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Japan's Nuclear Energy Industry Nears Shutdown
mdsolar sends this quote from an article at the NY Times:
"All but two of Japan's 54 commercial reactors have gone offline since the nuclear disaster a year ago, after the earthquake and tsunami, and it is not clear when they can be restarted. With the last operating reactor scheduled to be idled as soon as next month, Japan — once one of the world's leaders in atomic energy — will have at least temporarily shut down an industry that once generated a third of its electricity. With few alternatives, the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, has called for restarting the plants as soon as possible, saying he supports a gradual phase-out of nuclear power over several decades. Yet, fearing public opposition, he has said he will not restart the reactors without the approval of local community leaders."
https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+time+japan+shutting+down&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Li
And when (if) fusion becomes commercially viable what then? Japan was leading the world in fusion research and it was expected that they'd crack the break-even point first. I'd hate to see such an important development set back because a poorly maintained fusion reactor that was past its decommision date couldn't survive a simultaneous earthquake and tsunami...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Danish television had a reportage on the effect of the Fukushima incident on the people living nearby.
After seeing the reportage, I can understand why they are shutting down the other reactors for the time being. It's one thing reading that nuclear power plants statistically kills very few compared to other sources of energy, it's another thing when you have to leave your ancestors home for 12 generations, or be stuck with a house that nobody will buy because even if it's outside the immediate danger zone and the authorities say it's safe, noone wants to take the risk.
Whether fair or not, the incident violated the trust people had in the administrators of the nuclear tech, and it's going to take something to earn that trust back.
And what are Japan, Germany, etc. going to do for energy once they've phased out their big, scary nuclear power plants? Unless they find a way to quickly and effectively implement large-scale solar plants/farms, geothermal, etc. they're going to resort to burning fossil fuel. A big step backwards because, under extreme circumstances, nuclear can be dangerous.
You know what's even more dangerous than an accident at a nuclear plant? A world-wide war over the planet's dwindling fossil fuel supplies.
My dad was saying that Tokyo is depressing, apparently there are power shortages so most of the signs and escalators are turned off and the city is dark. How are they supposed to make up their energy requirements if they stop using nuclear?
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
It's O.K, it's just another pathetic anti-nuclear article submitted by mdsolar, a known kook and scaremonger. It's unlikely the NYTime article says anything remotely like mdsolars summary implies. In fact, just assume the complete opposite of anything mdsolar has written in the summary.
It's a shame, really. I'd love to see Japan eventually replacing the old reactors with the newer, safer ones. Especially in the more stable areas. I realize there's still a lot of hysteria in that area, still, but reason and logic could quell their fear. I think most people at with at least a modicum understanding of tech-- and most that I know, I've gathered from this site and the links provided-- realize the benefits newer reactors offer over the old.
Even so, if there are two nations with a history and will capable of innovating new tech for energy, it's Japan and Germany. I wish them the best in the effort. Who knows, the whole world might benefit from the research. Can you imagine a world not handicapped by the need for fossil fuels? Many oppressive regimes would lose the foundation on which they stand.
... but probably not much more than some of the more +1 Insightful commenters here.
The core of their problem is arrogance and the influence business has over government regulators. The days of shoguns and daimyos are long behind Japan but somehow the mindset still lives on. There are a few very large companies in Japan with a rich and tight lineage that dates back to before the Meiji restoration. Their influence over government and their "job-for-life" filial piety along with their reluctance to challenge the people "in charge" of things has led to a poorly regulated nuclear industry which allowed the Fukushima disaster to occur.
But Japan is not "unique" in this. It just so happens that they were the first to get tripped up with a natural disaster. But that said, they did a lot of things in the handling that simply made it worse and worse. (Still, they came in 2nd when you compare Fukushima to the BP oil spill and BP's handling of that.) In the US, the nuclear industry and been playing a pushing game where the NRC pushes the nuclear energy companies and the nuclear energy companies push back through various means not the least of which are lobbying and other forms of politics. One difference between the US and Japan is found in the success of independent watchdog groups who take personal interest in the environment and the safety of nuclear energy. Greenpeace is a huge annoyance, but they also serve an important purpose in that they can and do bring light to problems that would otherwise be swept under the rug. This exists less in Japan and problems that some people have knowledge of are often unheard and cannot speak. Their lack of openness is a critical problem.
My initial reaction to this turn is that Japan is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They are an emotional and over-reaction group of people. But the US made them that way.... the US did it to Germany as well. When we 'pacified' them over the decades, we shifted their thinking and their sense of reason. So instead of saying "okay, here are the causes of the problem, let's fix them!" they are more concerned about who is to blame and are focusing on the fact that nuclear energy is an awesome and powerful source of energy which is also very dangerous. Well, yes... yes it is. But they forget that it's also controllable and containable with vigilant regulation and oversight.
Vigilance of regulation and oversight are expensive... and annoying... and definitely slow things down and make things cost more. But without it...?
Many of the Japanese nuclear plants are old unsecure BWRs, they should start working on safer ones so they can shut them down in 10 years.
At least he has a name.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Wow, that sounds like JUST want we need -- Germany and Japan starving for energy.
Certainly that will end well!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I'm not Japanese, but I'm pretty sure the only people opposing nuclear power in Japan are in politics and fearmongers from other countries. Sounds like a global politics issue, which is stupid.
I'm sure the citizens will be thrilled when they drop coal burning plants down right next to the nuclear plants that didn't emit any sort of noticeable byproducts.
The Japanese have been very successful in curbing demand. I was over in Japan for a week on a business trip last year, and it was interesting to see how they did it. This included absolutely all hand-driers in toilets being switched off, less air-conditioning (room temperature was set for 28C in the office), the business week of large corporations shifted to reduce peak-week-time demand and increase that on the weekend, and a move to more relaxed corporate dress-code - which included in many cases, a small towel attached to the waistband with which to mop off the sweat form the oppressive environment. There were no doubt more measures that I wasn't aware of, but life definitely carries on as normal without power cuts.
Our suspicion is that this state of affairs will become the norm.
... that they're currently shipping in in vast quantities? I'm sure thats doing wonders for their CO2 footprint.
It's the NYT paywall - you just need to change the '_r' parameter in the URL to 0 instead of 4.
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They are going to have to get their electricity from somewhere & generating capacity don't grow on trees.
Unless they burn, um, err, apples? Yes, APPLES!
Man, I'm awesome!
So business created the tsunami?
Typically anonymous and cowardly comment. Business decided where to put the reactor, in a location they knew were unsafe, and government forced that decision through. So while business didn't create the tsunami, they deliberately created the situation in which a tsunami would cause a meltdown, and did so with government oversight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Great... we have politics trumping both science and democracy.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
They certainly had enough room to make cuts, when I was last in Kyoto every hotel room had SuperKettles running in every room and heated toilet seats ... ironic given the location
FTFY.
Remember, this is the land of the mandatory home inspections by the police. Let's not hold them up as the model of a perfect society.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Yet if you look at they graphic in the article it looks like they've only managed to reduce demand by about 10%. Not a huge reduction when you take into account the changes in living standards. Just goes to show that conservation will only go so far and it's all the things in the background that a required on a day to day basis that is the big hitters.
Germany are taking the route of pretending to get by with wind power by importing nuclear electricity from France. That doesn't work for Japan.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/14/europe-power-supply-idUSL5E8DD87020120214
Yeah - my bad.
"poorly maintained fission reactor" is what I should have typed.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Last year Japan’s trade balance fell into an annual deficit for the first time since 1980, driven by subdued global demand and soaring fossil fuel imports in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear power crisis.
I fully understand their desire to decrease dependence on nuclear power in light of the disaster, but quitting "cold turkey" obviously has had a strong negative impact.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
From what I read in the western media, TEPCO is losing incredible amounts of money cleaning up the Fukushima mess.
The Japanese also seem less than happy ("Private panel blames TEPCO's 'systematic negligence'") [note to Slashdot readers: that Asahi Shimbun newspaper doesn't seem to have a paywall].
However, I also read that TEPCO was strongly involved in developing Sodium-Sulfur batteries to help solve the storage problem associated with large rollout of intermittent electricity generators (i.e. solar only when it's sunny and wind turbines only when it's windy). Anything else than Sodium-Sulfur or other cheap redox couples, is probably too expensive for real large-scale use.
So, I really hope that the battery division of TEPCO survives any lawsuits/bankruptcy procedures/government sanctions because they seem to be working on transitioning Japan away from the nuclear addiction and towards a very clean (but slightly explosive) technology that the rest of the world is probably eager to share.
Anybody in Japan please comment if this makes sense. I don't read Japanese and have never been there.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
It isn't a summary, it's a quote taken directly from the article. So yes the article does say exactly the same as the summary.
I lived in northern Japan last year during the summer. The Japanese voluntarily cut back their electricity use so much that they didn't need to impose energy rationing. I don't know if that has changed since I left.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
So business created the tsunami?
Typically anonymous and cowardly comment. Business decided where to put the reactor, in a location they knew were unsafe, and government forced that decision through. So while business didn't create the tsunami, they deliberately created the situation in which a tsunami would cause a meltdown, and did so with government oversight.
Business doesn't decide anything in Japan. Japan has one of the most rigid centralized governments anywhere in the world. If you want to move a local street sign, you have to get permission from Tokyo. The government decides everything over there. I don't want to call Japan fascist... since they do have free elections there... but the Japanese government certainly does pick winners and losers in their corporate field in the way that classic fascist governments did, and the corporations in Japan take their marching orders from Tokyo. This is by design, and it's been the model since post WWII. This model is supposedly why Japan was going to rule the world via business (instead of by military force) by the mid-90's. Several books in the 80's touted the superiority of this model to the American market system, declaring the US system obsolete. It didn't quite work out that way. Japan is now in its' third decade of economic doldrums, yet the government clings to this top-down model. One of the things that Japanese companies found when they started building factories and plants in the US and abroad was that they had much more freedom to operate locally than back at home.
You seem to think that businesses tell the government what to do over there. Quite the opposite. The government bureaucracy completely rules that country. If the reactors were built in a bad place, then Tokyo was just fine with that.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Actually, this is one of the rare cases where business is the force for "good", while public opinion is the force for "evil".
If public didn't hear associate "radiation" with "oh god, a HORRIBLE DEATH GLOWING GREEN!", reactor subsystems would have been upgraded to more modern ones quite a while ago. But they can't be upgraded, because "upgrades to nuclear power plants peripherals" will be spun as "upgrading nuclear power plants" which will be heard as "we are building more nuclear power, HORRIBLE DEATH GLOWING GREEN!".
So we end up having tech from 60s (when entire industry was born in 50s!) instead of modern reactors and modern peripherals that would have taken the punishment of that tsunami. Hell, we can't even research new tech because of public opinion, and are forced to use old tech. Fukushima was a great demonstration of how well plants were actually made - many forget that plants were built to withstand 7 magnitudes and reasonable tsunamis, and got hit by 9 magnitudes and biggest tsunami in a century and then some. And even so, the plant didn't cause a single death, even with tsunami wiping out essentially all infrastructure of the region and killing 30.000 people.
We really should make a name for "stupid, loud and opinionated people" as a concept. "Sheepism" maybe?
The main reason Japan was stuck on Gen I reactor design was because the COMPANIES that ran the reactors didn't want to spend the money to upgrade and the GOVERNMENT thought that idea was just peachy.
It's called regulatory capture and the Japanese rewrote the book on it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I live in Japan. Life here isn't like it is in the west. Before the tsunami the air conditioner in the office was set to 26 degrees C. After it was set to 28 decrees C. In the winter, the heater was set to 15 degrees C before the tsunami and 14 degrees C after. Even then, because it was a cold winter where I am, they ended up pushing up the thermostat to 15 degrees anyway.
BTW, I work in a school and the class rooms are unheated/uncooled just like always.
Conservation works reasonably well. The problem was that the Japanese were already conserving.
Business decided where to put the reactor
Uh, no.
Technical reasons decided where to put the reactor. Like all nuclear power plants, Fukushima needed a massive body of water to assist in cooling the plant. Japan isn't known for its huge rivers or lakes, so the coast becomes the default location to place power plants.
Don't forget the strength of the Yen and the 2-3 months where the auto industry production was crippled in Japan.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Probably not....Japanese people are much more willing to put up with personal discomfort for the sake of the collective. A big part of their culture revolves around keeping harmony with the people around them, so speaking up with a complaint is unbecoming. Also having an idea that differs from other peoples' is frowned upon. This summer will probably turn out to be the same as last summer, with the rolling blackouts making a comeback. Although since more power plants have been shut down, the radius of blackouts might be extended. I don't know what my company will do during the blackouts if they come to our area, since we develop software and obviously can't do that with no power ;P.
I didn't think that the reactors at Fukushima were poorly maintained. The disaster planning/design however did not address both an earthquake and a tsunami of that size. Now they should have anticipated both as the plant was located along a shoreline, but that's a different matter. When the earthquake hit, the reactors shut down immediately and the emergency diesel generators kicked in to provide power and cooling according to plan. But these generators were located either on the ground floor or basements. The sea wall around the plant would protect it against it a 25 ft wave. The problem was the wave was at least 40 ft. The diesel generators were wiped out and the plant lost all power. Disaster planning did not address this scenario and operators had to improvise. I would also say that the company TEPCO as a whole was slow to react and not forthcoming about the reality of the situation.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"Now it is a competition between Germany and Japan to innovate the non-nuclear market with their new technologies."
Germany will have to buy a good bit of nuclear power from the French.
Yay for innovation!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Exactly, I'm no big fan of nuclear but the alternatives are either even worse (dirtier, more damaging, unsustainable etc), or simply not viable at all.
Until such time as viable alternatives become available, they should be working on building more nuclear plants while improving the efficiency and safety of them.
Building nuclear power plants in an area that's prone to natural disasters was never a good plan...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The Earth surface receives on average 116 petawatts from the Sun continually. Humanity as a whole uses less than 20 terawatts. We could power 7000 Earths with that energy.
We don't need to use less, we need to get smarter on how we capture it instead of burning through the reserves.
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Is that true, or is it another fallacious argument aiming at representing nuclear industry as the poor, benevolent guy trying his best to go good but being thwarted by crazy, enraged, hateful, irrational, almighty hippies, luddites and joe-six-packs? Honest question here. I have a hard time figuring out how a bunch of idealist activists did prevent the development of safer nuclear reactor designs and, if they were so powerful as to be able to do that, how were people demonstrating in the streets by the thousands all over the world incapable of preventing the Iraq invasion for instance? This just doesn't cut it.
My feeling is that there is at least as much lies, blindness and dishonesty on the proponent side of NP than on the opposing side. In any case the condescending, contemptuous attitude towards NP skeptics that is so common here on slashdot in particular makes me strongly think that the issues at hand are definitely not as simple and clear-cut as the nuclear fanatics would like to make it appear.
> In contrast, Germany has worked hard to make heatings and houses fit for the 21st century.
Yep: we are coming up to 10 years in our PassivHaus in central Germany: not only is there little need for active heating, but it is incredibly comfortable to live in: draught / sound proofing, no hot/cold spots, ...