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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."
Yes, Coal's constant spewing of fly ash, carbon dioxide, and various other assorted chemicals like mercury and thorium, into the atmosphere in which we breath is a much better alternative than having a relatively small exclusion zone from a disaster every forty years (Chernobyl was the only other one to require such an effort).
And the newer reactors at Fukushima Daichi, the ones built with a few added safety features... not a single one of those failed. Just the old, poorly designed reactors 1, 2, and 3. 4, 5, and 6 shut down just fine. But that's a reason to condemn the newer, safer designs too. Because nobody learns anything from past failures.
And let's totally ignore that not a single person died from the meltdown. Nevermind the ever increasing death toll from the pollution coal plants cause. We should totally shut down all nuclear plants.
(For the sarcasm impaired, the previous was entirely sarcasm.)
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.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Comparing Fukishima to Chernobyl is ridiculous. Chernobyl basically had no safety systems, was operated in the worst way possible, and the disaster and following cleanup were done in such a way that it would be hard to conceive of a worse outcome. The amount of radiation released in the 1st second of Chernobyls overload that lead to the eventual meltdown (and killed everyone operating it at the time) released more radiation by several orders of magnitude than the entire failure at Fukishima.
And Modern reactors CAN NOT melt down. It's physically impossible. But we're not building those due to the lobbying efforts of environmental groups. What should be done is a thorough review of existing reactor designs, and the government should fund upgrades or replacements of these older, more dangerous reactors. We then need to move on to more stable, efficient and reliable reactors.
Our next step is space based solar arrays. But those are at least 50 years off. So we need nuclear for now.
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..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I don't know where you live but that isn't allowed in western Europe. We require our coal plants to be reasonably clean and any new ones will have carbon capture built in.
Hardly - the scrubbers may filter out *most* of the pollutants, but not all by a long way. As for carbon capture - that's still limited to a tiny number of small scale test projects at the moment. None of the planned coal plants in Germany will have it, for example.