Japan Plans to Restart Most of Their Nuclear Reactors 255
pigrabbitbear writes "Areva, the French nuclear fuel company, helps supply Japan with a lot of its juice. And Areva's chief executive says that Japan is going to restart up to six reactors by the end of the year. Eventually, it's going to power up at least two thirds of them. Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe has been a little cagey, but he recently told the press that yes, despite the upcoming March 11th anniversary of the Fukushima crisis, the nuke plants are coming back online."
Supposedly, they are overhauling their nuclear regulatory agencies to fix the massive failure and regulatory capture that led to Fukushima being run unsafely. They are also not going to restart reactors that are on active fault lines; this includes the largest reactor complex in the world. Vaguely related, the Vogtle plant expansion in the U.S. is running a bit over budget, with folks like the Sierra Club seizing the chance to call for an end to construction (unlikely, since Georgia Power says it'd cost customers more, even pretending natural gas is infinite and will always be cheap, to halt construction in favor of any other kind of power plant), and legislators aiming to 'protect' customers from cost overruns. However, it looks like unless action is taken the nuclear renaissance is already dead due to the inherent short-sightedness of the "free market."
Nuclear Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article linked in that very sentence:
Avoiding nuclear power because of (higher investment cost + greater risk of liability + less demand) does not sound like shortsightedness. It sounds like a wise move.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:3, Insightful)
It's mainly because people were so convinced by the cold war 'nuclear terror' campaigns run by the west (and probably the other side also) that they cannot see past that.
Hence we get large amounts of patently false 'common knowledge' ingrained in peoples minds when they evaluate anything to do with the words nuclear or radiation.
The biggest problem we should be worried about is that old, out of date, and less safe (than modern) plants will be kept active WAY past their best before dates because so much effort has gone in to making it basically impossible to even design, let al9ong build next generation plants that there is little choice.
Costs and timelines in the west (especially America) have ballooned due to the mountain of legal and social blocks put in the way of building plants, meaning time lines and non-technical costs now hugely dwarf the actual real cost of building the plants, and make them unaffordable.
In the meantime we have the same organisations both screaming at us that we need to reduce CO2 emissions (or the world will end!), AND that anything related to the word 'radiation' is satans work and must be stopped at all costs.
It is good that the Japanese are showing some signs of reality-based decision making here, and at least the Chinese are actually starting to progress design improvements. America should be burying its head in shame over how it has controlled/managed the worlds nuclear power development (and thats pretty much how it has been until now, via the NRC ..)
Of course a lot of the problem boils down to the childishness of the modern public, where they assume everything will be handed to them on a plate, in a way that makes them feel most comfortable and happy, without offending any little sensibility they have decided to have, as they are obviously THE most important entity on the planet. Sad, really.
So yet again its time to sit back, get a cup of tea, and watch the backlash against satans radiation again, damn the torpedoes.
Foolspeak (Score:2, Insightful)
The free market is not inherently short-sighted. Every day people plant trees, for profit, without government force, such that they can be harvested 100 years from now. The asset will increase in value constantly, it is not necessary for any one investor to wait 100 years to get their payout.
Amazon's profits have NEVER been paid to investors (since going public, and probably before I just don't know that for sure). Not one penny. They have never paid a dividend. Nor has Google, nor many, many, many quickly growing companies. People invest in these companies, because they expect the company to grow, and will in turn sell there shares to people who will likely never see dividends themselves, and so on, until eventually, many years from now, a group of investors will (after buying out the previous generations), will begin receiving a trickle of actual profit.
The free market, when and to the extent it is allowed to exist is EXTREMELY far-sighted.
Even the bias towards 'quarterly profits' is truly indicative of where government regulation prevents the ideal outcome-- quarterly reporting would not be such a major factor in the decision process were regulations not so rigidly defined around such a reporting scheme.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem we should be worried about is that old, out of date, and less safe (than modern) plants will be kept active WAY past their best before dates because so much effort has gone in to making it basically impossible to even design, let al9ong build next generation plants that there is little choice.
TFA
Nor is there a serious case to be made that interest in new reactors has been suppressed by decades of overregulation. The candidates for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 1980 have almost all been subject to what amounts to a nuclear industry veto.4 In many cases, they have had outright industry endorsement. The idea that these industry-vetted commissioners have overseen 30 years of excessive regulation doesnâ(TM)t pass the straight-face test.
I'm not disputing that NIMBY and environmental regulations have retarded nuclear growth, but the real reason we're still running decades old power plants waaaaaaaay past their end-of-life date is regulatory capture.
The nuclear industry says "don't worry, we can run a 40 year old plant safely" and the regulators say "okay, we believe you"
This is despite every indication that the plants are corroding in place and the operators are doing as little maintanence as possible.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
The Japanese will restart their nuclear reactors. Their economy is not viable otherwise. Their economic recovery crashed more because of the plant shutdown and the energy costs of importing coal than the earthquake damage itself. Japan needs nuclear power. Too many people and too few alternative resources for a country with heavy industry. The Chinese are in full swing. They have like one of each leading edge nuclear power plant design either in operation or under construction and they are ramping up training so they can build more of them. Air pollution in China is a big problem and nuclear power in coastal cities is seen as a way to ameliorate the problem. The heavy industry in the interior of the nation will likely continue using cheap coal.
Re:Foolspeak (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market, when and to the extent it is allowed to exist is EXTREMELY far-sighted.
The summary is a troll. Attributing the 'free market' to nuclear power indicates either ignorance or deceit and we're left to ponder which is worse.
Nuclear reactors represent astonishing amounts of wealth and coordination. It is a hallmark of advanced nations that such things are created. For a reactor to exist in the US it must have the blessing of all levels of government. Financing is often backed by one or more government entities. Federal and state governments must actively regulate it. First responders at each level are prepared for emergencies. Rate payers are involved in voting on proposals prior to construction and regulating on-going rates. The timeline (in contemporary Western nations and certain Asian nations) is at least a decade for construction and licensing is a matter of fractions of a century. People are sourced from rarified cohorts such as military navel reactor operators.
In the end the actual operator is a small and even negligible part of the equation. Invoking the 'free market' mantra when dealing with the troubles of nuclear power is a cop out.
Re:Nuclear accidents shouldn't be possible (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, there isn't any safe type of power generation, but the high concentration of long half live highly radioactive isotopes make the nuclear generation in a category of his own regarding long term risk.
Re:Fukushima and regulatory failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps regulatory capture would have required that the last line of defense against a meltdown, the backup diesel generators, should not have been in the basement of a plant located in a tsunami zone?
The earthquake exceeded the design limits for the plant - if they put the generators on towers or on the tops of buildings, they may have crashed to the ground when the quake hit. There's no guarantee that moving the generators higher would have made things better. In retrospect it's not hard to come up with a design that perfectly addresses all of the issues from the last disaster, the hard part is coming up with a design that addresses all of the issues of the next, unknown disaster.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:3, Insightful)
You need to think it a little deeper.
The reason they are desperately trying to stretch out the life of the old plants is because the kneejerkers/dumb greens (yes, there are some clued up ones), and NIMBYs have made it next to impossible, and definitely not affordable, to build any new ones, in fact even to improve the existing ones..
New power plants are much cheaper to run, lower risk, lower cost of operating materials, lower waste, etc - but are simply unbuildable under the wests anti-everything regime due to the wonders of local/global pressure groups making regulators tie it up in so much red tape..
The result of this stupidity is what are now low safety (relative to modern designs) stations are kept running way beyond design life - so exactly the opposite of what should be desirable (clean, reliable, affordable nuclear power) is the result of the pressure groups.
And I suspect they want it this way, any 'disaster' is going to swell their supporters, bring money in the door, and increase their political power - why would they want safe nuclear power? (they of course being the many and varied anti-nuclear power groups).
The whole thing is of course complex as hell, but the big picture really is people ignoring technical realities, and instead treating nuclear power like it is a social issue (and of course mixing that with huge dis-information as to the realities of radiation, etc).
Nuclear energy could be a great boon if... (Score:5, Insightful)
The damn hippies, closed minded politicians, oil companies, coal producers and so on would shut their mouths.
Nuclear energy is a amazing thing that is really a great boon to us. But the problem is everyone tries to cock block it (mostly due to old concepts and misinformation) so we are stuck with old technology and old technology doesnt stand up so yes we have problems with it. But what people dont realize is they dont want new nuclear plants, so we have ones that are way to old and have problems, those problems make people not want more nuclear energy so instead of letting us use new designs and build new plants they make us us the old unsafe ones.
Its essentially like saying "Seat belts? You shouldnt be using cars at all, we dont want you making cars or redesigning them at all because too many people die in them" so instead of making cars safer and better people are stuck using the unsafe models because the general consensus is the old models arent safe.
Nuclear energy has a bad name because everyone is all "GO GREEN!" and automatically thinks that nuclear energy will poison our planet and rape our familes. Why? Because of bad information and bad misconceptions. Nuclear energy is more efficent, uses less resources, more potent and cleaner than what we use now. PLus its use could be lowered in a lot of places where water and wind energy could be also. A major city that taps in nuclear, wind and or water reduces the need for any one of them since they are using them together. Nuclear energy in some places could be the sole source of energy if need be, but in a lot of places it could be used with other forms of natural energy combined.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
You need to think it a little deeper.
The reason they are desperately trying to stretch out the life of the old plants is because the kneejerkers/dumb greens (yes, there are some clued up ones), and NIMBYs have made it next to impossible, and definitely not affordable, to build any new ones, in fact even to improve the existing ones..
Indeed this is exactly what we saw in Australia despite the fact that not upgrading our reactor was actually worse for people's health. By that I mean the HIFAR medical research reactor which was used to manufacture isotopes was nearing end of life. Hell it neared end of life years ago and the Greens were dead set against it's replacement. It got a replacement reactor OPAL in 2006 after long draw out political battles, and HIFAR was shutdown and is in the process of being demolished.
Funny enough when OPAL had issues in 2007 which required it's temporary shutdown the country went mental not due to a reactor having problems but do to a sudden shortage of medical isotopes and difficulty importing them from elsewhere in the world. Despite this crisis, and despite the fact the reactor is effectively brand new the Greens still have shutting down OPAL as one of the primary goals of the party.
The world is mad.
Re:Cheap Electrical power wins! (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet between them have killed less people than most other major process catastrophies throughout history.
While we're on the subject of land, Fukushima Daiichi has a 10km exclusion zone around it. That's 77000 acres of land which is uninhabitable for a period of time.
Taking a look at the worlds largest solar power plant and scaling it from 300kWh to the 7.5GWh that Fukushima Daiichi generated, and it would use 72000 acres of land, permanently.
But OMG radiation right?
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes there is geothermal, but if you run the numbers (I have) its easy to see it really is only a very regional solution and not a very sustainable one at that. In NZ as posted below uses geothermal. But the outputs had to be reduced because it was reducing the entire area activity. Sooner or later the rock lower down cools down. Same thing for the few plants in the US. Closed loop systems have their own issues. In particular you get a few decades before that cubic kilometer has cooled down.
Seriously it gets tiresome that so many *know* the solution but then won't do even the most basic analysis on that claimed solution.
Can nuclear work for a while (100s even 1000s of years)? Yes. Can we do it safely?That is a much harder question to answer. Technically i am somewhat pro nuclear. However that is not the same as saying i trust the companies or governments or even the IAEA for that matter to do nuclear safe. And we still are not dealing with the waste we already have.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually they have more or less recovered from the earthquake/tsunami. There is still a big drain from the Fukushima clean-up and the other economic problems like the Yen being too strong for about the past four years, but it turns out they really are not that dependent on nuclear power after all.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
How did this shit get modded up? Oh wait, it's Slashdot.
Chernobyl was not an accident, you understand? the reactor was a terrible design intentionally being pushed way outside design specs for no better reason that to see what happened
They were doing an experiment to try to improve safety after identifying a potentially serious risk in the emergency cooling system. The experiment accidentally went wrong.
You do realise that a coal power station would release more radioactive material in a few minutes of operation than TMI did, right?
Not bad, only an order of magnitude out.
there is NO free market in the nuclear industry, it is specifically and strictly controlled by one governing body.
That would explain why when TEPCO was told its plant was unsafe and should be upgraded immediately they ignored it and did nothing.
Re:Nuclear energy could be a great boon if... (Score:4, Insightful)
You have no idea.
For us as consumers it is better to save energy. It costs less and the money is spent improving our homes and our lives directly. The average Japanese or German home uses 1/3rd the energy that a US one does and they are not walking around in the dark or freezing cold or anything like that.
For politicians nuclear is a huge burden on the state due to massive subsidy. It is also unpopular. In a democracy that isn't going to get you very far.
For power companies they look at the high costs and uncertainties of nuclear and decide it is better to stick with dirty but known methods. Why get into constant fights with the government over subsidy and regulation over nuclear? Plus renewables are popular and improve your company image, while being fairly competitive on price (especially wind, hydro and geothermal).
It's the damn nuke-u-like brigade who are blind to the realities of the world and think because nuclear looks good on paper it must be the best option in real life who are fucking things up.
Re:Nuclear energy could be a great boon if... (Score:2, Insightful)
Size doesn't have much to do with it actually, if your house is properly insulated.
If your homes were as good as ours it would be a major lifestyle upgrade for you, and you wouldn't have to downsize at all.
Re:Nuclear energy could be a great boon if... (Score:2, Insightful)
You missed the point. If your house is insulated it doesn't need much, if any heating or cooling. Obviously extremely large dwellings will need significantly more, but not on the scales we are talking about. Also you can get a lot of heating for free by reflecting in light during the day or recycling waste heat from hot water boilers, appliances and cooking.
Insulation doesn't cost much, especially if installed during construction but even afterwards it can be fairly cheap to do now. My house is fairly large, bigger than typical US dwellings, and I was only quoted £350 for full cavity wall insulation and loft insulation. That would pay for itself in a year or two maximum. Double glazed windows are pretty much standard now. Draft exclusion costs very little.
Re:Nuclear energy could be a great boon if... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you live in the house during that time you are generating heat. Body heat, appliances, cooking etc. You do not need additional heating if it is very well insulated. There are houses in the colder parts of the UK and northern Europe like that, even in Norway where they don't see daylight for six months.