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."

Comments

That's good news

[Tarantulas]

They should leave all the reactors offline that have safety flaws common to the Fukushima plants (close proximity to tidal wave hazards, external diesel generator fuel tanks, etc.) and start up all the rest.

Yep...

[Mashiki]

Can't survive on renewable energy, and can't built the old coal power plants fast enough even when you're buying up coal as fast as Canada can dig it out of the ground for you. Not a surprise...not a damn surprise. Especially when you've got the idle plants just sitting there.

Re:Yep...

[Anonymous Coward]

If people get pissed about nuclear reactors and see building coal plants as a good alternative, I wouldn't care about the time it takes, those people are bloody idiots.

About time

[roman_mir]

About time they stopped the nonsense and came back to their senses on the nuclear.

But also it's about time they stopped the nonsense and came to their senses on this desire to destroy their own purchasing power, they have to stop printing the Yen and let it rise, so that they can buy the supplies they need cheaper and others would start investing in their economy more, creating more savings and thus investments, which would boost their real economy, create a bunch of new businesses.

No surprise

[bazorg]

When you can't have everything your way, having some electricity is not a bad start.

Re:Shortages are a solved problem.

[fredgiblet]

You're an idiot.

Re:Shortages are a solved problem.

[jklovanc]

Sorry but your logic does not actually work well for hot areas. The peak need for air conditioning comes during the day which is also the peak overall electrical demand time. At night the need for cooling is less as would the electrical rates would be lower. So as the days get hotter an air conditioning user will be using much more peak priced energy than off peak priced energy and their electrical bill will go up.

What about businesses who only operate during peak price time? They will not get much discount from off-peak price because they do not use it.

There is a falsehood in tying every purchase to the supply/demand curve. Some commodities are considered discretionary purchases. In the case of orange juice one could purchase apple juice instead. The supply/demand curve works very well in such cases. In the case of electricity, the only option is to use less. Most people are already conserving as much as they can so electrical purchases are no longer discretionary. No matter how much you raise prices most people are still going to use what they use up to the point of no longer paying their electrical bill.

What an incredibly stupid argument

[SuperKendall]

Both Fukushima and the subsequent tests have clearly shown that nuclear power, especially when bought from an occupying power and built by a powerful oligopoly under a weak and corrupt government, is neither cheap, nor safe.

If you had even a single brain cell you would arrive at the opposite conclusion.

Fukushima survived a huge earthquake, and unexpected wave, and a disastrous internal failure.

DESPITE all that, very few people were killed, and almost no-one outside the plant had any exposure of significance to radiation.

And all this in a plant with a design that was decades old...

If you can't see how inherently safe nuclear is from this incident, nothing can reach your luddite mind.

Nuclear is the one green energy we truly have at our disposal, and backward bumpkins like yourself seek to rob humanity of the benefits that come from cheap and continuous access to power. How many more lives must perish under your cruel tyranny of unwarranted fear?

Re:What an incredibly stupid argument

[Anonymous Coward]

You're obviously not familiar with the facts.

1. A large earthquake and tsunami are most certainly expected in that area, as there is much evidence that such quakes and tsunamis have happened many times in the past. The plant was not built for them in order to cut costs, because nuclear power is not financially viable if done properly.

So what level of earthquake do you build for ? The problem with your answer is that it would have been 1 less on the scale of richter one year ago, and just think how much less it would have been 30 years ago.

Besides, this tsunami also destroyed other powerplants with much more devastating results, and more dead.

2. The plant did not survive the earthquake -- the indications are that the reactors broke down during the earthquake, not because of the tsunami. It is not "official" yet, but that is not surprising -- the meltdown became "official" more than 6 months after it actually happened. This is done to give Tepco time to close the contracts with owners for damages, so that the final liability to the government is lower when it takes over. Again, nuclear is "cheap and plentiful" only when someone else is paying for it, or taking the risks uncovered.

That depends on your definition of survive. It did. There's many things you can blame for the subsequent meltdown but, here's one thing they modified in US power plants over 20 years ago : do NOT fully shutdown a powerplant if something is melting down.

Here's the first stages of the disaster :
1) tsunami hits, takes out most emergency generators, takes out power connection to mainland japan
2) automatic systems shut down every reactor
3) generators don't come up
4) there is no power for the cooling system, portable generators are called in from the mainland
5) the portable generators, it turns out, cannot be connected to the power plant.
6) hours later (during which there was *zero* radiation leakage, and any of the reactors could have been turned back on safely, even the one melting down)

So if the plant operators had violated the safety procedures and kept one reactor online (even the one that was melting down would have done), there would have been no disaster.

The plant was not brought down by the tsunami, or at least, not sufficiently bad to cause the disaster by itself. Human stupidity had to help, and of course there was more than enough of that to be found.

3. Few people were killed, but there was an enormous damage to the economy, and the area is unlikely to recover -- young people have practically moved out.

That's not true, and there's no good reason to do that either.

4. Nuclear power is not cheap at all, unless you cut corners. Just to cover the costs of closing the Fukushima-1 NPP, the electricity prices in the whole Kanto area (that is Tokyo and the surroundings, a territory with more people than most countries in the world) are up 20% this year. And this is a far cry from the real cost of the affair.

You ALWAYS cut corners by your definition. There is always some amount of disasters that combine into catastropic failure. This is no different for other power generation types. In fact plenty of people die from going to the toilet in an unsafe manner, by getting infected with all manner of scary stuff, do you think we're "cutting corners" there too ?

5. From the accident, I see nothing about inherent safety, on the contrary, it is obvious it is inherently unsafe, and very costly measures are needed to mitigate the risk. Only partly.

This reactor design predates "inherently safe" designs. By the way, in a way this reactor design was inherently safe, as long as you don't turn that feature off (which you do when you take the reactor offline). The inherently safe reactor designs simply cannot be fully turned off. Nothing can protect against idiots making wrong decisions.

Re:What an incredibly stupid argument

[LordLimecat]

DESPITE all that, very few people were killed,

Thats not exactly true, I heard some 20,000 died from the tidal wave.

The mockery here is that everyone has their panties in a bunch over 2 hospitalized workers (no doubt very brave and much to be commended) and a handful who died @ fukushima, while a whole coastline was littered with dead and dying people who got about 5 minutes of airtime.

WOOO PERSPECTIVE! Way to have those priorities in line.

Re:not actually that unpopular locally

[sjames]

In general, nothing trumps NIMBY quite like a threatened return to the dark ages.

Re:Nuclear disaster nearly shut down Tokyo

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe NIMBY's should remember this the next time they cockblock replacement of aging 60 year old 1st generation reactors that have exceeded their operational lifespan.

Re:Nuclear disaster nearly shut down Tokyo

[Rising Ape]

(with the disaster spreading to nuclear reactors closer to Tokyo) this would have happened.

What possible mechanism could have caused that? Radioactive leaks aren't like an infectious disease, they don't cause distant power stations to become damaged.

Re:Shortages are a solved problem.

[thegarbz]

There's another way to fix the shortfall: simply raise the price of peak hour electricity until demand falls to the level of supply.

Yes that works quite well if you're an all consuming nation that has no industry and produces nothing. Quite the opposite is true for Japan. The real fears were that rolling blackouts would start to affect their manufacturing industry and that it would give rise to a second major crash in their economy.

That doesn't even take into account what happens to a nation which is unable to run cooling or heating. Treating people suffering a condition is many times less efficient on resources than preventing the condition from taking place in the first place. You only need to look to Europe to see what happens when gas supplies are suddenly removed from people, which is exactly what happens when you price heating or cooling out of reach of people who may suffer heat stroke / hypothermia.

Re:Shortages are a solved problem.

[lucifuge31337]

I asked a valid question.

And you were asked if you were an idiot because even as far north as New York (and further) every summer hear wave comes with reports on the news of how many people died in their homes form the heat. Yes, these are predominantly the old and/or infirm and always the poor. I'm in no way OK with that. Are you?