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Japan Plans to Restart Most of Their Nuclear Reactors
pigrabbitbear writes "Areva, the French nuclear fuel company, helps supply Japan with a lot of its juice. And Areva's chief executive says that Japan is going to restart up to six reactors by the end of the year. Eventually, it's going to power up at least two thirds of them. Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe has been a little cagey, but he recently told the press that yes, despite the upcoming March 11th anniversary of the Fukushima crisis, the nuke plants are coming back online."
Supposedly, they are overhauling their nuclear regulatory agencies to fix the massive failure and regulatory capture that led to Fukushima being run unsafely. They are also not going to restart reactors that are on active fault lines; this includes the largest reactor complex in the world. Vaguely related, the Vogtle plant expansion in the U.S. is running a bit over budget, with folks like the Sierra Club seizing the chance to call for an end to construction (unlikely, since Georgia Power says it'd cost customers more, even pretending natural gas is infinite and will always be cheap, to halt construction in favor of any other kind of power plant), and legislators aiming to 'protect' customers from cost overruns. However, it looks like unless action is taken the nuclear renaissance is already dead due to the inherent short-sightedness of the "free market."
I feel that there is a lot of stigma against nuclear energy these days (particularly here on Slashdot), and for good reason. However, I don't often see people making a case FOR nuclear power, because there are definitely many good reasons to defend its use. Is this because people are afraid of speaking out, or because nuclear power really is that bad?
no more homer simpsons and cut cutting MR burns
From the article linked in that very sentence:
Avoiding nuclear power because of (higher investment cost + greater risk of liability + less demand) does not sound like shortsightedness. It sounds like a wise move.
The free market is not inherently short-sighted. Every day people plant trees, for profit, without government force, such that they can be harvested 100 years from now. The asset will increase in value constantly, it is not necessary for any one investor to wait 100 years to get their payout.
Amazon's profits have NEVER been paid to investors (since going public, and probably before I just don't know that for sure). Not one penny. They have never paid a dividend. Nor has Google, nor many, many, many quickly growing companies. People invest in these companies, because they expect the company to grow, and will in turn sell there shares to people who will likely never see dividends themselves, and so on, until eventually, many years from now, a group of investors will (after buying out the previous generations), will begin receiving a trickle of actual profit.
The free market, when and to the extent it is allowed to exist is EXTREMELY far-sighted.
Even the bias towards 'quarterly profits' is truly indicative of where government regulation prevents the ideal outcome-- quarterly reporting would not be such a major factor in the decision process were regulations not so rigidly defined around such a reporting scheme.
There is no chance of restarting the three damaged reactors. Are you comparing to hydro dam failure? That is indeed worse.
But what about coal power in Japan? They must have numerous coal and gas-power stations along the coast, but I can find no information about any of them being seriously damaged by the tsunami.
Although natural gas is now very cheap, you would still have to import scads of it to generate electrical power enough to supply what Japan lost when it shut down the atomic energy industry. In addition, you would need to build the generation capacity to replace the nuclear power plants. Therefore, I believe that the restarting of many nuclear power plants is necessary.
Nuclear is not any more dangerous than much of the alternatives out there so this is NOT a bad thing. It's the market providing electrical power in the most cost efficient and timely manor possible, in a country that needs cheap and abundant power to recover. Hopefully they have fixed any systemic issues in their government oversight program and can avoid future issues, but these kinds of issues are not about nuclear power, but effective government.
Good for Japan! Now lets start building some safer plants and really do this right..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Horseshit. There has never been anything remotely resembling a free market associated with nuclear power. As for shortsightedness it is hard to imagine anything more shortsighted then the way governments have reacted to nuclear accidents.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Exactly. There are leagues of politicians and activists who are going out of their way to prevent nuclear power from being affordable so that it doesn't happen, which is exactly what they want. This is much more of the government being short sighted.
I think the editor just has an axe to grind with capitalism. Granted its not perfect, but neither is democracy. However both have historically worked better than the alternatives.
In any case, that's no reason to throw out you're supposed objectivity. This is exactly the kind of shit that kdawson used to pull, and everybody hated him for it until he finally left Slashdot.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Perhaps regulatory capture would have required that the last line of defense against a meltdown, the backup diesel generators, should not have been in the basement of a plant located in a tsunami zone?
The earthquake exceeded the design limits for the plant - if they put the generators on towers or on the tops of buildings, they may have crashed to the ground when the quake hit. There's no guarantee that moving the generators higher would have made things better. In retrospect it's not hard to come up with a design that perfectly addresses all of the issues from the last disaster, the hard part is coming up with a design that addresses all of the issues of the next, unknown disaster.
I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned this, but we ran a very safe (for the time) molten-salt reactor, AKA the LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor). Later, total decommisioning was found to be an issue, but we've done what scientists and engineers do: find solutions. From Wiki: "Much of the high cost was caused by the unpleasant surprise of fluorine and uranium hexafluoride evolution from cold fuel salt in storage that ORNL did not defuel and store correctly, but this has now been taken into consideration in MSR design.[22]"
Nuclear is here to stay, in one form or another, unless humans cease to exist. Note that I didn't say "cease to exist tomorrow or next week." Try to think long-term. If you still can't wrap your head around the idea that nothing in the universe comes for free, and that we are stuck on a very small rock, your Buxton Index might not be the same as mine.
utter nonsense, the gensets at a nuke plant are huge and anchored to structural concrete, they aren't going to shake loose and fall off. are you imagining some pull-start unit on a cart for your house?
No, I'm picturing a 30 ton genset sitting on top of a structure designed to withstand a magnitude 7.9 quake getting hit with more ground movement than it was designed for when a 9.0 quake hits offshore, resulting in support structure failure.
The damn hippies, closed minded politicians, oil companies, coal producers and so on would shut their mouths.
Nuclear energy is a amazing thing that is really a great boon to us. But the problem is everyone tries to cock block it (mostly due to old concepts and misinformation) so we are stuck with old technology and old technology doesnt stand up so yes we have problems with it. But what people dont realize is they dont want new nuclear plants, so we have ones that are way to old and have problems, those problems make people not want more nuclear energy so instead of letting us use new designs and build new plants they make us us the old unsafe ones.
Its essentially like saying "Seat belts? You shouldnt be using cars at all, we dont want you making cars or redesigning them at all because too many people die in them" so instead of making cars safer and better people are stuck using the unsafe models because the general consensus is the old models arent safe.
Nuclear energy has a bad name because everyone is all "GO GREEN!" and automatically thinks that nuclear energy will poison our planet and rape our familes. Why? Because of bad information and bad misconceptions. Nuclear energy is more efficent, uses less resources, more potent and cleaner than what we use now. PLus its use could be lowered in a lot of places where water and wind energy could be also. A major city that taps in nuclear, wind and or water reduces the need for any one of them since they are using them together. Nuclear energy in some places could be the sole source of energy if need be, but in a lot of places it could be used with other forms of natural energy combined.
generators where they were wasn't an issue. Sealing them to work underwater and having intake and exhaust 60 feet in the air is easy. I've seen more done for under $10,000. It's a silly disaster when a small amount of remedial work would have prevented it.
Learn to love Alaska
The original article was a total troll anyway:
Reality check: the inherent robustness of the free market would prevent any "nuclear renaissance" in the absence of government interference, because nuke plants aren't economically viable in a free and fair market.
The rest of the world could have working LENR reactors or sustainable biofuels and Internet nuke shills would still be calling for massive government intervention and sponsorship to build their beloved fission plants. Somehow the tax-funded market distortion required, and the militarization of power production that results, just doesn't bother a die-hard nuke shill, even though they almost always claim to be free market libertarians. A real libertarian, though, would understand that the market has ruled against fission and that argument's been over for decades, instead of crying for more Bush/Cheney style, taxpayer funded market distortions.