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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."
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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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
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?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.