Will Japan's New Government Restart the Nuclear Power Program?

An anonymous reader writes in with a story about speculation that Japan might restart its nuclear power program. "Japan's newly-elected Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a strong supporter of atomic energy use in the past, should restart plants shut after the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years, said the CEO of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd . The LDP, headed by Japan's next prime minister Shinzo Abe, won a landslide victory on Sunday, fueling speculation that the new coalition government would take a softer stance on nuclear power. Public opinion remains divided on the role of atomic energy after natural disasters last year triggered a radiation crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant."

Comments

Re:Hopefully

[Andy Dodd]

I think it's telling that even counting Chernobyl, the deaths per terawatt hour for nuclear is the lowest there is.

If you look at civilian nuclear power, it's a good sign that it took 40+ years of civilian nuclear power for there to be a plant that released anything more than a few bananas' worth of contamination outside the plant boundary. (Yes, you'd receive more radiation eating a banana a day for a year than you would have at the TMI plant boundary.) Even then, for the first significant civilian contamination incident to happen, it required a massive natural disaster that killed *25,000 people within days*.

(As to why I say 40+ years - While the Soviets claim that Chernobyl was a "civilian" reactor, in my opinion a graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor can't be considered civilian. Its safety was fundamentally compromised by its weapons-friendly design.)

Chernobyl was not an accident - it was an act of gross negligence compounded with compromises in safety done to allow the reactor to be used for weapons production if desired. (Reactors with a positive void coefficient have never been legal in the USA to my knowledge.)

Re:Hopefully

[bobbied]

I wonder if you added up all the land which is now unusable from mining coal and disposing ash if you would get anywhere close to the size of the exclusion zones...

I'm thinking that Necular power has even less impact per terawatt hour in land use too..