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:What is generating their gigawatts now???

[AmiMoJo]

A) The economic damage isn't that bad, and in fact it is being credited with a boost in sales of energy efficient products that has helped kickstart their economy out of recession.

B) There are plenty of good reasons, like the fact that no nuclear plant in Japan was rated for a magnitude 9 quake and some are known to have been damaged. Checking them is only prudent and sensible, it just takes a very long time because nuclear reactors are so difficult to work on. You can't just crack the reactor casing open and have a look. Also there are many other plants with what are now known to be insufficient tsunami defences.

Re:So simple?

[angel'o'sphere]

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).

Sorry, but this is not correct. For all thermal plants the same efficiency paramaters ar dictated by the laws of thermodynamic.
Also there is no reason a coal plant can't be bigger (in terms of output) than a nuclear plant, in fact: they are.

They can't just throw up a handful of wind turbines and hope to call it even.

You are talking about Japan, aren't you? Perhaps you should look on the map for once where actually Japan is, and how it looks like, sorry, but that comment is very silly.

If a country in the world can easy switch to wind only, it is Japan.

Eliminate enough power generation technology, and you suddenly send your nation back to pre-Industrial Revolution economy.

This, as well as some posters before you, is complete bollocks. Ever heard about that magic thing called market? Price? Ever heard about the term efficiency? You can compensate lack of energy by reducing consumption. You can reduce consumption by switching stuff off, running stuff more economically (you do change the cooling setting of your fridge in winter, don't you?) or running stuff more efficient (big LCD flat screen TVs e.g. use less energy than CRTs).

Ofc, if you eliminate 90% of the power generation you obviously are right ...

Re:Who Would Have Thought?

[jmorris42]

> Fukushima has cost Japan a hell of a lot and it's still early days in term...

Isn't it nice how some folks obsess over the reactor in Fukushima and totally forget the trillon or so in 'normal' damage suffered during the same earthquake and then want to attribute almost all of the losses to the nuke part. Japan got it's ass kicked, the reactor meltdown was only a minor part of their problems that horrible day. But being Japanese they have bounced back from most of the rest of it; they buried their dead, cleared the debris away and are getting on with rebuilding. Also being Japanese this incident appears to have increased their existing fear of the N word over their normal practicalility regarding the need to have electricity to power their civilization.

Re:Better to go nuclear then to go fossil

[yurtinus]

...As opposed to the land area lost to coal mining? Damages to shorelines due to oil spills? Entire regions of the world subjected to wars by foreign powers over their energy resources? You're comparing occasional unplanned disasters due to accidents in first-generation technology to continued and systematic disasters to support coal and oil based energy production.