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."
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, this. Somebody asked this same question one time when I was visiting the local US Department of Energy site, and the answer they gave was basically "All of the cost-effective geothermal and hydroelectric locations have already been developed." Just as you would expect.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually there are other ways like using Hot Dry Rock Geothermal where you drill a borehole deep enough [wikipedia.org] that it gets hot enough to boil water which you inject into the hole. The problem is it induces low intensity earthquakes.
"inherent short-sightedness of the free market." (Score:5, Interesting)
Horseshit. There has never been anything remotely resembling a free market associated with nuclear power. As for shortsightedness it is hard to imagine anything more shortsighted then the way governments have reacted to nuclear accidents.
Re:Nuclear Bias (Score:5, Interesting)
I did find the uninformed anti-nuclear rhetoric annoying (like any uninformed rhetoric), but the pro-nuclear side suffered from technological hubris.
A nuclear reactor offers the promise of unlimited, cheap, carbon-free energy. OTOH, there is a small risk of a very big catastrophe, Are great benefits worth great risks? Hard to say. We now have Chernobyl as one real-world worst-case scenario.
Three Mile Island wasn't reassuring either. The reason why it blew, you may recall, is that a relief valve, made by Dresser, failed. It had a classic design flaw, a piston diameter that was too large for its length, like a wide window that gets wedged into the frame when you try to open it. This valve had been tested before -- and failed, about 2% of the time. Scientific American, itself a nuclear power advocate, had a good article about this.
Dresser for its own part was defending itself by taking out full-page newspaper ads, and denouncing anti-nuclear activists as Communists. Edward Teller said that Ralph Nader opposed nuclear power because he was an Arab, and he wanted the U.S. to be dependent on Arab oil.
I would like to live in a country where we make technical decisions on the basis of the facts and the analysis of experts. Unfortunately I live in a country where we make technical decisions (and any decisions) on the basis of who can muster the strongest political power and lobbying (which usually translates into, who has the most money to spend on it). I really wish the nuclear industry had been run by people who stuck to the facts and tried to resolve their disagreements with their critics with reason, rather than steamroller them with negative PR campaigns and campaign contributions.
I believe nuclear power could have worked, and might someday. One of the problems is that we seized on essentially one design, a scaled-up version of the one used on nuclear submarines. There were other designs that were inherently safer. It seems that American capitalism needs the government to do its R&D for it.
I always favored a free-market solution: The Price-Anderson Act absolved the nuclear industry of liability for any accident, and instead had the government step in, to compensate everyone for the damage (up to $120 million, which wouldn't go too far in Chernobyl). My solution: Repeal the Price-Anderson Act, and let the nuclear power industry get its liability insurance on the free market like everyone else. If they're so safe, let them convince the insurance industry. It seems that American capitalism always needs a government handout.