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."

Comments

Re:Who Would Have Thought?

[AmiMoJo]

The Japanese build a lot better than the Russians so there isn't going to be a huge no man's land that will be required to be maintained for generations around the site.

Actually the minister in charge of the clean-up did recently suggest that the area may never be re-opened. The difficulty and cost of clean-up is so great. Currently there is no timetable.

Think about what that means for the people who used to live there. Imagine not knowing when or even if you will be able to go back to your home, and knowing that even if you do half the other people won't be there anyway and your old job is gone. Most of those people are still living in rented accommodation just outside the zone, unemployed and dependent on benefits.

this was a first generation reactor that was ran decades beyond its design lifetime because the anticipated replacements got lost in the paperwork created by the very greens who oppose any nukes at all.

Fukushima Daiichi wasn't a first generation reactor at all, it was a development of the boiling water reactor (BWR), the second most common type in the world. The newer ones in Japan don't differ that much from it. It's lack of replacement certainly had nothing to do with the greens as you claim. Rather it was a simple matter of profit. Building new plants is expensive, inspecting old ones and getting the license extended is cheap.