Slashdot Mirror
Japan Aims To Abandon Nuclear Power By 2030s
mdsolar writes "Reuters reports that the Japanese government said it 'intends to stop using nuclear power by the 2030s, marking a major shift from policy goals set before last year's Fukushima disaster that sought to increase the share of atomic energy to more than half of electricity supply. Japan joins countries such as Germany and Switzerland in turning away from nuclear power ... Japan was the third-biggest user of atomic energy before the disaster. In abandoning atomic power, Japan aims to triple the share of renewable power to 30 percent of its energy mix, but will remain a top importer of oil, coal and gas for the foreseeable future. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's unpopular government, which could face an election this year, had faced intense lobbying from industries to maintain atomic energy and also concerns from its major ally, the United States, which supplied it with nuclear technology in the 1950s.' Meanwhile, the U.S. nuclear renaissance appears to be unraveling."
Just put it off for a while. It can be done safely. The path is obvious.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's unpopular government, which could face an election this year"
Are elections in Japan held on a need-only basis?
Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's unpopular government, which could face an election this year
So he's only doing this due to an election, and obviously nuclear is less popular with the people after the incident.
If it's anything like American politics, as soon as they win the election, they'll totally forget.
...from a dude that owns a solar-power company? The story is slashdot-worthy, but the tone is partisan fluff. Is he really the only guy submitting this story?
Oh man, a mdsolar story. I was beginning to miss his astroturf shenanigans.
Nuclear power is a damn better sight than oil is, that is for sure.
Just because some cheapskate made a nuclear reactor as cheaply as they possibly could have doesn't mean nuclear power is bad.
That reactor was as bad as the one in Springfield in The Simpsons! It is the real life incarnation of it!
Nuclear reactors are safe. What isn't safe are the morons who make them without having their inspections done and kept to reasonable standards in an unsafe area.
Japan itself is what is unsafe! Someone save Japan from itself, please.
No, not you America. Not you at all. Put your hand down America.
They have even been repairing units 5 and 6 at Fukushima Daiachii to go back on line within the next few years. All other nuclear plants are being repaired and re-fitted. It looks like a long way from a plan to phase out nuclear power any time soon.
...and nothing ever goes wrong! What a bunch of luddites!
Again!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The way I have seen the debate presented:
1. The world runs on fossil fuels primarily
2. Fossil fuels contribute to global warming
3. The world needs energy sources that don't contribute to global warming
4. Atomic energy does not produce CO2, but questions about its safety (Chernobyl, Fukushima, 3 mile) or public worries about its safety persist
5. Renewable energy sources, in there current state, can't satisfy current or projected demand for energy
6. Oh no.
Silly Japan, how are you going to fend off all of those space aliens without giant nuclear powered mecha?
In fact, it could be more than 20 prime ministers until that time.
The big question is, whether Japan is even capable of doing anything like this at all. They have been unable to implement internationally widespread safety measures that the contructors of the very reactors recommended, that have been destroyed in the accident. And that would have been cheap, less than $10bn for all 50 reactors, yet the Japanese didn't. And this isn't a singular experience.
Japan has stagnated economically for the last 25 years. Last year, the global shortage of harddisks wasn't down to the tsunami in Japan, but a flood in Thailand of all places. (Which intends to build at least 5 nuclear reactors, btw.) Currently, Japan is paying on the order of $30bn on imports per year to very imperfectly compensate for the lack of nuclear power - "volontary" blackouts and shutdown are continuing as power saving measures during the summer. And unlike other expenditures, Japan can't pay for this with domestic debt, because they actually have to pay a foreign country in foreign currency - which is unsustainable in the long run without a source of income, which hasn't been forthcoming in Japan for the last quarter of a century. And as Steins Law says, this will stop.
Renewable energy is expensive and no country has as yet installed anything in the way of the infrastructure require to use them on more than a small scale. So far, only the low-hanging fruits have been picked that stress the existing infrastructure to its limit. And Japan, being an island with two separate power systems, is in an even worse position than just about any other country imaginable.
The question for anyone outside Japan isn't just whether Japan will be capable of pulling it off. The question isn't just if one of the regularly resigning Prime Ministers of Japan turns his or her back to this policy and makes it null and void. The actual question is whether, by 2040, Japan is still going to matter.
Japan is a tiny, resource-poor but energy-hungry country. Nuclear energy is the only thing that makes sense economically. What are they going to replace it with? Oil? Natural gas? Those sources come from so far away and from such temperamental suppliers that it's too risky to depend on long-term.
To get reelected Japanese politicians have to put on an anti-nuclear Kibuki theatre to placate the masses. But the fact is they'll never give up nuclear and "renewable" energy sources won't ever put even a dent in their supersized energy demand.
If they increase their renewables to 30% of their total then that will more than replace current nuclear capacity, so their use of oil and coal for electricity won't go up. Furthermore you would actually expect it to go down as people switch to electric vehicles.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
put a "renewable energy tax" on pachinko machines and video billboards. Solve that whole polling problem for nukes in no time.
When the day comes that there are no nuclear power stations in Japan they will be safer during the inevitable skirmish with the Fenqing.
18.1% of Japan's power is nuclear generated. That's going to be a lot of fossil fuels, which must be imported. Importing large amounts of fossil fuels requires quite a bit of transportation, which also consumes resources as Japan has very little in the way of fossil fuels. Good for exporters, of course.
Replacing nearly a fifth of your country's power generation with ANY replacement is very expensive, time consuming process. Gearing up 44,000 MW is going to be entertaining. Renewables are not going to be very feasible, as Japan doesn't have lots of cheap land for it. Funny enough, burning coal tends to release plenty of radiation.
There's no easy choice. Nuclear power requires a high level of attention to detail, fanatical safety protocols and serious long term planning. It's complicated by social bias against building safer nuclear power and international politics. Renewables just can't economically hack it, at the moment. I hope they do someday, but not today. The third, unliked but default opinion is fossil fuels. Germany can get away with closing their nuclear plants by buying French nuclear energy. Japan really doesn't have that option. MAYBE if South Korea ramps up their nuclear power program, but I'm not familiar with any extremely large scale submarine power lines. Not on this scale, not anywhere close.
Nuclear power has an very low deaths per kWh, even when you include chernobyl, 3mile island and fukushima ( http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html ). chernobyl is a terrible design (as the coolant boils, the reaction goes faster. fail), nothing like that could happen in any modern (by which i mean anything made in last few decades).
Switching to any other form of power generation will cost lives.
From a environmental point of view, suppose japan can build enough wind and solar to replace nuclear (big job on the scale of a war effort), if they did that along side nuclear they would be reducing carbon emissions. if you do it instead of nuclear then you are standing still. Now take a look at this http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ and have a read of IPCC, and explain how we are going to not hit 400 ppm.
Look another anti-nuclear posting from mdsolar!
They won't abandon it - 2030s is plenty long enough to fully turn public opinion, especially in a small island nation with limited access to natural resources. The recent news at the end of "setsuden" (ie: limited use of electricity in summer) was comprised mostly of comparisons of energy prices prior to the short-term nuclear shutdown and during the shutdown. There were already a lot of people saying that they didn't want to abandon the energy source.
He missed the point of spelling "Nuclear" the correct American way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular
I couldn't agree more. New technologies like TerraPower's reactor ARE the future. To abandon nuclear is like being a holocaust denier.
People shouldn't be turning away from nuclear, they should be embracing it. One of the greatest discoveries in the last 100 years and people are shying away from it because of teething issues. Of course the teething issues left huge marks, but so do a lot of things of tremendous amounts of potential and power. Leaps and bounds have been made in the field too. Everyone wants to get back to the basics, but harnessing the atom still remains an extremely viable option, let alone what would happen if it went mainstream.
Stuff like this really makes me sad. It's made me sad ever since I learned about nuclear power and found out it was never widely used... It made me ask why. And so far, after all these years, the only reason I can come up with is fear.
to shut nuclear plants down at a "country" level.
Either you reduce (axe) your power hunger, or you buy electricity from another country.
Replacing that by natural resources (non renewable) would be overkilling for the health.
There's also the theoretical renewable energy solution. But the time and the investments needed would scare all politicians.
A solution at planetary level it's a different thing. Probably photo-voltaic plants in a few main deserts plus a planetary power grid could be enough.
But also this would scare all politicians!
So, forget it.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
These nuclear-phobic countries will be out-competed by China.
We provided them with some of our nuclear technology in the 1940s, too.
Just changing business dress-code from heavy suites to shorts and t-shirts, business style certainly. Allowing people to dry clothings outdoors on special dryers.
All is needed is a development of a new modern business style fashion and outdoor driers which look esthetically acceptable. It seems to be doable and relatively law-cost tasks.
Has no one else been wondering why Germany is being seen as a utopia with all of the answers, recently? Most news stories that come out about anything to do with world politics lately have some blow-hard from Germany talking about how great their country is, and how much better the world would be if everyone did what they say. Any blog post/any other website post that comes out also has a story in the comments about how great life is in Germany in some fashion. I don't know why, but it makes me uncomfortable.
No, but if 30-40% of your electrical supply is based on the sun shining a tropical storm can kill people dependent on electricity.
Japan should go with Geothermal. There is plenty of hot rock very close to the surface south east of Tokyo. There are also good GT sites close to Nagoya and Osaka. There is enough to meet all of their electricity needs for centuries.
One drawback for GT is minor earthquakes, but Japan has so many of those already, that a few more shouldn't matter.
The plant took an earthquake *and* flooding, and yet still the radiation leakage into the surrounding area was negligable. Containment held, even if it did need a bit of improvised emergency cooling. That was on an old plant design - if it had been built to a more modern design, there would have been no need even for that. And yet if you watched the television coverage, it looked like Chenobyl II. There was more airtime given to that nuclear plant than to all the rest of Japan put together, so it is no surprise people were terrified. The media played-up the nuclear aspect, because nuclear means scarey and scarey means viewers. And viewers mean money.
So what are they instead going to fail to maintain and properly test? Hydrocarbons? Wind and waves and all that? It's not nuclear that was the problem. Other power plants can't melt down but they can explode, just without all the radiation. I think we all know from playing Sim City 2000 what happens when space-based, solar-powered microwave transmitters miss their collection dish target rofl.
Welcome to Asia, where you make everything as cheap and crappy as possible to compete, never test it to save money, and thus bring honor to your family by being such a shrewd business man. Then when it fails horribly, blame everyone and everything but yourself then do the same thing over again with a different product. Remember China's maglev train problems? Classic example.
If you don't maintain and properly test your backup and backup-backup cooling systems, your plant will explode. If you don't maintain pressure properly in a coal power plant, it will explode. Once again, not nuclear's fault. It's just messier to clean up.
Unless Japan manages to scale back its energy demand, then I find it difficult to believe that there is anything that trumps nuclear in terms of energy production, especially given its geography. For me the focus should be on improving nuclear and making it safer. Heck, I am curious why we haven't managed to develop a good thermocouple instead of using nuclear powered steam engines?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Wile E Coyote failed to catch the road runner because he'd try one thing, it would fail, and then he'd try something else.
Some of his plans were good. Damn good. They just had maybe a one or two things that needed to be fixed about their execution. But instead of trying to improve them, he'd move onto something else that was completely different.
Yes, nuclear power can be disastrous, and Japan learned that the hard way. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good plan. Its execution just needs to be perfected. The advantages are too great to pass, especially for coal and oil.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Coal, natural gas and oil are declining, both in quantity and net energy return. Uranium, thorium - not so much. Want a large scale industrial civilization where 7 out of 8 people *aren't* starving by 2100? That means power and lots of it. There's some energy in sun, wind and water. Not enough to support the hydrocarbon population bloat we've created. Mass death or nuclear are pretty much your only choices if you don't get population control and/or massive conservation efforts. Since these won't sell to the public, nuclear is what we get.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
They'll be back, just like the Germans. Meanwhile, they'll pay a pretty penny (both up front and in pollution costs) to buy fossil fuels while they wait for renewables, forever.
History doesn't give credit for late work. We've been waiting for solar and wind to be 'good enough' since the 60's and they're still the most expensive and least reliable sources of grid electricity on earth. Then there's the matter of pollution. Oh well, a few thousand asthma deaths here and there and a vastly increased risk of cancer from air pollution is always preferable to one or two eventual cancer cases from the nuclear bogeyman here in the United States. I suppose Japan will learn to cope.
The article could have just as well been titled 'Japan Abandons Kyoto Protocol' because unless they know something the rest of the world doesn't, their renewables plan ain't gonna happen.
If anything, Fukushima has re-assured me. It kind of seems like it went "really wrong" - but nobody died, and according to the scientific evidence, no one *will* die from Fukushima radiation. What am I missing - how can it go "really wrong"?
It appears to me that the biggest threat to public health if something goes wrong at a nuclear plant, is people panicking and causing harm to themselves or others - self medicating on Potassium Iodide and overdosing themsevles or their children; getting into traffic accidents while trying to evacuate, etc.
Those are potentially real harms, but can be minimized by honest reporting by the media and sustained public education. Instead, the public is convinced that any release of radioactive isotopes from a nuclear plants is an end-of-the-world scenario, which it clearly is not.
"... the United States, which supplied [Japan} with nuclear technology in the 1950s." Actually, I think the US has been supplying Japan with nuclear energy since 1945.
"Japan lies in one of the most seismically active areas of the world, at the junction of the Eurasian, Pacific, and Philippine Sea plates" link
AccountKiller
nuclear .. the "one-button-for-everything" operating system.
I'm happy to hear this. Now it's time to start re-investing in Japan.
The Japanese PM has changed pretty much once per year for the past decade or something like that. The last PM to last any significant amount of time was Junichiro Koizumi. They even made a mahjong anime about him (see post title).
I'm in favor of scaling back our population.10^9 people seem to be enough to have a stable base and fun on this planet.
Call it lobbying or a conspiracy theory, but everytime there is a story about nuclear energy, all those comments appear that say: "Oh nuclear power is so safe, its just the human error" and "Its just the old nuclear reactors that are unsafe, LFTR would be sooo much safer...". My (personal) belief is that these comments come from people either working in the nuclear industry or marketing people. Probably both. Sorry technocrats, but the human error will never really go away. Nuclear fission might be a great technology, but its just too damn hard for humans right now!