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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.
What is the other 80% of electrical generation?
Mostly coal.
It seems like if the "fleet" was shutdown and all the generation was lost for 3+ years, why did they need to start turning them on now?
Because importing all that coal to make up for the lost nuclear electrical generation capacity was costing a lot of money, producing a lot of pollution, and alternatives are far more expensive.
I remember something of a joke I was once told... Do you know what a physician calls "alternative medicine" that works? Medicine.
That's what I think of when people tell me we need more "alternative energy". If "alternative energy" worked then we'd just call it "energy".
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Japan doesn't have enough sun and wind to run an industrial economy, and neither does it buy into the Green dream of devolving the economy into primitive foraging tribes. While its nuclear plants were down, it even has to import coal for the interim mothballed power plants.
Most importantly, Japan doesn't have western defeatism. When a problem comes up, it gets worked on and solved.
Mostly coal.
Nope. In 2015 Japan was:
39% gas
34% coal
9% oil
8.4% hydro
~4.3% other renewables
0.9% nuclear
Data from the IEA: https://www.iea.org/statistics...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest energy sources, as well as one of the safest. The fact that a modern industrialized nation like Japan realizes this, should be encouraging for those who care about the planet's climate and health.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition. Let me guess, wind and solar do not require mining fuel from the ground but instead rely on extracting the energy from natural processes that are never ending. Sound about right? Well, that's a nice definition but when wind and solar requires more than ten times the mining to get that energy that seems like a rather misleading definition. Take a look here at the material needed for wind and solar energy: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
All the steel, copper, aluminum, and so on needed for the wires and structures for that wind and solar has to come from somewhere. Kind of like how we need a lot of steel and so on for nuclear power. Oh, and uranium too but that's actually a very small part of the equation since we can get so much energy from so little uranium.
If you believe that "renewable energy" means it's good for the environment then you are quite ignorant on how wind and solar power actually works. If you want to see an environmental disaster then let's get all our energy from wind and solar. People will be begging for something else as the mining needed will be tearing open the earth for the resources required to extract energy from with wind and sunshine.
Oh, and there's enough uranium and thorium in the ground for nuclear power to last well beyond when the sun strips Earth of its atmosphere. We will run out of wind and sun before we run out of nuclear fuel.
The military doesn't need commercial liability insurance. That alone makes commercial nuclear shipping uneconomical. It's actually kind of perverse, it's cheaper to use polluting diesel than to insure against the risk of a nuclear shipping accident.
The Navy model can't be applied to commercial ships. The Navy has an endless supply of well trained people to monitor the reactors, people who are largely immune to cost considerations. The supply and maintenance contracts are gold plated.
For shipping we might look at hydrogen for fuel. At least we can make that cleanly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Only you are calling them "alternative energy", most people call it renewable energy.
Okay then, define "renewable energy" for me and then tell me how nuclear power does not fit that definition.
Nuclear power isn't renewable because the fuel is spent, it cannot be renewed. The clue is in the name. It's not a fossil fuel either. Even if your claim that there will still be plenty left when we're done was true it is irrelevant to the question.
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Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
And solar is just nuclear power with the reactor fueled at the beginning of the solar system (and yes, it will run out...eventually ;-p) and stored 150 gigameters away...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I can tell you are an IT guy. I thought all you need is a cheap fence and to throw up some panels/mirrors/wind turbines. Now we need battery/pumped storage too? Electricity generation is not like your server room.
Enslaved Pokemon forced to spin giant turbines.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
Given that "solar panels/mirrors/wind turbines" provide neither baseline nor peaking power, the only required forms for a reliable grid, where nuclear excels at the former, and can do the latter for the easily predicted general peaks like morning when people wake up and after people get home from work, no, they're not "convenient" at all. They have to be backstopped by other forms of generation, or maybe some decades in the future we'll have batteries cheap and long lived enough to store their output for when the sun goes down, is occluded, the wind doesn't blow, etc.
Which is not to say that some countries like Japan have safety cultures so poor they should never touch nuclear power, something that was very clear long before the tsunami.
Clicking the link proved in the post you replied to, you'll find some more details, such as energy generated from waste incinerators, to account for most of those 4.4%. Though even there some 2% are listed as just "other sources".
Only if your country is run by idiots. For one thing, you shouldn't be storing it, you should be recycling it, remove the neutron poisons, recover the unused uranium and the plutonium which was incidentally bred during operation (although I'm not sure how much you can usefully include in new fuel due to the isotope that's thermally hot). What's left over is quite small in volume, and then you have to wait a maximum of 600 years before it's no more radioactive than the ore from which is was mined.
That fusion reactor may be 150 gigameters away, but it's still a safety hazard! You can't even look at it directly without putting your eyes at risk, not to mention the cancer it causes.
> Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
They convert one resource ("fertile material") into fuel, but since that fertile material is itself not renewable the entire process isn't renewable.
Solar is considered renewable because there is an effectively unlimited supply of sunlight. Even if the sun is only expected to last another few billion years, that is a pretty solid prediction and is so far beyond the horizon it can safely be considered unlimited.
Wind and hydro are renewable because the air and water are not lost forever once they pass through the turbines.
Biofuels are renewable because once you burn them, the carbon that was released into the air can be recaptured by more plants and turned back into biofuel. Logistical issues aside, this is a closed-loop carbon cycle and thus renewable.
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone. There are some tricks to make new fuel, but there's no reasonable way to take all the waste and put it back into the system ad infinitum. Reprocessing spent fuel just removes contaminants and re-purifies the unused portion; it does not make new fuel from spent fuel.
=Smidge=
# 10: Nuclear energy can't reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Truth: Nuclear-generated electricity powers electric trains and subway cars as well as autos today. It has also been used in propelling ships for more than 50 years. That use can be increased since it has been restricted by unofficial policy to military vessels and ice breakers. In the near-term, nuclear power can provide electricity for expanded mass-transit and plug-in hybrid cars. Small modular reactors can provide power to islands like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Nantucket and Guam that currently run their electrical grids on imported oil. In the longer-term, nuclear power can directly reduce our dependence on foreign oil by producing hydrogen for use in fuel cells and synthetic liquid fuels.
The US Navy has been experimenting with synthetic liquid fuels for a long time and all it takes is a little help from Congress to expand the project to prove this as something that can mass produce fuel. Calculations show the fuel can be competitive with petroleum fuel on cost as well.
The carbon for the synthetic fuels come from the air and so the carbon loop is closed, no additional CO2 is added to the air in the process. This is a technology that works right now. That's unlike algae based fuel which is still mostly theoretical.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"Solar power causes more cancer than all other forms of power generation combined!" Yep, gonna have fun with this one. Now excuse me, I'm off to troll Farcebook
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I'll believe wind and solar energy can compete with nuclear power when people no longer refer to them as "alternative energy".
Humans were using wind power to do work long before they were using coal to do anything other than produce heat. The idea that wind power is alternative energy is a trick which was pulled upon you by the fossil fuel industry, and here you are feeling all smug about your complicity. How useful of you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Thin-film solar cells can last around twenty years, but will have substantial loss by that time. PC cells can last much longer. This kind of information is readily available via a simple google search, which is how I found it, though I already knew. The truth is that if we had started building solar plants en masse in the 1970s, most of those panels could still be producing over 70% output today. Of course, they probably wouldn't be, because they probably would have been replaced, and the used panels sold as surplus to homeowners who could have made use of them.
Modern solar panels made in countries which care about the environment (read: not China) are required not to leach if landfilled, even if broken up into bits. So they really are the safest form of power, if you don't install them on residential roofs. That's where most of the solar deaths occur. You can install them over parking lots (where the work is done on a scaffold or high-lift and not on the roof itself) or you can install them in open fields, and thereby avoid that problem.
We should have been going solar since the seventies. It may be too late now, but that's no reason not to do it anyway, since it may not be.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nuclear, even from an optimist's perspective, seems to be an abjectly terrible idea for the more small scale/dispersed requirements.
True, but what that's saying is primarily that not all sources meet all applications, so we may want to use different energy sources for different applications.
As you say (or imply), solar turns out to be a very good source for distributed small scale applications in regions that have good solar availability-- which is much of the third world, which turns out to be the part of the world that most needs new energy sources.
Nuclear, on the other hand, may be the preferred source for gigawatt-scale baseload power in industrialized areas (which is not to say that you might not also use solar for daytime peaking power).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Seems like every post that makes a good point has a 1 score. Somebody doesn't like nuclear power here but they'd better get used to the idea.