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Should Japan Restart More Nuclear Power Plants? (thebulletin.org)
Lasrick writes: Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that Japan should restart more of its nuclear reactors (the Sendai nuclear plant was restarted in August). The reason is simple, writes Baum: "Japan is now building 45 new coal power plants, but if it turned its nuclear power plants back on... it could cut coal consumption in half. And coal poses more health and climate change dangers than nuclear power."
If you're going to ask us a question, make it a poll.
Basically every option for them and their little fireball of an island chain are Bad Choices.
Still, engineered and maintained properly, with no corner cutting, they'd be better served by nuclear.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
We only get worked up about nuclear disasters because they're so unusual. Coal is a disaster in its normal operation!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Coal the only alternative?
What about Geothermal Power ?
What about Wind Power?
What about wave power?
Japan should take the lead from Germany who replaced all their nuclear power plants with renewables following the Fukushima disaster
Point a geiger counter at your smoke detector sometime, and maybe watch Pandora's Promise to educate yourself on the reality of nuclear power.
Or point it at a cinder block wall and watch it light up. In Jr High, one of my Scout leaders lent us a Geiger counter for a few days and it was amazing the things that would set it off and we were 500 miles from the nearest nuclear facility
And Japan lost the use of a LOT of land with one nuclear incident.
It CLICKS! And that's SCARY!
Speaking as someone who currently lives in Japan (for work, I'm not Japanese), I think they should. Japan has a ridiculous amount of people in a very small space - Tokyo has is only 75% as large as New York City, but has almost twice as many people. The amount of coal needed to provide enough electricity for them would absolutely pollute the area around them and render it inhabitable - and in a country where habitable land is so scarce, and with such a nice natural climate that attracts a huge amount of tourists, ruining it would not be a good idea. So long as they invest properly in their nuclear power plants and ensure they are well maintained and regulated, they have virtually no environmental impact, and they can provide absolutely insane amounts of power for a very low price. If they act cut the nuclear power like Germany did (which I think was an idiotic move, but I digress), they are going to have a very, very, very hard time supplying enough power for everyone, and if they do it in coal, that will be a disaster. I'll finish with a nice little graph: what do you think?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Ah yes, Nuclear myth #3: All radiation is caused by nuclear power and nuclear bombs.
Fact: Nearly everything in the world is naturally radioactive. You're horrified that that stuff around your office lights up Geiger counters, because you never pointed a Geiger counter at that stuff before the accident. Thus you are incorrectly attributing natural radiation to the accident. Your largest annual radiation dose actually comes from your own body. Potassium has a relatively common naturally occurring isotope (K40) which is radioactive, and your body needs potassium to survive (it's essential to how your nerves function). Your second largest dose comes from cosmic rays. Most of these are filtered out by the atmosphere, so in a twist of irony many of those who fled Japan by plane after the accident unwittingly exposed themselves to more radiation during their flight (planes fly above most of the atmosphere) than if they'd just stayed put in Japan.
This myth is so prevalent and pernicious that we screen our nuclear plant workers with detectors which would be screaming if placed at the exit of a drugstore or supermarket. K40 is common enough that most of the false alarms from the "dirty bomb" detectors at our borders are caused by shipments of food which are high in potassium - bananas, avocados, cocoa, etc.
Perhaps most damning with respect to TFA, burning coal releases radiation. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium. The uranium in coal actually contains more energy than the coal itself, but because people who believe this myth are staunchly opposed to nuclear power, they end up breathing in those minute traces of uranium released by burning coal instead. (Burning coal is also the current major contributor to mercury in our oceans which makes fish like tuna dangerous to consume. Historically the biggest contributor was mining, but that's been regulated enough that the primary mercury source is now coal pollution.)
Try a banana on your Geiger counter..
And yes, I spend plenty of time in Tokyo myself, so I get to have an opinion...
Mind you, as you are posting anonymous, I suspect you are actually an american scaremonger posting BS, but thats pretty common.
every coal fire plant is a disaster that is occurring every single day and are continuing to affect the human race in ways we still don't fully comprehend long after everyone here is dead.
You are arguing that having two problems is the solution, instead of getting rid of both problems. Nuclear and Coal are as bad as each other and Nuclear is worse in ways we still don't fully comprehend.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm pro-nuclear (generally speaking). I live in Japan.
I don't think turning on a bunch of outdated reactors that sit on one of the most earthquake and tsunami-prone areas of the world is a good idea.
How about replacing the existing reactors with a smaller number of very modern Westinghouse AP1000s? A far better way to spend billions of dollars than the stupid 2020 Tokyo Olympics. I think this is an acceptable medium-range solution until someone demonstrates a commercial 1GW thorium plant.
Nuclear and Coal are as bad as each other and Nuclear is worse in ways we still don't fully comprehend.
I'd argue that Coal is worse, and worse in ways that we still don't fully comprehend. We understand the problems with nuclear power pretty well, including that it kills fewer people per MWh than solar.
Remember, most of the dangerous byproducts from a coal plant don't break down, and aren't all that well contained. Nuclear power waste is at least contained.
I don't read AC A human right
You seem to forget that the US dropped NUCLEAR FUCKING BOMBS on two Japanese cities only 70 odd years ago, and both are thriving cities these days.
A nuclear bomb has a mass of plutonium in the kilogram range. A nuclear reactor's fuel mass is in the 100-150 ton range. You are missing the difference between radiation and radionuclides.
What goes on for so long is the bs paranoia that is so deeply ingrained that people refuse to look at the scientific facts that low levels of radiation are not lethal
Citation please. LNT has NOT been disproved - so where is your evidence that it is?
But dont let actual facts get in the way of your cold war radiation terror..
Well I'm sure you won't have any trouble producing the facts you claim to have.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
every coal fire plant is a disaster that is occurring every single day and are continuing to affect the human race in ways we still don't fully comprehend long after everyone here is dead.
You are arguing that having two problems is the solution, instead of getting rid of both problems. Nuclear and Coal are as bad as each other and Nuclear is worse in ways we still don't fully comprehend.
No, I am arguing coal is a KNOWN far worse problem right here and now, we don't have to wait for an accident, it doesn't have some "chance" of being an issue. It has far reaching known issues and probably just as many unknown.
perfectly safe gov't run nuclear plant
The worst reactor disaster our species has yet caused was the explosion and melt down of Chernobyl; designed by government researchers, built by government owned industry, operated by government employed staff and named after every intellectuals favorite opium dealer; V.I. Lenin.
But don't let actual history impede your little world view. Go right on indulging the bullshit they trained you with.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The difference is that at least with gov't you take a good chunk of the profit motive out.
And of course, you think that is a bad thing.
The way I see gov't, especially central gov't is this: It's a tool. A dangerous tool. But what other tool has the raw power to stand up to a mega corp?
You do. Megacorps aren't that powerful. Stop buying their stuff. If one really, truly went beyond the pale, its employees could quickly sabotage it into non existence. This fear of business is profoundly misguided. And frankly, I think it's encouraged to deflect attention from government power grabs.
The geek's technical and ecological arguments count for nothing if you have lost faith in those who were responsible for the safety of nuclear power both in private industry and in government.
I'm from Sweden, almost half of our electricity has come from hydro power and the other half from nuclear power.
Well, you guys and Finland and the world leaders in this technology. I commend your countries pragmatic approach to spent fuel containment, of which Japan has none.
Just to give other people here some context, one of the most major criticisms of Yucca Mountain was that the DOE's original policy using the 'Defense in Depth' approach to the specification for building a spent fuel containment facility could not be applied to Yucca's geology. The reason to choose a specific geology (in addition to being seisemically stable) was also to have the geologic chemistry of the rock able to control the the amount of time ground water took to travel through the facility carrying radioactive isotopes, eventually, into the water table. If the amount of time it takes exceeds the decay rate of the longest lived radio-isotopes then the facility was providing defense in depth.
In addition, as a site like that would be containing pu-239, whose half life is around 25000 years, after considering the daughter products you need a geology capable of containing it for 500,000 years, which is what the original specification called for.
Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology (pdf) revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products. The reason is Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash.
Feild studies have established that crystaline rocks like granite and bentonite clays can acheive this control. So far Finland is on track to be the first with an active facility with a Swedish facility also in the works.
Curiously, getting this right should be the one thing pro and anti nuclear folk should be able to agree on, if only for their own reasons. For Nuclear power to continue operating such a storage facility is essential so that new reactors can be deployed and materials removed from reactor sites. For people against Nuclear power such a facility would improve the safety of the industry as a whole by providing a place to store the materials permanently where there ingress into the environment can be controlled.
We don't see any improvements to governance, containment or anything else in Japans Nuclear industry thus very little logic in restarting it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'd argue that Coal is worse, and worse in ways that we still don't fully comprehend. Remember, most of the dangerous byproducts from a coal plant don't break down, and aren't all that well contained.
You're not going to get an argument from me that coal is bad. It is a shit industry, they don't want to change and you already know my opinions, based in knowledge of the appropriate bills, how and why the nuclear industry is still, like all of us, beholden to coal and oil.
You also know that I think Nuclear *could* be better if we could get past all of the people who think they are supporting it, but in reality are preventing it from evolving a safety culture. It needs to be divorced from private industry's profit motivation and moved into the domain of government where it can be managed with the same type of safety culture that exists in military installations.
Based on the available evidence from the official report, I doubt Japan could make the appropriate regulatory changes that would support a safe restart of the industry. Same situation, it's not the technology so much as the entities running it.
We understand the problems with nuclear power pretty well, including that it kills fewer people per MWh than solar.
Well, I think you need to read my comments about IAEA and WHO however I see that it has already been modded down, perhaps the facts are a little too confrontational. It doesn't matter - the real conversation about Nuclear power is always at -1 here at /.
As for killing less than solar, I think it is clear that that is a contrived situation.
Nuclear power waste is at least contained.
It's a core problem of the nuclear industry around the world that needs to be solved of which I have already commented on.
Incidentally, I will post the last part of our previous discussion on EPR vs AP1000 for you later as you asked me to answer some specific things which I was too tired to answer. I could be related to what we are discussing here.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Thanks for the link, I didn't see anything there that disproves LNT, care to provide one that supports your statement?
But you just keep believing your reds-under-the-bed propoganda view of radiation.. because science stopped in the 50s, really it did.
There is no need to get emotional, I'd prefer to stick with the science myself. You are *still* missing the difference between radiation and radionuclides, the difference between internal and external exposure to radionuclides.
For bonus points I suggest you keep working hard to stop development/deployment of new generation nuclear power, to maximise the length of time we keep running old gen reactors, and block any attempts to minimise waste through reprocessing/breeding! yeah, thats the ticket!
breeding eh? I see you have a long way to go before you understand the issues. Right now you think I am anti nuclear, yet you don't even know what a burner reactor is.
Before you start ad-homing the shit out of me, why don't you check out some of my other posts and see if I've supported my opinion with fact. It's a complex industry and you may have some good points to share which will mean we both learn something. I'm not being an asshole to you, I'm just asking you to support your claim if you can.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Okay, let's state clearly the argument being made by opponents of the coal plant re-starts too, just so we are all clear.
Firstly, the claim about building 45 new coal plants is nonsense. Most of that number appears to be replacements for existing plants. This is the same lie used to claim that Germany is building extra coal plants - it isn't, it's closing old ones faster than the new, more efficient ones open.
Japan sees coal as a temporary measure. It was 24% of capacity before 2011, and the plan is to have it at 26%by 2030. The debate now is over how much of the ~14% that was covered by nuclear will be replaced with coal, restarted nuclear, renewables and energy saving. The government has set the goal of an additional 2% coal, but with a reduction in emissions through newer, cleaner plants.
Opponents of nuclear power in Japan point out that many plants have been found to be inadequately protected after Fukushima. Previously unknown geological faults have been found right under some plants. Poor maintenance, previously undiscovered damage from the earthquake, and extremely high costs. As an alternative they suggest the development of renewable energy.
An extra 14% renewable energy is not a particularly lofty goal. Japan leads the world with battery technology for storage. Geographic distribution, geothermal and the like all increase the capacity factor. They argue that rather than spend vast amounts of money restarting nuclear plants, it should be spent on renewable energy. Japan would benefit from being able to develop and export the technology, and there are fully costed plans to get the capacity needed.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So a plutonium fire would destroy the planet? How?
Learn to love Alaska
ok lets state this clearly for you. EVEN the cleanest most modern coal plant is thousands of times more polluting than a nuclear plant. This isn't questionable, or ifs or buts, the only scenario the two can be compared is in a nuclear disaster. 2% increase in coal will mean the deaths of 10's of thousands of people, it will be polluting millions and millions of tons of toxins into the environment and atmosphere. If instead of building those new cleaner coal plants they built modern nuclear with high levels of safety they would generate massive amounts of clean low risk power, they would save 10's if not 100's of thousands of lives over the lifetime of the plant and they would MASSIVELY cut emissions across the country.
Why do you think that TEPCO worked so hard to remove the fuel rods from the structure that is failing. What do you think would happen to plutonium fuel rods in a spent fuel pool without water surrounding them to moderate neutron activity had the structure collapsed?
Nothing spectacular --- MOX or no MOX.
Circumstances of Unit #4 fuel pool was the biggest money-making lecture bonanza for Arnie Gundersen and Harvey Wasserman, two disingenuous prophets of nuclear doom whose popularity peaked in 2013. I am sorry to see that your scenario is directly taken from their playbook. Wasserman it was who doubled down on TEPCO's offloading of fuel for his bread and butter, saying âoeWe are now within two months of what may be humankindâ(TM)s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.â Even then the experts could see that aside from a few places where debris had fallen into the pool there was nothing even remotely resembling the dangers espoused by these two men. To make matters worse the Japanese press picked up their remarks verbatim without even attempting to verify the physics, then the wussy American press echoed the stories as if their Japanese colleagues were 'reliable sources' and also failed to interview experts. Web sites like enenews serve up this crap again every day as if it's still fresh or has an ounce of merit. That's their bread and butter.
The doomsday scenarios rely on some miraculous condition where all convection was blocked and all bundles are somehow pushed together and reach the 900C-2500C sustained temperatures required for ignition and meltdown. It is like announcing that a wildfire is likely to melt a steel building and having the newspapers pick up the story.
Leslie Corrice documented the unfounded hysteria centered on #4 In almost any other branch of science there would have been an immediate and severe blowback of ridicule, but in matters pertaining to nuclear energy the press seems to feel there is no such things as journalist 'thin ice'. Doom porn sells.
it would be, IN FACT, an extinction level event
So ease your worries. Give TEPCO a pat on the back for a successful and uneventful fuel offload. If you were so worried about this why cannot we hear the jubilation in your voice?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
No, it can't. Stop being ridiculous. Chernobyl was about as bad as a nuclear accident could get, and it was bad, but it didn't come close to wiping out the human race. Hell, it didn't even wipe out the population of the city of Chernobyl, although it did make the city largely uninhabitable.
You're not going to get an argument from me that coal is bad. It is a shit industry, they don't want to change and you already know my opinions, based in knowledge of the appropriate bills, how and why the nuclear industry is still, like all of us, beholden to coal and oil.
I think you need to lay off the oil-nuclear conspiracy theories. And yes, that's what I'd relate them as. Nuclear has historically been a baseload electrical power source, with Oil only being used for emergency power(including at nuclear plants) in most areas. In the previous thread where you posted more on this, I was seriously off-put by your allegations.
'Coal' opposing nuclear is more understandable, but it's important to remember that coal isn't a single entity - and they're actually more in bed with each other than being opponents. A lot of coal power plant owners also own interests in nuclear.
You also know that I think Nuclear *could* be better if we could get past all of the people who think they are supporting it, but in reality are preventing it from evolving a safety culture. It needs to be divorced from private industry's profit motivation and moved into the domain of government where it can be managed with the same type of safety culture that exists in military installations.
You do realize that 1/3 of the major nuclear disasters was from a government controlled nuclear plant? If you go below 'catastrophic' and look at the behavior of government controlled plants, you'll find that their record is actually much worse than the commercial plants. That includes the USA and USSR.
Consider that for commercial plants that an accident means lost money, huge amounts of it. There's plenty of incentives to be safe.
Also, I've worked on military installations. 'Safety Culture'? We're not really any better than private industry. Also, consider that the USA hasn't had a major disaster since TMI, which is when we went through and drastically increased safety requirements, instituting drastically altered safety protocols. Defense in depth, automatic safety systems, etc...
Well, I think you need to read my comments about IAEA and WHO [slashdot.org] however I see that it has already been modded down, perhaps the facts are a little too confrontational. It doesn't matter - the real conversation about Nuclear power is always at -1 here at /.
Looked at that post. First, your citation as to the hazards of DU consists solely of a heart-string tugging google image search. In short, at best you have some coorelation there, but also a lot of images of birth defects that have nothing to do with Iraq, photoshopped images, fakes, and normal birth defects that happen in any population, especially when nutrition isn't that great and pre-natal care is relatively primitive. And you complained about me posting a yahoo news link?
Your second reference, which you claim supports a death toll of ~980k, doesn't say so at all. I see references of 4,000-93,000, the latter by greenpeace, which I've read as having problems since they pushed out most of their more scientific members.
What I could find of your higher figure, I see a number of issues that make me rate it as 'uncredible'. Consider global warming research - there are still papers written and published that deny it's existence, they're just not credible. To be blunt, it seems that they're counting 'all cancers' where another cause, such as smoking, isn't identified.
As for killing less than solar, I think it is clear that that is a contrived situation.
Contrived, how? Dead is dead, whether it's by radiation leak, lung cancer fr
I don't read AC A human right