Slashdot Mirror
Japan To Be Without Nuclear Power After May 5
mdsolar writes in with a Reuters article about the continued fallout of Fukushima on the nuclear industry in Japan. "Japan will within weeks have no nuclear power for the first time in more than 40 years, after the trade minister said two reactors idled after the Fukushima disaster would not be back online before the last one currently operating is shut down. Trade Minister Yukio Edano signaled it would take at least several weeks before the government, keen to avoid a power crunch, can give a final go-ahead to restarts, meaning Japan is set on May 6 to mark its first nuclear power-free day since 1970. 'If we thoroughly go through the procedure, it would be (on or) after May 6 even if we could restart them,' Edano told a news conference, adding that whether they can actually be brought back online is still up to ongoing discussions. The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where a huge earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 triggered radiation leaks, has hammered public faith in nuclear power and prevented the restart of reactors shut down for regular maintenance checks, with all but one of 54 reactors now offline."
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
...Japan is over-reacting.
Nuclear energy is still cleanest and best especially given the need for power over there. Big mistake Japan.
They can dial back on their use of lights at night now. At least the should be able to around the Fukushima reactors. Everything there has been irradiated enough to glow like a bright night light, right?
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
Still haven't seen any good articles about where they have offloaded all that generation to. Are they burning more coal now that 53 reactors are offline?
I love how it sounds so simple. Just shut the nuclear power plants off, stop generating electricity and bury the fuel forever. Of course, for a country with few natural resources - how are you going to make up for the power generation short-fall. Nuclear power plants are really efficient at generating massive amounts of power, more so than any other power generation technique available today (by size, configuration, and technology). They can't just throw up a handful of wind turbines and hope to call it even. They can't erect coal fired or natural gas plants, especially if their reserves of such resources are marginal at best (Japan is an island, after all). All petroleum-based power generation will just make oil and it's derivatives vastly expensive - it STILL won't make up for the gap.
Are they going to ration power? Black out selected parts of the country to help keep the demand in check with the new available supply? Eliminate enough power generation technology, and you suddenly send your nation back to pre-Industrial Revolution economy... not good for a country that is the current technological leader of the entire planet.
I suppose its up to China to reinvigorate the Nuclear industry with their program of heavy investment in the coming years. At least they don't have irrational fears about radiation....of course, lets just hope they maintain those new reactors and don't suffer any fatal earthquakes.
The industry is busily building new reactors in developing countries like Turkey - even though the local population there really, really doesn't want to live near a nuclear reactor (not that that has ever stopped the shady N-Industry). For every Japan reactor they loose, they'll build 3 - 4 new ones in developing countries eager to join the "prestigious club" of developed nations that use nuclear power. And then we'll probably see brand new Fukushimas/Tchernobyls happening in countries that could have - and should have - invested in renewables like Wind and Solar Energy instead.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Where will Godzilla go now to get powered up????
A while back I left a comment here explaining that Japan needs to stop devaluing their currency, because they'll be in a hole without so many resources needed to rebuild their broken infrastructure, and it would be much cheaper for them to buy these resources from around the world if the Yen was valued much higher, than what their government allows. Well, guess what, that comment is still completely appropriate today as it was then.
Japan needs a lot of raw materials and energy, so they really need to trade with countries at least for those resources, and stronger currency would help Japan immensely, especially now, that they've been hit with too many natural disasters and they need all sorts of materials and energy to rebuild everything.
Japan needs to rebuild their infrastructure in many places, so they need to allow their currency to appreciate, so that more investments would be put into it, so they could buy more, and they need to stop listening the insane Keynesian charlatans, who really caused their economy to stagnate for 20 years. Nobody should be bailed out and nobody should be protected from rising currency with government intervention. Having currency fall looks good on a quarterly statement due to more sales in devalued currency, but it's terrible for the actual citizens and consumers, who have rising prices because the government destroys the money.
Maybe the Japanese should think about kicking their government in the balls for these 20 years and taking away their ability to print money in the first place and do something smart for a change and switch to saving and trading in gold and let the investments come into the country, because that's what would happen.
They would fix the unemployment in a hurry, with more investments coming in and they would be able to fix their infrastructure with strong money and they wouldn't even need to make these cuts in scientific spending.
Also while the Japanese have to re-evaluate some of their nuclear power plant safety features, such as not all generators being in one basement together, or whatever else, including extra cabling to connect the plants to the grid, they cannot just rely on buying up oil to run their electrical grid. Oil is going to get more and more expensive and if they keep devaluing the Yen, it will be as expensive for them, nominally, as it is going to be for the Americans, and it's not a good example and a path to follow.
You can't handle the truth.
It really is.
All because one plant was designed as cheaply as possible and left in a state for years, they ban the entire industry, effectively, from continuing? BRILLIANT IDEA.
And I come from Scotland, where a considerable amount of our power is from wind!
So now, most likely, energy prices have skyrocketed, as well as a few other prices, because they will need to make up for the huge lack of nuclear power.
Good luck to them. If the country sinks, they have only their self to blame.
No, they're not going all non-nuclear. They're shutting down and doing an audit of each reactor. The first one to clear the audit and restart won't be able to restart until a few weeks after the last running one is shut down for the audit.
That's ALL! They're not abandoning all nuclear power, or anything like that. As others noted, they really don't have a choice except nuclear, currently, what with Tokyo's ~40000 megawatt requirements, on top of the whole train network. And that's without thinking of industry...
Suffice it to say that Japan can't go no-nuke for a while, even if they wanted to.
Nuclear Power has its issues. But the alternatives are not exactly free of cost either. At the end of hte day, the costs of nuclear power are arguably less than anything else that is capable of generating power at that scale. Wind / Solar would be optimal, but they do not have the scale yet to be seriously considered as alternatives unless you are content to live at a level of technology comparable to 1910.
From an environmental standpoint, I think it would be a better choice to try to deal with the accumulated nuclear waste than to deal with trying to undo the damage of the toxic emissions from using fossil fuels. The nuclear waste is at least highly localized and it can be collected and contained. You cannot really clean up all the emissions from burning coal or oil.
The problem with Nuclear power is that the costs associated with an accident are so massive (environmentally and financially) and they are incurred all at once. You will never convince most people to buy a car for $30 000 in one lump sum, but it is easy to sell someone on paying $40 000 if you tell them they can pay a little bit each month.
END COMMUNICATION
Dam breaches following Japan earthquake
A dam in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan was breached following the recent earthquake and tsunamis which have devastated the country.
According to media reports, the dam broke on Friday, with a wall of water washing away 1800 homes downstream.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
In comparison of what is already naturally in the world (ie. biosphere) it is less then a tiny amount of radiation. The amount is literally like dumping your swimming pool into the ocean and panicking that water level will rise.
Of course, the local contamination is Not a Good Thing, but that is a Japanese problem caused by Japanese safety measures.
I happen to carpool with a gentleman who's sister was a lead engineer at Chernobyl. From what he tells me, some Communist party official's son was working on his doctoral thesis. He wanted to do an experiment. They told him it was a really, really bad idea. They were overruled by the father. And the rest as they say is history.
The son ends up dying and the dad was thrown in prison.
So even with an unsafe design, everything was working fine until all that political interference happened.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
If Fukushima had been a thorium reactor, Japan, and the rest of the world, would not have endured much of anything. Nor would there have been Chernobyl. Nor would there have been 3-Mile Island.
The facts are in, boys and girls, and thorium is at the top of sustainable energy production. Solar isn't even in the running and wind has proven to be costly, unreliable and a vast waste of land usage. The debate is over.
People denying that fact are akin to Holocaust deniers, people against civil rights and against gender equality. It's time for them to get into the current century and pull their heads out of the sand.
I call balderdash!
Only something so valuable as to be utterly priceless can defy rational thought to the extent that it isn't even considered, and hence of no value, like the value of the condition of the environment of "spaceship Earth" we would leave to our progeny.
Nuclear energy (civilian nuclear energy) isn't even viable economically, and only came into being in the USA to support the military nuclear weapons programs. The Department of Energy spun up the Tennessee Valley Authority under the threat to civilian power companies that their (TVA) nuclear energy "would be too cheap to meter". Of course, they lied, and the civilian power companies only committed to nuclear power when massive "corporate welfare" flowed in from the government. Those subsidies included, but were not limited to (1) grants for nuclear plant design, (2) passed legislation to underwrite power company liability by the taxpayer, (3) grants to fund nuclear fuel rod assemblies, (4) wide latitude in operational deregulation, (5) leave in limbo used fuel rod reprocessing, and (6) leave largely unaddressed the issue of nuclear power plant decommissioning and hazardous waste disposal (100's of metric tons of low-level radioactive waste && multiple metric tons of high-level radioactive waste, plus whatever is stored in the prerequisite cooling ponds.)
One question neither answered nor acknowledged by the civilian nuclear power industry or the government is the longer-term period of radioactive waste management. At least one reactor (#3 ?) at Fukushima Dai-ichi used a hotter, more dangerous blend of uranium and plutonium called MOX. This has a radioactive half-life of 20,000 years. At that rate, even 500,000 years later (25xTau) this waste would still be deadly to all living things, and would need to be re-packaged periodically. Does any capitalist society actually plan that far into the future, as well as funding such a long-term project? Hardly so. That is the nature of the economic order we live under, corporate socialism (aka fascism). We have to leave it to science fiction writers to imagine such a future -- like "A Canticle For Leibowitz". Yes, a new technocratic religion is borne ...
3/4 of Earth is covered in water. Water is comprised of 2hydrogen and 1oxygen, both useful products separately but when combined turn back into water. Only the method of splitting water apart should be a question solved by regional conditions, not limited to civilian nuclear energy. New methods to economically store metallic hydrogen will evolve.
Then what do the plant operators do? Acknowledge that they made a mistake? No, they try to make excuses, try to blame it on a disaster of "unprecedented" magnitude, try to claim they were adequately prepared for largest earthquake and tsunami known. They still claim they did their homework, even now when it's clear they didn't. That's not a recipe for inspiring confidence.
I guess that's a sign that the Japanese have been fully Westernized.
A Samurai would have committed seppuku for such a screw up.
A Yakuza would at least have cut off finger.
If you really think there is a 'tiny' amount of radiation being leaked, why don't you go live there?
Don't speak the language, don't have a job there, and the services in the area suck at the moment. That's why I'm not moving next to Fukushima. That covers Chernobyl just as well, for that matter.
I don't read AC A human right
Than nuclear has... Imagine if a few months after Deepwater Horizon the USA had said 'We're not using any more oil. Period." How would we make up that considerable energy gap?
This is essentially what Japan is doing. They are slitting their own throats for a PR move. At least 30% of their electricity comes from nuclear. How are they going to make that up? It's like asking them to go back to the 60's and start all over again in terms of infrastructure.
For a country that is an industrial giant, it's not a good idea to lose 30% of your energy capacity. I mean, even if you switched everyone over to LED lightbulbs instead of incandescent, I still don't think you'd get 30%
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Japan is now moving the regulators to the environment to create more distance. See below on why that is imporant.
You are assuming that regulators can weigh the pros (cheap power) vs. the cons (rare events ) in a impartial manner. A weakness of regulation can be “Regulator Capture” where the interest of regulators and the industry align, thus diminishing true oversight..
For example, in Japan, the industrial ministry regulated nuclear power. The ministry pushed nuclear because industry needed cheap power. Bureaucrats graduated from low paying public jobs to higher paying industry jobs. Regulating a technical industry requires hiring technical people, which means hiring from the industry that they are regulating – and of course those people tend of have confidence in the system that they built.
Just picking nits here... But it makes no sense to compare nuclear to hydrogen power. Hydrogen would be an energy storage medium (like a battery). The method of splitting the water is exactly what we're talking about. Nuclear? Solar? Coal? Oil? It doesn't decrease the amount of energy needed to "create" that pure hydrogen - if anything the inefficiencies will increase it. Currently most "low cost" schemes to generate hydrogen do not involve extracting it from water, but extracting it from some form of hydrocarbon. Hydrogen is great, but like batteries it has its pros and cons.
+1 Disagree
After spending several years discussing a wide variety of issues with Engineering departments at various Universities about Nuclear Power I came to some conclusions:
1) Nuclear power is sort of a term that needs to be described, as more than one possibility. When you think of Nuclear power, you think of Uranium. That simply isn't the case, there are alternatives, including the most promising, which is Thorium.
2) A decision was made a long time ago, by the government, that Uranium would be the only nuclear power that would be acceptable. This was for cold war reasons, because Plutonium was required for Nuclear weapons.
3) Besides the by products of Plutonium, to make weapons, there was huge private interests in the University community and research that also had a part to play to insure the Uranium route was the path that the United States would follow.
These three realizations of the historic Cold War, Military and Private institutional interests is why Nuclear Power is in the horrible state it is in today.
However, the technology has come quite a long way since the 1950's and through various advancements in materials and ceramic technologies, Uranium power no longer has any advantages economically over Thorium based Nuclear Power plants.
Besides the problem of refinement and fuel quantity is much more desirable with Thorium than it is with uranium.
Thorium process technology does away with any sort of explosion, beyond steam, that might occur at a Nuclear Thorium based power plant.
Including the generation of huge clouds of hydrogen, which as we see at Fukishima, blew highly radioactive parts of the building and infrastructure into half a mile trajetcories all around the plant with the explosions it created when the zirconium casings were melting around the fuel rods in contact with water, producing gigantic releases of Hydrogen gas.
Thorium is now a very viable energy alternative and with the advancements in ceramics in recent decades, all of the engineering issues are much more easily handled. Cost is competitive, to operate as compared to Uranium plants.
So as I have been watching the news, I have been wondering why such countries as Iran who is just really beginning on a energy program for their nations, would want to go the Uranium route? Why not just switch to Thorium?
My personal opinion about the Iran bomb issue, is WHO CARES. I mean lots of countries have the bomb, even wacko's like North Korea who constantly broadcasts every day it will turn the South Koreans into a sea of fire....blah blah...for the past several decades.
So I don't see Iran with a bomb any different that Iran without a bomb. Like most countries , Iran primarily do these things for national reasons. Anyone foolish enough to actually use one will be turned into a glass parking lot. Historically this line of thought seems to prevent their use....even through the nearly tragic 1960's with the cuban missile crisis. This keep in mind was all through the big terrorist years of 1980's with the CIA even back then publishing papers that the Soviets would use Syrian nationals to plant suitcase size nukes in large US cities.
Never materialized, although today it is Al Queda that would be doing such things....just another boogey man in my opinion.
So I am glad to see Japan put down the Uranium Nuclear option, but the country should reconsider Thorium.
I am also aware, through various research, that there seems to be a strong international reproach, mainly from the U.N. and NATO, to restrict or discourage any sort of discussion or idea of Thorium options for power and to keep them out of the press. (Forbid to publish.) Now, it is in my own mind clear why this would be the case. If the world went Thorium, Nuclear weapons would be a _very_ hard proposition indeed without Nuclear fuel.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The problem with hydrogen, specifically, splitting hydrogen atoms from oxygen atoms, is that current processes require more energy to be input than you get out. The conversion process is a net energy sink, and until someone figures out a way to split them without an energy input, hydrogen is NOT going to be a viable option.
Japan has banned driving cars and going outside as "too dangerous."
There's a big difference between 'handful' and enough turbines to power a substantial part of a country's electricity needs. That's his point. You can't do it with even several hundred turbines. By the time you're looking at building enough wind turbines to replace a nuclear plant, especially off-shore, you're looking at cost similar to or even exceeding that of a nuclear plant. There's a LOT of sunk costs with a nuclear plant.
Please don't take this to mean that I'm not for renewable power, it's just that I believe that we still need a mixed supply - my 'ideal' carbon-neutral mix is 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, and 20% other such as hydro and geothermal.
That means that if I was in charge of Japan, not only would I be reactivating those nuclear plants, I'd be building more - though part of the building would be constructing modern 3rd generation plants to replace the less safe 1st and 2nd generation plants currently in use. One thing I like to note is that the Fukushima plant was older than both TMI and Chernobyl. Modern plants are far safer.
I don't read AC A human right
Once the rolling blackouts in Tokyo start, they'll find a way to get any and all undamaged reactors up and running, regulations and fears notwithstanding.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami deaths: 15000
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant deaths: 3? 4?
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation deaths: 0
Interesting note: While researching this post, I searched for the words "dead", "death", and "killed" on the wikipedia page for Fukushima Daiichi, but these words were not used.
You have forty years of relatively safe power production in Japan and the fear alone of an invisible threat shut them all down.
Don't misunderstand that I do not think it was a disaster -- a good bloody nose for the face of complacency and corporate greed which was well deserved. But I am wondering when the crying child will grow up, get over it, and go to school again.
This is why terrorism works. It is a self inflicted wound of the weak minded.
Nuclear power is safe and there is enough nuclear fuel for millenia. Stupid NIMBYs and petroleum puppet "green" parties are going to doom us all.
nuclear is a base load .. because daiichi blew up after it lost connectivity to teh grid (and oil burning backup). .. millions of years ago ... and maybe even got a sunburn. .. in a few million years : D
dinosaurs enjoyed breezy summers and cool waterfalls
our evolved off-spring will be repacking and recasting our nuclear waste
Unless you live, there, you're not accepting the risks. You're demanding someone else accepts the risks.
And why? If you don't live there, then you're not affected by any "risk" of power outages and so forth in Japan.