Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima Disaster Leads Japan To Backpedal On Emissions Pledge
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from the New York Times: "Japan took a major step back on Friday from earlier pledges to slash its greenhouse gas emissions, saying a shutdown of its nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster had made previous targets unattainable. The announcement cast a shadow over international talks underway in Warsaw aimed at fashioning a new global pact to address the threats of a changing climate. Under its new goal, Japan, one of the world's top polluters, would still seek to reduce its current emissions. But it would release 3 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than it did in 1990, rather than the 6 percent cut it originally promised or the 25 percent reduction it promised two years before the 2011 nuclear disaster."
Fear has caused their inability to act responsibly, when if they had the will to do what was right, they'd have been able to solve the real problems with Fukushima and move on.
I swear, we need a gom jabbar test for politicians.
Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions, according to Japan.
OK, so is the most important thing to be anti-nuclear, or to actually save the environment?
Anyone watching what happened must be aware the Japanese took one helluva hit.
I, for one, am extremely impressed with the Japanese, making do despite such a setback.
My take: Salute them and cut them some slack. A lot of slack.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Just don't seem to go together.
Australia just elected a government on an unapologetic anti-carbon tax platform.
France has thousands of truckers shutting down the major roads protesting carbon taxes, and the people support them widely.
Japan is all done indulging carbon caps; reality has imposed itself and they have other priorities now.
I don't know whether our CO2 is going to Venus the Earth. And neither do you. What I am absolutely certain of is that we're going to find out — people will not subject themselves to energy poverty and they are no longer in doubt about the consequences of carbon caps and carbon taxes.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Regardless of the safety of modern reactor designs, Japan's seismic instability and high population density makes it an inherently inappropriate location for nuclear power plants.
The back-pedalling on previous emission pledges and blaming it on idled reactors is all about convincing the domestic electorate to approve nuclear power. The LDP is responsible for putting Japan on the path of nuclear power dependency in the first place, and now that they are back in power they want this particularly bad idea resuscitated.
Japan has a long way to go before exhausting its latent solar, wind, geothermal and conservation potential. With plenty of industrial capacity to embark on leading the world in non-nuclear, non-fossil-fuel energy infrastructure, the LDPs obsession with nuclear is a clear sign of their lack of wisdom and cozy relationship with the like of Mitsubishi.
It's probably been five years since I saw a TV commercial.
Write failed: Broken pipe
What should piss off Japan and everyone else is these plants are US plants, Westinghouse and Japan didn't follow the same standards for US nuclear plants, otherwise this whole thing wouldn't be were its at.
They are Japanese nuclear plants built and operated in Japan.
And why are the standards for US nuclear plants supposed to be better than the standards for Japanese plants? If a USSR design bureau had built some nuclear plants in Japan, would you be similarly claiming that these plants should be built to Soviet standards rather than Japanese standards?
There are a couple of big ways in which nuclear power does a bad job on greenhouse gas emissions. First, it is expensive and slow. So much so that its opportunity cost is bloated and when effort is ill spent on nuclear power, alternatives which are faster, cheaper and better are hindered. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Library/E09-01_NuclearPowerClimateFixOrFolly
Second, as we are seeing here, one accident can lead to a massive pullback from nuclear power, both in the affected country and around the world. Even France has announced a planned pullback. When the pullback is rapid, then relic fossil fuel plants rather than new clean energy replacements are pulled into service to make up the difference in generation. This makes nuclear power not just a slow response to climate change, but a retrograde response since these bad accidents are inevitable.
There are other ways it has a bad influence as well, such as pretending to be a silver bullet to the adolescent mind for example, so much time is wasted on fantasy scenarios. But these two big ones are bad enough.
Two plants in the disaster were supplied by General Electric and the other two plants were manufactured by Toshiba and Hitachi to the General Electric design. Obviously they were "built and operated in Japan" because they just don't fit things that big onto a ship and iirc G.E is still an American company.
Simply because the U.S plants have a massive concrete dome encasing the entire reactor with a Thermal power to pressure rating related to the power output of the reactor. The Fukushima reactors didn't have the same feature, if it was a regulatory requirement then the reactor would not have been operating.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The moon is pretty, leave it alone, build them in Nevada instead where they won't bother anyone. By the way just how many entire countries have been evacuated due to nuclear disasters?
This space intentionally left blank
I refer you (again) to the official report of The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission prepared for the The National Parliment (Diet) of Japan, which says;
Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster – that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.
So it would seem that the official findings differ from your opinion.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
5% before 1990s emission. Mainly through replacing coal electricity with gas electricity. And bit from increased auto efficiency.
So it would seem that the official findings differ from your opinion.
Negligence is different from merely being a "man-made" disaster. For example, driving cars will inevitably result in man-made accidents, no matter how safe the drivers are. It doesn't mean that drivers as a group are negligent. We could, as the original poster proposes, simply end all use of nuclear power, but not doing so isn't automatically negligence.
I am aware that the above report does at several places claim negligence on TEPCO's part, but there's only one actual claim in the conclusions. Here is the sole place where negligence on TEPCO's part was claimed:
NISA did instruct TEPCO to conduct an anti-seismic backcheck, but by not completing the backcheck as originally scheduled, TEPCO effectively invited the accident that followed. NISA is equally at fault because it did not ensure that the backcheck was completed in a timely fashion, despite its awareness of the backcheckâ(TM)s importance. NISAâ(TM)s failure to demand action, and TEPCOâ(TM)s failure to act, together constitute negligence which led to the accident. They cannot use the excuse of circumstances occurring that were beyond their expectations.
But of course, they can and did, contrary to the assertion of the report. Note that the supposed back check was called for in 2006. How that's supposed to rapidly turn into the appropriate safety measures in a few short years is never explained by the Commission.
Sure, if someone had been thoughtful enough to remind TEPCO that there was a huge earthquake scheduled for March, 2011, TEPCO could have been ready in time. That didn't seem to happen for some reason.
Only nations like Canada, USA, Australia, etc. are continuing to lower their emissions.
BUT, Europe and Japan, in fact the west, are NOT the issue. It is the nations who continue to increase their emissions.
China, India, Brazil, South Africa etc. are building out massive new coal plants and running these without pollution controls. These plants will exists for 50-70 years. And these are growing faster than the west can shut down ours.
Not only do we need to get nuke power going quickly, BUT, we need to force all nations to partake in lowering their emissions, or at least keeping it low.
The funny thing is, that emissions are tied to GDP, not ppl. Businesses burn up far more energy than does anything else. As such, focusing on emissions PER CAPITA is about the worst idea going. Instead, it should be about emissions per GDP (real, not PPP). In addition, it should be measured for real, rather than estimated. For CO2, we can do that via satellite. OCO2 will lets the world know next year which nations are emitting what and how much it really is (china is going to be a real shock to the world).
We, esp. the USA who is the worlds largest importers, needs to put a tax on ALL goods (local and imported), based on where it, and the parts come from. If it comes from a place with high emissions/GDP, then the tax is high. If all parts are from nations like france/sweden/iceland, then the tax will be low to nothing. OTOH, if coming from nations like China, Vietnam, India, South Africa, etc. the tax would be high. Why? Because these nations have massive amounts of emissions in terms of their real GDP and NOT the PPP GDP.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Im quoting a certain recent article... by David Suzuki. A rather nasty potential worst case scenario outcome of fukushima, wouldnt you say?
We should send all those fucking smart-arse slashdotters over to work on the dangerous reactor cleanup.
You know, it'd probably be interesting short term work - as long as the rest of the supersmart Slashdot population isn't there.
I agree it was an accidental side-effect of new technology rather than any committment by the US government. Sadly environmentalism is so polticized that many groups refuse to celebrate this achievement. Got to keep developing alternative technologies for when this one runs out.
I think we are cutting emissions and will get to that target before too long. But maybe not this year and already too late to be in compliance. One big advantage that we've got for ourselves is that we can lay the liability for climate damage on China now. As with an auto collision, the person with their foot in the brake is less at fault than the one with their foot on the gas. We've found some safe harbor from the coming storm of blame. I think we should be putting tariffs of imports from China to cover increased flood and crop insurance payouts domestically and to cover emergency assistance in the Philippines.
But it would probably have been better said like this:
We should send all those fucking smart-arse slashdotters over to work on the dangerous reactor cleanup.
I've already worked in functional, operating, nuclear reactors, it was quite interesting. Perhaps we could send fanbois, such as yourself, as you are confident you are safe.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.