Purposefully deactivating all security mechanisms and automatic control of a reactor in order to try and get a chain reaction going despite Xenon poisoning of the core isn't lack of luck. Removing all but 12 control-rods from a reactor that needs at least 30 to maintain a negative void coefficient (which the automatic control doesn't allow) isn't lack of luck.
Chernobyl wasn't lack of luck.
In fact, after 1986, all RBMK reactors used somewhat higher enriched fuel (2.4% or so) with absorbers included into fuel rods to permanently give the reactors a negative void coefficient. A fact that is widely ignored by the public.
Also, as the WASH-1250 report pointed out in 1975 - before TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima - having a large containment with containment spray as was the case with all PWRs as opposed to BWRs built before the 1990ies isn't luck. But was credited back in 1975 with retaining a much larger amount of radionuclides compared to BWRs. That's because of larger retention times, as the larger volume has a much slower pressure build-up and containment spray can remove both iodine and caesium from the containment-air before venting. The accident in Fukushima proved this report to be accurate. (And unlike Japan, many European countries adopted counter-measures in the form of filtered containment vents that can remove 99.99% of Cs and 99% of iodine during venting.)
TMI wasn't luck.
As the WASH-1250 also pointed out, floods and tsunamis ('tidal waves') were known as a major risk that could lead to melt-downs and must be dealt with. Both Onagawa to the north of Fukushima and Tokai to the south of Fukushima were prepared for and hit by the tsunami, resulting in non-events, as the inlets for cooling water were sealed and no vital equipment was destroyed. Strangely enough, they were able to foresee what it takes to prepare for a tsunami, but the Fukushima power stations were not prepared.
Fukushima Daiichi and Daini weren't prepared. But out of ten reactors only five lost emergency power supply - those with Mark I Containments. All others had Mark II containments mong them only reactor #6 in Fukushima Daiichi (current generation BWRs would have a Mark IV or Mark V containment, if they hadn't stopped numbering after Mark III). Those retained at least one emergency generator. That wasn't luck either, but an advanced safety concept calling for two separate sections that could provide all functions necessary for the safety of the reactor. Including an air-cooled emergency generator. No additional air-cooled generators were supplied to any of the Mark I containments, even though the Mark II containment made it plonkingly obvious to anybody that they were needed. And those are cheap compared to a nuclear power plant.
What's worse is that the japanese regulator NISA specifically told plant operators that total station black-outs need not be included in safety drills. Personell could not properly deal with the situation, despite having the necessary equipment to mitigate it by using the firefighting equipment to pump cooling water into the reactor. Those had been equiped with the necessary joints to plug the pumps right in, as the (american) designers of the containment had the foresight to deal with this possibilty. Training would have included knowing how and when to properly vent the containment, without creating a backwash into the containment building and opening the blow-out panels to prevent hydrogen build-up in case of a meltdown - as was done in reactor #2 where no explosion occured.
Fukushima wasn't bad luck.It was lack of training, safety equipment and regulation that had been established decades ago in other countries.
If the temperatures in summer were a prime example, then please tell me why 33 out of 51 of the hottest temperatures on record in the US are from the 1930ies or earlier.
This statistic also favours more recent dates. When a record temperature has not been surpassed,but merely reached, only the most recent date is mentioned. So it's already biased towards a warming trend.
They could have extreme events in: - maximum measured temperature all year - maximum measured temperature in winter - maximum measured temperature in autumn - maximum measured temperature in spring - minimum measured temperature all year - minimum measured temperature in summer - minimum measured temperature in autumn - minimum measured temperature in spring
- highest average temperature all year - highest average temperature of a spring - highest average temperature of a summer - highest average temperature of an autumn - highest average temperature of a winter
- lowest average temperature all year - lowest average temperature of a spring - lowest average temperature of a summer - lowest average temperature of an autumn - lowest average temperature of a winter
And that's just temperature. Same could happen with rainfall, snow and total precipitation (high, low). There can be the "longest dry spell", "longest stretch of rain", "longest period with temperatures above 25 degree", longest period below 10 degree
Seems like you never heard about the null hypothesis. Weather disasters rack up no matter what and none of what we have seen is in the least out of line with what has happened in history.
If you ignore history, however, you'll always think things are going to hell in a handbasket... as people have done all the time in history.
It was clear from the start that this was the case, that this was the primary reason of building it.
Why do people keep repeating the propaganda?
Nothing about this project makes any sense at all from a nuclear power perspective. Be it the hugely inefficient, short-lifetime lasers that can be fired about once a day. Just 10% of the energy released from the lasing medium actually reaches the target. Even more energy is wasted creating the laser beam in the first place. Be it the miniscule amounts of *frozen* hydrogen, put into a GOLDEN, high precision capsule, put very precisely into a delicate assembly that needs to be rebuild after each successful shot... while any significant power generation would need several shots per second, churning through the gold-plated fuel.
Absolutely nothing at all makes sense if you want this to build a power plant. Yet, everybody seems to have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Nobody dared to mentioning the obvious:
The whole assembly is a weapon test stand, with the sole purpose to simulate an environment of radiation pressure that can only be found centimeters away from the explosion of a nuclear bomb, compressing deuterium and tritium - freshly bred in-situ from lithium - for nuclear fusion to boost the fission-chain-reaction of the primary.
I'm more afraid to go to the USA than to China... there, at least, everybody knows the news are all about spreading propaganda. At least some people still think for themselves every once in a while.
I kind wondered why SpaceX started building their own turbo pumps for the Merlin 1D engine - it doesn't just seem to be a matter of performance, but also of quality assurance. It seems like SpaceX has found itself a nice opportunity to review their QA process, while proving that their engine out capability isn't just theoretical.
That said, I wouldn't expect the next launch to happen on time.
See the problem? You're just reviving an old paradigma with all its old weaknesses - plus lack of any visual confirmation of hits whatsoever because you're firing way beyond the horizon, plus much longer time of flight due to distance. Accuracy just won't materialize in any way whatever, so you'll end up blanketing an area hoping to hit something sooner or later. If it's a moving target - forget about it.
Spending money on something nobody else is spending money on. This is harder than it seems to be for us mere-mortals, once you're flirting with your n-th billion of dollars. (n>1)
So... you don't get what I say and thus I must be wrong.
Figure out what energy is. Figure out what power is. Realize, that power consumption is limited at a limit way below power production that is being envisioned. Realize, that there are no buffers in the system. And you may understand.
1GW of installed solar power produces on the order of 1TWh of electricity per year. Germany uses 600TWh per year. If you want to generate 15% of that amount (90TWh), you need to install 90GW of solar power. Ok, my rough calculation was off a bit, but 90GW is still more than the typical 70-80GW Germany consumes at noon. (Though less than that on weekends.)
If you want to get 50% out of solar, you need 300GW of installed capacity - and there is just no way that this can be used. Even at 9am or 3pm, you'd still get on the order of 200GW or more than twice as much as can be used.
Getting 300% of something when you can only use 100% is not good. Especially not, when there is another 100% coming from wind. 1GW of installed wind turbines produced 1.6TWh in 2011 and about 1.45TWh in 2010. Depending on wind conditions.
For comparison: 1GW nuclear/coal gets you 8TWh per year. Hydro is typically on the order of 4TWh per year.
As I said elsewhere, I hate the media and this is one more reason.
However, what the english translation does is shifting the blame for the cause of the accident, it doesn't change the cause of the accident. That being lack of adequate safety measures against very well-known failure modes that have been discussed for decades en detail *and* happend just as predicted. Those safety measure have actually been implemented in Sweden (as early as 1980), Germany and France (both 1988) and seen regular upgrades since then - without any major accidents prompting those updates. The initial ones were triggered by Three-Mile-Island and Chernobyl respectively.
Given the string of upgrades since then, it is obvious, that there was safety wasn't handled properly before those accidents in (western) Europe as well. But the changes have been tremendous in the time since then until 2011. When two out of four emergency generators failed from a common cause in 2005 or so in a reactor of Forsmark, it prompted a Europe-wide investigation of all power plants to see if they too might suffer such failures. (For comparison: The reactors in Fukushima had only two generators per reactor to begin with!)
When a flood struck a French powerplant in 1999, without prompting an accident, all European nuclear powerplants were investigated to see if they could withstand at least a 10,000 year flood. And safety will keep being improved after Fukushima just as before.
Other countries in Europe made such upgrades as well - but I limit myself to those I'm absolutely sure about. I too thought that Japan had properly managed nuclear power plants until last year, you see.
I don't trust the media either - but this is just the wrong part to distrust, because it is true.
It's not true that the areas will be uninhabitable for centuries or millenia or millions of years as some people think. The worst affected areas are expected to fall below 20mSv/year by 2016. That's not exactly a low figure, some people will freak out about it and the Japanese government won't allow people to stay in such areas over night, but it's in line with natural radiation in some places like Denver - without them suffering any health consequencess.
What gets lost with many people is that Cs-137 only contributes to half the radiation of Cs. The other half is Cs-134 which has a half-life of just 2 years, which means that radiation drops quickly in the first years. In Chernobyl, they just reduced the maximum allowed life-time radiation dose from 400mSv initially (a bit less than the average in Cornwall) to 250mSv to 150mSv. Recently, they stopped doing that and plan to simply open up a lot of areas formerly treated as off-limits dead-mans-land.
That's because, it isn't true. I can tell, because that's where I am and once you look under the hood, most is propaganda and the second highest energy prices in Europe. (The trophy for the highest prices goes to Danemark, which used to poster-child of renewables through using wind energy before everyone started looking at Germany. But the competition is close and Germany might claim first place in the coming years.)
The nuclide release wasn't neglible, it wasn't acceptable in any way whatsoever and I have yet to see anyone in authority say so. That's nonsense. Period.
It is true, it was much smaller than that of Chernobyl, especially considering that 3 reactors were involved. But it was still so large, that the evacuation of the population was definitely necessary - though on a smaller area and for a shorter time. It also not in all places that were evacuated (especially in the south) and not in the way it was done, especially the hasty evacuation of hospitals that cost hundreds of lives.
You really like to have reality bend your way, don't you?
Read the repont of the "Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission" and you will find that safety measures not being implemented, was *not* a matter of nuclear energy being nuclear energy, but a matter of nuclear energy being in Japan. The conclusion was, that Fukushima was a disaster "Made in Japan". Google it, read it.
You will also find that the epicenter of the quake was *not* in Fukushima. It was more than 100km away. That makes your claim that it wasn't laid out for a 9.0 quake just ludicrous.
As for renewables:
Hydro - right let's build a three gorges dam in japan! Or let's build dam anywhere on the whole damn planet and watch the self-declared saviours-of-the-people-of-the-world decent on it and declare it perfectly impossible/superfluous or whatever. Be it in China or Brazil to name just two recent cases.
Wind - go to Germany and you will find wind turbins standing while others are spinning, because their power isn't needed at that point in time. This problem is growing worse each time another turbine is added. Meanwhile the self-declared saviours-of-the-people-of-the-world are protesting power lines and hydro-storage whereever they can.
Solar - same problem as wind, just worse, because its power peaks at even higher levels. If Germany wants to get 15% of total electricity from photovoltaics, it needs to install power equivalent to 150% of Germanys midday electricity consumption. You're not just wasting a third of the solar (meaning you won't actually reach the rather modest 15% I set out), but you're also wasting *all* the wind power being generated concurrently and hydro and geothermal etc. And that's not even considering the fact that in order to simply replace Fukushima Daiichi, you'd need to blanked the whole initial evacuation area ( 20km around the plant, which has already been reduced and will continue to shrink) with state-of-the-art solar farms and ignoring all storage and infrastructure issues. No forests, no untarnished scenery, nothing left. - Just for 6 out of 54 reactors.
Geothermal is laughable in a country with a decent population density. Iceland might get some 40% from geothermal. New Zealand has less than 10%. Iceland has about 3 people per sqkm, New Zealand has 16 people per sqkm, Japan has 340 people per sqkm. All those islands are volcanically active and hardly representative of the world at large.
Also, only hydro energy is sometimes cheaper than nuclear power of all the options you mentioned. The larger, the cheaper. All the rest is much more expensive. And forget your propaganda figures of $ per MW. What counts is not how much energy per second you can deliver under ideal conditions, but how much energy you can deliver under typical conditions per year. And again, this still ignores the infrastructure and storage requirements.
In fact, it could be more than 20 prime ministers until that time.
The big question is, whether Japan is even capable of doing anything like this at all. They have been unable to implement internationally widespread safety measures that the contructors of the very reactors recommended, that have been destroyed in the accident. And that would have been cheap, less than $10bn for all 50 reactors, yet the Japanese didn't. And this isn't a singular experience.
Japan has stagnated economically for the last 25 years. Last year, the global shortage of harddisks wasn't down to the tsunami in Japan, but a flood in Thailand of all places. (Which intends to build at least 5 nuclear reactors, btw.) Currently, Japan is paying on the order of $30bn on imports per year to very imperfectly compensate for the lack of nuclear power - "volontary" blackouts and shutdown are continuing as power saving measures during the summer. And unlike other expenditures, Japan can't pay for this with domestic debt, because they actually have to pay a foreign country in foreign currency - which is unsustainable in the long run without a source of income, which hasn't been forthcoming in Japan for the last quarter of a century. And as Steins Law says, this will stop.
Renewable energy is expensive and no country has as yet installed anything in the way of the infrastructure require to use them on more than a small scale. So far, only the low-hanging fruits have been picked that stress the existing infrastructure to its limit. And Japan, being an island with two separate power systems, is in an even worse position than just about any other country imaginable.
The question for anyone outside Japan isn't just whether Japan will be capable of pulling it off. The question isn't just if one of the regularly resigning Prime Ministers of Japan turns his or her back to this policy and makes it null and void. The actual question is whether, by 2040, Japan is still going to matter.
Instead of speculating on the basis of miniscule data, you're better off just shutting up and burning less stuff - which, incidentally, is exactly what needs to be done because we're a) running out of stuff to burn in some areas and b) we finally start bringing a few billion people from abject poverty into reasonable (though still very poor) living conditions who will need stuff to burn.
Actually, it will be radioactive for millions of years
Pu-238 decays into U-234, which has a half life of about a quarter million of years (subsequent isotopes are shorter lived). But still, its radioactivity drops by a factor 3000 to one tenth that of pure Pu-239. U-234 is a natural isotope that is the result of the decay of U-238 (to Thorium-234, which decays in two steps to U-234) - there's plenty of that around on earth, it decays (among other isotopes) into each of the well known isotopes Radium-226, Radon-222, Polonium-210 and eventually stable Lead-206 ( Uranium decay is the original source of almost all the lead we have on earth today).
All of which we deal with on a daily basis without panicking or evacuating huge areas - even though places like Cornwall are sufficiently "contaminated" with all of those by nature, that they would have to have been evacuated, if the criteria of post-Chernobyl evacuations had to be met all over the world. However, increased cancer rates, Mutants, Zombies and Gozilla are noticably absent from over 1000 years of historical records of Cornwall.
Slashdot Mirror
Purposefully deactivating all security mechanisms and automatic control of a reactor in order to try and get a chain reaction going despite Xenon poisoning of the core isn't lack of luck. Removing all but 12 control-rods from a reactor that needs at least 30 to maintain a negative void coefficient (which the automatic control doesn't allow) isn't lack of luck.
Chernobyl wasn't lack of luck.
In fact, after 1986, all RBMK reactors used somewhat higher enriched fuel (2.4% or so) with absorbers included into fuel rods to permanently give the reactors a negative void coefficient. A fact that is widely ignored by the public.
Also, as the WASH-1250 report pointed out in 1975 - before TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima - having a large containment with containment spray as was the case with all PWRs as opposed to BWRs built before the 1990ies isn't luck. But was credited back in 1975 with retaining a much larger amount of radionuclides compared to BWRs. That's because of larger retention times, as the larger volume has a much slower pressure build-up and containment spray can remove both iodine and caesium from the containment-air before venting. The accident in Fukushima proved this report to be accurate. (And unlike Japan, many European countries adopted counter-measures in the form of filtered containment vents that can remove 99.99% of Cs and 99% of iodine during venting.)
TMI wasn't luck.
As the WASH-1250 also pointed out, floods and tsunamis ('tidal waves') were known as a major risk that could lead to melt-downs and must be dealt with. Both Onagawa to the north of Fukushima and Tokai to the south of Fukushima were prepared for and hit by the tsunami, resulting in non-events, as the inlets for cooling water were sealed and no vital equipment was destroyed. Strangely enough, they were able to foresee what it takes to prepare for a tsunami, but the Fukushima power stations were not prepared.
Fukushima Daiichi and Daini weren't prepared. But out of ten reactors only five lost emergency power supply - those with Mark I Containments. All others had Mark II containments mong them only reactor #6 in Fukushima Daiichi (current generation BWRs would have a Mark IV or Mark V containment, if they hadn't stopped numbering after Mark III). Those retained at least one emergency generator. That wasn't luck either, but an advanced safety concept calling for two separate sections that could provide all functions necessary for the safety of the reactor. Including an air-cooled emergency generator. No additional air-cooled generators were supplied to any of the Mark I containments, even though the Mark II containment made it plonkingly obvious to anybody that they were needed. And those are cheap compared to a nuclear power plant.
What's worse is that the japanese regulator NISA specifically told plant operators that total station black-outs need not be included in safety drills. Personell could not properly deal with the situation, despite having the necessary equipment to mitigate it by using the firefighting equipment to pump cooling water into the reactor. Those had been equiped with the necessary joints to plug the pumps right in, as the (american) designers of the containment had the foresight to deal with this possibilty. Training would have included knowing how and when to properly vent the containment, without creating a backwash into the containment building and opening the blow-out panels to prevent hydrogen build-up in case of a meltdown - as was done in reactor #2 where no explosion occured.
Fukushima wasn't bad luck.It was lack of training, safety equipment and regulation that had been established decades ago in other countries.
Citizen Gman,
how dare you ask factual questions? Resume making gozilla jokes like all good citizens!
If the temperatures in summer were a prime example, then please tell me why 33 out of 51 of the hottest temperatures on record in the US are from the 1930ies or earlier.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_temperature_extremes
This statistic also favours more recent dates. When a record temperature has not been surpassed,but merely reached, only the most recent date is mentioned. So it's already biased towards a warming trend.
There are over 200 countries in the world.
They could have extreme events in:
- maximum measured temperature all year
- maximum measured temperature in winter
- maximum measured temperature in autumn
- maximum measured temperature in spring
- minimum measured temperature all year
- minimum measured temperature in summer
- minimum measured temperature in autumn
- minimum measured temperature in spring
- highest average temperature all year
- highest average temperature of a spring
- highest average temperature of a summer
- highest average temperature of an autumn
- highest average temperature of a winter
- lowest average temperature all year
- lowest average temperature of a spring
- lowest average temperature of a summer
- lowest average temperature of an autumn
- lowest average temperature of a winter
And that's just temperature. Same could happen with rainfall, snow and total precipitation (high, low). There can be the "longest dry spell", "longest stretch of rain", "longest period with temperatures above 25 degree", longest period below 10 degree
or whatever, just from the top of my hat.
You're being fooled by the media.
Seems like you never heard about the null hypothesis. Weather disasters rack up no matter what and none of what we have seen is in the least out of line with what has happened in history.
If you ignore history, however, you'll always think things are going to hell in a handbasket ... as people have done all the time in history.
> How exactly is the speculation even tied to something worth a story?
It is tied to something worth a story by a scientific paper linked in the fucking article.
Parachuting back to earth would have been *a lot* more comfortable than what they ended up doing.
It was clear from the start that this was the case, that this was the primary reason of building it.
Why do people keep repeating the propaganda?
Nothing about this project makes any sense at all from a nuclear power perspective. Be it the hugely inefficient, short-lifetime lasers that can be fired about once a day. Just 10% of the energy released from the lasing medium actually reaches the target. Even more energy is wasted creating the laser beam in the first place. Be it the miniscule amounts of *frozen* hydrogen, put into a GOLDEN, high precision capsule, put very precisely into a delicate assembly that needs to be rebuild after each successful shot ... while any significant power generation would need several shots per second, churning through the gold-plated fuel.
Absolutely nothing at all makes sense if you want this to build a power plant. Yet, everybody seems to have swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker. Nobody dared to mentioning the obvious:
The whole assembly is a weapon test stand, with the sole purpose to simulate an environment of radiation pressure that can only be found centimeters away from the explosion of a nuclear bomb, compressing deuterium and tritium - freshly bred in-situ from lithium - for nuclear fusion to boost the fission-chain-reaction of the primary.
I'm more afraid to go to the USA than to China ... there, at least, everybody knows the news are all about spreading propaganda. At least some people still think for themselves every once in a while.
I kind wondered why SpaceX started building their own turbo pumps for the Merlin 1D engine - it doesn't just seem to be a matter of performance, but also of quality assurance. It seems like SpaceX has found itself a nice opportunity to review their QA process, while proving that their engine out capability isn't just theoretical.
That said, I wouldn't expect the next launch to happen on time.
Well, title says it all. Any news about the orbcomm satellite being properly deployed?
Not when you're firing 10 times the distance.
Or another Hood? Or new Dreadnoughts?
See the problem? You're just reviving an old paradigma with all its old weaknesses - plus lack of any visual confirmation of hits whatsoever because you're firing way beyond the horizon, plus much longer time of flight due to distance. Accuracy just won't materialize in any way whatever, so you'll end up blanketing an area hoping to hit something sooner or later. If it's a moving target - forget about it.
Ironic, isn't it?
Spending money on something nobody else is spending money on. This is harder than it seems to be for us mere-mortals, once you're flirting with your n-th billion of dollars. (n>1)
So ... you don't get what I say and thus I must be wrong.
Figure out what energy is. Figure out what power is. Realize, that power consumption is limited at a limit way below power production that is being envisioned. Realize, that there are no buffers in the system. And you may understand.
1GW of installed solar power produces on the order of 1TWh of electricity per year. Germany uses 600TWh per year. If you want to generate 15% of that amount (90TWh), you need to install 90GW of solar power. Ok, my rough calculation was off a bit, but 90GW is still more than the typical 70-80GW Germany consumes at noon. (Though less than that on weekends.)
If you want to get 50% out of solar, you need 300GW of installed capacity - and there is just no way that this can be used. Even at 9am or 3pm, you'd still get on the order of 200GW or more than twice as much as can be used.
Getting 300% of something when you can only use 100% is not good. Especially not, when there is another 100% coming from wind. 1GW of installed wind turbines produced 1.6TWh in 2011 and about 1.45TWh in 2010. Depending on wind conditions.
For comparison: 1GW nuclear/coal gets you 8TWh per year. Hydro is typically on the order of 4TWh per year.
As I said elsewhere, I hate the media and this is one more reason.
However, what the english translation does is shifting the blame for the cause of the accident, it doesn't change the cause of the accident. That being lack of adequate safety measures against very well-known failure modes that have been discussed for decades en detail *and* happend just as predicted. Those safety measure have actually been implemented in Sweden (as early as 1980), Germany and France (both 1988) and seen regular upgrades since then - without any major accidents prompting those updates. The initial ones were triggered by Three-Mile-Island and Chernobyl respectively.
Given the string of upgrades since then, it is obvious, that there was safety wasn't handled properly before those accidents in (western) Europe as well. But the changes have been tremendous in the time since then until 2011. When two out of four emergency generators failed from a common cause in 2005 or so in a reactor of Forsmark, it prompted a Europe-wide investigation of all power plants to see if they too might suffer such failures. (For comparison: The reactors in Fukushima had only two generators per reactor to begin with!)
When a flood struck a French powerplant in 1999, without prompting an accident, all European nuclear powerplants were investigated to see if they could withstand at least a 10,000 year flood. And safety will keep being improved after Fukushima just as before.
Other countries in Europe made such upgrades as well - but I limit myself to those I'm absolutely sure about. I too thought that Japan had properly managed nuclear power plants until last year, you see.
I don't trust the media either - but this is just the wrong part to distrust, because it is true.
It's not true that the areas will be uninhabitable for centuries or millenia or millions of years as some people think. The worst affected areas are expected to fall below 20mSv/year by 2016. That's not exactly a low figure, some people will freak out about it and the Japanese government won't allow people to stay in such areas over night, but it's in line with natural radiation in some places like Denver - without them suffering any health consequencess.
What gets lost with many people is that Cs-137 only contributes to half the radiation of Cs. The other half is Cs-134 which has a half-life of just 2 years, which means that radiation drops quickly in the first years. In Chernobyl, they just reduced the maximum allowed life-time radiation dose from 400mSv initially (a bit less than the average in Cornwall) to 250mSv to 150mSv. Recently, they stopped doing that and plan to simply open up a lot of areas formerly treated as off-limits dead-mans-land.
That's because, it isn't true. I can tell, because that's where I am and once you look under the hood, most is propaganda and the second highest energy prices in Europe. (The trophy for the highest prices goes to Danemark, which used to poster-child of renewables through using wind energy before everyone started looking at Germany. But the competition is close and Germany might claim first place in the coming years.)
The nuclide release wasn't neglible, it wasn't acceptable in any way whatsoever and I have yet to see anyone in authority say so. That's nonsense. Period.
It is true, it was much smaller than that of Chernobyl, especially considering that 3 reactors were involved. But it was still so large, that the evacuation of the population was definitely necessary - though on a smaller area and for a shorter time. It also not in all places that were evacuated (especially in the south) and not in the way it was done, especially the hasty evacuation of hospitals that cost hundreds of lives.
So stop belittling it.
You really like to have reality bend your way, don't you?
Read the repont of the "Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission" and you will find that safety measures not being implemented, was *not* a matter of nuclear energy being nuclear energy, but a matter of nuclear energy being in Japan. The conclusion was, that Fukushima was a disaster "Made in Japan". Google it, read it.
You will also find that the epicenter of the quake was *not* in Fukushima. It was more than 100km away. That makes your claim that it wasn't laid out for a 9.0 quake just ludicrous.
As for renewables:
Hydro - right let's build a three gorges dam in japan! Or let's build dam anywhere on the whole damn planet and watch the self-declared saviours-of-the-people-of-the-world decent on it and declare it perfectly impossible/superfluous or whatever. Be it in China or Brazil to name just two recent cases.
Wind - go to Germany and you will find wind turbins standing while others are spinning, because their power isn't needed at that point in time. This problem is growing worse each time another turbine is added. Meanwhile the self-declared saviours-of-the-people-of-the-world are protesting power lines and hydro-storage whereever they can.
Solar - same problem as wind, just worse, because its power peaks at even higher levels. If Germany wants to get 15% of total electricity from photovoltaics, it needs to install power equivalent to 150% of Germanys midday electricity consumption. You're not just wasting a third of the solar (meaning you won't actually reach the rather modest 15% I set out), but you're also wasting *all* the wind power being generated concurrently and hydro and geothermal etc. And that's not even considering the fact that in order to simply replace Fukushima Daiichi, you'd need to blanked the whole initial evacuation area ( 20km around the plant, which has already been reduced and will continue to shrink) with state-of-the-art solar farms and ignoring all storage and infrastructure issues. No forests, no untarnished scenery, nothing left. - Just for 6 out of 54 reactors.
Geothermal is laughable in a country with a decent population density. Iceland might get some 40% from geothermal. New Zealand has less than 10%. Iceland has about 3 people per sqkm, New Zealand has 16 people per sqkm, Japan has 340 people per sqkm. All those islands are volcanically active and hardly representative of the world at large.
Also, only hydro energy is sometimes cheaper than nuclear power of all the options you mentioned. The larger, the cheaper. All the rest is much more expensive. And forget your propaganda figures of $ per MW. What counts is not how much energy per second you can deliver under ideal conditions, but how much energy you can deliver under typical conditions per year. And again, this still ignores the infrastructure and storage requirements.
Sorry, but Slartibartfast didn't get his way all over the world.
In fact, it could be more than 20 prime ministers until that time.
The big question is, whether Japan is even capable of doing anything like this at all. They have been unable to implement internationally widespread safety measures that the contructors of the very reactors recommended, that have been destroyed in the accident. And that would have been cheap, less than $10bn for all 50 reactors, yet the Japanese didn't. And this isn't a singular experience.
Japan has stagnated economically for the last 25 years. Last year, the global shortage of harddisks wasn't down to the tsunami in Japan, but a flood in Thailand of all places. (Which intends to build at least 5 nuclear reactors, btw.) Currently, Japan is paying on the order of $30bn on imports per year to very imperfectly compensate for the lack of nuclear power - "volontary" blackouts and shutdown are continuing as power saving measures during the summer. And unlike other expenditures, Japan can't pay for this with domestic debt, because they actually have to pay a foreign country in foreign currency - which is unsustainable in the long run without a source of income, which hasn't been forthcoming in Japan for the last quarter of a century. And as Steins Law says, this will stop.
Renewable energy is expensive and no country has as yet installed anything in the way of the infrastructure require to use them on more than a small scale. So far, only the low-hanging fruits have been picked that stress the existing infrastructure to its limit. And Japan, being an island with two separate power systems, is in an even worse position than just about any other country imaginable.
The question for anyone outside Japan isn't just whether Japan will be capable of pulling it off. The question isn't just if one of the regularly resigning Prime Ministers of Japan turns his or her back to this policy and makes it null and void. The actual question is whether, by 2040, Japan is still going to matter.
Instead of speculating on the basis of miniscule data, you're better off just shutting up and burning less stuff - which, incidentally, is exactly what needs to be done because we're a) running out of stuff to burn in some areas and b) we finally start bringing a few billion people from abject poverty into reasonable (though still very poor) living conditions who will need stuff to burn.
Actually, it will be radioactive for millions of years
Pu-238 decays into U-234, which has a half life of about a quarter million of years (subsequent isotopes are shorter lived). But still, its radioactivity drops by a factor 3000 to one tenth that of pure Pu-239. U-234 is a natural isotope that is the result of the decay of U-238 (to Thorium-234, which decays in two steps to U-234) - there's plenty of that around on earth, it decays (among other isotopes) into each of the well known isotopes Radium-226, Radon-222, Polonium-210 and eventually stable Lead-206 ( Uranium decay is the original source of almost all the lead we have on earth today).
All of which we deal with on a daily basis without panicking or evacuating huge areas - even though places like Cornwall are sufficiently "contaminated" with all of those by nature, that they would have to have been evacuated, if the criteria of post-Chernobyl evacuations had to be met all over the world. However, increased cancer rates, Mutants, Zombies and Gozilla are noticably absent from over 1000 years of historical records of Cornwall.