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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."
...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?
Not need-*only*, but when needed, yes. Like any parliamentary system, election are held if the government suffers a vote of no confidence. There's also a set term, at the end of which elections are held regardless, but they can happen early. in Japan, the term for the lower house is four years, but this wouldn't be the first time in recent history that an early election was called; the 2003 lower house went back to the polls in 2005.
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.
Maybe... but it's like air travel. It might be statistically safer, but when it goes wrong it can really go wrong. It's hard to overcome that psychologically, even if it isn't rational.
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.
The real solution are LFTR reactors.
No more enrichment, ever.
Cheap fuel (currently is a waste product of mining)
No more 100+ Atmosphere pressure vessels to burst
No more backup generators needed
Accidental meltdowns are impossible
Turn reactor on/off in hours/minutes not months
Unable to weaponize any part of fuel or waste.
Needs Uranium only to start the reactor
Creates leukemia fighting medical isotopes from waste
Creates isotopes for space-grade batteries for NASA from waste
Very little waste is left-over and it's radioactive for about 300 years.
Prototype was run for 5 years+ in the 70s.
Both China and India are working on it (and THEY will get the patents)
Issues:
-Regulations set by existing Nuke industry.
-"Nuclear is bad" mentality of public and politicians.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
No, but if 30-40% of your electrical supply is based on the sun shining a tropical storm can kill people dependent on electricity.
There are some people that believe so completely that nuclear power is unsafe that we are going to move from electricity being an always-there reliable energy source to something that is there sometimes and other times not. The biggest thing that comes to mind are home patients that are reliant on some assist device for breathing. Today, such devices plug in the wall because it is assumed that the wall supply is 99.999% reliable. We are going to change that.
In the US the biggest problem with reliability will shortly become simply that we are out of capacity. We haven't built a new major power plant in a long, long time and we aren't likely to do so anytime soon either. We have crippled the electric generation industry with public comment and environmental impact statements to the extent that a small group that is barely organized can block a new generating plant until the plant's sponsor gives up. That is what keeps happening - a plant is proposed, plans are drawn up and goverment approvals and even financing guarantees obtained. Then it is opened to the public and a few people that are fearful of electric power lines can block it. Or it is people that intensely want the US to return to prairie and forest rather than cities and suburbs block it.
In the meantime, growth continues and the margin of overcapacity grows thinner and thinner. We massively overbuilt in the 1950s and 1960s to the extent that we have been able to live off this and a bunch of relatively small "peaker" plants that were designed to run for a few hours a day - they are now running 24x7.
We had an opportunity for the federal goverment to change the rules and make it possible to build a new generating plant in the US. This didn't happen and almost certainly we are going to run out of capacity within the next few years - a time period shorter than it would take to build a new plant and get it online if we started right now. And that would have to be a coal plant - it takes about twice as long to get a nuclear plant built and there is no time for that now.
Either Japan or Germany is likely to be one of the first places to experience a change when electricity is no longer an assured resource for the average homeowner. Germany has the buffer of being able to draw on France and their nuclear power generation but Japan really doesn't. A couple of storms with high winds and clouds would wipe out any solar collection and/or wind generation and leave them in the dark - but it isn't being in the dark that is the problem. It is the people that are at home that are reliant in one way or another on electric power to continue living.
We aren't talking about air conditioning - people in Japan lived for thousands of years without air conditioning and central heating. Germany as well and most parts of the US are fine without air conditioning. What will lead to deaths are the people with the home oxygen concentrators, home ventilators and things like that. For the most part if the power is on for even a few hours a day and at night people's refrigerators will be OK and things like insulin will be fine.
And I would assume most businesses will simply have to have their own generating capacity in one form or another.
Your idea of problems with nuclear power are interesting.
Three Mile Island really affected nobody - not even plant workers. It is somewhat of a blot on the history of nuclear power, but there are plenty of those anyway.
Chernobyl was caused by a stupid test that was mismanaged - sort of a stupid on top of a stupid. There has certainly been some health considerations for a few thousand people and it is likely the most widespread effect of nuclear power, ever. And it would be nice if it stayed that way. But, there is no accounting for stupid.
Fukushima could have been forseen, but the environmental conditions were a bit extreme. Part of the problem is and continues to be spent fuel storage. We should be reprocessing this but because the fuel rods contain plutonium this is viewed as a way to make bombs and strictly forbidden right now. So we are all waiting around for either a reprocessing plant or two to be built - since the 1950s - or for there to be constructed a disposal site - since the 1960s at least.
Probably 90% of the problems with nuclear power could be solved by having a small number of reprocessing plants for spent fuel rods built. Understand that the fuel rods have been only around 5% "spent" and could be reprocessed into new fuel rods with the 95% of the active materials still present in them. The "no reprocessing" philosophy is like having a car that spews 95% of the gasoline out the tailpipe unburned and leaving this situation for 50 years.
Nothing comes without risk. Dependance on imported fuel seems much more risky for Japan than modern LFTR reactors, but if they want to deal with the financial risks of having to buy fuel from imported sources, I pity them.
LFTR reactors are stable when unattended, even right after full power operation. This means that one could build the containment structure in such a way that even with the strongest shaking/bouncing the internal structure would be there and the thing would be safe, even without somebody there to take care of it. The risk of containment breach is greatly reduced because there is no pressure vessel required when the reactor is on its own.
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