Japan To Restart Nuclear Power Tomorrow After Energy Prices Soar

An anonymous reader writes: After the Fukushima meltdown, all of Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down, the last in late 2013. This week the government plans on starting up reactor No.1 at the Sendai nuclear power plant. Energy prices have risen 30% since 2011, and it is hoped that the plant will soon be producing a surplus of electricity. Not everyone is happy about the plant restarting. This weekend, about 2,000 protesters marched around the plant and voiced their opposition. "Past arguments that nuclear plants were safe and nuclear energy was cheap were all shown to be lies," said writer Satoshi Kamata, one of the demonstration organizers. "Kyushu Electric is not qualified to resume operations because it has not completed an anti-quake structure to oversee a possible accident as well as a venting facility."

Comments

And...

[LynnwoodRooster]

Gozilla breathes a sigh or relief... Nuclear power, sweet, lifegiving nuclear power!

It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Firethorn]

From the article: "has built stronger, higher tsunami walls near the new plant" and "Regardless, the 31-year old reactor"

It's sad that 31 years old counts as 'new'.

Consider that if they had had some really new nuclear plants that Fukushima probably would have already been shut down.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Applehu Akbar]

Japan's newest nukes are of the very latest design, and all of the plants being restarted have passed the latest safety tests, on a date that has been planned for years. No, this is not some panic move "in response to soaring energy prices" as the headline claims.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[trout007]

Imagine if the nuts never stopped reactor development? We'd have breeder reactors by now with little waste and much better air.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[FranTaylor]

There has to be an acceptable level of imperfection in the human hands that exploit nuclear power generation.

Yeah, that's the ticket, keep telling the nuclear fuel to be more forgiving of stupid humans, that's how we prevent accidents.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Trepidity]

Japan's newest reactors are indeed of a modern design, but the specific plant whose restart is discussed in this article, Sendai, is still a 2nd-generation plant. It's a newer one than Fukushima (1984 vs. 1971), but not a 3rd-generation plant.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[ColdWetDog]

Japan's newest nukes are of the very latest design, and all of the plants being restarted have passed the latest safety tests, on a date that has been planned for years. No, this is not some panic move "in response to soaring energy prices" as the headline claims.

No, not really.

"The vast majority of plants under construction around the world, 47 in all, are considered Generation II reactor designs—the same 1970s vintage as Fukushima Daiichi, and without integrated passive safety systems."

Note the last phrase 'without integrated passive safety systems". That is the key. Fukashima required external power to shut itself down safely. Yes, TEPCO could have done things differently - site generators uphill, install a seawall that could actually contain a worst-case-scenario earthquake. Installed a hydrogen vent system. But it didn't. And TEPCO stated for years that the system was safe.

Until you can shut down a reactor all by itself, then it isn't safe.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[rmdingler]

You don't ever, really, completely prevent accidents.

There becomes a measurable, yet acceptable level of environmental consequence for the creation of energy using fossil fuels, hydro, solar, and even wind.

Should the bar for nuclear use be set right near perfection? Of course not, but maybe

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[David_Hart]

There becomes a measurable, yet acceptable level of environmental consequence

That level for nuclear generated electricity would be zero, considering that we have multiple other options available. If we had to choose between whale oil and nuclear, it would be a different story, but face it, between solar, wind, and reduced consumption, we simply don't need to take the risk

Wrong...

Wind and Solar are unpredictable and cannot be stored for peak times. Geothermal and Hydro tend to provide reliable power but do not provide enough supply. Wave power may contribute to this, but they are still working on engineering materials that will last in the ocean and handle the currents. That leaves Coal and Natural Gas, both of which have their own detrimental effects on the environment and risks, some of which are as bad or worse than nuclear. http://motherboard.vice.com/bl...

Modern reactor design is as safe, or safer, than natural gas and coal. Most accidents are occurring at older plants that are near their lifetime. We are in this state because of public fear and the near impossible process of bringing a new reactor online. This has slowed the development and deployment of newer, safer designs.

One of these days, we will learn how to store solar and wind energy. At that time, the other methods would quickly become obsolete. But until then, the sources of energy that we use will carry some form of inherent risk.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[epyT-R]

How about this for starters:
1. A design that does not tend towards crazy positive void.
2. Does not allow one to remove all the rods at once, especially from the control room.
3. Does not allow one to shut off all the cooling systems at once, especially while > x% of the rods are removed.
4. Not built on a faultline.

Really, one, two and three, were fixed a long time ago. Four is just common sense.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[quenda]

Hydro? Are you insane?
In 1975, an 18GB hydro-electric dam system in China failed, killing at least 170,000 people. And 11 million made homeless.

Far more in one incident than from Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Do you really want to take that risk?

And don't get me started on coal ...

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[FranTaylor]

Wind and Solar are unpredictable and cannot be stored for peak times.

Duh, solar happens PRECISELY during peak hours, no storage necessary! Summer peak electrical usage is for air conditioning because of THE HOT SUN.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[FranTaylor]

You lost me at reduced consumption.

Really? Between LED bulbs, more efficient computers and a better refrigerator, I've reduced my personal power consumption pretty steadily over the years. I know I am small potatoes, but big buildings can also reduce their consumption by pretty massive amounts with a retrofit:

http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/06/29/empire-state-building-retrofit-new-projects

"In 2011, the Empire State Building beat its year-one energy-efficiency guarantee by 5 percent, saving $2.4 million, and in year two, it beat it by almost 4 percent.

The core building retrofit is completed except for the build-out of high-performance space for new tenants. Once that's finished, $4.4 million is expected to be saved each year, about a 38 percent cut in energy consumption."

And then there is the Conde Nast building:

"Environmentally friendly gas-fired absorption chillers, along with a high-performing insulating and shading curtain wall, ensure that the building does not need to be heated or cooled for the majority of the year."

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[ultranova]

reduced consumption

Says a guy wasting power posting on Slashdot. But that's what it always comes down to with such suggestions: your uses of energy are important, other people are merely wasting it.

Even if humanity was perfect, reduced consumption would in practice mean the misery of rationing with the added effect of having lights go off suddenly when someone else more important needs power or generation drops. But since humans are not perfect, it in practice means no electricity for the masses.

Then there's the developing countries which are currently using little power and are trying to change that. Are you going to tell them to endure poverty forever, then keep bombing their infrastructure back to stone age every few years when they tell you to go to Hell and continue developing - thus increasing their energy use - instead?

Every future where energy consumption is reduced or even stays the same is a nightmare scenario. Every "better tomorrow" scenario requires (vastly) increased energy consumption. Plans which include reducing energy consumption are noise at best and actively harmful for humanity at worst.

Re: It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[WindBourne]

Gen 4 melted salt thorium reactor. In addition, these can use current nuke waste and leave us 5% of the volume that is safe in 200 years. Zero chance if a failure, unless all of the laws of physics suddenly collapse.

Re: It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[WindBourne]

No, all of Japan's plants require human intervention to prevent meltdown. A gen 4 reactor is needed.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[hcs_$reboot]

What it doesn't say is that this power plant (Sendai/Kyushu) is close to one of the largest active volcano on Earth, mount Aso. In this area, an eruption of mount Aso is more to be feared than an earthquake / tsunami like in 2011. So the next excuse is gonna be "look, that wasn't a tsunami, that wasn't an earthquake, that was a volcano eruption which was [unexpected/very unlikely/not seen before...].

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Chas]

Solar and Wind are *NOT* "options" for baseline power.

Not with our current grid system.
Not even if we rebuilt into a proper national grid, spec'ed to maximize the solar/wind contributions.

And I wish people would STOP trying to push this sort of bullshit.
Solar and wind currently provide a TINY fraction of the national power load. Scaling up to provide all of it, were it even possible with current tech, would basically leave vast swaths of the country buried under panels or reflectors (in the case of solar thermal). Leaving said tracts of land useless for pretty much anything else.

Nuclear is a 365-day-a-year baseline power solution. And far more energy-dense than any renewables out there.
The main problem is that too many people have been conditioned with "Nookyoolur = BOMZ!" fear and antipathy.
As such, we've seen even simple issues blown COMPLETELY out of proportion. And every and any issue is treated like "the plant blew up and we have thousands of people dead because of it".

There have been approximately 371 deaths in the nuclear power industry since 1950. Most of them being uranium miners.
There have been approximately ZERO civilian deaths.
And most of the overseas casualties have been plant workers in poorly designed/maintained/operated facilities.

That I know of, there's been approximately 3 deaths in the solar industry since the 1970's. All of them during install.
That totally discounts deaths among silica miners, as other industries utilize silica-based products too.

As for "reduced consumption".

You be the first to volunteer to go shiver in a cave in the winter, roast in the desert in the summer and generally never use modern electronics again.

Consumption of power is only ever going to INCREASE in the US. Any efficiencies realized will simply be subsumed in further consumption.

Realistically, what I'd like to see is a modernized grid with a base generation of nuclear fission (for now) with additional load covered renewable resources mated to power storage technology.

This can tide us over while we race to find out if nuclear fusion will become a viable power source.

After that, baseline nuclear fusion augmented by renewables with power storage technology.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Chas]

In your area maybe it does.

In the US, we're pretty much AT Peak Hydro right now.

Environmental concerns over the repercussions of implementing new hydro has dropped new hydro projects to virtually nil.

Hell, we're ripping down Hydro dams to revert areas to their natural ecology.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Chas]

Right. You want to use things like Solar and Wind at peak times.

For everything else, there's nuclear.

And you know who's pushing the solar and wind farms the most?

The gas company. Because a lot of these solar and wind facilities being put in are actually:

Solar + Gas backup

Wind + Gas backup

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Chas]

How about something like this?

A molten salt reactor.

It's DEFAULT state is "no reaction".

Because a drain in the reaction tank is plugged by a supercooled chunk of the reaction medium itself.

If the reaction starts to run away? The plug melts. The fuel drains away from the catalyst. The reaction stops.

If the power to the generator goes out? The plug melts. The fuel drains away from the catalyst. The reaction stops.

Someone sabotages the plug cooler? The plug melts. The fuel drains away from the catalyst. The reaction stops.

And there's no crazy boiling water system inside the reactor itself to overheat and blow up (this is what explodes in reactor accidents).
And with a simple design like this, there's no Rube Goldberg domino machine controlling the system and trying to circumvent every possible way of being, itself, circumvented.

This is the problem with current solid fuel boiling water reactors. They're heavily over-engineered to try and compensate for every little implausible or impossible corner case a sick mind could imagine. However, the larger and more complex it becomes, the more ways there are to fuck it up. And it's a never-ending vicious cycle.

As for "perfect" systems that never fail?

As soon as you can show me 100% failure-proof solar and wind systems.

There's no such thing as 100% failure-proof.

However, done right, even failure mode can be 100% safe.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Solandri]

That's an invalid comparison. It's like comparing how a plane crash kills hundreds of people while a car crash kills 1-4, therefore cars must be safer.

To compare properly, you have to normalize the consequences by the amount of power generated. So 1 nuclear plant = 1 hydro plant = 2 coal plants = 7500 wind turbines = 19 square km of solar panels. Then you apply the failure rate of each technology based on the construction, operation, and maintenance of that amount of infrastructure. Even with Fukushima and Chernobyl, nuclear is by far the safest power generation technology. Hydro is second - a close second if you exclude Banqiao, a distant second if you include it. Then come wind and solar which kill about an order of magnitude more people per MWh generated than nuclear. (Little-known fact: despite nuclear power producing 12% of the world's electricity vs 2% for wind, and suffering its second-worst accident in history in March 2011, nobody died from nuclear power during that month, while wind killed one person. Someone forgot to lock the ladder to a wind turbine, and a high school student climbed up and fell to his death. While forgetting to lock one ladder is unlikely, multiply it by the 7500 turbines needed to replace a nuclear plant and it's almost certain to happen.)

Coal is about 4 orders of magnitude worse. That is what is not even an argument. We should be doing everything we can to replace coal with any of the alternatives. But because some people have a stick up their ass about nuclear, they're insisting we phase out coal slowly so it can be replaced with only renewables, even though right now nuclear is the only power source which can realistically replace coal.

Nuclear doesn't have to be our final power source. We can transition over to nuclear for a few decades while R&D into renewables drops their price to more competitive levels. Then we can phase out the nuclear plants and replace them with renewables. That would get us off coal almost immediately, saving hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives each year compared to our current trajectory, where we're hanging on to coal plants because certain people are adamant that we cannot build new nuclear plants. Those coal deaths are on your heads.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[cheesybagel]

The Chinese are presently building a lot of Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactors which are passive safety Generation III nuclear reactor designs. The current owner of Westinghouse BTW is Toshiba Group.

In fact the first one should be started up next year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[AmiMoJo]

In Europe we have been reducing out energy consumption (down 9% from the peak in 2006) while increasing our quality of life. That is despite population growth, and the admission of new rapidly developing nations to the EU.

It's cheaper to save energy than it is to install new capacity, and doing so improves your life. Why waste energy heating and cooling your home when you can insulate it once and then enjoy a pleasant, temperate environment with minimal effort? Air conditioning gives you the chills and heating dries the air out. Insulation is much better.

Why drive a really inefficient car? You are just wasting money on fuel and polluting the environment that you live in, which then damages your health. Thanks to manufacturers being forced to improve modern engines are much more efficient while still delivering plenty of power. You can bet that without regulation they wouldn't be - just look at other products such as vacuum cleaners and hair dryers - the market created products with massive, inefficient motors instead of good cleaning/drying ability until regulations fixed them.

Ever increasing energy consumption is a nightmare scenario. I want my phone to last a week on a tiny light weight battery, that's progress. I want my environment to be clean. I want products that don't produce waste heat that I then need to vent in the summer or crank up the AC to compensate for. I want a stable population because the infrastructure can only take so many personal vehicles before I end up wasting half my life in traffic jams.

Many of the biggest improvements we can make now involve reducing energy consumption.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[Bongo]

Does it explain why energy consumption went down? Less industry perhaps?

I think the main argument about energy is simply, how much is needed? Cutting energy use 10% might not make much difference, to say, whether one can ditch nuclear or coal altogether.

I live in a small house, wear jumpers indoors, don't have a car, rarely fly (once in ten years), always turn the lights off when I leave a room, etc. I doubt I'm making any significant difference to my energy use. Fact is, I use what I need to use. There are no big savings to be made. We forget that we have washing machines and fridges and TVs and computers which previous generations didn't have. We forget that when we turn up to work, we're by law expected to enjoy a comfortable environment, a standard previous generations would have thought extravagant. And whatever you do, don't get sick and need a hospital, just think of the enormous amount of infrastructure you are making use of there. We will always be using a lot of energy. 20% less of a lot is still a lot.

The only way forward really is new cheaper energy sources. We need much much more energy available. And saving is good but that's always been the case that we find some things we can make more efficient. But generally, efficiencies mean people can use more. It is only when you make things much more expensive that you may stop people using energy, but then you are forcing people to be poor.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[serviscope_minor]

And yet if you measure deaths per TWH, nuclear is still safer than wind or solar. Why?

The answer is because wind and solar are diffuse and so the plants are truly colossal, compared to a nuclear plant of equivalent power. Those plants have to be built and those raw materials have to be mined and construction and mining deaths are still a thing.

Wind and solar don't have the single catastrophic accidents, but they more than make up for it in lots and lots and lots of small accidents. But "gut dies in a construction accident" is never a news story so you never hear about it. But news of fukishima radiation reaching the west coast is, even if it's over an order of magnitude below the background level in the sea never mind in food and on lang.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[TheRaven64]

Lighting is less power intensive now but desktop computers aren't

Nonsense. Even if you're talking about high-end workstations, compare them to a quad Alpha or similar from 15 years ago. We've actually had issues in the building where I work (full of computer scientists, so not exactly short on power users - for normal office users, the requirements would likely be even lower). The heating in the building was designed based on the assumption that every desk would have a CRT on it and a tower next to it. The CRTs are all gone (replaced with LCDs) and the towers now all consume less power: a modern multicore i5 or i7 consumes a lot less than a Pentium 4, modern SSDs use less power than spinning rust, so the waste heat from all of these is a lot lower than the building designers expected. I can't tell from the fan noise whether the computer under my desk is on - the machine I was using a decade ago made it very obvious from the jet engine noise.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[AmiMoJo]

Does it explain why energy consumption went down? Less industry perhaps?

I live in a small house, wear jumpers indoors, don't have a car, rarely fly (once in ten years), always turn the lights off when I leave a room, etc. I doubt I'm making any significant difference to my energy use.

You are. Turning down the thermostat a couple of degrees makes a big difference, for example. Not owning a car is another huge saving.

Fact is, I use what I need to use. There are no big savings to be made.

You are not very typical. Most households own a car, for example. Even for you though, if you live in the EU your modern appliances are a lot more efficient than the old ones. Your fridge, for example, uses a fraction of the energy the one you bought in the 1980s did, and contains far fewer harmful chemicals, and needed less energy to build too. You saved energy by replacing an item that came to the end of its natural life, because the government made sure that the new one was more efficient.

And whatever you do, don't get sick and need a hospital, just think of the enormous amount of infrastructure you are making use of there.

Personally, I'd rather the hospital fitted LED bulbs (more reliable, less likely to fail at a critical moment) and fitted me with the most efficient pacemaker possible so that I don't have to have the batteries changed too often. I'd also rather the atmosphere in the hospital was a free of pollution as possible, which is helped by having more efficient combustion engines or moving to alternative fuels. I'd rather that the medical equipment used efficient LCD panels instead of CRTs, because then they will run longer on emergency generator power and are easier for staff to move around. I'd rather I could be seen right away instead of having to wait while they treat the soldier who was injured securing our energy supplies.

You need to take a holistic view, rather than focusing on tiny individual actions. While small things are important, the are often only significant when everyone is doing them, which is why regulation to mandate efficiency is important.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, even the most energy sucking LCD display still sips power compared to the CRTs of yesteryear. Also, we aren't tiptoeing the line where computers are drawing 10 amps at startup like we were in 2004 due to multiple spinning disks starting at once + fans using max current to get moving in order to get rid of the waste heat from bad CPU designs like Pentium 4. Plus, add in virtualization in the data center and you've got less machines using less energy to do more work these days from far better load-sharing efficiency and capacity utilization.

Technologies like Intel vPro allow businesses to sleep / shut off machines that used to run 24/7 in order to get software updates. vPro allows for reliable unicast wake-up events over the network, unlike trying to rely on shitty wake-on-LAN layer-2 broadcasts.

Try again.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, except what you're conveniently not saying is that your molten salt is likely to be NaK, which ignites spontaneously in air, and explodes if it makes contact with water. As a bonus, the molten salt also becomes incredibly radioactive while in operation (sodium-24, half-life of 15 hours, two gamma rays per disintegration, decays into magnesium which is also highly flammable).

There's a reason that these haven't been built past the research and design phases, and it's mostly to do with solving a whole new set of engineering problems. The Soviets used lead-bismuth eutectic as coolant in nuclear submarines in the 1980s, and that technology never made it to commercial energy production either due to issues with the coolant being corrosive to steel, and that configuration has WAY less concerns.

I'm a big fan of using nuclear power and getting it as close as we can to perfection and operational safety, but you can't just paint over the problems with each design.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[MrKaos]

From the article: "has built stronger, higher tsunami walls near the new plant" and "Regardless, the 31-year old reactor"

It's sad that 31 years old counts as 'new'.

Consider that if they had had some really new nuclear plants that Fukushima probably would have already been shut down.

Awesome, so basically if it hadn't been for anti-nuclear protestors, we likely have never had a Fukushima incident.

According to the official report if it hadn't been for collusion between the regulator and TEPCO, we likely have never had a Fukushima incident.

Re:It'd be hilareous if not so sad...

[TheRaven64]

I used to be able to put my hand on the CPU of my PC in the early 1990s while the thing was on. Good luck doing that now

And my laptop can do everything that the PC from the early '90s could do without even turning the fans on. Even a Raspberry Pi 2 outperforms a late-'90s PC handily and doesn't even have a heatsink (let alone a fan) on the SoC and can run happily from a battery.

Why do you think the power supply wattage keeps going up?

It doesn't, unless you're talking about high-end workstation machines (or gamer rigs, which are a similar and small market segment). The reason that I brought up the Alpha is because that's what people who had high-end workstations used and those things had 500W+ PSUs. Pentium-class machines had 230W PSUs at the entry level. Now, for basic office use, an Atom or similar with embedded Intel graphics and a small SSD will happily do what you need with a 30W total system power budget.

My laptop has a quad-core i7 (4+4 with hyperthreading), an nVidia GPU, and a 1TB SSD. The power supply is rated at 85W and when I'm using all of the cores, and the GPU, and hitting the SSD hard, and have the screen brightness turned to maximum, it's still charging the battery at a reasonable rate, so the total draw is a lot less than 85W in normal use. A Pentium from the early '90s wouldn't even turn on with an 85W PSU (don't forget, that Pentium had a load of logic in the north and southbridge chips that each drained power and a load of discrete ICs for various controllers that are now integrated into a single chip, plus a hard disk that drew a reasonable amount of power).

Those data points that you're picking are completely irrelevant for office machines. No one needs a 400W GPU for office work. You might need them for scientific computing, but there that 400W GPU is often replacing a 10kW cluster from a decade or so ago. Haswell-E is an 'enthusiast-class desktop' chip - i.e. a thing that idiot gamers with more money than sense buy so that they can feel 'leet. You won't find them in workstations or in office desktops.

Fact is a computer is today a major power hog in a regular house

In a regular house, there are no desktops. There are laptops, tablets, and smartphones. And, increasingly, only tablets and smartphones.

How about large screen LCDs? 245W for a 55".

So, about the same as a 24" CRT. Which do you think are more common: 24" CRTs 10 years ago, or 55" LCDs now?

Back when we used CRTs we also used smaller screens. 160W for a 36".

That's 160W for a new CRT, which is a lot more energy efficient than the ones we were using a decade ago (less loss, better phosphor). Even then, 30" CRTs were pretty rare a decade ago - I only knew a couple of people who had them, I don't know anyone who has a 55" LCD. You're more likely to have a projector for that size, and modern LED / laser projectors are even more power efficient for the same brightness.

What did they think was going to happen?

[timrod]

It should've been obvious to everyone involved that shutting down all the nuclear reactors in Japan as a reaction to the Fukushima meltdown with absolutely no replacement strategy wasn't a sustainable option.

Re:What did they think was going to happen?

[Person147]

Bah, it was a popular decision with the public - and that is what democracy is all about!

Re:I thought Abenomics wanted inflation?

[CrimsonAvenger]

I guess they only wanted inflation directed the "right" players in the economy, ie people instead of businesses.

Price increases, in and of themselves, are NOT a sign of inflation.

Essentially, inflation is an increase in the money supply not supported by a corresponding increase in "stuff you can spend money on".

While electricity certainly qualifies as "stuff you can spend money on", nothing that can be done to the supply of electricity signifies inflation in and of itself.

Remember, while price increases may be a sign of inflation, price increases are not necessarily a result of inflation. Sometimes it's just more demand than supply....

Fine but they should invest in wind next

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Japan actually has a large, and largely untapped, capacity to use wind power. They also have quite a lot of hydroelectricity, which is useful for buffering against variations.

Wind power is actually cheaper than nuclear anyway now.

Nuclear power is probably not such a great idea for Japan, it's quite a small country, very highly populated, and on the ring of fire, and any accidents could have much worse effects than we saw with Fukushima. With Fukushima, it was fortuitous that it was on the East coast, and the prevailing winds blew the fallout out to sea where it was diluted it down. If the accident had been West of Tokyo it would have been incredibly, stupendously bad, and if they return to using nuclear power in a big way, that could actually happen.

Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next

[Anonymous Coward]

Wind power is not cheaper and has its own problems. It is certainly not cheaper than re-starting existing nuclear plants.

Plant cannot withstand tsunamis, that is well know. They should not restart any plants that are in tsunami vulnerable areas. They have proven to stand up to earthquakes quite well, as they were designed to do.

Cooler heads are prevailing in Japan.

Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next

[Harlequin80]

The other way to look at it is if Fukushima had been on the West coast we wouldn't be talking about it at all and it would never have been damaged by the Tsunami.

All power generation systems comes with some kind of risks. As a species we have been using nuclear all around the world for over 50 years and there are around 450ish plants with only 2 accidents of major note. In both instances we have learned what to look for and how to defend against those and similar issues in the future.

One of the huge risks on other energy sources that is a major reason why Japan will have a nuclear energy sector for the foreseeable future is it is the only reasonably independent energy source available to it which other countries can't take away easily. Japan has no major fossil fuel reserves so must import gas, coal etc. putting it at risk to other countries for its energy supply.

The same can be seen in their food production. Japan intensively farms its land and supports / protects its farmers. This is so that in the event of a conflict they retain the ability to feed themselves without imports.

Wind is great, solar is great, hydro is great but I'm not convinced there is enough capacity, built or build-able, in those sources for Japan to move away from nuclear at this stage.

Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next

[FranTaylor]

if this is an example of your ability to critique, then you're the one who belongs in the kitchen

Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Things still fail, shit still happens.

Yesterday I saw a picture where corrosion had eaten about 7 inches into a huge thick piece of metal in a reactor; but I can't find it today. Really scary.

People make mistakes, in specifying, designing, building and operating equipment; even with things a lot less complicated than a nuclear reactor.

The difference is, with other things, you don't have to evacuate towns (or entire CITIES) for hundreds of years when they fuck up.

Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next

[Harlequin80]

I didn't know the event so just did a quick read. From what I can see the other cooling towers were more than capable of handling the heat load and the plant was throttled to 50% until the cooling tower was repaired. I couldn't find anything that referred to discharges into the river causing ecological damage, happy to read if you have something. Also it looks like it was a failure of a timber support not metal.

That said cooling towers are not specific to nuclear power stations. They are used by all heat based generation systems to the impact would have been identical at a coal or gas plant.

Re:Fine but they should invest in wind next

[cheesybagel]

Wind is only cheaper if you don't take into account the secondary investments in backup generation capacity, storage, and electrical grid modifications.

If you are using it to power an industrial process than can run as you get power (e.g. milling) I guess its fine. But not for business processes that must work 24/7.

Also as you can imagine Japan does not have that much empty space to waste with windmills. They do have quite a few already.

Re:What energy prices have risen?

[cheater512]

Chances are they aren't producing much of their electricity domestically any more and instead are importing.

They didn't shut down their nuclear reactors and a whole bunch of coal plants just sprung up everywhere to take up the slack.

Re:What energy prices have risen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost all energy prices (crude oil, natural gas, coal) have fallen by half comparing to the mid-point of 2011 prices, except uranium. What energy prices are they talking about?

They are talking about their electricity supplies.

Nuclear energy is mostly local energy. Fossil fuels are ALL IMPORTED into Japan. So yes, energy prices increased since yen devalued and Japan has been literally burning foreign currency reserves to burn fossil fuels.

Uranium prices do not really matter for nuclear power. It forms a very small fraction of actual costs.

Re:What energy prices have risen?

[erice]

Chances are they aren't producing much of their electricity domestically any more and instead are importing.

They didn't shut down their nuclear reactors and a whole bunch of coal plants just sprung up everywhere to take up the slack.

Um. This is Japan, and Island country. I'm pretty sure they are not importing electricity from anywhere, though they do have some submarine cables between the islands. If they did build a cable on the shortest route to South Korea (the only plausible endpoint) it would be on the longest undersea power cables in the world. Maybe if/when the build the tunnel

Re: What energy prices have risen?

[TheRaven64]

That's because radioactive waste is a horribly misleading term. Anything that is sufficiently radioactive to be a danger is also radioactive enough to be useful, even if only in radiothermal or betavoltaic generators. The 'waste' is fuel that, for political or economic reasons, it doesn't make sense to use at the moment. Most of it can be reprocessed in breeder reactors and turned into fuel useable in existing reactors. Often, storing it and using newly mined fuel is cheaper, but 'we have so much nuclear fuel that it isn't currently economic to make efficient use of it' is a really, really bad argument against nuclear power.