactor design underground but there are many other safety features that can be applied.
The argument for Nuclear Power generally ignores the entire nuclear industry paradigm and focuses on reactor technology as the answer, whilst the argument against focuses on the consequences of an industry that was rushed into existence based of the premise of nuclear weapons production. But I believe there is a middle ground based on spent fuel containment and a proper infrastructure to support it.
There is little doubt that Fukushima would be much easier to deal with now if the spent fuel pools were empty but the truly sobering thought is that US reactors of the same design have up to five times the density of spent fuel contained in those pools and the same type of accident in one of those reactors would almost certainly result in a un-contained plutonium fire.
It is possible to build a much safer nuclear industry but it would start with an international effort that incorporated the Joint industry findings the NRC commissioned AND the EPR design enhancements applied to all new reactor designs. That and a proper infrastructure program to handle spent fuel would answer most of the arguments the critics have of the Nuclear industry.
It's really only attributable to the arrogance of the 50's thinking that leaves legal artifacts like the Price-Anderson act in existence long after it's use by date and demonstrates that announcements such of these are as insincere as the regulatory enforcement that led Japan, and the world, into this mess in the first place.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No, the design of the reactor complex was fine, they could also have engineered a taller wall to protect against it as well. At some point you do have to draw a line as to how over engineered you're going to be. Based upon what was understood about the risks they built what they could, and considering that the wave was substantially larger than what they were anticipating things went quite well.
I'm just surprised that they didn't have a secondary backup generator in case something happened that prevented the primary backup generator from working or for periods when they needed to take it apart for maintenance.
I remember reading Asimov's 'Foundation'; where people after colonising the whole galaxy, fell into lackluster apathy and gave up on their knowlege of science, abandoning nuclear energy in favour of combusting carbon based fuels. I'm glad Asimov's not alive to see the day when the human race lives up to the end of days scenario he thought so terrible before even touching the stars.
But unless its different where you are, its a tick the box and pay the fee event, the 'age' at which you require a doctors approval is still almost a tick in the box too, no real work goes into check on these.
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What's the alternative?
Japan is devoid of natural resources.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
40 years was the original design life for nuclear reactors. Of course, this article is pretty much 'life as normal'. In the USA you get a permit good for X years, normally 40. When a reactor reaches the end of that life, the owner of the plant has to decide whether to shut it down or move for permit renewal, where they have to, guess what, prove the plant is still safe to standards. That most likely means spending some millions on plant refurbishment/upgrades.
Look at Fukushima - it was scheduled to be shut down.
That being said - I DO support replacing old nuclear plants with new ones - they're more efficient and safer.
I don't read AC A human right