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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."
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.
We need to start making some of these Thorium reactors.
Before the accident 27% of Japan's energy came from nuclear power. Even if everyone could 15% (which is impossible because many big users are already conserving due to costs) that still leaved 12% unaccounted for. Sure green power can make up for some of that in the long term but in the short term it means increased import and burning of fossil fuels. A 54% increase in fossil fuel base electricity production in one year is significant.
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.
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According to this Fukushima 4's fuel was removed soon after the disaster and therefore has been shut down for some time.
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.
The activists have a point. The reactor designs are relatively unsafe compared to modern designs, though it took a hell of a lot of punishment to show it.
Here's hoping Japan makes the switch to thorium.
Except the Activist are against the building of newer safer designs.
Japan has essentially no internal oil or natural gas resources. Everything has to be imported. As a result of the nuclear shutdown, imports are up. Way up. So are prices.
From the Financial Times:
As utilities last year met the shortfall of nuclear power, Japanese consumption of LNG rose by 56 per cent, crude oil for direct burning by 27 per cent and fuel oil usage by 20 per cent. The trend, which is helping to keep spot LNG prices in Asia and global oil prices higher, is set to accelerate in the next few months as utilities burn more hydrocarbons to compensate for the lack of nuclear power.
Energy analysts say utilities have maximised LNG-fired electricity output, leaving crude oil and fuel oil to meet additional needs. Oil traders believe that Japan's nuclear cutback could add between 450,000 and 800,000 barrels a day to world demand for crude and fuel oil. The figures are significant. The bottom end of the range equals the production of Ecuador and the upper end matches the output of Qatar.
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.
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.
don't worry, the day you prove p=np they will all bow before you. /mutates & /ducks
2002-2008 the United States handed out subsidies to fossil fuel industries to a tune of 72 billion dollars. I sure wish the government would block me like that...
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
That is why nobody listens to anti-nuke people. How is someone outside Japan affected? The rods won't go critical if the building comes down, so there'll be no fallout. So "humanity" isn't under any threat at all. It can't hurt most of the world. So humanity won't care.
Considering that debris and radioactive waste from Fukushima landed in my back yard, it does become somewhat of an issue. And no, I don't live in Japan... but I do live downwind from Japan. At least the Pacific Ocean offered a little bit of protection so the bulk of the cloud from that disaster didn't hit my house. There are some large scale issues with nuclear engineering, and sometimes you do need to consider the effects outside of the immediate area where the reactors are built.
This said, I do think the GP post was way over the top and exaggerating things a bit. The storage of the rods isn't all that difficult to deal with, but it does take some creative solutions.
So 12 billion a year across a wide industry, of which how many companies went bankrupt? Didn't Solyndra get 2 billion? Wasn't there a few other billion-dollar handouts to solar firms that have gone belly-up?
Government money should not be involved in the creation or propping up of business and industry. Research, yes, and if such research leads to advancements that are economically feasible and viable.. money will find and support those advancements.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
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.
Adding to this:
At current LNG prices Japan pays additional $200 billion a year for its elecricity generation from gas compared to what nuclear generation would cost. The anti-nucreal crowd can calculate the cost of Fukushima disaster as they want, but in no way they can deny the fact that cheaper elecricity would cover the cost of the disaster in few years. The bigger economic cost was not the nuclear disaster itself, but that the reactors shutdowns afterwards.
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.
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.
These activists seem to be against ALL forms of power
No matter if its coal, gas, wind, hydro, solar, nuclear, tidal, or anything else these people are always there protesting its construction.
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 Nuclear is the disasters are so bad, and sooner or later the reactors get privatized and some wealthy jackass cuts funding to safety. Since he doesn't live anywhere near the disaster (or could just move if he did) he's fine. Running a nuclear reactor is very, very expensive. So there's a LOT of money to be made by cutting corners and skipping maintenance. The kind of people who run our world (thanks to the way inheritance works) are not very bright either. Unless safety can be made so cheap that the margins aren't good enough to attract your average capitalist you'll never have 100% safe nuclear power.
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You speak the truth. Coal fired power plants have spewed more radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere than all the nuclear disasters ever did.
The only rational thing to do is ignore the radical environmentalists and get on with building the next generation of nuclear plants.
Renewable energy remains a sick joke, coal and oil aren't going to last forever, nor should we wait until it reaches a crisis point.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
I can think TWO better options. We can reduce the global dependency on uranium by switching to nature's organic power.
1. fuels created from organically-fed, free-ranging dinosaurs.
2. 100% Certified Organic Coal (also reduces dependency on hydro from dams)
Of course, reducing power consumption is part of the equation.
1. Stop reading slashdot using manufactured, powered devices and switch to better alternatives.
2. Stop distributing slashdot using manufactured, powered devices and switch to better alternatives.
Toss your power-hungry, multi-core laptops in the landfill and invest in clay. "Tablets" are power-efficient and will be next big thing in global communications.
I suggest Japan switches to powering itself with Activists.
An average size activist has a mass of approximately 70Kg (counting the younger people and women into the average).
70Kg of a raw unadulterated activist contains about 6.3 Ã-- 1018 J, which translates to 6Ã--1015 BTU, or 1.7Ã--1012 KW/hr.
Thus only one activist fully converted into energy should in principle be sufficient to power Japan for about 25 years.
Of-course this is assuming that an activist can be fully converted into energy, but since an average activist is against all forms of energy that people actually need to live, we can also conclude that activists are generally against human survival, and thus they are self-defeating. If the activists get their way, there will be no humans, but there also will be no activists, so by converting activists into energy even in less efficient ways (an open fire stove), would still provide us with some energy and bring the Earth closer to the blissful moment, when the people are removed from it, starting with the activists.
You can't handle the truth.
They want modern clean technology like wind and geothermal.
Instead of just guessing what they want why not try simply listening to them.
Though, I'm not originally from here, I live in Japan. You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I talk to Japanese people every day. They are against nuclear power. At best, people don't mind wind power. At least most people don't actively complain about the new windmills being put up (and there are a lot going up). But nobody is calling for them as far as I can tell. But people here do NOT want geothermal. There is a fear that it will somehow destroy the onsens (hot springs). This is a major problem, because we have *no* domestic base load generation capacity except geothermal. Even now, as far as I can tell, there is *no* move to find new geothermal wells.
There is, unfortunately, a media fuelled misconception that solar power will solve all the problems. Granted, where I live, it is quite feasible to run most of your house on solar power. But we still need base load generation and we don't have it.
Don't get me wrong. As far as I'm concerned, nuclear was only a stop gap for Japan. It gave us some time to sort out new technologies. It's not like Japan has a domestic supply of nuclear fuel. But by shutting down all the reactors, it really puts the pinch on. I just hope we end up going the right direction in the end...
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.
A lot of the is policy and radiation fears.
They are people (quasi-illegally) living in the exclusion zone.
And they aren't all dropping dead of cancer. Imagine that.
If the US became as radioactive as the exclusion zone, and smoking decreased by 5% and people exercised 5% more, and 5% more people would get colonoscopies the overll cancer rate would PLUNGE.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Wind doesn't work, too intermittent (even off shore wind, and that won't cover the midwest)
We were talking about Japan. I don't know about the US, but Japan and the UK both have enough off-shore wind to supply all their base load needs on a 100% reliable basis. Out in the Pacific and the North Sea the wind always blows enough to provide the minimum level of energy required with spare capacity if you build enough turbines. Yeah, you need a lot, but that isn't beyond our ability to do or anything like as expensive as what nuclear has cost.
Solar isn't dense enough for major cities, think eastern seaboard of the USA, NYC, DC, Boston, etc. or any other major city, Chicago, Minneapolis, Saint Louis.
Again I don't know about the US specifically but 0.3% of the Sahara gets enough solar energy to supply all of western Europe. That is why the EU wants to build solar thermal plants in north Africa. Distance isn't an issue now we have efficient DC voltage conversion and besides which the "fuel" is free and will never run out anyway.
It seems like there should be plenty of places in the southern states where the US could do something similar. The northern states are obviously not well positioned.
Hydro... methane...
Geothermal? Japan has lots of that.
It would also seem that making nuclear power plants a comercial venture, corners will be cut, plants will operate longer than designed to, back up and spare power will not get tested as often as it should.
I agree, but what is your proposed solution? Until the early 1980s all UK nuclear facilities were run by the government and they still had accidents. You don't even want to know how they handled our nuclear arsenal. The government has a limited budget too and a strong desire to cut costs.
All I'm saying is that you should look again at the viability of renewable energy and maybe instead of spending all that time and money developing new nuclear devote it to developing safer forms of energy.
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