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Japan's Last Nuclear Reactor Shuts Down
AmiMoJo writes "Japan's last active reactor is shutting down today, leaving the country without nuclear energy for the first time since 1970. All 50 commercial reactors in the country are now offline. 19 have completed stress tests but there is little prospect of them being restarted due to heavy opposition from local governments. Meanwhile activists in Tokyo celebrated the shutdown and asked the government to admit that nuclear power was no longer needed in Japan and to concentrate on safety. If this summer turns out to be as hot as 2010 some areas could be asked to make 15% power savings to avoid shortages, while other areas will be unaffected due to savings already made."
That's securing your nation's future in the post-oil world! /s
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
While nuclear can be done safely, there seems to be no effort to do so - as it would deny environmentalists a chance to remake the power grid in their own way.
Environmentalism - as practiced today - has been about control versus the original intent of cleanliness and efficiency.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You have it wrong --- this is "we can save face if we blame the problems we had with our nuclear reactor on nuclear energy being inherently unsafe, not the fact that we totally f**ked up the safety management and planning in multiple ways".
BTW, at least one of these errors is being made practically everywhere in the world: stopping research into new, possibly safer reactor designs because of the public's knee-jerk fear of technology. (Maybe not so much in China, though.)
Do you have a shred of evidence suggesting environmentalists want control over power vs clean energy? It almost sounds like an oil executive projecting his own motivations onto green activists: "Harumph, CLEARLY they are just after more control and power, and don't actually give a rat's behind about the well being of the planet or the implications for human health! ... (cough) ... Stevens, fetch me a glass of brandy, I'm done giving press conferences for the day."
How about the simple fact that "environmentalists" are celebrating the shut down of nuclear reactors while ignoring the coal and oil based power plants?
When solar and wind power becomes widespread then we can celebrating shutting down nuclear power plants. Until then, all you're doing is trading one evil for an even greater evil.
And despite what the greenies say, wind and solar aren't always reliable, especially near the ocean -- clouds come and go, as do storms, and wind fluxuates, whereas power demand is constant. Not only that, but the efficiency of solar panels isn't high enough yet to be a replacement in an urban area -- panels have to be installed outside the city and cover large tracts of land. That may work in America, but it will not work for an island city-state.
Japan is taking a step backwards here because of political pressure and disinformation about the safety of nuclear power: Fukishima wasn't a failure of engineering, it was a failure of management, and it's something every government has to contend with when they hand over to capitalists and industrialists anything that can go boom; They are asked to balance profit with safety, but invariably when the two conflict, profit wins.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Of course he doesn't have any evidence. The pro-nuclear crowd wants to pick and chose the best parts about nuclear... they want to pretend that each plant lasts for 40-60 years--so that the cost of nuclear is competitive with coal,etc.. and then when those 50 year old reactors are found to be unsafe, they say it's because they are out of date.
Well... if they were rebuilt every decade with the latest safety improvements, they would not be cost competitive. So chose: unsafe reactors... or uncompetitive energy prices.
I know we are all supposed to point out how foolish they are being but they do have reasons for such a strong reaction. Up until Chernobyl they were the only country to deal with major contamination in heavily populated areas. Even Chernobyl was in a rural area not two major cities. It badly scarred them not only physically but mentally. The recent disaster effectively killed a chunk of the country and Japan already has a shortage of land especially farmland. It may have been smarter to phase it out but the fear of a second such disaster was too great. Japan is fairly new to nuclear power and they are in a unique situation. The country is very active geologically and earthquakes are commonplace and it has a lot of potential for similar disasters. None of us can know the real position they were in. The accident happened because they got sloppy and after reviewing other plants they may have seen shortcomings in the other plants that could have lead to disasters and the upgrades would take too long. I'm just saying there may be more to it than we know and Japan has a lot of pride and it's hard for them to admit they got sloppy. It's easy to say all the disasters are human error but it's impossible to take human error out of the equation. Growing up I heard there would statistically be one disaster every thousand years. If statistics were accurate we would be safe for the next three thousand years. Human error will always be a factor. As costs rise also there's a tendency to cut corners increasing risk. That's what caused the gulf oil spill. All the reactors in this country are rapidly approaching the end of their projected lives and many have already passed it. The nuclear materials have a corrosive affect on the pipes so the risk keeps going up on existing plants. The point I'm trying to make is it isn't as cut and dry as most think. There are a lot of pros and cons. Fusion makes a lot more sense but in truth I've never heard anything to convince me it'll ever be practical. For all it's potential every test so far takes nearly as much energy as it produces. We need safe, stable, long term solutions and there is no magic bullet one size fits all solution. In the near term we need all of the sources including coal and oil but a critical part of the puzzle will be that ugly word, conservation. Trust me, the Japanese will be hearing that word a lot over the next few years. Used wisely conservation is a powerful part of the puzzle. Obama got laughed at for suggesting properly inflated tires would save as much oil as the arctic reserve would contribute. As funny as some found it the fact is he was right. If everyone embraced conservation they wouldn't have to change their lifestyles significantly and we could put off new power plants for a decade or more. That would buy us time to make the needed changes including building more nuclear plants if that's the solution. I'll predict this, Japan will become the world leader in conservation. It's the only way they'll survive.
You can't convince the anti-np crowd or conspiracy theorists with facts. They just keep on repeating the same misinformation hoping it will eventually override all the evidence.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
I don't see environmentalists ignoring anything at all. In fact efforts to fight Oil have been really stepped up, especially in light of what happened in the Gulf with BP. Plus, more and more environmentalists are arguing for modern, safe nuclear power, not against ALL nuclear power. Just the sort of plants that put profits before safety.
It sort of looks like these environmentalists are celebrating the fact that ALL nuclear power plants have been shut down in Japan. While I will admit there might be some bad plants that needed to be shut down and that some changes needed to happen, was it necessary to shut all of them down at the same time?
Keep in mind that the celebration is over the last of the nuclear power plants being shut down. They are celebrating the death of even the concept of nuclear energy.
If there was a real concern about the environment, they would be far more worried about increasing dependence on coal and oil for electrical power. Heck, just by restarting some of these older coal power plants they are going to be introducing more radioactive debris into the environment than had they simply left the nuclear power plants running. These environmentalists are in that way celebrating a nuclear future AND the destruction of the environment on a massive scale, where many more people will die because these plants are being shut down.
If you were genuinely concerned about safety, you would be insisting that these nuclear power plants be restarted ASAP. If you look strictly at deaths directly caused from mining coal to replace these nuclear power plants, I think that would more than offset any potential deaths caused from even casual handling of spent nuclear rods, much less the risk of having another Fukushima-type disaster happening in the next few years.
The failure to build more nuclear reactors is the biggest social disaster since the sacking of the library of Alexandria. Just as that act set world civilization back by 1000 years, the failure of humankind to use carbon-neutral and safe modern designs of fission reactors will be seen by centuries of people in the future as a major failing. It disgusts me that people who don't understand reality and science pretend that a 40 year old reactor design in Fukishima, or a completely unsafe design as in Chernobyl, have ANYTHING to do with modern nuclear energy generation technology. The ironic thing is that so often it's the people who pretend to care about the environment who are ignorantly opposing modern nuclear energy plants.
Huh? Liquid Sodium cooled reactors are nothing new.
And none of them have been run successfully as a commercial unit. If someone could build one successful sodium cooled power reactor, and have it run for a decade with decent availability then sodium-cooling might be viable. Based on current evidence, the technology for a successful plant does not exist.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The safety improvements in modern designs are enough that they don't need to be rebuilt every decade. This isn't like computers where you need the latest and greatest all the time. There is no Moore's Law of Reactor safety. This is an issue of the technology having matured since the reactors in question were built.
That people are celebrating is not evidence that they want control. What is evidence of is that a large number of environmentalists are deeply ignorant about the pros and cons of different types of power and that they have absorbed a large number of anti-technology memes. That's not an indication of a desire for "control". Hanlon's razor seems a bit relevant here.
Every time this topic comes up, there is the same string of irrelevant nonsense. Wake up.
There are only two long-term, large, successful, safe nuclear power projects on Earth - the U.S. Navy's and France's. Last year, the Navy logged its 6,500th reactor-year of experience w/out a single serious accident - nuc subs Thresher and Scorpian went down for reasons unrelated to their power plants. Both the Navy and France use a high degree of standardization between plants, rigorous operator selection and training, and procedures enforced by iron-fisted independent regulators - anathema to the unregulated free-market mavens designing and selling reactors and the natural-monopoly privatized power companies either trying to maximize profit or with guaranteed profit margins regardless of efficiency. The U.S. nuc power system failed as much because of the heterogeneous designs afoot - and resultant inability to insure standardized reliable performance and procedures, as because of the political resistance. But, the two are highly related - that is, there was good reason to be skeptical of promises of safe, long-term operation. A small, compact variation of the Navy's system is being marketed to U.S. communities for local power production at this time, but its adoption is meeting strong resistance in the regulatory agencies and congress due to big power and big energy special-interest influence - i .e. corruption.
So yes, there is a way to have safe, long-term nuclear power right under our feet and it is only our inept corrupted political system that keeps us from realizing it.
The trouble with Hydro power is the disasters are so bad, and sooner or later the dams get privatized and some wealthy jackass cuts funding to safety.
See what I did there?
Heres a tip, find every stat you can on nuclear deaths. Go ahead, even include the hypothetical assumptions about who got cancer but might not have. Now compare it to a single hydro dam failure. Or to estimated coal mining deaths.
All of a sudden it starts to look a lot less terrible.
Solar power is also ridiculously expensive compared with anything else
Only if you fail to account for the cost of cleaning up the mess of using other kinds of power.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which is why we don't build very large dams much any more, unless absolutely forced to. Perhaps you can agree that the same logic should apply to nuclear power.
In a lot of the world, large dams aren't being built because the suitable sites either already have a dam or have a large number of NIMBYs in residence. The geology matters; build in a limestone area, and your reservoir will never hold water as the rock will always be too permeable. (Put the dam itself in a bad area and it will collapse. That's occasionally happened, until everyone learned not to do that, and far more died from that "learning" than have ever died due to nuclear accidents.)
Look, we don't claim that nuclear power is 100% safe (it clearly isn't) but we do claim that you're putting a falsely low estimate of risk on the alternatives. Remove those rose-tinted glasses!
Death is not the only consequence of a nuclear disaster. Look at the economic damage and the cost of fixing the problem. A large area of Japan is uninhabitable, a large number of people were displaced and are now jobless and living on benefits just outside the exclusion zone. You can argue all you like about whose fault it is and if the actions taken were justified, but none the less it happened.
But most of that is due to excessive caution and fear-mongering. If you can't measure the radiation or the chemical pollution, by what possible standard is it unsafe? Mystic karmic vibration disturbance?
If Fukushima had been a geothermal plant, if instead there had been large off-shore wind farms, even if there had been a coal plant on that very same spot this would not have happened.
That is true. It is also the case that the pollution produced by that plant's normal operation would have caused many cases of respiratory diseases and low-to-medium levels of chronic poisoning. Furthermore, the cost of importing all that coal (Japan has none to speak of domestically) would have resulted in the Japanese people having significantly less money to spend on other things (such as healthcare, but it's really a long list of missed opportunities). As I said before, take off those rose-tinted glasses; don't just see the downsides of one alternative, look the others fairly too and weigh them all in the balance.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
The coast would have still been fucked up to hell and back by that little tsunami, that you know did all the minor damage that killed over 30.000 people, left hundreds of thousands homeless and a whole lot of other bad things.
But let's whine about Fukushima instead. Because radiation is scarier then big ass waves and earthquakes, since we can see big ass waves and earthquakes. Actual lethality and damage potential is irrelevant when faced with illogical feeling of fear of something we cannot see!
Nuclear isn't done so much in the US because of litigation. The instant somebody announces they're going to be looking at building a nuke plant anywhere, the lawyers come out from the rocks and start burying the courts in paperwork, trying for injunctions to stop any and all nuclear construction.
Nuclear plants are expensive. They wouldn't be nearly as expensive if it weren't for the legal fees associated with the word 'nuclear'. When you have an activist-lawyer go in front of a camera and say "The only phisics I know is Ex-Lax', you know you're dealing with idiots.
Just read the history of the Perry Nuclear Plant. Most of the 'construction time', the plant was idle, nothing was moving due to the injunctions. They weren't even allowed to do maintanance on what they already had up, so when the injunctions lifted, they got the construction crews in there to inspect 100% and replace anything that even LOOKED like it had a rust spot, or they wouldn'tve received their operating license. And they had to keep full construction crews on the payroll even while they were waiting for the injunctions to crawl through the courts because if they didn't, the crews would vaporise off to other jobs with no guarantee of getting them back. Half the time they just barely got through with the inspection and maint before they got hit with yet another injunction. The lawyers made tons of money on that project.
All told, Perry cost $6 billion and took 9 years to build, mostly due to the injunctions. They never did finish the #2 Unit because of cash flow problems from all the litigation. Even though all but the containment vessel is done for #2, they stopped construction on it in '85 & 'abandoned' it in '94. They still have to do maintanance on the empty building in order to keep their license to operate since it's considerted legally to be 'one complex'. It could have gone online with both reactors at half the cost and within 3 years of groundbreaking if it wasn't for all the injunctions.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.