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Japan Restarts Two of Its 50 Nuclear Reactors
Darth_brooks writes "Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda ordered the restart of two idle nuclear reactors Saturday, amid split public response. The Japanese government is trying to fill a summer power shortfall. According to the article, the two reactors supply power to the Kansai region near Osaka, where local officials were predicting a 15% shortfall in power capacity during July and August."
It's not that simple because Japan has the additional problem that some of the country uses 60Hz like here in the us and some places use 50Hz like in europe.
While restarting any nuclear reactors is currently quite unpopular in Japan nationally, the decision to restart this particular plant's two reactors was actually made with local input and approval. Local councils aren't normally required to approve such matters, but due to the current controversy, Japan's government de-facto made restart contingent on approval from the local government. After several months of safety studies and deliberation, the municipal council voted 11-1 in favor of restarting the reactors in mid-May, which gave the national government some cover to go ahead with it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You know, do at least *some* research before stating bullshit.
It is a HUGE PROBLEM. Any interconnect is very limited in size. If a significant portion of one grid is impacted, you can't easily move power from one grid to another. This is exactly the situation in Japan.
The HVDC links between the two grids have a limited capacity, about 2GW as I recall. They've not needed anything bigger since both parts of the country have adequate generating capacity for each region, or at least they did until the nuclear stations in the Kansai area and points south shut down for inspection and refuelling and didn't restart. The Kanto area (Tokyo and environs) has a lot of older coal-burning and oil-burning power stations that were demothballed after they lost the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini reactors and the other stations shut down due to the quake and tsunami (Onagawa, Tokai and Hamaoka) were refused permission to restart. Kansai (Osaka, Kobe, Hiroshima etc.) has fewer fossil-burners available to bring back to use hence the predicted electricity supply shortages in the region this summer.