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Japan Has Restarted Five Nuclear Power Reactors In 2018 (oilvoice.com)
With Shikoku Electric Power Company's 890 megawatt (MW) Ikata-3 reactor, Japan has restarted a total of five nuclear reactors in 2018. "Japan had suspended its nuclear fleet in 2013 for mandatory safety checks and upgrades following the 2011 Fukushima accident, and before 2018 only four reactors had been restarted," reports OilVoice. From the report: Following the Fukushima accident, as each Japanese nuclear reactor entered its scheduled maintenance and refueling outage, it was not returned to operation. Between September 2013 and August 2015, Japan's entire reactor fleet was suspended from operation, leaving the country with no nuclear generation. Sendai Units 1 and 2, in Japan's Kagoshima Prefecture, were the first reactors to be restarted in August and October 2015, respectively.
The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants requires the approval of both Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and the central government, as well as consent from the governments of local prefectures. In July 2013, the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness. As part of Japan's long-term energy policy, issued in April 2014, the central government called for the nuclear share of total electricity generation to reach 20%-22% by 2030, which would require 25 to 30 reactors to be in operation by then. In 2017, four operating nuclear reactors provided 3% of Japan's total electricity generation.
The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants requires the approval of both Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and the central government, as well as consent from the governments of local prefectures. In July 2013, the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness. As part of Japan's long-term energy policy, issued in April 2014, the central government called for the nuclear share of total electricity generation to reach 20%-22% by 2030, which would require 25 to 30 reactors to be in operation by then. In 2017, four operating nuclear reactors provided 3% of Japan's total electricity generation.
Nuclear power will be with us for a very long time in some form. I say this because of the 200 or so nuclear reactors in operation by the USA roughly half of them are operated by the US Navy.
It turns out that you can in fact put a nuclear power reactor just about anywhere you like, such as on about 70% of the world's surface. They do take years of planning and construction but so do a lot of things. I recall hearing that Boeing plans out their aircraft lines out to 30 years in the future. They hit the "Y2K bug" in 1970.
There is no modern navy in the world that will power their ships with wind and solar power. There's always stories that pop up every few months or so of some company or another that plans to have some cargo ships with sails on them. Greenpeace like to talk big about their boat, Rainbow Warrior, calling it a "sailing yacht". This boat does in fact have sails, and with them it can sail about 5 knots in a good wind. What they don't like to talk about is the 1800 HP diesel engine it has. For someone that likes to go about harassing oil rigs at sea they seem rather hypocritical for using so much of the products from those oil rigs to get there.
So, how are we to expect to get people and products over the sea unless it's by nuclear power or petroleum?
People like to point out how experiments with commercial shipping by nuclear power failed in the past. Well, that happens when oil prices takes a dive. Having organizations like Greenpeace harassing the crews and owners of these boats didn't help either. That's going to have to change if we find it politically or economically problematic for shipping to use oil.
Oh, let's not forget air travel. Even if someone developed some leap in electric aircraft technology tomorrow there's going to be 30 years before Boeing uses that technology in their airplanes.
You might think our electricity will come from wind, sun, and batteries but that's something like 1/3rd of the energy we use. About 1/3rd is transportation and the remaining 1/3rd is things like industry and heating. That's not going to be from wind and sun. That's going to be nuclear, coal, or natural gas. And, again, that will be true for at least 30 years if not hundreds of years.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Make Hydrogen cleanly? Not at this time..
Commercial hydrogen gas production is currently done by reforming natural gas, which releases carbon and consumes huge amounts of energy. I suppose you *could* sequester the hydrogen easier, but that's about the *only* environmental advantage I can come up with for hydrogen as fuel.
Splitting water using electrical hydrolysis is insanely inefficient, wasting nearly 70% of your input energy. Note that this is a theoretical limit based on the physics and chemistry of the process so we won't make it better with research. So don't believe that canard of this being environmentally viable. It's simply not.
Well, after a wind tower reaches its end of life in 20, maybe 25 years, you can recycle the metals pretty easily. The plastics used to insulate wires, etc. not so much. Doubt much of a solar panel can be recycled, but I don't have any figures off the top of my head on their lifecycle, might not be as ultra short as wind towers, which are subject to lots of stress, with many parts needing to be as light as possible, forcing engineers into tough yield (of power) and longevity tradeoffs, and they're badly exposed to the elements. Solar cells, you ought to be able to seal them up pretty well, but I have no idea how much they're subject to degradation over time.
Nuclear, even from an optimist's perspective, seems to be an abjectly terrible idea for the more small scale/dispersed requirements. It's a pity; because some of its features are very attractive(radiothermal generators pretty much give you something that puts out the power of a decent size battery; except for several decades; all sorts of things that currently use a beefy diesel engine or generator are large enough to make use of a nuclear reactor without heroic minaturization efforts); but the more widely you distribute something the more often the owner is negligent or incompetent and doesn't really do things like 'maintenance' or 'disposal' properly.
The soviet use of radiothermal generators gave us a bunch of (not well sealed) Strontium 90 sources floating around, not necessarily even documented in the worse cases; use in commercial shipping would likely end up with a bunch of reactors ending up in one of the hellholes where shipbreaking is cheap because regulations are thin and workers largely expendable.
It's much easier to get adequate standards for operational competence when you have fewer specialist operators; but that rules out a lot of distributed applications. As it is, isotope sealed sources with assorted medical, industrial, and scientific applications already go missing all the time; increasing the number(and power) of those things being used out and about seems likely to go poorly.